Ann Arbor Energy Commission Meeting 6/14/2022

001it to order so good evening um my name is john mursky i am chair of the ann arbor energy commission and as chair i'm calling this meeting to order at 6 02 pm i am participating from my home in ann arbor welcome to the june 14th electronic meeting of the energy commission this virtual meeting is to affect social distancing and mitigate the spread of the covid 19 virus we will conduct this meeting similar to in-person meetings commissioners during roll call please indicate your current location during the meeting please remain on camera just as you would be visible during in-person meetings also mute your microphone when not speaking public comment will be via telephone only to speak during any of the two public comment opportunities please call one of the following two numbers eight seven seven

002eight five three five two four seven or eight eight 888-788-0099 and enter meeting id number 937-6751-6819 on your phone this information is also available on the published agenda in the public notices section of the city's website on the broadcast of this meeting on ctn and online at www.a2gov.org backslash watch ctn see would you please read the land acknowledgement i acknowledge that the land the city of ann arbor occupies is the ancestral traditional and contemporary lands of the anishinaabe and blind 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

003thorough understanding of the ongoing consequences of this past can empower us in our work to create a future that supports human flourishing and justice for all individuals thank you so we now come to the roll call um as i mentioned uh we got notice from larry kerber that he's in route to washington state so he will not be joining us and we have edie joining us from bonn germany she can tell us more about that maybe later in the meeting and um sharice when we um maybe are done with the end of the roll call you can introduce yourself um we're welcoming jerry smith to um the energy commission it's her first meeting and we're excited about her joining us and she's got a great background that i'm sure will enable her to make a

004big contribution to our work so missy i'll let you do the formal roll call and then now turn it over to um shari so perfect just remember please state where you happen to be occupying land at the moment chair john mursky president and participating from ann arbor commissioner here uh in ann arbor commissioner mccomber here in ann arbor uh vice chancellor garcia i'm here um from ann arbor i'm commissioner mccoy commissioner smith present in ann arbor excellent council member brings karen ann arbor council member regina here in ann arbor hey cherry evac great thank you um just to remind everybody uh commissioner hook um um uh gave um his resignation uh so that he could do consulting work for osi and we hope to welcome some new members soon to the commission but um we

005have a new member who you already now know at least by name and face on the screen but um sharish why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself um and um maybe we can also go around and just give a sentence or two about each one of us as a person so she at least has some background about each one of us great thank you so much um very excited to join you all uh and uh looking forward to working with you all my name is sheree smith i am a director with guide house consulting firm originally from the ann arbor area and have lived here most of my life i took some time outside of ann arbor to at cornell university when i left for school where i have my educational background

006is in civil and environmental engineering and then came back to ann arbor shortly after my graduate studies there to raise my six-year-old daughter here and looking forward to really engaging more deeply in the community during my career i started off with an energy services company as an energy solutions engineer really identifying energy efficiency opportunities in commercial buildings and actually during that time had the opportunity to work closely with ann arbor public schools and identify some of the energy efficiency opportunities and actually a behavior program to kind of educate the community around energy efficiency and the importance of it and then kind of moved on after a couple of years to what was legacy navigant now guide house and have been given this guide house some 10 years now and during that time i had the

007opportunity to oversee a lot of our client work with dte and energy efficiency or energy waste reduction program as some of you may be aware leading program evaluation understanding and validating the impacts and to validate savings customer research strategy and regulatory support so a wide variety of work in that space i've also had the opportunity to serve on the my green power community impact pilot as a subject matter expert focused on community solar within three you know communities within michigan here um also had some time to oversee some project work with the advanced customer pricing pilot so the time abuse pilot um also uh with dte um so have some rates experience and background as well um and most recently work on our guide house mobility solutions team which is really focused on ev programs

008again strategy regulatory evaluation type support so have varied backgrounds and again looking forward to contributing to our group here and working with all of you very excited to join and we are too as i said now you know why we were excited when we read charisses application so um i'm gonna go uh around uh what at least appears to me on the screen for me and if you can just introduce yourself very briefly um teresa and i uh have already met and talked with missy um so i'm not going to belabor my introduction um but um erica if you would introduce yourself briefly and then i'll call on people from there sure i'm erica briggs i represent ward 5 um city of ann arbor and um have served on city council since 2020. noah excuse

009me uh welcome uh to the commission uh i i live on the west side of ann arbor and i have two kids that go to steam uh that are now going into uh fifth and third grade and i have uh when originally came to ann arbor uh to the school of natural resources as it was called at the time and i also now have a law degree from lewis and clark in portland welcome again hi nice to meet you my name is edie juno i also came to ann arbor to go to formerly snr now c's um for a master's degree in environmental policy and ecology um and i currently work for a non-profit the national wildlife federation on forest climate and energy issues um so awesome travis hi i'm travis rodina i am the

010anniversary council member from ward 3 or one of them also been in council since 2020 uh and welcome to the to the board look forward to working with you heck hi sharish i'm uh jonathan overpacker i go by peck and i also came to work at the school of natural resources in the environment now called c school for environment sustainability and i'm actually the dean very happy to have such amazing alums bridgette i'm trish welcome to the energy commission um i have served on the park commission in the past for six years and i've been on the energy commission for a while i'm the finance director at the ecology center where i've worked for over 20 years and i happen to have lived in ithaca in my college days so it's nice to hear of

011somebody else who's been to that area it's amazingly beautiful really interesting stuff happening in that city still so welcome and then finally carlene and i realized i'm not being very informal and using everybody's first name instead of commissioner and councilman but i think that's okay go ahead carlene hi cherise welcome to the energy commission it's really great to see you and be interacting with you more in person this evening my name is carlene colvin garcia i'm the vice chair of the energy commission i've been on the commission since 2017 and i've been particularly active with the um transportation electrification endeavor here in the city um i uh together with a team of visionaries co-authored the ann arbor evie readiness ordinance that was passed early in 21 and um i have been very active with the

012community with the schools with education and curriculum development for hands-on project based solar power curriculum um in particular k through eight uh grade levels um that is right now um being rolled out at the ann arbor steam at northside school and um i am right now uh building my business with ev charging installation consulting um focusing my efforts with multi-unit dwellings uh to support folks uh landowners and tenants to bring the charging to their multi-unit housing and i also am a licensed residential builder focusing on green building so nice to meet you so that's our team and welcome to the team thank you a pleasure to meet all of you great and we'll look forward to one of these days meeting um in person face to face and we'll figure out how to do that

013we might talk about that later in the meeting too so um so um i'm gonna just deviate real quickly because i got a text indicating that the meeting id number wasn't correct and i've been texting with missy and missy um do you have a correct number that we can share with people or well the meeting id is correct uh on legistar if anyone goes to the public legislature site under this meeting if you use last month's reading maybe they're looking at may it is a different because we have to upgrade the system but under this one june 14 you'll see the same caller number and the meeting id is different um and it is the right idea i touched and tested it while you know we're introducing yourself so on the agenda it's the same

014number that i read which was nine three seven yes the agenda listed here's the meeting id number and again anyone that's on registrar will see this the meeting id is 956 eight seven one eight seven eight seven six again personal registrar everything is up today with that number so it is nine five six eight seven one eight seven correct okay the same phone number just meeting id is different yep perfect great and i'll i'll mention that again in a second okay so um next on the agenda is approval of the agenda can i get a motion from um in a second from members of the commission to uh approve the minutes i've reviewed them and if you take my word for it or if you've read them to myself they're fine i move to prove

015the minutes so moved by uh vice chair calvin garcia and seconded by council member radina thank you very much all in favor say aye aye aye raise your hands very good so it passes unanimously don't have to ask about nays or abstentions so we're good to go on the agenda um oh i was actually talking about the me and minutes and so first the agenda that was the agenda actually now the minutes let's approve the minutes can we have an approval to our emotion to approve the minutes and a second sorry about that so a quotient from council member a second from uh commissioner juno all in favor say aye hi no one's opposed so it also passes so now we are at public input and this is an opportunity for members of the public

016to speak for up to three minutes if you are watching on ctn the numbers are correct please call 888 788-0099 or 877-853-5247 and enter meeting id nine five six eight seven one eight seven eight seven six this information is also displayed on the agenda actually that number is wrong don't use that number is the number i just read off and the video feed city staff will um call 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 message indicating that the host is allowing you to speak when speaking please move to a quiet area mute any television or background sounds so

017that we may hear you clearly and finally state your name and your address at the beginning of your comments call our ending in one three four thank you dr stealth and tara mursky and for the corrected meeting id number ken garber 28 haverhill court i really look forward to tonight's 820 talk on the slideshow a huge list of accomplishments congratulations to city staff i just have a comment and a question strategy 2 action 1 of the 820 plan says quote promote home and business electrification unquote and assumes that quote all new residential and commercial buildings are designed and built to operate without the use of natural gas i track new building projects that use gas heating since june 1st 2020 the city has approved 487 residential units 275 000 square feet of new commercial space

018and 254 000 square feet hotel space all of which burn gas i'm not counting the few all-electric projects using standard estimates for gas emissions per building type and a conversion factor that takes into account upstream emissions i calculate that together these projects will produce 14 100 metric ton co2 equivalent emissions per year there will be some gains from reduced commuter miles but it's a small fraction for context you will hear tonight about the three megawatts of new solar from the solarize program and the four megawatts scheduled for city facilities great numbers for sure applying the city's dte electric emission conversion factor and assuming a 20 solar efficiency rate these seven megawatts of solar will prevent 7934 metric tons of co2 equivalent emissions annually which is great except that the 14 000 tons from heating new

019gas burning buildings wipe out those gains not just once but twice putting up solar panels is self-defeating when we construct buildings that will lock in gas emissions for the next half century the climate of course does not respond to good intentions or dollars spent the climate only responds to the actual physics the amount of co2 and other greenhouse gas emissions gases we dump into the atmosphere and we are losing ground there that's my comment my question is what do we do about it the 820 plan urges state passage of the iecc zero code appendix that's under review but even if adopted it won't go into effect for almost two years the appendix doesn't preclude gas and it doesn't apply to low-rise residential we often hear that state law prevents the city from passing a stricter

020building code than the state code for new construction as a categorical statement this is incorrect there is no clarity in state law on this question i think we should move forward with a natural gas ban like others have done most recently in new york city michigan is a strong home rural state and the courts here give cities wide deference in such cases i'm certainly open to other ideas anything but the status quo we need to stop the bleeding and fast thank you and thank you um that is all that's all okay very good so we can then uh get directly into the heart of the agenda and the first uh major topic is a an update on washington county climate action planning and missy eye you can see that it's elevated matt nod matt we're

021going to let you uh introduce yourself you are well known to most of us but there may be a few of us that don't know you and also um andrew dulu thanks for joining us as well um and like i said we'll let the two of you uh introduce yourselves and play team tag on your presentation well maybe i'll start and let andrew go because i'm going to be moral support and jump in when he needs me andrew's been a great client and awesome leader in this space and i think this is the second of three evening meetings with ipsy ann arbor and celine's various commissions so um for those of you that don't know me i'm matt naught i live in ann arbor on the west side and see my council member and so

022i'm waving hi um and i've lived in ann arbor since 95 i was the environmental coordinator for the city since 2001 to 2018 and uh had an opportunity to retire early but i joke that i still had a very expensive daughter at the university of champaign-urbana who did just graduate this year so um so i've been consulting doing a lot of work with a local firm called resource recycling systems uh doing work for the state of michigan and with um a really good team including elevate energy uh chip smith with wade trim ecoworks uh beth gibbons uh you know nationally recognized adaptation expert uh am i forgetting oh a cnt in chicago with elevate um we are working on the washington county climate plan and it's called brazilian washington so that's me and uh happy

023to be a resource if anything else comes up but i'm gonna pass it on to andrew and let him uh share with you where we are thank you matt uh good evening everyone my name is andrew dulu i am the director of strategic planning from washtenaw county i'm coming to you from eastern county we've got some broadband challenges here so if i have and sputter a little bit greatly um so i'm really excited to be here and speaking with all of you certainly you know the city's work and climate action is in this city uh tremendous amount of success but missy in particular as well as the other folks in lsi as we've worked to develop our plan and so i'm excited to talk to you tonight about what the county's plan like it's still

024formative um kind of the the end goal process is to go back to our board of commissioners by the end of the year um and we think we've got a pretty good at this point certainly there's a lot of work to do uh tonight i'm looking just to tell you about our project uh the scope and the the shape of that project uh we've recently released our draft project framework uh that framework is structured similarly to other climate action plans but i think there's some some things that will be in washington county just because of the the space and the communities that we cover uh and then finally we'd love to hear from all of you um either tonight or at some future date in terms of you know what what else we need to

025do uh we've been trying to think about ways that the county's plan uh can be supportive of the the local plans that are in place and can be very complimentary in terms of again some of those additional resources that we have uh and so would just like to be explicit in terms of asking that question i think you'll see a lot of alignment in terms of five percent but you know the the feedback's great but you know i don't certainly want to hear you doing things better so i had a brief presentation that was shared with you uh apologies use the content because you're breaking up and a lot of times we just see a frozen image of you anyhow and let me know if you want to share the screen are we doing that

026co-host or if you'd like me to share for brian reasons well i i hope that's better [Music] you're still coming in broken um is that any better you're um audio is good yeah okay um so i i can't tell missy are you able to share your screen i can absolutely do that let me do that okay thank you um and i'll i don't know if matt heard this but matt if you're if things get too bad for me i would appreciate if you could uh jump in and take over um so uh as i've talked about we're here to talk about our climate action plan um if you could please move to the next slide missy uh so our plan is really focused on both climate mitigation and adaptation uh that's important for a lot

027of reasons and i will try to touch on those over the course of this but the the base goals for the plan have are things that have been set by county board of commissioners through resolution uh these happened in the past couple of years there's been other actions taken by our board on climate um but the two that are really pertinent to this would be net zero county operations by 2030 uh and then net zero wash not county by 2035. um we are currently in the process of updating our emissions inventory for the plan we're not yet done we ran into some challenges with data collection uh and so recently i've had some good progress on that uh but our we did an initial inventory in 2019 um and the estimates at that point were

028seven million metric tons of co2 equivalent uh at that point so we think that that's right and and still would certainly expect that to be the right order of magnitude um but we are working to update that and certainly know that we need to have good information in terms of the sources of those emissions inside of washington county the county um relatively is much tinier we don't have a water plant we don't have street lights we don't have you know a bunch of the other stuff that the city does uh it's mostly buildings and then vehicles for us and so our county number is about 14 000 metric tons um and so yeah still still good work to be net zero by 2030 uh but the one that i think will be much more challenging

029is certainly the county wide goal in terms of what it will take for us to reach there um and then our plan is going to look a lot like other plans for good reason you know it'll look like a20 it'll look like the city of ypsilanti's plan and to some degree it'll look like the state of michigan's plan that's intentional we want to align with those things and be supportive of them where we can we want to go beyond them where we need to um but but again trying to align with the other good work that's being done inside the county i think is important for us um i think the one thing i would point to in terms of what our plan will include that i think is very important in terms of the

030county's priorities is the vulnerability assessment and so we've been spending a lot of time trying to think about how we can best understand the communities inside of washtenaw county that will be harmed by climate change are the things that we're looking at right now the the most important things will be understanding uh folks that are vulnerable to high heat days uh folks who are vulnerable to flooding events and then trying to understand energy burden inside of the county and the thinking with that is that the county already provides services generally to the most that need inside of washington county uh and so by incorporating our those types of considerations under our climate action plan uh we can make sure that we are uh thinking about our actions helping the people who need the most help

031um you know washington county there's a lot of folks who are going to be able to do good work on their own and who don't need the county's support to take climate action but there are also people who won't be able to do this without our support and feeling like again those are those are going to be the places where we need to think first in terms of directing our work next slide please missy uh so generally we're doing this uh because it's a good government thing uh you know we think that government can play a role in addressing big social issues uh and so you know that's that's why the county is involved in this work um i think past actions have been insufficient certainly at the county level uh but pick your level

032in terms of you know the insufficiency to date size and complexity you know stuff doesn't stop at the borders of the city of ann arbor or washington county certainly but you know it requires all entities to get involved in thinking about how we can change our society to move away from fossil fuels the county has a bit of a unique role in washington county and in the past has helped work in in other similar issues of broader concern and think we can help in this place as well and then we've also got very strong direction from our board and the community in terms of doing this work next slide please so uh the key components of our plan there's both the organizational and the community goals we're trying to have those be seamless and well

033integrated where we can mitigation and adaptation are both really important the board has not set adaptation goals but again the the priorities of our organization are to think about how we can provide services and provide infrastructure to at need communities and so adaptation really goes along quite well with that we want to be in alignment with existing plans and services of the county and the county both as an organization and the stuff that happens inside of the county we have a very strong equity focus and you heard me speak to that in terms of the the need for the vulnerability assessment but we've been trying to think again about the the areas of greatest need and those most likely to be harmed by climate change and then collaborative you know trying to talk with folks

034and understand how we are able to do this work while being and this is a challenging balance but i think we want to be cognizant and aware of the other responsibilities and services that need to be offered while we work on climate change and and i can speak more to that but the reason for that philosophy is you know we're trying to get folks on board and and the county has quite a wide difference of communities in terms of where they stand with climate change what they've done to date and what they can do and so we think that we're going to be more successful through that type of approach next slide please missy thank you matt spoke to the project team they're great you know a lot of them uh and so i can

035speak to them for quite a bit and but you know you're probably already familiar with that work so i won't spend too much time there but i think we're very fortunate in in terms of the group that we've got working on this plan for the county um so in terms of engagement uh lots and lots and lots of engagement it's probably never enough but you know we need to keep on putting putting time and effort into talking to people about our plan understanding what they are concerned about uh as a means of making sure that we're addressing the right things inside of our plan so that includes local governments and institutions within county government we've spent a lot of time trying to work with staff and and the different boards committees and commissions just to

036touch on that i think the county through its boards and committees and commissions similar to the city of ann arbor you know gets involved in a lot of work that happens uh and from where i'm sitting i think that's really a great opportunity to to expand the reach of the county's climate action plan very preliminary but i think as an instructive example the road commission i think would be a good example of that or some of the transportation planning that happens through watts there's a significant amount of infrastructure spending that happens inside of washtenaw county the county is involved in that decision making there's not a single decision maker but to the extent that we can go to those groups help them incorporate climate considerations into their decision making help them set their own climate

037goals we think that again we'll be able to get more people involved in this work and through some existing channels that we already have a lot of discussion with community groups in the general public and then we also have two two advisory bodies that have been set up to provide regular check-ins on this we've got environmental council uh similar to some of the other groups that are out there working on this that's a subcommittee of the board of commissioners but then we've also convened a staff steering committee and that's made up of leadership from around the county our parks department our water resources commissioner our health department our emergency planning department a lot of the the functions of washnot county that are already responding to climate change and are really concerned with how well we

038do climate change planning going forward we've got a website set up it's a great website uh we'd love to continue to drive people to that website we have been using this to solicit feedback in the early stages we're in a little bit of a wall right now as we do uh some some more behind the scenes work but we'll be uh going back out there as we move into our our second big engagement push later this summer but we've got a great mapping feature we've been trying to to get ideas of what people like regarding climate projects or climate action what they're worried about and and what they'd like to see done differently so it's been great and i would suggest and that you check it out if you haven't already uh so our timeline

039um where we are right now is about halfway through a 12-month project uh and and i'll say right off the bat that we know the plan that we delivered this year will not be perfect uh and so we are trying to balance the urgency of addressing climate action uh and then you know the the challenges of pursuing perfection with this um just and i can speak to more on that we have just wrapped up and have released a draft [Music] mark [Music] we're losing okay matt matt can you happy to jump in okay thank you i think where andrew was was and if you go to the resilient washington website there's a a version of this um slide deck with the uh strategies and priorities uh that strategies and principles that the county is starting

040to focus on um so i think andrew was just running through this timeline in a perfect world um it did take a long time we didn't get energy data from dt until last week and i think that's seven months of uh waiting but we did get it and we did get it at the zip code level so we've got a little more granularity than we expected so hank and elevate are working on that um so we're hoping to have a draft version of this uh ready for public review comment in august with the idea that we would have a working session with the board of commissioners in september uh so that they could hold uh at one of their meetings in october have the plan be on the agenda uh with the hope that in

041november it would get approved uh so we'd be looking for any of your thoughts either formally as a commission um because you get to make recommendations to ann arbor city council or individually so i've told people feel free to give us good ideas offline and unattributed and we'll get them in the mix um next slide so uh there are seven strategies in the way we've thought about these are just how do you organize the county's climate story and the actions are going to be the important part currently we're thinking about organizing them around seven key areas what's different about the county is public health is one of their main uh service areas so health is front and center in that work uh currently talking about energy transition and we have some language associated with each

042of these that you can read on the website or in the if missy shares this slide deck um we think infrastructure investments uh is going to be really important uh water resources commissioner flooding that county-wide stormwater work um currently thinking about uh the kind of recycling waste world is circular economy uh and how do we really grow that circular economy here in washington county uh mobility and access uh gotta reduce transportation emissions get people out of their vehicles uh give people the modes of transportation that they're seeking and then again what's different about the county is working farms and natural areas and how do how do those fit as you think about climate change state of michigan climate plan um came out with a 30 by 30 goal preserved 30 of the land by 2030

043currently we're thinking about how does the county fit in that um how would you balance that preservation around working farms versus natural areas is there an intersection with could you preserve land put solar on it sub-optimal ag land uh put solar on it and then put lots of compost and grazing and then 30 years from now turn that back into much more optimal ag land so kind of some interesting thoughts in that area um so those are the strategies how we're organizing the big ideas in the plan and starting to build the actions that go within and a lot of those are pretty well known you know we need to do energy efficiency and electrify everything and i think the key question for the county is what's really in the county's wheelhouse that they can

044help with directly and then how do they again the unique part of the county and i think if andrew didn't mention it i think this is the first county climate plan in the state of michigan um but a key part of this is how do you get 28 local units of government who don't always have to play nice together to work together to solve for climate and protect public health and environment from a changing climate so those are the strategies what's really important as well are the principles and the ideas there are these are county priorities county has a racial equity office they've declared race racism and emergency in the county so these are the kind of all of the actions will be how the priority is set will be based on how well they

045move the needle on carbon move the needle on adaptation but also racial equity and environmental justice the idea of just transition how do we there's real opportunities to create good jobs if we do this right uh resilient economy again there's an economic development opportunity by keeping money that was going to ship coal into michigan and keeping that here in washington county again health fits in both of these categories because many of these actions are going to have a public health benefit again because of the county's convening role what are the roles of the ngos the partners the local governments in kind of helping work together on this a lot of this is looking at opportunities to scale the good work that's already going on at the local units and how do we kind of work

046together and do that county wide communication transparent engagement um and so for each of those strategies we're really trying to focus on just big five ten actions in each of those categories we're hoping not to make this a hundred and fifty page plan but really focus on those high level move the needle actions lots of other work that's going to go on through the years and low-hanging fruit but that's the idea where we are right now next slide missy so um the the way we're trying to describe this and we've shared this with the public andrew talked about there's goals how to set the what what are the goals for the county as an organization countywide carbon neutral by 2035. i talked about the principles really important priorities of county that we want to use

047to set the priorities for the actions strategies how we're organizing it around these seven categories and then those actions and again really trying to focus on um those things that reduce carbon emissions and as you all know it's going to be really hard for the county to get to carbon neutral by 2035 without dte doing a lot of things um we're also exploring things like carbon offsets a lot of a lot of green washing in that carbon offset space and we've gotten some good feedback that you know we got to be careful about those but there's a lot of good work on land preservation kind of taking sub-optimal ag land using it for pollinators there's a great guy at michigan state that's doing national work for usda and how do you pay people to do

048that so i think it's one of those things that we're probably not going to solve it by the end of this planning process but um i think a county local carbon offset program would be a really interesting thing for the community to build next slide so i think i'm not going to go through all these words missy can share these slides this is some of the language and we would welcome somebody who says hey i think there's a much better way to phrase this wordsmithing um but these are the phrases we're trying to use to kind of clarify what we're meaning in each of these areas next slide talked about that next slide and again missy's going to share those this is some of the language we're using associated with each of the strategies so

049again please take a minute and read that um next slide so once we get these actions and we have a couple of events coming up where i forget whether andrew mentioned but for each of the strategies seven areas we invited county staff from cross departments to work together and start talking about what are you doing already what could you do if you could scale it with more money and resources what are some big windows of opportunity are you building a new building that could be you know we heard it from one of the commoners all electric um and one of the county buildings new parks at stabler is all electric um so how are we going to use these um different criteria to set those priorities so next slide we talked about this a little

050bit board of commissioners ideally will approve this in november what we didn't mention is a separate piece of our work is recommendations on staffing what kind of staffing should the county be looking at because someone needs to own this work into the future funding and financing the program there are some models for ways local governments work together around climate and there's some communities that have been at this collaborative working for 10 years and what are those models that watchdog county might look at how does the county plan fit between the state plan and a20 the ipsy work things like that they talked about coordination with local governments next slide so with that and andrew if you can you've got bandwidth you can fill in what i missed but resilientwashnot.org is our website and i've got

051one more thing to add climate watchdog.org is a general email but andrew's email is a great place to send things directly i do want to add that you know an opportunity's come up where ann arbor township has decided to go out and explore climate planning they put out an rfp and what ultimately happened is they're going to work with the counties so that their plan aligns with the county framework that the kind of plan that's developed will really be the set of actions and implementation that really fit the township's needs and so that process will be just behind the county process which is good but it also gives us a potential model for how some of the other local units of government in the county might work on their own more granular planning around climate

052adaptation but do it in a way that aligns with this broader county umbrella so really kudos to ann arbor township for one deciding to work on this but also deciding to work on it in a way that is more likely to align well with the county's project andrew um this is andrew again i hope i'm coming through clearer now uh glad to see the nods thank you matt um i think matt touched on on all of it i think just the points that i'd really like to reiterate um would be trying to align with other plans i think there's a lot of good work that's already happening inside of the county uh the county doesn't want to do recreate new stuff that's already working well right and so to the extent that we can look

053to other folks and help support things that are going well i think is going to be a key strategy for us and certainly there's a lot to look to and what's happening in the city of ann arbor i'm glad that this presentation is happening before missy's update because it'd be a really hard thing to follow in terms of all the work that the city is reporting on and what's happened over the past year but i say that in terms of you know there's again there's a lot of good work that is happening across the county and not only with ann arbor and and so i think to the extent that the county can um you know help support those things is a really really key part of how we're trying to approach this work thank

054you gentlemen i'd like to open things up now for questions and discussion if appropriate does anybody have any questions or comments go ahead commissioner mccumber thank you matt and andrew it's nice to see the language about um justice and equity um i'm curious to know as part of this planning process if um community members particularly vulnerable communities of vulnerable communities are being involved in the planning process yes yes they are i think you know we're not done with that but we've been trying to focus our outreach and engagement i think um it's been easy for us to talk to a lot of groups that are already doing this work and you know people have been calling us up and we're certainly happy to talk to them um but i think in terms of the quality

055of the plan and our ability to meet the goals that we've just discussed uh we we need to talk to those groups um and and so those groups there's a lot of them in the eastern county and perhaps the eastern county comes to mind first but not exclusively a lot of parts of the rural county have different challenges as vulnerable communities those things look different when you think about what those might mean with climate change but but again we're really trying to put a lot of extra additional effort into to reaching out to those vulnerable communities um we've got a good sense of where those folks are the county already has an opportunity index tool that we use in policy development and program considerations um some of our initial uh our initial work uh or

056initial think um not thinking but the initial versions of our vulnerability assessment show a lot of overlap with that tool um and and so i think we generally know where those communities are maybe not specifically enough to do actual programmatic decisions um but but we know where we need to focus our outreach efforts um so maybe that's a little bit long-winded but i think to your question yes we think it's really important uh yes we've been spending time and effort doing that we we're not perfect with it and we have more to do but we will continue to do that over over the rest of our planning process and then beyond the planning process as well and bridgette i'll add um i think andrew is in the process of there's going to be some handouts

057going out in the community on the east side um about 3 000 so we're trying to tap into some of these opportunities where the counties already working um to kind of get the word out we've done some work direct outreach to some of the um black pastors on superior township and ipsy and kovid's been a challenge trying to get in front of congregations and things like that but you know some of that effort is getting out there it's just probably not as much or enough as any of us would like yeah and and i i'd ask you know if there's any specific groups that you all know of that we should be talking to please pass those on i think where we've had the the best engagement has been through referrals uh and you know

058not super large meetings but smaller groups you know of 10 or so and and being able to have a good discussion in terms of you know climate change in washington county um and so those things uh steam not steamroll but they uh they escalate and they kind of lead to additional discussions so i would appreciate any referrals but but we're continuing to do that work that sounds that sounds great i just have a another follow-up question i'm curious if um so reaching out and getting people's input is a great thing um is there an intent to like create a citizens and advisory board um yeah that that's the role that our environmental council is playing right now uh that that group uh was called or convened to help direct the county's work on sustainability and

059the climate action plan and so we're we're looking to them to do that that's a public group they meet the fourth tuesday of the month uh they're open meetings uh similar to this um and so have appointments there um they're they're more of a steering committee uh they don't do the actual outreach work but that's the main channel we have through that plus a whole bunch of uh direct direct input mechanisms for the public and are there records is that uh is there a good representation from the some of the vulnerable communities on that uh yes i mean i think probably not not i can send you the list and you can make your own determination on that i think we've got a lot bunch of folks from around the county um it's primarily based

060on uh you know um background experience in terms of why they're seated on that group so it's not a geographic determination but it is made up of people from around the county thanks other questions or comments i have a couple of quick ones and i'll also comment on the email or on your website um i'm aware of the wolf pack convening of a lot of uh entities within the county um city of ann arbor that was done at wcc by the way with emu etc there's a whole bunch of different entities there um missy i know you've had some talks with people since then and i'm wondering between some of the key players if is there now sort of a path forward that that uh will continue to take place and that there will be

061some kind of formal coordinating role what's can anybody comment on that um so i'll i i can and i wouldn't want to speak for missy um but i think what i'll say is it's been clear to the county that there's uh there's utility and and having a coordinated voice from washington county when we talk about legislative changes in lansing being able to speak to possibly pursue outside funding um i think that's that's been as we've worked through this you know the discussion that matt referenced with ann arbor township you know folks are looking to not want to replicate this work because you know there's a lot of work to be done in replication doesn't make a lot of sense in terms of how we spend our time um so i think in terms of what

062comes next there's you know from where i'm sitting there's still that need but the decision in terms of how how we best work together hasn't been determined um but i think yeah i hope you've heard through the philosophy that we've expressed through our planning process you know that the county certainly wants to be collaborative uh and and to work with other other groups with this work um i don't think we've used you know i certainly wouldn't describe our approach as being authoritative uh you know and i think there's probably some trade-offs with that given you know the work that we're talking about to be done but um you know i think we're we're trying to think through that and so um i've had you know informal discussions with missy with others and you know from

063around the county and and we'll continue to think on that but um i i guess i i hope i i see that as being something that will be really useful in terms of helping the county uh pursue our climate goals okay the one other main question or comment i guess question that i had is with regards to financing matt mentioned it briefly um but um financing is so important to a plan i'm wondering if that's going to be a core element of the plan or if the intent is to uh similar to frankly what ann arbor did and to some degree what u of m did is develop a plan with strategies actions recommendations whatever you want to call them and then deal with the financing after that has been digested if you will by

064residents and by leaders in the county how what's your thinking on that or have you even yeah i think it's going to be both you know our our board set the goals very clearly uh and they said give us a plan that meets these goals um and so i think we've got good benchmarks from inside of the county in terms of what it will take uh regarding money to meet those goals um and we the county does not have uh billions of dollars sitting around right now to dedicate to climate um so i i think we we certainly need to give an idea of the magnitude of the costs involved with this um i think it probably won't be perfect it'll i think we're trying to as we consider the climate actions understand not only

065the cost but the value of spending money uh on the plans and what we can get with both the emissions reduction and adaptation benefits from various things as we as we think about costs um that's that you know that's how the county tries to think about things just not spending money but what do you get for it so um i say that and that we we need to include money but we will not have all the money day one and that you know the the the way in which we do this plan is going to require investment over time for the life of and beyond the plan um as a practical matter we're also trying to think about or i'm trying to think about the existing spending that already happens inside of the county both

066both things where the county board of commissioners directly controls the budget but other things again like transportation spending that happens inside of washington county infrastructure spending that might be coming to washington county and thinking about how we can use our participation in those decision making processes to alter the outcomes knowing that you know again getting getting a dedicated pot of money is something that will be very challenging and will take time um so so trying to think about all of the the funding and financing options that we will have uh as as a means of doing this and i think just to touch on that again or maybe take a different approach really the county is trying to approach this in a very comprehensive manner right and we're already spending money on parks and natural

067areas preservation those things do a lot of climate benefits we haven't necessarily quantified them as a climate uh climate action previously but but we're already spending money and doing that stuff and so i think it's quite feasible for us to to measure those things and to say what's the value we get for that uh and and i think we can then look to those fun [Music] lens and give us a bit of a starting point as we talk about the resources needed to do this great i'm gonna add just real quick um remy long who's now a city employee has been using a tool that i believe was developed by c students um looking at the stored carbon in some of the land that's preserved and it's been great we're going to try and see

068whether that's something we can just start looking at what's the order of magnitude of stored carbon in the preserved land and that's the forested land ag's going to be a little different and pack if you have any students because what we're hearing is it does the stored carbon but it hasn't it's not looking forward as to the ongoing sequestration potential so that's one of the things we've been talking with the nice thing is we've shared that work with the state of michigan because in the michigan healthy climate plan i think it was a little more back of the envelope and so they're interested in taking that tool and maybe seeing how they can use that as the state thinks about the healthy climate plan the other thing i wanted to add is if you don't

069know semcog is doing a ghg emission inventory for all seven counties um so there's again an opportunity to kind of is that going to be a regional scale that we might be able to work together across seven counties not just within one that's good news does anybody else want to comment or offer up any questions okay so i would encourage everyone to uh noodle over this so to speak and if you have any thoughts please share those um the the contacts that are on the last page um or some of you probably know matt and andrew personally and have their addresses um and you can contact them directly so thanks very much for the presentation i'm really excited about what you're doing and i also just want to thank both of you um for your

070long careers in public service and we really appreciate what you're doing and especially now i'm directing this on climate action at the county level that's great so thanks a lot thanks for joining us yeah thank you so much for having us apologies for the technical difficulty but glad to go happens to all of us unfortunately made it work all right so good to see folks and meet the new folks and happy to help as we do this work and um matt and andrew of course you're more than welcome to stay on and listen to the next presentation which is um missy's presentation of eight two zero at two two i know it's crazy i'm gonna see if someone is free like generally should you and he may have you but in our attendee list is

071the newest member of osi joe uh he's coming over right no joe do you want to say hi really quick to everybody sure um hi everyone my name is joe um i just started yesterday here at osi um coming from a couple places but did undergrad at michigan state grad school at indiana university in public affairs environmental science and i've done a couple various things in climate change and such so really happy to be here and looking forward to working with all of you right to work night to like day two we're doing a night meeting so joe thanks so much for joining us for glad to have you so to jump in you're at least for me you're coming over not as clearly on audio as you were before right now i'm not coming

072here does anybody else have the same sort of effect yeah it's just um i don't know how to describe it i'm going to try this way is this any better no no not really i mean we can hear the audio but it's just a little muddled i'll say let me call i'll pretend it's me i'm not really all right let me just check out here i i don't i don't seem to think that it's a connectionist issue missy it sounds maybe more like your microphone sounds further away from me that it sounds fine to me so i don't know okay y'all we are problem solvers i mean i'll talk loud on the other one in the office so i'll do that all right here we go a2002 which is bonkers because we're already in year

073three uh thank you so much for the opportunity to share a little bit about what we have got going on here in osi and how things have been moving forward and i do have to start by saying this isn't all there's just so many people that we would have to thank that have helped make the progress that we've made and of course it's not enough uh but i also think that we spend a lot of time focusing on what we didn't do and not as much time celebrating what we have done and sometimes uh we need that to help keep the momentum going forward for the big fights that are ahead of us so this is a moment to kind of reflect back um i will definitely do some self modulation of all the things

074we didn't do in the midst of this but i also do want to take a moment and sort of celebrate what the team and the community has accomplished so let's start with a quick look back so starting with year one i am going to go off because it's showing on my other screen so i'm with you i'm just going to go off camera to make this not look awkward in year one of a2 a20 some of the notable highlights we have this report on the website so you can take a gander at it but we have the solaris program right and we have 1.3 megawatts of solar through that initiative we hit soul smart designation we were really focusing a lot on renewable energy we launched the aging place efficiently program and really built the

075collaboration partnerships to see that that program gave us the momentum we launched the ambassadors a2 0 ambassadors and trained our first 22 individuals we launched the 10 000 trees initiative and got a thousand trees in the ground in year one we were able to create the first resilience hub at northside community center and we started the design with uh zimmerman's and others for the a2 r3 returnable container program so really uh year one for us was a lot of structural setting up the systems the work plans the frameworks and then running at a few of these these programs here year two as we transitioned over became a lot of implementation of uh kind of using that foundation that was built in year one and i want to start by saying of the 44 actions in

076e20 in this uh in this second year we actively worked on 36 plus uh so a lot of things are in play and the plus is because h zero is living right so one of the things i talk about most commonly is when we wrote h20 we analyzed telework and we didn't think it was possible at the scale necessary and of course we had a pandemic that showed us that telework is possible for some constituents but not all and so it it seemed relevant to start working on supporting telework which is not one of the actions in a20 but it is an action that's helping reduce bmt for some portions so that's the plus things that sort of come up that are really really relevant strategic opportunities or things that honestly we wanted to do

077we just didn't think would have the success that they're having right now so i'm going to walk through these based on the strategies just as the organizing principle uh recognizing that everyone spends their time thinking about the seven strategies of a20 but i do so we'll start with strategy one which is powering our electrical grid with 100 renewable energy some of the accomplishments from this last year are solarized went from 1.3 megawatts to 3 megawatts and we're over because we put this out weeks ago it's really really exciting to see how that program the behavioral science behind it is spreading uh we also have a map that i just saw today for the first time showing how it actually works in neighborhoods and how solar clusters through the program so we'll be sharing that uh

078i'll be sharing that kind of as we're going into year three some of the visualizations and reporting that we're hoping to get in place uh we also started conversations for the commercial side of the solaris program today it's been residential focus we know we're missing an opportunity in the commercial sector but we also know commercial roofs look very different washington dairy's roof is different than the ymca's roof which is different than grizzly peak uh it doesn't mean there's not opportunities but we want to really work with those entities to figure out what this can look like so julie is on the commercialized uh the commercial side of this program which janet culbert said with the 2030 district uh successfully we've integrated a lot more education around efficiency and electrification into solarize of course solar uh

079we sort of talk about it as like the chickpea steak if you will people are really excited about it it's the main course but we need them to also be thinking about electrification and efficiency at that time and so we use that as a gateway uh for folks and it seems to be working in terms of people get solar and then they want to do what's next and they're already teed up what comes in the system and then of course i'm not enough for ann arbor to do this on her own so we worked with the great lakes renewable energy association created a replication guide for solarize and launched the ann arbor solar stories where folks who have gone through the solarize program uh every month have an opportunity to share their story with others

080which just kind of helps people understand and makes it much more personal what the journey is like if you're capable of investing in solar we also this year designed four megawatts of solar at city facilities i wrote this before i knew uh council approved a contract for just shy of one megawatt on monday night not yesterday but last monday uh that is at nine city parks and also includes some grandma and some rooftop systems five solar carports 26 electric vehicle chargers and two batteries one for the senior center and one for vets so burn senior center will be coming online as our next resilience hub as will bryant community center which i'll talk about in the end we're really excited to see this move we also did a lot of work this year on the

08120 megawatt landfill solar project which is now named the wheeler solar uh the wheeler center solar park uh this one went on ice at the very end literally after gosh the energy commission meeting that we had when we brought it forward and you passed the resolution the tariffs had just been announced uh i'm gonna let the cat out of the bag with last week's announcement that the president invoked the defense act uh to invest in solar and put a moratorium on uh these tariffs this is office so we're waiting on updated pricing and i hope to have this move forward by the end of the summer to contracting so that that'll be a success hopefully in year three we'll see this project around um and we continue to intervene in uh rape cases we are

082interveners in 2836 which is the rape case currently being heard by the public service commission we intervened as you all know and got settlement in 2013 which was the migraine well the voluntary green pricing program which includes the my green power program and that's how we got wheeler center solar park to become a community that's siri uh community solar initiative uh which we're uh delighted to see it would be the first in dt's territory we also know in here to develop the proposal for the sustainable energy chile and we joined a working group with the world resources institute looking and starting to get ahead uh thinking about how we plan for a 24 7 power offering so while our goal in h20 is 100 renewables we've always thought about that as a year kind of

083store up over the course of the year we used x did we also generate x or purchase x amount of clean energy uh i anticipate that in the not too distant future we're going to want to try to get to real time when i'm using electrons on electron speed underneath and that requires a very different type of planning so we've joined your working group to start getting ahead of that strategy put it into strategy 2 which is beneficial electrification we have posted a number of uh resident-facing educational workshops on this topic and uh have incredible turnout more so than i expected so much so that after last summer a workshop that we hosted with a few hundred attendees we started to panic uh that we would have a bunch of people let loose on the

084market and not have contractors to support them which is why we worked with michigan saves and got a great grant from the state to create electoral commission training and contractor badging program it is live it was launched at the end of 2021. you can go into the michigan safes website you can search for if you need an hvac contractor and you'll see this orange badge that's demarcated here against any contractor that has gone through the training program and is certified as electrification first so this is a contractor that is knowledgeable about electrification options for things in like cold climate airsource keyboards so instead of being talked out of something you have someone who's capable of really understanding your situation and helping you make the right decision which might not be a cold climate airsourcing pump

085but it might very well be so you don't want to start from the assumption that you've got to convince your contractor to do something you want to start from the assumptions you're both going to find the best solution to your situation so excited that this is launched and it's the trading partners across the state so it's not just ann over anyone in the state uh can go through this program and get the badge we asked to join the cohort with rmi formerly the rocky mountain institute we're working on other cities to design an electrification campaign kind of similar similar to the solarize campaign but thinking about the nuances in our climate where electrification electricity is more expensive than natural gas so how do you actually design a campaign how do you structure it how you

086support it how do you make it accessible to lots of different folk so julie sits on that with phone we also worked with ibew and nika on the futures electric uh initiative which helps people understand and you can see this range about here uh understanding opportunities around electrifying and actually helps point them to uh contractors here that pay living wages family sustaining uh wages uh top people make that transition we developed the 820 home assessment which we're piloting in bryant this combines strategy one two and three so i put it here but it's all things it's looking at the renewable energy potential on site an energy audit um and an electrification assessment this is kind of like the full service so you get a roadmap to have how to de-carbonize your home and we've piloted

087it in about 12 homes in uh bryant right now the goal is to pilot in about a hundred uh so we're actually recruiting more folks into that initiative we've drafted the green royal housing initiative and this is that talked about a number of times to the commission had a lot of public engagement and activity on this uh it is legal for some initial feedback and i've kept people very very busy on something for the last four weeks so i haven't gotten any feedback from them and keeping them focused but um this hopefully will will come loose in the next few weeks so i'll be able to see this move forward in your theme we've been working on many many elements of the energy concierge uh especially more recently the people service portion of this so

088we've been talking with folks like ecoworks and elevate to actually create um someone someone uh an actual person that can help folks when they have questions navigate what to do help find contractors find uh uh right now to help pilot this on services initiative so this might be in year uh it straddles your team we've successfully uh transitioned 20 of the city's fleet to electric we have our refuse trucks on order they uh were ordered quite a while ago they are back ordered in supply chain issues but we expect the first one to hit the street sometime this fall and shortly they're after the second uh to come in to operation which i'm i'm really excited to see those big trucks coming differently if you don't know on july uh 15th we have an electrification

089expo that's happening at the farmer's market this is something that we plan based on public input and excitement around the lunch institution so we as of today uh bring equipment show people the benefit of electrification uh kind of let people interact with appliances it's for renters it's for homeowners it's for businesses anyone can come and enjoy some time learning about electrification and actually engaging with folks who can help make that happen we installed uh 40 dual port chargers and dvd garages that's 80 additional chargers uh and not 40 that would be incorrect that's a typo we have four fast chargers uh city hall 40 would be insane i would single-handedly have blown up the miso grid uh so i'm not not gonna do that and you know this is a small one but a really

090significant one we updated our permitting system across the city and as we were doing that we successfully got uh electrification in to the permitting process which means as people are doing things like installing um induction stove versus arranged or putting in a heat pump when they have to pull a permit we're actually getting that information so we're able to track how many people are transitioning to a lecture which is great because without that data it's sort of hard to know how effective uh some of our outreach initiatives have been strategy threes right energy efficiency here we passed michigan's very first benchmarking ordinance for energy and water which is super great the first deadline was june 1st um we have extended the deadline until august 1st because it's the first time right that people are recording

091we're learning a lot about the struggles that they're having and everything it's been really successful and i want to once again do a shout out to the 2030 district who's been helping us with this uh overall we're really impressed by what we're seeing people are engaging in the system and it's starting to lead to questions about how folks can reduce their energy consumption which is my goal we have completed 19 homes in the aging place efficiently programmed the program is officially out of money it is grant funded but we are fundraising and you'll see that's a high priority for us for year three because we have a very long wait list of older adults who are in pretty desperate need of some support uh to be able to stay in their homes safely and reduce

092their energy usage we also uh were asked to join a white house coalition on energy performance and water performance which we did uh i wish i could tell you more about what that looks like yet uh it just formed we're not 100 sure but i believe we go into uh discussions later this week to kind of create much more structure around what this would look like but exciting to have vanguard communities from around the country sit with the white house and be able to really push for some support uh federally on the kinds of initiatives uh we worked with jen hall and the housing commission and together we won two and a half million dollars to support net zero energy affordable housing right now the rfps are on the street for the final work that

093we need to do to make a number of housing commission sites net zero energy but this is super exciting and so this was an earmark that we won uh largely because of teamwork uh because we keep promoting this and doubling down our communities commitment to affordable housing i think really elevating this project we have also submitted a grant uh two million dollar grant to support the work in bryant fingers crossed um you'll see later we want a number of smaller grants this larger grant from the department of energy would really help us actually make the improvements in the neighborhood continue pushing for the codes uh to be updated at the state level there's a hearing that's happening shortly uh i'll have referred back to the commission and then i just saw yesterday that the residential

094code is now up for comment so we continue to organize around that we designed the carbon neutral fire station in tandem obviously with the fire department and we are actually fundraising it'll be the first in the state of michigan we think it's the first east of the mississippi uh that all depends on when we break ground uh and then kind of just a little bit of inside work we have successfully integrated uh sustainability into the city's plan review process so as a developer comes forward with a project or an idea we want to be at the table at the very beginning and we haven't historically been so this year we were able to get at that table so right from the beginning we can talk about each of zero the goals that we have the

095objectives uh and this this just happened recently and that changes a lot of the tone and tenor so by the time we get to planning commission we've already had conversations we've already worked through many issues we've already asked for electrification as opposed to coming in at the end it's really hard to change when a project is fully designed but when you're at the beginning of a process you have a chance and then um we've done energy audits at four varsity facilities and right now we're working on a plan to make them the first four fully departmentized buildings we have listed in terms of strategy for reducing our vmt by 50 so we worked uh are working on a carbon calculator which is helping us uh analyze transportation emissions and include both in planning projects so

096as people are proposing developments what's the impact of having people closer and further away but also for us to understand how people are moving and have a more effective calculator to be able to engage the kinds of decisions like protective bike lanes what really is the impact that those have on the system versus extending sidewalks versus a bus expansion all are needed but we want to sort of understand where and how those things function we uh are working with planning actively we meet with planning every week right now and trying to find ways to integrate h20 into the unified development group and there's lots of changes that have come from like the removing of working uh minimums was one of the things that we worked on and there's some other work around solar siding we're

097working to do away with height restrictions when it's solar solar is the thing that breaks the height restriction whether that's on a pole or on a roof so things like that fire and solar you're likely going to see that coming back as something that's valuable and then i'll continue to support protective bike lanes we've seen growing ridership which is really great we've got my discount programs uh and then i already want to show them the particular ones you're doing great almost done strategy five is moving towards the circular economy so we have our reusable container program which is expanding super exciting we run a number of grants for this we've been successful in getting some some grants to actually secure uh funding to do a business plan so far the city has really supported this

098initiative but we know it's going to take off and we have a lot of people who are interested in being a part of this but we've been reluctant to bring more businesses in until we have a sustainable business plan so uh we have a nonprofit that's ready to run with us they just want a grant to help develop that business plan and hopefully uh in year three you're gonna see this take up the whole community which makes me really happy we did move to around composting hooray uh we're beginning in a few days downtown commercial recycling uh city council directed us and we've been actively working on a sustainable food purchasing policy for city purchases but we've also got a working group that's helping us think about how we do this within the community and

099what does sustainable food mean is it local is it organic does it have is it plant forward plant-based does it have no packaging all of those things are really important workers rights animal rights so we're trying to figure out how we in the city frame sustainable food and how we score it how do we let people know what is the most sustainable option and it's uh it's a really exciting area of work and it's a work where people have very strong feelings about what sustainable food means so we've been talking the university around this as well uh and a little bit within our public schools to make sure we have some alignment around how we classify food we have successfully run two zero-waste uh week-long challenges uh over a thousand folks that participated in those

100challenges and in the fall we're gonna run our third with university of michigan students we're gonna continue this it was just wildly successful super super fun hopefully you guys participated in them if not i can't wait for you to do it uh really really accessible um and then we also are working on a circular economy strategy so we have a working group and we've been doing a bunch of outreach to different stakeholders to understand who's already operating within the circular economy space for their map of businesses that are in the circular economy there's way more than i ever knew existed and then also trying to figure out how we tie all these things together into more holistic approach to against this and then uh just as other side we started to really ramp up our

101work on reducing refrigerants within the system because while there's not a lot they have extremely high global warming uh potential so thank you strategy six relates to oh my enhancing the resilience of our community we have uh we planted twenty five hundred trees for a free tweak and away and our community tree plantings which is just amazing to me so these are trees on private property um we also have all of the support uh we've got a support app for folks we've got education uh for folk that help make sure that we're not just planting trees we're maintaining this reason we're putting on the ground uh staff went through master rain gardener training and we're starting to promote that way more in the community because flooding is getting more intense as we saw winter storms

102last night and so we want to be able to help residents as they're making choices about installing green infrastructure to maintain um to maintain their site and avoid them we've installed the very first air quality monitors in the city when i'm carrying time and brian there are two more sitting in the office next to me one is going to go on main street and one is going in an arab or public school so we can monitor idling emissions and identify solutions there and then we have a goal for many more coming into the system in the coming years we're working with the hazard mitigation team to integrate climate more holistically into that plan you may be familiar we've done this in the past but we didn't go really really deep and this time it is

103it is just entrenched in that plan uh the impacts of climate change both directly and indirectly uh and that's it's cascading through all the actions that are falling out public comment um we have one public kind of uh period during the planning process and we've got another cleanup soon and i can't wait to bring maybe we can bring that plan forward to the commission for your comments more question um i'm gonna buzz through the rest of this because you guys are doing great and it's like so we uh have actually funded the second and third resilience house so in the last few weeks we funded bryant community center to move forward and as i mentioned before the senior center we've also been doing resilience assessments with avalon because more mature housing commission sites are taught

104uh second or third cohorts of ambassadors are through the system that soil carbon calculator matt talked about talked about it we funded it uh sean staffed it so super exciting to see it being used throughout the canada uh the community and then we did some modest support for nobomy but are gearing up to make no mermay a thing that anna robert does in the weekend and then in the other category uh just uh last week we finished the final trench of funding for the sustaining ann arbor together grant program so we will give it a hundred thousand dollars this year to community uh initiatives focusing on community-based sustainability progress uh we are in the beginning of an anti-battling community campaign with another public schools and you already mentioned that air quality monitor that's the best

105part of it to really understand what we're necessary so we can reduce them uh the collaborators network continues to grow and we just continue to do public engagement never enough as you heard andrew say but a really fun a really fun part of what we do so we had over 100 community meetings presentations events discussions uh over last year so i want to just take a minute and acknowledge some cool things right uh we were recognized as one of only 95 communities around the world to be an a-list community for our work uh in particular on transparency and reporting we are a michigan green community uh gold community which is great i want to call it cindy barr when an eevee champion from cranes which is so wonderful sean won the government award for urban

106and community forestry here in the state of michigan julian was named george sexton public servant of the earth the best possible award i think you could ever get that title is amazing uh galen was appointed to the board of the great leagues renewable energy association the feu won the project of the year from gmr so they're it's great and i really wanted to put that forward too because sometimes i think the team focuses on all the things that we still have to do as opposed to the fact that we are making some progress so just to close out i want to tell you a little bit about what's coming forward um and i'm gonna i'm gonna riff off this the the thing i'm most excited about we just got permission for we've had a darn

107hard time getting a dashboard set up we've worked in with it on a platform and that we designed the whole platform we were ready to go live a long time ago and then the platform was not compliant with the city's website we've had all these hurdles and that is really frustrating to me because we have all of this data that we want to be sharing well we just got permission to stand up around a website and and use a different platform to report that so a high priority for us we run an it call this morning is we're going to get that platform up and operational because i want everyone to be able to know transparently what we're doing where we have success and where we don't and where we have to pivot and change

108so you're not going to see that on this list because i didn't know when i wrote these slides that we'd be able to do that that makes me very excited on uh tuesday night we go to council with a ppa contract for three megawatts of additional solar at city facilities so we'll hit that four megawatts absolutely because of the the listing of the tariffs i think we're going to break ground on the landsat solar project if we get pricing back you know let's change supply chain issues have impacted uh solar installations around the country but if things look good we're going to bring my contract forward and if it's approved we will break ground we are going to head to the megawatts julian has said this out loud but we're going to figure out how

109to get two megawatts in the next year so we get to five megawatts of solar flu through solarize we're going to have to collaborate more with department we've got to figure out what regional collaboration looks like in a deeply meaningful way so we can sustain this work and really institutionalize it in our region and then draw more federal funding to this region because we are the leaders in this work and that also involves working deeply with the state and the my healthy climate plan uh both to support that plan but also to unlock funding and resources and make sure that funding and resources are built into that plan for local units of government and then policy-wise we are we're going to get the green rental housing and home energy uh reading disclosure over the finish

110line it's just it's time we've got a lot of engagement that's been going on a lot of design work uh and it's it's they just need to be able to finish one in year three we also want to take the h20 home assessment we're testing and buying and bringing out to the whole market we'll have that circular economy plan and the two top priorities for us in terms of fundraising are aging and place efficiently and brian bryant is my favorite project it is the most meaningful sustainable project i think that we do everything matters but this one um this one just touches really deep to the values that i have and the reason i do this work so we have to find a way to correct market failures and fund the work environment if we're

111going to equitably departments we're going to stay true to our values so we are deeply committed to fundraising there's some other things on this uh screen that i just want to show those are the primary priorities but overall i think the future looks pretty bright we got a lot of work to do uh you know what but we've got we've got a great team we've got a great community and i'm hopeful that we're going to figure it out so awesome thanks jamers thank you missy okay folks can we just applaud yes you can may any anybody have any comments or questions go ahead carlene uh the quick question just about the an event that you mentioned that's going to be taking place in july at the ann arbor farmers market i think it says it's

112it starts at 9 00 p.m can you um let us know what time it's actually going to start which i'm sure you didn't mean i probably did not no i think it's 6 to 9 p.m but i'm pulling up the flyer that i just said to ctrl it's it's from four until nine this is one four two nine okay four p.m until nine p.m it didn't show up on my side on my end when i was doing it at least i haven't entered in my calendar that way i have it as five to nine pm at the farmer's market and let me just share with you all why don't you ask the questions here is what this oh is we are the community high school band i believe jazz band is playing so obviously do

113you need any support from the energy commissioner or are you getting also people who have electrified that are willing to table are you what's this yes that is the largest area of need we have right now we have a few folks who have done electrification in their home who are willing on speaking but we could use more so if you have made the transition either fully or in part and would be willing on spending a little bit of time with us we would love that and should the energy commission want to have a table and talk about the commission and the work 100 percent you could do that we have space okay i mean just send to an email fund is the one organizing it or uh i would send julie or hannah loftus okay

114okay so another really quick question um about could you embellish a little bit about the soil carbon calculator what it is and then is this something that's going to be posted like on a website that we can interact with yeah i think it already is but let me find it um yes so what is what it was we worked with remy long uh and a bunch of master students to understand the the impact that soil has different kinds of soil in different parts of the city as we're thinking about development so what amount of carbon is actually sequestered in the soil what's uh sequestered in the leafy material the ground cover on top so we can understand as we're making decisions and trade-offs about development you know we can think about density and having people

115in a certain space but we also wanted to add the impact of that's hormone disrupting it and the emissions that would come from that so we've used it mostly in the green belt when we're making decisions on the quality of product to buy uh or a piece of property so it's another value that we take into consideration but also you would not talk about we're trying to transition it to other languages and other types of soils so more in city we could help have uh kind of more informed decisions about how we developed ourselves are you also does the tool evaluate things like um moving to perennial crops like kernsa or changing to no-till practices and things like that does it do you know if it evaluates those kinds of things i don't i don't

116think so but i'm happy to have ronnie and the students come and see if they wanted to give a presentation on the tool and as i heard matt talk about there's interest in the state and growing it so maybe we could talk about what it is and what it could be if that's of interest to the commission it seems it might be maybe also possibly to the environmental commission i don't know what would be the appropriate um because i know when we've talked about greenbelt topics in the past some of those have been in the energy commission because we talked about solar on green belts but in other cases we've talked about the green belt and the environmental commission so maybe we put a pin in that and come back to that okay council member

117thank you folks thanks carlene thanks um so i can obviously direct people to this legistar attachment for folks who might be interested in the greater public but is there an easier space for people to go and digest kind of some of the accomplishments or um anything like that is there a space we should direct folks yeah thank you so you're the first to hear this later this week we'll be doing a press release and putting out the actual report that is uh like a more aesthetically pleasing summary of this and we'll have this as an attachment so it'll be on the city's website very shortly you're just the sneak review um we're still in design work again i'll send that out to you all as soon as we actually post it you see i think

118there's also a page full page up on heat pumps on this on osi's website right a bunch of resources on that if anybody um should ask so you can direct them to that so who would we contact once once we have access to the full report the backup and if there's any questions that we have um will there be um some place in the report that can guide us to where we can find more information if that's something that we're interested in yeah uh great question i would say the way we drafted it not for each item because as you just saw there's a lot of stuff in in kind of the summary but i am thinking maybe the best thing to do is for each because we organize it by strategy as well maybe

119for each strategy i can put in a point person so even though it may not be simey because sami's running point he knows anyone else missy i sent an email to you and i copied oh the go ahead commissioner bricks yeah i just watched yeah not a question i just wanted to reiterate um kudos to you and the entire team this is really incredible work in year two it is there's a lot that's happened i'm glad that um you and other members of the team are getting recognition for all the work um but it is exciting to see us moving forward so rapidly and so many actions and all seven strategies uh commissioner smith thank you yes certainly significant accomplishments it's truly a pleasure to see all the great work that's been done over the

120course of this past year with that with any plan i imagine there's been challenges as well so i guess in the report or i heard you mention a dashboard do you plan to kind of outline some of those challenges and mitigation strategies here as well you know what we have that we're really saying really is more of a kind of really easy to read summary of the things that we've accomplished with a little bit more context so we don't spend a lot of time and all the reasons other things did not happen uh just because that isn't really the really the character of what it is we're putting out what you're noting though is super important something we document a lot in individual project based work i wonder i mean the dashboard was that more

121to be transparently reporting on progress if we've got a goal of 100 renewable energy power in the community how are we doing i mean how much renewable do we actually have compared to where we need to be so i could imagine that in that dashboard we could include some education about the ways to up that number and the challenges stopping that number but we haven't gotten yet to design because we just sure the right way to explore the challenges more publicly but would welcome thoughts and suggestions absolutely just thinking there may be an opportunity to capture learnings um and how to improve upon um you know uh you know based off of again the kind of the work and the challenges that we're up against yeah we've made a pitch before to funders um and

122those who want to see local governments collaborate to actually lend some support to do case study interacting uh because we all of the communities that are doing this work are not incentivized to tell their story in that way and we know what we learned but it it often doesn't get pen to paper you move on to what's next right in the to-do list i wonder if we could explore maybe something with me uh with students at seas that you may be able to have some help maybe even an project where folks are really documenting the lessons learned and the struggles of this work so we can stand and be sure i heard him say yes did you have anything else to raise no um again i think all great ideas um and just you know

123wanted to kind of open the question the dialogue about the opportunity to explore again capturing some of those items uh missy i submitted some questions via email and i was wondering if you'd be willing to address those if you don't have them handy i can summarize them briefly yeah i will be honest that i am under deadline for something else and so i did not prep for those so you i'm happy to take those questions so some of them i think you can probably answer um right off the cuff and it'd be fine actually if you just simply say well that's something i want to consider or think about or respond to later that's that's that's perfectly acceptable um so some of the questions are more straightforward some of them are a little bit more

124longer-winded i would say and they're offered in the spirit of continuous improvement thinking that we'll also have reports um eight two zero at three eight two zero at four eight two zero at twenty um where we'll hopefully be at zero or um some form of zero um so the first question that i had was um the inventory um as far as i know the last inventory was done for calendar year 2019. it is actually done for 2020 and it's on our website and you can see it um and we did a report in a video summarizing it well i am when i read your question i talked to thea and realized that we just need to have a stable like we're coming in august because the inventory is done in august with the update so

125i can share that with the commission um but it is it was done for 2020 and 2020 was anomalous endemic had 20 almost 22 percent reduction and is is there roughly a time table when those updates could be expected um are we thinking like um june or what's what's the typical yep it's summer uh and it the plus or minus depending on the data access that you heard not talk about i think uh if you're open to it we just plan to have kind of a stable like in june or july we come with the update to the commission with the power tracking okay um the um next question i had was in the plan the plan is really nicely structured um hopefully washington county does something like this where every action had what were

126baseline assumptions what were what are indicators of success what is the timeline at the bottom of four various actions and then also in a summary table there's total costs total greenhouse gas emissions emissions reduce and as an output of that what is the cost per metric ton or kilogram i guess it is i can't know i think it's metric ton of co2 um e reduced and then also co-benefits and um just my thought or my question was would it make sense in future reports to report against those specific um let's say that specific framework um where we can really see um this tied to this and this is what the outcome was or we anticipate seeing the outcome at such and such a point of time yeah i think that it could be in the

127report or and and or it could be on the like the the dashboard so the way i sort of the dashboard is that we're actually tracking against those i know it's real-time reporting and then maybe the annual report um touches on that but directs to it and highlights you know we moved from here to here yep no i i really like that idea if it's on the dashboard um the next question that i had is um when um at the very beginning of 820 there was a uh prioritization summary that was generated and um my sense is that um we haven't heard much about it and i'm wondering if that is still actually um a a living summary and if it's still being updated and if for example resources via dollars be it staff time

128are being focused um according to that prioritization summary and for everybody's benefit basically it was um what does it cost what does it deliver in terms of reductions what is um i think there was something about the timing of the impact um let's see i wrote it down i think um all the feasibility and the co-benefits and then points were assigned and then based on that uh priorities were identified and for example some of the things that really rose to the top were some of the things that had big bang for the buck like energy efficiency and things like that where you're getting um a ton of co2 reduced for four dollars and then there's other things that we have in the plan that are in the thousands of dollars and so i'm wondering how

129how was that guiding um time resources put into there we go yep that's that was the the framework exactly thank you for pulling that up so various feasibility questions what level of control we have etc and then what kind of benefits and you can see on the right hand column there are points that are assigned and then with those being applied to all of the actions that missy showed at the beginning of a report then there was a summary of what those were i don't know does that document have the summary yeah this document is just the actual framework that was used and it's it is on the htc website if anyone wants to see it just wanted to show you right how is that actually guiding the application of resources and what we work

130on now versus what we work on in 2025 or 2028. yeah so it's used in two ways one was a filter by which the actions in a200 even fell out right so uh everything went in and the 44 actions that came out were the 44 that ranked the highest in that framework so by default uh we use it in charge of like what we're investing in and then new actions have to run through that so things like telework um we just we didn't think it was feasible but it scored high feasibility now until it came in to the plan free uh the plan framework we've pivoted um away from using that for individual actions like is somebody gonna spend time on x or y the answer is gonna spend time on both and how we

131prioritize that now is in a project management framework we have a project management system where people have to fill out uh because they're proposing new projects that align with h zero they have to then actually file this whole charter that indicates what the action is what they think like the strategic opportunities how it aligns with the framework how it aligns with the goals and objectives to set by council and so we sort of use the prioritization prioritization framework because like the umbrella and then the specifics fallout through the project management system we use okay okay and then um let's see i think you mentioned so i had a couple of questions specific about looking forward um and i couldn't make quite what you were saying you talked about the landfill project and you talked about

132the department of commerce action is that project delayed or is it on still on schedule i'm waiting on updated pricing uh we were on ice for the two months when the investigation for those who are unfamiliar department of commerce launched an investigation right before we came to the energy commission i mean that i think it was that week like a few days before into solar panels manufactured in four countries and uh imposed a retroactive tariff up to two hundred percent of the cost of a system if you used any animal credit card for multiple countries but 86 of all solar panels have hearts from those four countries uh that we know of and likely many more did so it was an existential crisis for the industry things just stopped and our project was one and

133also stopped and uh what happened last week is the president put a ban one more domestic manufacturing of solar panels heat pumps and other equipment so that meant that the project could move forward with no risk of penalty while we're building the domestic ability to manufacture so last week we met on thursday uh with the project team we're getting updating pricing uh unfortunately when that happened some manufacturers shattered their doors uh and so we need to understand the impact but as soon as we get updated but actually in parallel we're moving the contract we were almost done with contract negotiations so we're moving those forward in tandem hoping that pricing comes back so i would say we lost two months but we might um if the pricing comes back great we might actually be able

134to still save harbor the assets this year which means we lock in the 26 percent so that's what i'm running on so it is still possible that we would be breaking ground next year on the project it would not be likely commercially operational but it's not impossible that it would be commercially operating the next calendar year okay that's good to hear i i read him i wrote in the email i read something like 80 large utility scale projects in the united states have been cancelled just because of all the uncertainty because if for those of you who hadn't heard those tariffs were going to be retroactive so it was really nuts i mean it just it with that kind of a tariff it would have just made all these projects uneconomical and people were not

135going to go ahead with a project that was going to be uneconomical um there was no mention of the municipal utility feasibility study could you give us a sense of with a timetable for that yeah so in the actual written report we have a line that just says continue the investigations because we are getting the time tables back right now from the bidders so i i just don't have a timetable to tell you definitively it would be done or it would not be done the stance that we have in the office and i think holistically as a city is we want it as fast is we can get really high quality data back so we will be pushing uh the vendors to move rapidly and to give us offerings through that process where they evaluate

136something and it is just not going to work we get it out quick so we we really minimize which means they can go faster with a smaller scoop of work so that's the only reason you don't see this i just don't have it yet right and what about the the feasibility study that um council approved in in in january the rfp is out right because yep bids are in um um right now and so we are starting to review an interview folk but that's they're combined right that task includes the scu and yeah uh the physical pc so that's that's part of this hangout so when is the decision anticipated on when the vendor is going to be picked probably probably july at the end of july more than you want to know i'm going

137on vacation so i leave on friday i'm not going to work so it'll be after i come out yeah okay um then yeah so we can maybe talk about some of those other maybe i'll just ask one last question because it came up um in public comment natural gas ban um this has been discussed um between um ken and you and me and in the three of us and others it's been something that ken has been pushing at the planning commission meetings and also here um is is the city's position absolutely definitive that we are going to wait um and determine see what happens with the uh the energy code and if the zero code is adopted as an appendix is that what what we're going to do i can't give you an answer that's

138going to feel meaningful on this what i can say is that we are looking at this from different angles including non-traditional angles to try to figure out where there's space for us to move and we have some ideas we have some ideas that are not going to fly but we kind of try to push we have some that are ambiguous as to whether or not we're allowed and here's somewhere clearly so we are right now doing some work of staff to figure out where there's space and most likely this will become a council question of how much risk we want to take as a city yeah i mean it's basically legal costs if we do some of this right we while it is true that michigan is a horrible state it is also true that

139our legislature is very quick to take away things especially when ann arbor does them and so we want to we want to try to present something that has a chance of actually surviving i've never learned [Music] so the answer is i don't know but we are working on it and why we i don't mean just us there's a lot the planning commission is very interested in this topic the planning department is very interested we've heard counseling we've heard the planning commission we've heard the public loud and clear um this is not a case where staff is just kind of back out of sales we are trying really hard to think that's important i think just you know we're here to advise council and i think can you know i he hasn't shared his calculations with

140me but i believe his calculations and i think what we're seeing you know what his concern is is that we should all be aware that while we're doing all these things that you outline that are really great um we're also doing things that are growing emissions um and you know there's other things for example that potentially are going to negatively impact us that we don't have a lot of control of you know the new university of michigan hospital um that's going to have um it's going to be a huge new building it's going to be ums but also ann arbor's emissions there's going to be 600 new employees just associated with that hospital and there's not 1600 new housing units in ann arbor so that means those people are going to be commuting in and

141i'm you know that that building is is also going to be a very very energy intense building all these new developments that are going to be heated with natural gas are are going to be offsetting a lot of the great things that you and your team have done so it's it's something that we need to be aware of that you know when these developments come online in 2026 2027 we're gonna see um those offsetting some of the great gains that that unfortunately we've um they will offset the great things that we've done unfortunately so okay that's that was it um and i think does anybody yeah go ahead council member i was also just going to add i mean to the to add to the complexity of kind of the ban on natural gas um

142there is actually senator zorn that has introduced legislation at the state level that would ban local bans on natural gas and so the current majority is not friendly to these types of things and so i think that also adds to the the challenge that missy was talking about i think we would need to consider really strongly if we were to move forward on something if that would actually give weight to his legislation at the state level to prohibit us from doing it right yeah the we might um we might uh open pandora's box in in a negative kind of way is that that's basically your point right yep it would it would close pandora's box on us doing other kinds of things that we might want to do okay i think um that's it we're

143down to now uh a few last topics first of all um osi reports and news from energy commissioners i think we just got a rather detailed report from osi but missing that there might be a few other things you want to share with us well i'll just say that on tuesday night uh at council we will be bringing it's the last council of the fiscal year um and we're bringing forward a resolution for a power purchase agreement for 3.1 megawatts of solar at central facilities water trooper flight research you can flat wheeler airport stair farm super exciting stuff uh two batteries large large commercial batteries and one two and five retailer two implement ev chargers uh 26 speed chargers that would go with the extra we just had so and during the fiscal year commissioners

144comments from commissioners updates from commissioners questions from commissioners so um i have some comments and what i thought i would do is also provide some background so um there's been um an email that was sent from ann arbor for public power to city council on that questions um the appointment of a uh or the recommendation of an appointment to the energy commission and what i first wanted to do was explain um what the process has been in recent years when um we make recommendations for appointments and then what happens then beyond that so i don't know that it's widely known but for the last um at least three years or so uh missy and i um carlene as vice chair and then our two council liaisons um meet and we review all of the applications

145that have come in in the last several years um so we're not just looking at recent applications we're also looking at ones um that are still on file with the mayor's office so i think everybody knows that there's a website where people can um basically make an application to join a commission or actually several commissions at any point in time and then as openings arise we look at who is applied we each study that um individually um in last couple of rounds i've done a summary and a spreadsheet um to sort of summarize some of the key information from each one of those and then we've had our two hour long hour and a half long meetings where we've um basically come to what we feel are recommendations on appointees that are then provided through

146missy to the mayor's office ultimately then the mayor uh has the right to make nominations um for the approval of city council and then those go to city council for approval i don't know um that everybody was aware of that process many of you or of us have um been serving and um maybe the i think some of the the process steps um changed a little bit um so recently we met and um one of the people that we recommend for not nomination um is um knox cameron knox is um a um local in ann arbor resident um he lives here in ann arbor he's raising um his um children here he's um an employee of um dte he works in the my green power program and there was um a big um concern that

147was expressed number of concerns that were expressed by hannover for public power i don't know if this was um sent on behalf of the whole organization or um um which i think it was or or just a couple of individuals or their border however they operate um but what i wanted to do is just share with you um at least my personal viewpoints on this um and i'm going to send these also to city council and i encourage anyone to speak up with their own opinions um obviously each one of us are have a right to our own opinions and obviously a2p2 had some concerns most of those concerns were related to dte and dte's actions with regards to its business and how those in some cases conflicted with the goals of a20 but what

148i wanted to say is remind everyone first of all that the energy commission has had members from investor owned utilities in the past so all of you know that we had um chuck hook um serving until recently um he as he told us on his last meeting day has been on the commission for many many years um we also had um as commission chair shoshan olensky she served on the commission for seven years including one year um as chair and she has been a long time employee of dte so um past practice at least has been that we have not um disqualified someone just because of who their employer is um in um in no one represents i think in in the commission um their employer they're representing themselves they're representing their own professional opinion

149and i think we all know we've studied and talked about the bylaws in the commission that the bylaws require that any individual recruits themselves or any other commissioner can raise the concern that someone may have an ethical or professional conflict of interest and if that's true in those cases then the person is to be recruited from voting as well as from any actually even any discussion on that matter um knox brings um diversity to the commission along multiple characteristics um he's younger than certainly i am um and a few other people on the commission um he's an african-american he went to university of michigan so he's got a strong background um knox in in my view should not be judged by what we might call the misdeeds or the the um the policies and strategies

150of of dte um most of those strategies are set at the executive level um he has a managerial level in the migrate power program but that program um was set up um several years ago before he joined that joined that program in 2019 so i i think it's it's um a stretch to look at knox and say knox is somehow unqualified to serve on the commission because of um because of that and then i would finally then just simply say knox is only one out of 15 votes on the commission so um he has an opportunity to raise his or horse opinions and concerns just like anybody else and um but that doesn't mean that he can uh be out vote voted if we feel differently we still have all of our individual votes and

151i might also point out that we i think most of us know that there's um one person on the commission who has been active within the a2p2 community i don't know if they have members or whatever they call their um their followers or whatever but um so it's it's not that we have um said well we're going to start to exclude people because of their affiliations so that was something that i wanted to to share um with all of you and um you'll probably catch wind of this um my understanding is it's going to be considered by city council but i wanted to share my thoughts with you and do that first with the commission before i did that with city council because i wanted to be just transparent about my my feelings on this

152and encourage anybody else to speak up um and to share their thoughts with city council members um between now and when that's voted on so um that was an update for me and i don't know if anybody else wants to comment on it um but um i don't see any hands up so i would just ask one last time if anybody else on the commission wants to speak to any other topics before we move to working group updates and i don't know that there's going to be much there because carlene dropped off she had written me she had some other commitment at um eight and then also we had edie drop out from her sorry my wife is boiling water in the other room um so uh edie is as you heard in in bonn

153germany and they are six hours ahead of us so it's already 2 a.m there so um i don't know if anybody else has any other updates regarding anything in a working group or from the environmental commission i'm not aware of anything um that's of particular interest from the environmental commission so um that takes us then to uh public input before adjournment and so i will read off the uh spiel here as far as how to call in so again this is an opportunity for people to speak for up to three minutes um if you are watching on ctn please call 888-788-0099 or 877-853-5247 and enter meeting id and this information um is on the video feed in a legistar city staff will um select callers that have raised their hand one by one using the

154last three digits of um their phone numbers and in order to raise your hand to indicate your desire to speak please press star 9 on your phone and then you're going to hear an automated announcement that the host is allowing you to speak please state your name and address at the beginning of your comments thank you dr stalton chair mursky ken garber again 28 hammer hill court um great presentations and very interesting discussion tonight just a quick question on the annual greenhouse gas inventory this is a beautifully detailed report with essential information for tracking the city's decarbonization progress i think i heard dr salt state tonight that the report covering 2020 is posted on the city's website i just checked and i can still only find the report from 2019. maybe i'm looking in the

155wrong place but when i spoke at the green fair on friday with thea jagerlander from osi she told me it wasn't posted but offered to send me a copy anyway if it hasn't been posted i hope it soon will be if it's there somewhere now my apologies i will check back with osi in a couple of days if i still can't find it thanks that is also what i attempted to do i also mentioned in my email i searched on legistar for greenhouse gas inventory and inventory and both last year and this year and could not find it in 2000 and um whenever it was 20 when we did the 2019 inventory then it was on let posted on legistar and linked to in the agenda so you might take a look at that any

156other i'm sorry i was trying to find it yeah that's all right do we have any other columns caller ending in zero one zero we do not hear you yet we're still moving there we go hello yes can you hear me now yes uh good evening this is wayne out with the our former energy commissioner i was on energy commission for 26 years talking to you from my all-electric net zero home in norville township in jackson county first i want to applaud the julie roth and entire osi staff for the several megawatts of installed solar generation it's really a wonderful accomplishment i totally agree with the previous speaker ken garber that the continued use of natural gas and the installation of additional natural gas usage is totally detrimental to accomplishing the a20 plan since co2

157remains in the atmosphere for hundreds of years the area under the curve is of utmost importance we simply have to stop combusting now i do however understand that the pushback is already occurring on the state level as there is a michigan bill senate bill 820 that would ban such a ban on natural gas interestingly the fact that this bill is in progress indicates that the current law does not as ken suggested ban a ban on new gas installations i would like to propose a different ordinance proposal which although not an entire ban may go a long way to having the same effect without a ban from the state the ordinance would simply require that all new construction would require that the electric service capacity load breakers and electrical wiring to the locations of all installed

158natural gas appliances be provided furnaces and boilers and sucks in order to allow for the future conversion from natural gas to electricity this would both reduce the cost of future conversion and increase the cost to the developer such that it becomes cheaper for them to go all electric i think that is something that you should propose to the legal department and see what they think about it because i really do believe it would be difficult for the state to tell you that you couldn't require that thank you very much um i would only observe um that um i've done a fair number amount of research and spoken actually to a company in pennsylvania that designs and builds and develops net zero multi-family um construction um and their construction costs are actually the same or lower

159and the the state of pennsylvania has done extensive um comparisons on and benchmarks um of traditional construction against um these best practices from a number of different developers and it's it's simply not a cost premium to design highly efficient all-electric buildings so um anything we can do either convincing or with the kinds of ordinances that have been proposed i think is something we really should take a look at again um any other comments before we adjourn seeing none uh it is 8 16 and i thank all of you for attending night and for your public service um i wish you a nice rest of your evening this meeting is adjourned thanks good night have a great trip you