001shall we start okay hello everyone um i'd like to welcome you to the environmental commission of ann arbor um and i'd like to first say that i'm sorry to tell you that steve brown our chair is not feeling well tonight and so i am sitting in as co-chair and rita mitchell and i want to welcome you all to the january 27th 2022 electronic meeting of the environmental commission the meeting is in accordance with the executive orders of the governor to affect social distancing and mitigate the spread of cloven 19. we intend to conduct this meeting similarly to an in-person meeting and i ask your patients if there are technical issues i'm new at doing this or not well-experienced and there may be technical problems who knows public comment will be via telephone only and to
002speak during public comment please call 788-0099 and enter meeting id 989-2851 and there will be some information on how to raise your hand and get the attention so that you can be called on to speak this information is available also on the published agenda in the public notices section of the city's website and on the broadcast of this meeting on ctn channel 16 a t channel 99 and online at www.a2gov.org watch ctn so um with that let's move forward with our agenda um galen would you give the land heritage statement all righty i acknowledge that the land the city of ann arbor occupies is the ancestral traditional and contemporary lands of the anishinaabe including ottawa ojibway bodhi wadmie and wyandotte peoples i further acknowledge that our city stands like almost all property in the united
003states on lands obtained generally in unconscionable ways from indigenous peoples the taking of this land was formalized by the treaty of detroit in 1807. knowing where we live work study and recreate does not change the past but a thorough understanding of the ongoing consequences of this past can empower us in our work to create a future that supports human flourishing and justice for all individuals and that's the land you statement thank you um gail would you now call the role please sure uh commissioner needham commissioner needham okay uh councilmember dish president from evanston illinois okay uh commissioner graham commissioner graham president ann arbor okay uh commissioner gibb randall karen ann arbor councilmember griswold here ann arbor uh commissioner kylie ward here in ann arbor chairperson brown uh vice chairperson mitchell you're in ann arbor hi
004commissioner vandenbrot here uh commissioner oriol here in ann arbor commissioner zang here at a number commissioner marston here in ann arbor all right we have a quorum great thank you and um thanks everyone for for being here um i would like to now ask for approval of the agenda would anyone like to make a motion because graham and i see a second by um council member griswold great thank you very much um and now i would like to ask for approval of the minutes from december 2nd 2021 commissioner gibb randall and a second from commissioner martin thank you great um and now we will move on to public commentary and i'll read a statement about the public commentary um this is an opportunity for persons to speak for up to three minutes please call i'll
005say the number again it's 1-888-788-0099 and the meeting id is one 989-2851 six three seven um [Music] no information is also on the agenda and on the video feed for this meeting uh city staff will select callers that have raised their hand one by one using the last digits of your phone number in order to electronically raise your hand to indicate that you wish to speak please press star 9 on your phone you'll hear an automated announcement that the host is allowing you to speak and when speaking please move to a quiet area you tell any television or background note sounds so that we may hear you clearly please state your name and address at the time beginning at the beginning of your comments and to unmute yourself it is star six so um galen
006do we have anyone who's ready to talk with us there are no callers no callers okay then let's move on with our meeting um we are intending to have some special presentations although i don't see those additional speakers galen do you see um either anyone from the we care denali group or the werma theo aggramant uh i'll take responsibility for that one uh susan thoman should be signing in and i'm gonna just call her on my cell phone okay um on that see if we can't get her to sign in here all right she's coming in she's speaking from uh washington state um anderson the head or she's the executive director of the compost manufacturing alliance and they are in constant communication with the we care denali set up and also rod tyler who is
007the regional director of the regional manager over we care denali he was invited in uh also to speak so let me see if i can't get them okay thank you i don't know i'll check with theo he works in my office i didn't know he was on the agenda until i saw the agenda a few minutes ago whoops thank you let's give it just a couple of minutes and see if we can line these up hey rita yes while we're waiting i would just like to point out we have a really long agenda tonight um so if we're really having a hard time with some of these things i would suggest that we table something um so just wanted to put my vote in for that if we're struggling with getting people right yep that's
008fine um i think that's an easily doable and i know that there's one that's going to be tabled anyway it's the one on the potassium iodide um steve was going to lead on that and so that one is definitely off the agenda for tonight um i guess i should have mentioned that when we did the approval of the agenda my apologies so i wonder if we should move up could i move to rearrange the agenda so that um we have two speakers who are available evan pratt and vanvic now we could move forward with the um issue on the galman plume would that be acceptable to the group yes i see a yeses okay great and chris are you are you making it through with with um the other group she assured me this afternoon
009like at three o'clock even and that she was on for tonight so i don't know okay well let's let's just go ahead with with um the galman plume question and um then we'll we'll move back if we can do so right and so uh thanks so i want to just give a brief introduction and then um then we'll we'll have some further discussion um last year actually in january the um city council and followed by the environmental commission um supported the work of of the water resources commissioner who is evan pratt present tonight um to move forward with um giving a notice of violation to the gelman company because of an infiltration of one four dioxin into the allen creek drain that runs through that was identified specifically in the west park area moving toward
010chapin street and um since then there has been a presentation by gelman elder were planned to address that but the plan was considered insufficient or incorrect um and so it was we're waiting and waiting to hear more from gelman to move forward so this is an opportunity for us to talk over um the kind of the history of it see where we are going and then um uh i have also prepared a resolution for us to consider tonight for additional support so with that i would like to turn it over first to dan bicknell who is the president of global environmental services i'm sorry associates um and who has been following the galman plume issue for a very long time and he has prepared some information for us to discuss right so dan are you
011thank you thank you commissioner mitchell um galen is it possible for me to share my screen um is it visible now galen it is not yet okay thank you see that evan is co-host we need dan right now i don't know if evan if you want to present something we'll definitely set that up for you too yeah i don't see a screen share button either but i'm you know i'm fine with the verbal to the extent that it doesn't confuse people i i have a hard time visualizing stuff sometimes without maps but i know everybody's city residents but i'll still yield the florida dan for the moment yeah i thought maybe evan we could just quickly kind of go through um the uh status of the allen creek during storm water contamination and then quickly
012touch on you know the ms4 permit if that's okay um the allen creek drain which we all know goes through the city of ann arbor has been impacted um by the gilman dioxane plume contamination and the gelman sites probably about three miles away from the current uh west park area which is becoming contaminated and in 2019 20 and 21 there was sampling done through evans office water resources commissioner's office and the eagle great lakes environment and energy and the new allen creek stormwater data collected by eagle in 2021 shows the continued dioxane plume degradation of the allen creek storm water currently gilman is in non-compliance with the washington county water resources commissioner january 2021 notice a violation as rita was talking about the nov covers the gilman dioxin groundwater contamination seeping into the allen creek
013drain and that's a violation of the federal municipal separate separate storm sewer system permit in november 8th of last year eagle sampled the allen creek drain and found in three locations dioxane at one at 33 one at 16 and one at 2.5 and again this confirms what was generally found in 2019 and 2020 and as a consequence of this dioxane seeping into this ms4 permitted ellen creek drain above remedial criteria it's a violation of this municipal separate storm sewer system ms4 permit additionally in november or december of last year they sampled the west park pond and found one part per billion dioxane in the area officially to be in compliance with the ms4 permit no dioxane is allowed into the allen crate drain storm water here's a quick overview of the plume area different concentrations
014the yellow line is the 85 part per billion line the red line is above that 85 part per billion level the blue lines are the allen creek drains there's three main laterals of them and if you look upstream if you will the flow of the groundwater is from west to east as well as the drain flows from west to east you see that in this location here wildwood arby view there's not any dioxane noise there in maple ridge but as the run goes down towards west park you see that there is contamination here um of of 17.3 in 2019 49 and 2020 and 33 parts per billion in 2021. similarly further downstream in chapin street you see the dioxane at 9.1 2.8 and 16 in those three years and if you go down to this
015southern reach you do see dioxane at 8th street at 2.5 and in the past at one and in the past at murray it was about 1.1 so there is a continued problem that we have here with the dioxane in the plume seeping into the if you wills fissures in the storm drain which is normal normally you'll have infiltration of clean groundwater but unfortunately because the ground is contaminated with dioxin you're having this dioxane seep infiltrate into the allen creek drain again the stormwater documents that there is a multi-year gilman violation of the allen creek ms4 permit and the dioxin plume into the drain is not going to be going away in any time in the near future now the ms4 permit is a federal clean water act permit that's been delegated to the state of
016michigan to be administered on behalf of the federal united states environmental protection agency the state of michigan issued the ms4 permit to the water resources commissioner which covers in part the allen creek drain however when we talk about a violation the ms4 permit violation is a totally separate federal law violation from what most of us know as the state of michigan part 201 contaminated site violations which you all are familiar with uh being intervening parties uh in the court order so the 2021 court order between the state government and their intervening parties is totally separate from this federal ms4 permit violation the ms4 permit and applicable guidance governing the drain require that gilman halt any dioxin above background concentrations from seeping into the storm water so for our government situation the appropriate option is to
017immediately stop the illicit violation by treating it to uncontaminated levels prior to entering the storm drain and the point of compliance officially is where the dioxin plume infiltrates into the drain as commissioner mitchell was talking about in january the water resources commissioner issued a notice of violation to gelman for this illegal discharge andy gilman replied with an april 2021 work plan unfortunately it was defective in the water resources commissioner in june twenty twenty one responded to their work plan compelling gilman to provide a revised work plan the revised work plan was due within three weeks from june third and was to address all the problems that were found by the water resources commissioner in eagle and they were also directed to complete storm water sampling of dioxane by october 9. unfortunately they've both missed the
018revised work plan submittal date uh as well as the october ninth storm water quality due date and therefore they're really in violation of the notice of violation in the ms4 permit and from my understanding evan um currently gilman has not provided a revised work plan and that's kind of where we are today on the concentrations of the storm water continuing to be impacted as well as uh not having gilman being able to be in compliance with the ms4 permit um so um dan before you remove your slides i think it might be worthwhile for us to um have the opportunity to hear from and unless you have some more comments do you do you want to um i don't know anything i was i was kind of my uh that was the seven mile high
019view that's good great um and i guess evan since right now we have an opportunity to use a map that dan has and i was thinking that that might be useful in in your discussion if you wish um yeah i guess we can we can have that up in case that's handy for for folks in picturing anything i go over so um yeah i agreed to come to provide an update of where we're at first off uh to kind of pick up where dan left off we have not received a work plan from gelman but the county's legal council has been working with them they did have a target of getting that to us this week i was told today that there was a there was a hitch at gelman's end with their final final
020review that the consultants done their work uh but uh whoever was supposed to say it's okay to send it over to uh my legal counsel was out sick i don't know if that's true or not we don't have it yet but basically what i'm told is we'll see it any minute so that's just one that's really the main update to know um secondly uh i came more for an update not necessarily to debate uh this that or the other there's a few things that you know i feel and i think i've said at uh card meetings before uh that dan provides in more or less an absolute and concrete state as far as what's required and what must be and this that and the other and i guess i'm going to just say my understanding
021from talking with our legal counsel the attorney general and eagle staff many times over time eagle called last week to say oh yeah sorry we haven't gotten you a little better clarification um it's not as cut and dry as you might have just heard if in fact people were really able to absorb all that i know there's a lot of terminology here so i'll just kind of keep it as high level as i can and say uh two things one the ms4 regulation regulating keeping contaminates out of storm sewer systems and making the operator of that system responsible for chasing down i'll say surprises um is has been around for a while uh it's been used on things such as pfas uh like with tribar up in the i'll say wixom area that was the
022responsibility of the sanitary sewer folks to take care of that surprise uh with local enforcement one of the areas where i would say both eagle and the superfund program do not see or haven't given us a clear understanding i guess all i can understand from those agencies about this ms4 thing when there is an active site remediation going on is the rules are different um i can't seem to get to the bottom of exactly what does that mean exactly what can we require and can't require uh but it's seems to me that what i get out of eagle and the ag's office as well as uh superfund is that the the contamination in the pipe if it's resulting from an active cleanup may or may not have certain requirements so uh i think dan in
023other documents has provided a copy of internal eagle guidance that describes four different options that are one of them is yes you've got to get everything out of the pipe uh that is a contaminant and you got to stop it from getting in there but there's actually three other options too one option is kind of related to hey make it all go away from the groundwater around the pipe that's put a hard liner inside the pipe there you go there's some documentation so these four things on the bottom eliminate the discharge is on the left hand side as i look at my screen there's also saying hey they could just get an npds permit that says up to a certain level uh npdes is national pollutant discharge elimination uh permit so that's something that uh
024agencies get from eagle in fact the city sewer plant has an npds permit and it says you can't discharge more than this on a daily basis or more than this on a monthly average so your monthly average has to be lower than your daily and in fact uh gelman has an npds permit for the discharge of the treated uh water uh over at wagner road that discharges into a very small creek that's under equal jurisdiction and there's limits to how much they can discharge after the cleanup process because they their their process doesn't get it 100 down to zero but the third option uh would be uh you know get total uncontaminated discharge uh but also you'll see this box in the bottom right here that says well if it's uh part of a contaminated
025site uh restoration uh you know they're coming up with additional options that might be a long-term plan but the bottom line is what i get out of eagle is they're not seeing anything that's more immediate and acute and i think one issue where i've been very clear to eagle to say look i i want contamination out of pipe we all want that i feel bad when i come and tell groups that's what i want but the pathway to getting there through the regulatory process uh seems a little unclear at best there is an eagle memo that i provided to rita that provided some clarification of where their head was at on that and i guess the only other thing i can say is it's probably not beneficial because danaher pays people to look for any
026information that's publicly available that might help them i'm a little uncomfortable with getting deep into legal strategy but we have an extremely weak hand and at the crux of that we can is you know just whether you put yourself in my shoes or just say any local agency it's a little baffling to me to say we've got what's effectively you know not to be dismissive but we've effectively got collateral damage from a cleanup program and if i'm gelman i'm sitting there saying i did everything that i'm required to do for the cleanup program um we did everything eagle said if there's a problem uh you know how are we to blame likewise as a local agency i really do say we've got absolutely nothing to do with this this isn't a surprise card is documented
027uh in writing two eagles since at least hey we're thinking that this dioxane is moving down to the west park area it's going to get into the river i can't recall if they've specifically said we think it'll get into allen creek but there's a a lot of documentation that says we're worried that this is going to happen it's happened so from my perspective i feel it would be unreasonable for eagle to expect a local agency to spend their money to undo something that got created by an enforcement action by eagle that doesn't mean we necessarily have to sit here and do nothing but if you take a step back and think about what's being asked of us here um it really doesn't seem to be that the local taxpayers should have to flip this bill
028if there's something more to chase so i'm hopeful that what gelman submits to us is acceptable i do have to say [Music] i might have caused part of the problem by although i did have legal counsel review the letter that i sent that said hey you you all need to do a better job with your work plan that letter did say get started on what you proposed because that needs to be done but i am told now that asking them to go ahead and start doing some groundwater sampling is definitely beyond what we could ask so i might have scared them away and i'll take responsibility for that by asking for more than what's required by law the law and the stuff that dan showed you basically says that the polluter has the opportunity to
029uh figure out what's going on they use the word characterize the site so they do have the opportunity to figure out where is this infiltration coming in and at what concentrations so they can get a better idea of where should we be exploring for heavy concentrations of groundwater so i'll i'll take the mia culpa for for maybe scaring them off and essentially losing nine months of investigation activity however if you look at the eagle memo that was provided with my correspondence gilman certainly needed to do more than say we're going to go look at where things are coming into the pipe and figure out where that is they didn't really say what are we going to do if we find it's really bad somewhere uh you know they didn't get into any of the potential
030follow-up activities and eagle identified uh you know three or four or five things that they really do need to address in a revised work plan all that's a roundabout way of saying we're gonna work get a work plan i believe you know they've committed to providing a work plan i believe it's gonna have less than what i asked for in my letter um it would be nice if they did a whole bunch more groundwater sampling but because of the sampling that my office did and uh i would say it was oh shoot you can't see my cursor on this thing because this is dan's screen but there was an area where i was absolutely convinced we were going to find high concentrations of dioxane in the ground water near shannon's house in what's called hannah
031nature area so that's at the end of mark hannah uh behind the salvation army uh near just east of urbana i was just certain so we had samples taken there and we didn't find high concentrations of dioxane in the near surface groundwater we found .44 parts per billion at that location and we found zero at west park when we tested it so i do feel it is appropriate for them to spend time and energy of figuring out where is the mass of dioxane getting into the allen creek pipe to be straightforward with everyone here having that contaminate you know in the pipe itself on the one hand i don't like it and i agree in general with dan's uh you know statements that say we want it out of there the law doesn't seem to
032support us real well there but quite honestly the dioxane in that pipe isn't directly hurting anyone i'm more concerned about that boxing zipping right down to the river are the concentrations going up or down we need long-term monitoring on all of this stuff and that's really where eagle's head was at too with uh feedback and comments of the prior work plan of they need to identify how are they going to do long-term monitoring for this because that is kind of one of the options that's open with long-term sites is well we're just going to eyeball it and if the levels are more than zero we'll just see how they're doing and and see if there's anything that should or shouldn't be done it's pretty fuzzy quite honestly it doesn't look like there's any case law
033out there that said you must do ms4 enforcement if it's resultant from 201 it's the gist of it so i i'm not sure all of those words really add up for people so i probably just need to shut up and see if uh any folks on the commission have any clarifying questions or what have you and i do have a couple comments after that but i need to just stop and take a breath here let's pray too long already thank you evan and dan um rita if i could just make one point is that you know the the ms4 is a federal clean water act permit and that's completely separate from what we have in front of us in court now which is a state of michigan part 201 contaminated site in other words the
034gilman site isn't regulated by the federal government at this time unless it becomes the u.s epa superfund site right now it's in state court it's a court action generally between gelman and the state of michigan and that's a totally separate process totally separate violation it's a violation of michigan regulations whereas the ms4 permit is a federal clean water act permit and when they violate that they're violating a federal clean water act so it's definitely apples and oranges and they don't mix together to make cranberry juice they're definitely different things and i can understand why gilman would try to put them together but really they're completely separate violations as i said i'm not here to debate it we've this this same conversation has come up many times dan i understand you're going to stick to your
035interpretation and i'm obligated to stick to what i'm hearing from the attorneys and the fact that the attorney general does not use the same words as dan does that doesn't mean anybody's right or wrong but it means i have to go with what folks with legal expertise in this area describe certainly it's a separate program but again the pertinent point here is uh those regulations as i understand it are applied quite differently ms4 regulations i mean are applied quite differently when there's an active site remediation uh causing the issue so questions from the commission though i see kathy's got her hand up but i'll let rita let rita direct traffic as the chair sure go ahead kathy please okay yeah as someone who has is responsible to my constituents and for some reason people in
036the second ward seem to be very concerned about the one for dioxane but it it seems like we've just gone round and round about what this definition is and uh whenever you ask a lawyer it seems like it adds two weeks to whatever process you're working on um so um i guess my question is for both of you dan and evan would um given that congresswoman debbie dingle has been very involved in this cleanup would it uh be helpful to have her office try to get clarification on this statement because she has the the resources to do that so that we're not getting two different interpretations and i don't know if dan or evan want to weigh in on that well i guess part of my main point is i'm not sure anyone can give
037a definitive interpretation that will definitely hold up in court what i've been trying to convey is part of the muddiness is uh this is not ground that has been tread often and there isn't case law where an agency took somebody to court and said you're you're also violating ms4 in addition to this cleanup we've got going on and uh you know again without getting into something that's too helpful to the other side that like lack of case law given the number of sites that have probably had this issue is one that does not uh warm the heart of of winning in court if you had to go to court and again i'd like to see their work plan and see them take a step forward but it doesn't seem very winnable if you wanted a
038suggestion one thing would be you could sit down with you or another council rep or an ec rep with the city attorney and whatever the ag or anybody else involved and have the conversation of what is how would the city attorney advise council on what's the odds of success if if uh if there was a desire to pursue this more vigorously um as either its own thing or as part of the existing consent judgment so that's one idea another idea is the attorney general's office has been very reluctant to put anything writing on this they consistently say they are working for the folks who do remediation eagle that's not the only group but eagle there's other attorney generals that support eagle there's also going directly to the attorney general and saying why can't this get
039sorted out why can't you just tell us this isn't going to happen or we can help you and make it happen it's got to be one or the other right either the ag is telling us this is something that you don't have any good legal standing which is what i'm interpreting but perhaps they could use a little more encouragement with more vigorously pursuing uh getting contamination out of a pipe i those are the two things and i don't know if uh representative dingle is the best one for that or uh somewhere from the city is best for that that's those are two thoughts oh okay why don't we talk about that offline because you know if you're proposing possibly having a meeting and i don't care what the path is so much as i just
040want to have the sense that we're moving forward and the other thing is political pressure is sometimes helpful this is a an election year and lastly on chapin street there is a black church that has a basement in at least part of its building and it looks like it's sort of in the path of of this dioxane movement i mean i'm not a professional at this but i i definitely want to uh get a better understanding of that because i don't want to have a public discussion about that or being having reporters ask me questions about it we need to be as proactive as possible yeah i i'm going to say i'm not um suggesting that that i'm calling a meeting that's something you could ask for what i think of responsibility to my constituents
041uh what i am seeing here quite frankly is putting a lot of time and energy into pushing on a rope and i'm not sure that's the best thing to do for constituents but my office you know the allen creek drain anyway is almost entirely funded by the city of ann arbor so i will if the city feels like we want to ramp the energy up i just want to be clear that you could put a lot of time and energy in and if if there's a feeling that there's some political reason to do that that's your choice that's the city's choice but i the what i see from the information i hear suggests that if we want to spend lots of time and energy on something we might focus on the core cleanup and ensuring
042that continues to go as well as possible you know in the circumstance and i gather that they've started implementing some of that consent judgment for uh stuff that is over and above what eagle and gelman were agreeing to that started i don't know if that fixes things or not but i do know that until things get better in the core you're not going to see this situation uh vary other than the you know ups and the downs just because the 2021 sampling showed the first reduction and a notable reduction in the amounts doesn't mean that that's really the trend it's just one day one snapshot so i'd really like to have these folks out here monitoring more so we've got more to play with right so okay well i i thank you for for everything
043you you've done i thank dan bicknell for everything that that he has been doing and i guess if it's okay i'll in addition to the resolution i will take an action item and i can work with um with council member dish if she's interested in talking to our city attorney and talking to our city administrator and and letting congresswoman debbie dingle's office know what the status is so that we can at least move this forward in some way and not just go in this continuous loop so thanks thank you thank you um kathy and evan and dan um and i i see i see you lisa um i but i saw chris graham's hand up first so i'd like to ask chris if he would like to make a comment i haven't maybe dan i'm
044not a person who ever wants to be in court i don't think a lot of things that happen in court end up very well i'm curious to know either one of you evan first please has an answer to this problem what well let me put to another way um [Music] the contamination by this chemical has proceeded inexorably without any constraint for 20 years um is there truly an answer is there a way to fix this i'm not suggesting who should fix it or what or you know who pays or what is there a practical way to solve the problem kevin and then then right so when you say the problem like are you just talking about the dioxin in the pipe itself right now about dioxane flowing inexorably toward the huron river somewhere near the
045out flow of allen creek or maybe elsewhere is there a way to to remove the contaminant from our from our groundwater is there a way to uh deal with this in fact or are we facing an issue that's insoluble and so maybe the ultimate result of court action is who pays but yeah they all are paying yeah okay thanks i just want to make sure i hit the right button yeah i mean of course anything's possible with the time and the resources i i have to go back to what you know a number of people have said over time the biggest problem here is the law the part 201 law the law that governs site remediation that was written by lobbyists for you know essentially polluters and doesn't require full cleanups all of that said
046i think i fall on the same side as as just about anybody in the community where i see the word prevent in the consent judgment and i i'm right with eucharist i i don't see a lot of preventing in the long term history i hope that some of this consent judgment for gives us better prevention i hope that the epa should they take this on gets better prevention and that i hope prevention means clean up a lot more mass a lot faster than it has been so it's possible i think the law leaves us with dioxane under the ground even if we get everything we want to at least you know the level of 7.2 parts per billion but it's feasible it's possible it's frustrating yeah chris this is dan and this is not a
047unique problem these solvent sites are all around the united states and the world and the solution is to do groundwater extraction now in the proposed fourth amended consent judgment they're not extracting enough groundwater with enough groundwater wells to have any meaningful impact and that's why the plume just continues to expand but if you put in the proper number of groundwater wells and extracted them then it would halt the plume and restore the aquifer that's what uscpa in the superfund program would ask for and as evan said in this eagle part 201 agreement i call it the new 2021 court order it doesn't require that it's totally deficient as a matter of fact the new court order pumps maybe 12 more gallons per minute than the current order so that's the solution though is to put
048in more groundwater extraction wells to halt the plume and capture this contaminated water don't let it expand and it's nothing new it's classical remediation but gellman has you know as in i think with this ms4 permit issue uh put up a legal defense and well i it's not being required i i think you're probably correct the number of groundwater extraction wells the impact on the community of those in all of the locations they would have to occur is it practical undertaking or is that pipe dreaming no it's a practical it could be it can be done it's not a problem it's done every day in other sites and the cost to doing that the um 50 million dollars it was estimated 50 million dollars in the gilman feasibility study and they said that it was
049practical this was probably more like where are we now relative to that we're completely different they went a completely different way now as seven indicates they're going for uh trying to just basically hold hold the line but what they have is groundwater uh monitoring wells and extraction rates isn't going to hold the line it's going to just let it go by if i was spending a handful of million as opposed to 50 million in order to to do what they're doing in the way of extraction exactly okay thank you yeah i mean if i could just just to quickly respond um to give you a visual um chris i gave this presentation to a number of um units including scio towns of ann river township and i think maybe a little bit in the city
050but these are the uh the yellow lines go to where the extraction wells are that are required in the proposed fourth amended consent judgment and in the current court order as you can see this is the plume and these are the extraction wells well down here is west park the plume is not going to be captured past these two points as it goes towards west park there's nothing that stops it and as a matter of fact these two wells 19 and 23 haven't stopped the plume from going from west to east so this is an example of how deficient the system is and as you can see beyond these extraction wells you have all this contamination flowing freely so that's that's that's the basic problem we have there's not enough work that is being done
051in the court order to stop the uh the plume from migrating i got it so how do we remedy this shortcoming without waiting for the courts to catch up well the basic thing is we've no petition for the united states environmental protection agency to make this into a superfund site and if the united states environmental protection agency did this did make this into a super fun site they would compel gilman to put in many many many more groundwater monitoring wells and halt the plume and restore the aquifer drinking water requirements which is what they do on most all superfund sites but that's different than what is being done underneath the current court order i got it thank you i'd like to let lisa ask her question thank you i want to just get clear on
052to make sure that i understand i absolutely want to work with you on this kathy this is really important and i just wanted to understand the suggestions that we that we got from mr pratt so what i have in my notes is that uh mr pratt advised us to uh to sit down with our city attorney and the ag's office and i agree with you um councilmember griswold that we should of course include the city administrator and ask them um [Music] how winnable a case would be if we tried to take them if we took them to court over the stormwater permit and i'm also thinking that i mean mr proud also raised the question whether their whether the regulatory framework gives us a remedy for this seepage into the allen creek drain and so
053i think that is another question that i would want to hear what the ag's office and our council says because if i understood everything that mr pratt said because the allen creek drain is largely in ann arbor if we want to pursue this through a litigation pathway um that would cost us and so and it is my understanding that our attorney's office likes to make sure they can win before we embark on litigation um so it'd be good it'd just be good to hear what they say that's not necessarily to say that we wouldn't pursue that option we just want to hear what they say um so am i did i follow all of that mr pratt did i get it right i think so i don't think i overtly said i mean i would
054presume that the county's legal counsel spent a lot of time and energy on this one specific issue would be helpful in that conversation i let him know that i i would at least put this out there as a choice i do not have a problem with the county being in front or or behind the city on this one i i just don't feel like it's my uh i don't feel it's my place to go start down that path without everybody's eyes wide open as far as you know what i've heard so far isn't encouraging and it is money of city taxpayers and you know i got constituents all over the county and i try to make sure that how i work with my constituent group considers the the funding of things all along because my
055office doesn't collect any general taxes it's all based on what happens on this piece of pipe or that ditch or what have you so just at our attorney is the only thing they had i think and i don't know if i don't want us to debate this at length because we have already a lengthy agenda but um you have emphasized that our best pathway forward may be aggressive implementation of the fourth consent judgment which does significantly increase the volume at which the cleanup will proceed from what has been true up to now um it is do we need more extraction wells farther east given the way the plume is moving as mr bucknell suggested i am not i don't have a good background in that hydro geology thing but just uh intuitively and having read
056a lot of information with maybe not comprehending 100 of it absolutely more extraction wells which would seem to be a no-brainer as a benefit to the to the setup i mean i you know i laugh at myself not at the subject matter here and obviously having them a little further east the catch is we're not seeing the groundwater uh in those areas with a lot of dioxin in it once you get past our banana like i said i swore that there was no way we were gonna have anything other than you know noticeable bit higher levels than what's in the pipe is what i expected to find out of the pipe because there's a fair amount of clean water getting in the pipe we didn't find that at all so we're really not i'm not
057concerned about the church i used to live on chapin i know simone from way back when and you know her dad running the church and everything i'm not concerned in the least about at this time about that but we need to be keeping track of this stuff on a constant basis uh because who you missed two years and all of a sudden the plume did you know whatever crest whatever was holding it back and it moved along now it's been six years since eagle did a fair amount of shallow groundwater monitoring all along seventh and there was no dioxane found in the groundwater all along seventh but that was six years ago and as dan points out uh now they did find something in the pond at west park after not finding it for quite
058some time so yeah more extraction was the better other than that i don't know the science or the legality behind all that kathy i just wanted to clarify my statement that i am not advocating for litigation and that would be my absolute last resort that you know more monitoring is is definitely i'm not an expert in this but again it seems like that would be money better spent than than a lengthy court battle i mean we've already seen what happens there so okay yeah and i just want to clarify i'm bringing up legal things because not because of go to court now or go to court later it's uh what rights do we have to put out there as i said i've learned after the fact that my letter overstepped uh you know the law
059and my attorney keeps reminding me let's just follow the law let's just follow the law i keep reminding him you took a look at that letter before i sent it again i'm not laughing at the subject matter i'm laughing at myself he wanted to be very sure that i was not in a position of having to walk back things that were in that letter and i feel like i'm in that position and i feel bad but i guess i feel better about uh pushing too hard then not pushing hard enough so i guess i in this case i'm okay with being over the line and i hope that doesn't offend anybody but we certainly need to know what our legal standing is as we continue down a path that probably includes more frustration than satisfaction
060but i echo chris's comments quite a while ago i know of very few people who ever went to court and walked out and did a joy dance and that includes people who absolutely had everything clearly on their side by the law and it just didn't work out they had a jury that didn't see it the same way or what have you were a judge that disagreed we've got a friendly judge you know in general so that's a good thing but that only goes so far so i only bring the legal stuff up and we want to make absolutely sure that everything we do puts us in the best position going forward i agreed i see another question from chris graham so lisa and kathy and the mayor and the council um if you went to
061gelman or whomever were dealing with actually and said okay we'll split the cost with you [Music] to install three or four times more extraction wells than you're doing now well you'll do it of course the city would have lots of conditions and no doubt gelman would have lots of conditions but what would that cost wouldn't it if an agreement could be made wouldn't that go a long way towards solving the problem long before the courts solve it rhetorical question you don't have to answer all right i see a hand up with uh dan bicknow and i think we should just try and wrap up soon yeah i i would just observe chris that the uh proposed fourth amendment consent judgment was as far a field for gilman as they're willing to go the eagle people
062interveners were not happy with the monitoring wells and the extraction rates as i understand them and a number of other things but that was the offer that gelman made so it's very unlikely that gilman is going to agree to install a bunch of extraction wells if half the cost is going to be on their side of the ledger that's why i keep going back to if you really want to change the dynamic here you need to get the federal government involved and have this become a u.s epa superfund site because they have the ability to enforce with the department of justice and the ag's office uh a a real result and if gilman at that point refuses to follow superfund remember that there is this excuse me if they refuse to have an administrative order
063and and do this compromise you have that super fund in the background that will pay for it and then we'll sue them in a cost recovery action so classically when you get into this situation where you're in in with people who like to litigate you go into the federal government you get the department of justice to help out in that way the city and the municipalities don't have to continue to fund what they're doing now through this state action so i guess the obvious question is where are we on the request of the super fund funding yeah well what where we are is back in 2016 we petitioned the us epa to go forward and look at making this into a superfund site uh in 2017 they did a preliminary assessment and they said yes
064the gilman site does qualify tentatively to become a uscpa superfund site and late last year the governor of the state sent a letter to uscpa saying we support making this into a u.s epa superfund site so currently right now u.s epa is moving forward to make this into a u.s epa federal superfund site they have people now that are taking additional samples federal people that are taking samples and ideally near the end of the year they will have collected that data and shortly thereafter we'll understand if the united states environmental protection agency is still uh looking uh at likely making this into a uscpa superfund site fingers are across thank you welcome thanks and um i guess i'd like to just make a statement that for my part um having lived in town since this
065has been discovered um so that's like over 30 years i personally feel a level of beyond impatience and amazement that we've gotten this far without some kind of better resolution and i'm hoping that that we have started some things that are actually going to be effective and i would like to encourage the continued efforts as they are ongoing um so with with that in mind um i did prepare a resolution that i included in the agenda packet that is basically a very much a restatement of what we did last year which is to support um the water resources commissioner evan pratt in his efforts at addressing the um the ongoing ms4 infiltration which is separate from the epa approach um and so just to to continue that and then knowing that you're going to get
066we hope uh a response from gelman very soon um i know that this feels probably redundant but i would like to um uh ask the group first off did you have a chance to look at that resolution do you want to look at it can we look at it right now if we need to and if if so um i'll just play it and we can talk through it everyone read it no okay i will need some screen sharing time [Music] and oh my gosh i think i found it can you see my screen so this is a proposal that we address the ms4 permit that is actually managed by the water resources commissioner to address the the work that has been started um read it yes i would recommend given the time that we
067just skipped down to the resolve clause because there's only that i just didn't want to okay here we are here's the result okay um this is very simple that the environmental commission advises city council which is our job to advise city council to pass a resolution in support of the water resources commissioner and enforcing the notice of violation in compliance with the ms4 permit that is issued to the water resources commission and i see two hands up ah chris you're up first where's that from before chris graham um i'm gonna skip chris for the moment and go to lisa your hand is up there you go sorry um yeah i'm just not sure um there's some language in the in the whereas clauses about how gelman's not in compliance and i'm not i'm not entirely
068sure if that's what commissioner pratt has told us um they're late but he indicated that he was expecting their revised work plans so i mean i think though that this is consistent with the kind of thing that you just have described in terms of working with um various members of our support on this kind of issue working with the city attorney with the aha with the administrator that that this resolution supports your moving forward in that way so it's just advising so we're just advising council to move forward um is there is something we would like to amend in this we could certainly do that i'm just not sure that it's necessary i think we're going to do this anyway and this commission has already you know provided this advice so i guess if we
069want to say it again i guess there's no harm done um does anyone else like to okay um chris graham are you i see your hand raised and i see john calvary chris i'm not hearing you oh okay so i guess i'm just asking for clarification it seems like what we did a year ago was to support um the issuing of the nov and now we're moving forward with enforcing right so it's taking the next step after what we did a year ago correct thank you i see now kathy as well um i'm open to um amending any of the whereas clauses if evan pratt feels anything is is out of line or inconsistent with with his observations but i i think that the resolve clause is really what's most important and that is enforcement
070i've not reviewed the document so i don't feel like i should step in and give a top of mind answer or anything like that i did not look at this i mean the agenda thing just came out recently to us so i've not had a chance to look at it i don't want to bind anything up you know or you you can table it and i'm happy to look at it between now and your next meeting with whatever works for you all okay um chris graham again i'm i'm not enthusiastic about more court i um [Music] it seems to me that something's got to give here and it's very difficult for a city and a corporation to negotiate once they've drawn lines in the sand so in this in this case though we're not asking
071the city to go to court we're asking our water resources commissioner to work on the enforcement and i do realize there's a redundancy to last year um so i i say this is as an expression of uh impatience with the situation um and support for real um for um moving forward because it has been a significant period of time so i'm open to suggestions and i would support that and if that if this is not requesting the city attorney to go to court on this basis then i'm supportive but i think another step is really required and that is to get to a practical solution inexpensively as possible and that does not include internees and it probably does include some city expense at helping to solve the problem and maybe the super fun thing works
072out but that's a ways away and it would be very helpful uh but an overture in the meanwhile might be worth doing my two cents okay um personally i would prefer not to put that kind of thing in this resolution um i feel pretty strongly that we've had a long time of working with this company that has created the problem and we are now living with it and i personally would like to see them be the responsible for resolving it um so that's my statement um but um i'm open to other questions and if we would like to vote on this i'm happy to do that um let's see two hands up again uh chris chris are you intending to ask i'm sorry i'm not i forgive you that's right hi john my personal feeling
073is that i'm not uh sufficiently kind of knowledgeable of a lot of the information in the whereas clauses so i'd like to take up mr pratt's offer to kind of review it and that we come back to this next meeting all right is that the wish of the group since i can't see everybody i guess i'll stop screen sharing every moment if i can figure it out stop here hi um all right well um would i'll just put out a motion would the group like to table this resolution for consideration over the next month and bring it back yeah i moved to postpone until the next environmental commission meeting okay um everyone in favor say a second thank you uh everyone in favor all right okay closed all right we will table and bring it
074back and i appreciate the discussion thank you very much um thanks evan thanks dan yeah good to hear the discussion i'll check in if there's any feedback on the resolution but if any members of the commission want to have additional conversation or something i'm certainly available i say i can't type my address in the chat but all our emails are the same at washington county it's last name first initial at washington.org so i'm pratt e washington.org if anybody wants to you know talk a little bit further or say i don't like this clause or whatever but i'll just take a look at it and follow up with the chair and the council members i apologize for the late submission or getting it to you um thank you all okay so uh we have had this
075extended discussion and thank you um let's move on to or back to our um first item and i will ask chris vandenbrook i guess to perhaps do an introduction is that acceptable to talk about and we're talking about the um compost perfect right um i've been curious about compost and the more i look into it i get more and more curious and it turns out there are several people agencies that are in the business of qualifying what can be composted and what can't be and what has become interesting to me is that the compost manufacturing alliance does field testing on compostable items and susan tolman is the executive director of the compost manufacturing alliance and she tells me that she's in frequent conversation with the managers of our local we care denali facility so i've
076invited her some time ago if she wouldn't please try and give us a little talk about how this whole operation works and i see you're still on the line susan so it's uh it's all yours i don't know the technology here maybe uh galen has to enter in but um it's all yours great well it's a privilege to be here um and part of the important work you clearly do um so i am the managing director for the compost manufacturing alliance and we just got back from the u.s composting council conference so unfortunately i don't have any of the wheat care facility folks here but i'm an extension of them and and really what i do is deal with compulsables all over the country for a whole network composters so if i can share my
077screen is that the plan and then i'll just go through a quick presentation for you so good deal here button okay oops sorry guys huh oh there we go i hit the wrong button can you see my screen now yes okay so we're in an interesting time now um where there's a lot of um epr legislation and plastic pollution reduction packs and all sorts of things to get plastics out of the environment to ensure that we're not you know polluting the environment so what we're seeing is a whole lot of companies and brands and and like whole foods saying 40 less plastics on the shelf um and what that's doing though it's moving a whole lot of interest into the compulsible space so this is a very critical time when compulsables become maybe a strategy
078to minimize plastic pollution to really be engaged in what compulsables are all about what they mean to successful programs and how we can actually bring in more food waste but also make sure that we're not taking the wrong things it would be a problem so the program just a little background on me i work here in seattle um and i worked on the pro food waste programs that started uh back in the late 2000s and really was part of building the program from the ground up literally um and and and we came to a point about 2009 where if you're aware here in seattle we have some big companies uh big campuses and everybody's rushing to do compulsibles and so we took the standards that were really um the historical standards that everybody took at
079the time which are lab standards we took all this packaging and lo and behold in a few months we found that a good uh over 50 percent of the items that we were taking in just didn't break down so there's a reason for that and that is that a lot of the lab standards that were developed in the 90s before a lot of the technologies that were built you know after that time were actually cited and permitted so you had standards for basic windrow facilities that might have been running for six months and now you had permitted technology that could process uh feedstock compost feedstock in 60 days so those compostables that were starting to come into these facilities that were newer technology and higher levels of technology uh didn't necessarily align well with the
080original lab standards which are still the lab standards used today so we thought that was a really sustainable as a company i worked for cedar grove so we had to come up with our own plan and we started field testing so compulsible do a lot like i said they minimize plastic pollution it's a great story to know that if you've got a kids you know you've got you know food being served at the local school in a compulsible we can take the food scraps and the package and send it back to the local composter and bring it back to put in the school garden you know it's there's more and more science coming out about composting either applying it or or diverting those organics from the landfill or a big mitigating factor to climate change
081and not to mention if you ever use compost or if you're a home composter we know it grows healthy plants and gardens and we can keep that material in our communities and we get jobs and we get just so many i just can go on and on but i know i gotta keep going so we are a third-party certifier of compulsibles from a solid waste perspective so what what happened over the years is all these folks were using the lab standards and they're good standards we need those lab standards to be met the lab standards tell us that they're safe they don't contain chemicals that they're not phytotoxic that they will biodegrade to biomass and water and not simply fragment in the soil and leave behind microplastics so those uh standards are still very important
082but we're sort of in 0.20 now in this compostable world and that is but it also has to work for the composter so if you think about it if you're a menis if you have a municipal contract with a hauler those organics are going to the composter um someone paid a premium to get a compostable version only to have it go all the way through the system and end up getting landfilled we're actually going the opposite direction environmentally on those materials so cma has really created a system sort of like our own epr system across a network of composters where we have our own bedding system that goes a step beyond the lab standards and that's what we care is adopted in all their facilities taking food scraps uh in their network across the country
083so like what i like to say is we're taking the supply chain that's making all these great products to reduce plastics um and we're taking the compost facility and the solid waste systems and i always like to remind the supply chain if your material ends up in the bin that goes to a municipal composting plant or a privately owned composting plant we have to be part of the same system we can't operate as two different systems so i spent a whole lot of time collaborating with the supply chain in our network to make sure we're co-creating good compost uh with the right compostables so what's really happening and and the reason we cares adopted this is the traditional model of the old standard for compostables one size fits all you make the product you pass
084the lab standards you put it on the shelf no one was thinking about the composter all these years so now we're really creating the space where we all come together and we talk about the lab standards what do the municipalities need for their education how about the haulers and what are we going to tell our consumers so cma is really trying to be the place where all those gaps get filled because we know i always like to say this to my staff people don't fail you systems fail you so if we don't have the right systems to make this optimal for everybody um you know we're going to continue to have problems and people may give up we don't want them to give up compostables have a strategic place out there and we just want
085to make sure we create the right systems the right applications um we are accomplished your own and operated i will tell you that and we put this together um about four years ago and so we have the largest composters uh you know some of the largest in the u.s most of them have multiple facilities we're doing hundreds and thousands of tons at their facilities um i think we're collectively just when our uh in our membership network including we care over three or four million tons just within our network but we also have affiliates uh that have joined us because they also want to take compostables but they want to take compulsibles that are vetted by the composter so this is the map of the affiliates that we have uh again we just came back from
086the u.s composting council and this whole program started when i worked with the city of seattle when let's say a school system wanted to know what can i what could what's what could i procure for my school what what works it you know in my school at your facility so we're really list makers at the end of the day so if you're to go on our website you'll see this map and you hover over the city and that city will give you a link to a list of of the products they're accepted at that facility so at ann arbor you would just we have to add that here but on the ann arbor facility you would just click you would click the link on the map and that list would um would show you all
087the things that have been vetted for their process which is a windrow process so i always like to tell people especially or or explain a little bit about the composting process because our goal is also to mutually educate you know we have all these systems going on and if you look at the recycling commodities over the years and where we ended up when a lot of things um you know no longer were being processed domestically and going overseas and some of the recycling challenges that we've had we don't want that to happen with composting we want to make sure that we're being thoughtful and that we're working with you and together and i always say sustainability is a team sport um it takes everybody to do it right but a lot of that is education
088so we really take our role as educators seriously so we like to show a little bit about the composting price process to help understand why this program's uh very important so there's many steps just like in any manufacturing process the composting you know the recovery the preparation the actual composting and the aging and so it's like a production line that's why we call ourselves compost manufacturers we also like to say that we encourage everyone to to say you know compost manufacturers because we want to put in people's minds we're not dumps we're not places to just throw something we're actual manufacturers of a product that we want to resell and have a market that will come back over and over again and also a market that will grow because if your food scrap program grows
089so does your market it needs to grow with it um so we really are trying to change you know the perspective in people's mind that we're yes we're part of the solid waste systems but we're not a place just to send empty packages just for the sake of empty packages so we also do a lot of outreach on you know you know what things you shouldn't make compostable like toothbrushes and cell phone covers and things like that it's really about a recipe that needs to be consistent yard waste food waste and compostable food wear that's really the lane we're in and that's the lane that we're willing to certify so when things come in you know they're tipped into a building this is a facility that we work with north of seattle and one of
090the things we're also working on and we've been successful in my state in passing legislation that actually employs color marking on compulsibles why is that well if you look at this picture um yes logos are good and how to compost logos are good but if you're 20 feet up on a loader and you have a thousand tons a day coming into your facility you don't know a compulsible from an on compostable so we're really pushing legislation in our state combustibles have to be easily identifiable and they ha and and if for instance in uh in the grocery stores um you can't have a uh you can't have a compulsible bag that is the compostable bags need to be brown or green but there can be no non-compostable bags that are brown or green for instance
091on the spool in the produce department and i i'm testimony of this um but we used to get a lot of green film it just started growing and growing well those organic bags are green you know polyethylene bags so we got an ordinance passed in the city of seattle we helped write the language for that and it was adopted statewide last year and this is now the model legislation uh for the country um that's solid waste based it needs to be a system that works for a high volume composting site so we encourage color marking and we're going to continue to push that type of legislation to keep compost clean oh this is i went the wrong way i'm sorry just a minute let me get back to where i was hit the wrong button
092my apologies and i'll just go through the rest of this pretty quick um yeah let's pick up here so at the end of a process uh what composters do is they screen out the inert materials and the non-compostable materials so that might be film plastic that's the number one contaminant in compost streams is film plastic again from produce bags and go to your grocery store now and i know when 30 years ago when i went to the grocery store there was no plastic on the english cucumbers there were not strawberries and tiny plastic containers there were not one inch pieces of cake and big domes there's so much plastic around food now and statistically if there's so much plastic around food you better believe it's going to get to the composter that's taking food scraps
093so we're really trying to make things that make more sense to be compulsible rather than end up with a whole lot of stuff at the end of the day that ends up going to the landfill and is very costly the composter and that pushes your contract rates way up pushes your residential rates way up so we got to arrest this now we gotta move the dial backward and have a better system um materials um after their screen they're aged and then that material goes out to market and again if there's flex of plastic or you know bright green thymes from spoons or anything like that that really affects the solubility of that compost so we're really protecting the aftermarket for compost by making sure we're taking compostables and putting them in a vetted system that
094makes sense for the composter what we do is we test to different technologies because not every compost facility is the same so at ann arbor you have a windrow system so we do field testing and windrow processes um and um and those are run with turners and large you know large rows uh out in the environment and you know and they're basically turned those materials go from usually 90 days to 180 days our test runs 90 days so we're being conservative on the the lowest time frame that it might go through in large municipal areas like in seattle and new york city is just finishing building a covered in vessel system that's the gore system that system runs like i said actually it's running now 49 to 60 days so it's a much shorter cycle
095but it's highly controlled it's much higher temperatures a lot quicker and it's covered with a fabric that's from the same family of fabric as gore-tex so it's sort of like a live skin and creates a biosphere over that um feedstock and then it automatically aerates uh it's all automated so it's super controlled very effective 98 voc and emission control so a lot of your large urban composters are going to this very high-tech system engineered in germany but you're going to see more and more of these facilities in larger facilities um out there and then finally aerated static pile often is the technology that a windrow will go to when they start taking food scraps because you need a higher level of control for instance for pathogens that are going to come in from food you
096want to make sure you can have that pathogen kill and you want to make sure that you have enough control to get that so a lot of the asp systems are replacing windrows once people go to food scraps in certain states depending on their regulations but they're shorter cycles as well so these are the modern technologies that are used and represent probably 90 of the capacity out there so we do tests and these three processes with packaging companies and they get certified for the different process once again our prerequisites are they have to meet the lab standards i won't go into great detail we have all this on our website but they have to meet the lab standards um and we also have a flooring policy so if you're aware of it i'm sure this
097group is there's a lot of uh activity going on in fact again washington state was the first to uh write regulation that bans any food service sales of products with pfos um they're um you clearly folks on on this uh commission know a lot about pfos in the work that you do but our policy is we only accept items shown to have less than 100 parts per million total flooring we've actually developed the lab standard with one of our advisors who works for astm and we will not accept anything into our program nor will uh nor will it be allowed in any of the weak care or uh cma facilities in our network so lab standards plus field disintegration test equals the cma certification um and i went over a little bit why there's differences
098between the two it's really time frame um what the media is and if you think about a lab test versus a wild woolly composting plant you're not going to have the controls you're going to have the temperature and the time frames and all that are going to be highly variable so we're really just trying to get in that sweet spot in all these facilities to help packaging companies design what's going to work best in the long run so this is what field testing looks like or these are just photos from some of our work across the country where we've gone out and done field testing and we put samples in the pile we're tracking the temperatures we're taking feedstock samples to an outside lab and looking at c to n ratios what was the ph
099and the moisture level so we're giving information back until cma existed packaging manufacturers never knew the science and compost piles believe it or not so we literally sit with packaging designers and say oh there i had a gentleman tell me yesterday if i knew the ph was five i wouldn't have designed my package that way and i'm not saying compost facilities run at five but sometimes we find discoveries about ph and moisture levels and how that affects the the the disintegration of those products we take those out of the piles after they're done and active composting we provide reports back on how they performed and again all we're doing is disintegration testing we're not a lab we're doing a visual operational disintegration test to ensure those materials aren't left over at the end of the
100process so this is just again some shots from our work at st louis composting in belleville illinois and we take uh the rod feed stock that comes in from the collection programs and we mix it 80 to 20 products and non-biodegradable mesh bags we immerse them in the center of the compost piles and then we pull them out and uh yeah so you can see here we have a tester putting them in the piles we put them in the middle of the piles we have the composters cover them and then we come back out extract them dry them and put the results together so well we'll literally have pieces of electrical tape which don't bow to grade so a good test means you just find the tape and a bad test means you got the
101whole thing and it didn't break down or you have you know you know you have a spoon and you know it's still eighty percent there so if you got eight a spoon that's eighty percent there and you take forty thousand you know and now let's say 120 000 spoons from a microsoft campus in one day that's a lot of green flecks and in in contamination that'll end up so we have to be very protective of our materials we have to be very protective of what we sent in this is a report this is a sample of a report that we might send out to a client so that you have the before picture of what's a pla ngo cup uh and all that's left after the test in our in-vessel system is the tape um
102i will tell you you might be surprised there's a lot of fiber products paper products with a lot of treatments um a lot of additives um and fiber and paper does not break down all the time so we're actually doing a big paper study with big mills we're going to be doing a fiber study with some top-notch people from some universities because we want to get to the bottom of the how do we get fiber products to you know what what are the ideal conditions for fiber products to work and again a lot of your fiber products now your clam shells and your takeout containers they will contain pfos so you'll also see that we don't have a lot in that category right now not because of lack of disintegration but because they have pfas
103because um the the industry hasn't caught up with having alternatives to that right now so keep that in mind that's a real problem right now so at the end of the day we do all that work to make these great lists and again it started as a list making sort of activity with the city of seattle um that list in seattle that cedar grove made that we did was started to get used all over the country the phone rang one day and and my boss said i just he said hey who are you talking do somebody in another state so i said you know i gotta i gotta do this thing national so we just started working with these other composters and now we have these lists all over the country so the risk of
104not field testing just to to summarize on proper improper breakdown in real word systems could lead to market limitations for composters so we have a lot of composters that don't know the difference in a pile between a pet cup and a pla cup that was made to be compostable and companies um that pass field testing um usually have a better market opportunity because they're actually connected to the local composter and we think that's the only way to do this um and if they uh if a manufacturer put a lot of money into a lab test and it didn't break down in a compost facility that wasn't really a good investment if they don't have a home for that and we're finding more and more composters are refusing to take compostables because they're very uncomfortable with
105them so um higher landfilling rates from compost contaminants um that adds more cost to the composter and ultimately your contracts and there's a growing it it just creates growing mistrust between manufacturers and composting facilities so our goal at the end of the day is to protect the investments of our you know composters and compost manufacturers and also the product manufacturers but to protect your investments in your cities your haulers your solid waste programs you know your education programs you know everybody everybody contributes a lot to make these programs successful so we're just trying to make sure that we protect everyone's investment in time and do this in a way that makes sense and like i s what i like to say is we're working from the pile backward to make a difference to make this
106a better system and we cares all in on this they've been a wonderful supporter of ours and um and and that is that that's what the cma program is and and that's um that's what we're doing and so it's your local program and we're here as a resource to you in any city we work with we work with a lot of universities a lot of cities i'm working a lot with counties down in uh california now with all their new regulations so we're on the phone a lot just being a resource a free resource to any municipality hauler you know government agency because we're funded we it's kind of like dpr we're funded by the packaging world to make a better system for everybody so that's what cma is about and that's what the program
107is and that's not my name because i got the wrong slide on the end but um but you have my name so um that's what i have to share tonight well thank you so much susan i really appreciate it and maybe there's some questions i got some but i'll leave it to other people first before i weigh in thanks yeah i'm just wondering uh either if our guest speaker or anybody else has updates on the pfas within ann arbor's compost stream because i know the community garden i was involved in stopped ordering from them two years ago out of fear of contamination so i don't know if we've got any more up-to-date information on that or not i do not does anyone uh know where we would go for the information uh speakers did susan
108have any information about the ann arbor testing and for i i am not representing the facilities tonight unfortunately i apologize um i would not but um rod tyler at week here could probably give you an update thank you go ahead chris i have a fundamental one and that is as a resident we just had some takeout food from a restaurant tonight and it came in a clam shell labeled world centric world centric apparently makes a lot of stuff and it says compostable on it but i don't see any special color or any special certification or anything anything on it and i'm wondering as a general rule what should a resident do when he gets a load of food from a local restaurant and the little straws and the plastic cups and all this stuff all
109say come possible on what should i do with that stuff should i throw it in our compostable bin or should i throw it out well certifications are important ours and bpi is the other certifier very well respected and recognized um and again our policy is cma only certified for the lab for the field test portion um but you know it takes a little work i i'd go to the manufacturer's site the product the world-centric site i'd make sure that's pfos free because that that paper-looking clam shell make sure it's p-floss free first um but compulsibility um it may not always have a logo or a certification on the item but but the websites usually tell you if they're certified so the and again that's where our system is now the goal is down the road
110we should have the right logos and the right color marking to really make this system you know legitimate in terms of what's compostable um but but our site you know and and you can also send us lists you know and items not that your homeowners are all going to be calling us but but our lists are great resources and i found in seattle it was really cool we went to the college and and we almost had compost police out there when we got started once we had the list like you're not using the right stuff but it was like they were like my police all the college kids so we they did a lot of that work for us but once you're educated the key is education any follow-up we're always happy to do a
111webinar for the community for or for you or record something to help your your your residents understand and and and understand what's compulsable what are the things you can look for and where you can go to find out i think that's a tall order for most people i have neighbors who don't really care and they're not going to make the phone call so my advice to them has been up until today anyway is if you don't really know throw it out and it seems to me the restaurant owners who peddle this stuff they ought to be making a phone call and making sure that if they if if the clam shell that they deliver their food in says compostable on it that it really is impossible in our wind roll seems like but well the
112other thing i want to add there's legislation in maryland washington state and california now that you cannot put compulsible on it unless it passes the lab standard unless it passes that astm so if they have compulsable on it and there's the size of world centric it at least meets the lab standard so i think you could use that as a baseline not that that's easy to explain to a resident but i would say compostable on an item probably means they don't want to get sued or be in trouble with any of those three states and that's you know california they sell a lot of compulsables so um and they're gonna harmonize to do that all across the country just because california does it doesn't mean they're just going to make it for california they're going
113to harmonize the production of those things so if it says compulsible you know it it has to be compliant but that doesn't mean it will be compliant i'm just saying that most companies won't put compulsible on it now because of that legislation unless they meet that standard okay thank you i have a question it seems like there are two things that um that you're describing so compostable really means the breaking down into like the smallest pieces right um and really break it down to biomass and water because oxal biodegradables are fragmenting yeah right those are not what you want sorry celeste no i said that's you don't want oxalbyter grails i always like to warn about oxels they fragment but but compulsable means that biodegradable bio biodegrades to biomass and water right okay um so
114biomass means that it's something that's other than pfas that's one of the components well interestingly enough pfos were not part of the astm standard so until pfas became a big issue in about they weren't considered that wasn't considered in in in what was termed certified compulsible but once that became apparent that it was an issue um now both the certifier bpi and cma has a pfos limit in certification it really is all about certification the two certifying bodies in the country us and bpi um that's our standard we're kind of like the gatekeepers on what's acceptable um i don't know if that addresses your your question or comment but but there are lawsuits now that that are addressing the fact that because there were pfos in items sold now lawyers are going after those companies
115that made those products with pfas and saying you misled the pug blood because pfas is not compostable so that is a development that's kind of i get your thinking but that people are also thinking that way and now there's lawsuits against those companies so i think it the question really is like how reliable for us in our city are the um indicators that say compostable and are we making things worse if we put some of those containers in our compost and it sounds like yes i would say fiber fiber plates and deli wraps the paper del are the two ones i'd worry about the rest are pretty good in fact i'd be happy to follow up with chris on articles the uh ceh down in california has a wonderful list of resources to help better
116better understand you know this whole area of pfas what is and isn't and they they do have tests that they did at berkeley i believe um on a lot of different products out there in the market and those are the main the main ones french fry bags deli wraps and the fiber containers and that's unfortunate because whole school programs need that tray so we're really scrambling right now for alternatives but at least you can you can you can take those categories those subcategories and say yeah i'd be wary of those subcategories i would agree that i would be wary of those uh those categories the the things that they wrap sandwiches in those papers thanks get your your yes yes sandwiches sub sandwiches yes when you go by ask them is that p fuss free
117yeah it feels to me like we really need to start at a very high level at the manufacturing level right so that that the restaurant owners even don't have to think about it so much that they they want to just get the food in a thing and then get it out to somebody who wants it but but they it would be easier if they didn't have to think about pfas um or or whatever else might be something that would be incorrect to use um okay thanks does anybody else have a question comment i really appreciate this presentation and chris thanks for making the effort to to reach out to susan and bring this information here um i think it gives us a lot to think about um chris are you are you raising your hand
118i am okay so thank you for the pfas thing it's one doesn't see that i elaine and i have a vegetable garden and i generally recharge it every year with uh leaf humus or what i call leafiness from ann arbor's compost center and it really works but i'm not happy if it has pfas the whole any of the zone of those chemicals in it and so i'm glad you're watching that um i also build gardens for living and one of the problems i face in doing so is when i need topsoil a large percentage of the suppliers of that are providing me with soil scraped our farm fuels before they get built upon [Music] and as many of you know most of those farm fields have been growing uh european weeds for decades the soil
119is full of weeds basically and so i've gotten around that by making my own soil and i do that by mixing the city's leaf humus from the compost center with sand or bark and end up with a soil mix that's probably not very good but way better than buying farm fuel soil with all the weeds in it and so i'm wondering how widespread your ph testing is in one of those acquisitions i went to a compost center up north west of detroit and bought compost that was very alkaline because they were predominantly composting leaves from streets um ann arbor has typically been ph neutral because they're taking a lot of wood that tends to even out the alkaline leaf inflow um [Music] is is ph testing really a significant part of your program and and
120if it's not can it be for those of us who depend upon compost for making soil in our gardens in our landscapes okay very very good question i appreciate it so there's two places composters good composters are testing unrelated to us so it's they have to get the recipe right to make good compost so they do what are called feedstock tests when when all the material comes in they do a composite sample and they send it to the lab to test all those things and there's a range that's promulgated by the us composting council that they want to be in and all the facilities we work in we pull a feedstock test for our test and i can tell you that most facilities we op that we operate in are in that range because if
121they weren't they wouldn't make good compost okay so from the standpoint of our network and what we're doing those are the best practices at the facilities there's also the sta program the u.s composting council has and that's a program that you have to certify your compost meets certain standards okay so those standards are also extensive lab tests tme ecc lab tests you go to u.s composting council site and look at the tests and the methods that they use but they also have to meet those standards so there are some qcs in place best management practices the composters use that doesn't mean you're not going to end up with a composter or a compost somewhere that might be out of range and that's really i don't represent one individual site tonight but that's really a facility
122by facility situation but i can tell you at least for with but to give you some assurances the composters that are doing it well are going to do that anyway because that's going to be important to making the good compost and selling it if that's helpful it is i just have to be careful about who i buy from that's it and i've been so thrilled about ann arbor's program because the product out there has typically been outstanding and ph neutral the other thing i find when i buy compost is a lot of small non-biodegradable plastic scrap i i i can put a three or four inch coat onto my vegetable garden and rototill it in and up comes dozens of little plastic non-biodegradable plastic i think a lot of it's vinyl but so are they
123um screening state-of-the-art screening equipment really getting down to that level yet or are we still struggling with that problem i think it's still an issue and usually to sell product that's going to actually be applied in you know their respects on product right screen size and all that i would say most facilities are screening to a quarter inch to 5 16 of an inch but again it's it's going to be inherent as long as there's contamination in the bin so i go upstream everything we got to get upstream we got to get better education can we use compulsibles to as a replacement i was just spoke last last week at a big conference said why don't we make salad bags compostables you know forget the hair brushes the salad bags you know can we use
124that to mit to actually reduce our contamination can we use compulsables as a contamination reduction strategy so but yes it's going to be there i was the sales director of compost for years at cedar grove it will always be they'll always be a percentage as long as we're taking it from the public i just if it was clean every day we wouldn't have that problem but i can tell you that there's a lot of people that see a lot of money to be made if we can really get those little tiny pieces out so we're hoping that technology will bring that but i'd rather see it never go there in the first place yeah well we have the same problem with the regular recycle bins with people putting all of their paper products and so
125on that are definitely recyclable in a plastic bag and putting it in the recycle bin right thank you thank you so we are um at nine o'clock and i just was um does anyone else have other questions um i really appreciate hearing from you susan it's really good to think about what's going on with compost and chris thanks this is really very um helpful and thought-provoking for me and how we move forward um so if if no other questions i'd like to move on to our next presenter and and um to say thank you to theater eggerman for for sticking around for this long and was we got our agenda um moved around quite a bit this time um and uh oh looks like shannon do you have a question i'm just wondering can we
126just think big picture about what we really have in front of us tonight because it just seems completely unrealistic to me that we're going to be able to cover everything in the agenda that we have so i can tell you that the next two are going to be super short after this presentation one is going to be deferred the ki discussion completely because steve was going to manage that and he's not available tonight and there's another super short on the deer call so um if we i believe this that if we can get through this presentation that we'll have a relatively short remainder of the meeting okay i just would like to consider i would just like to consider tabling some things it just feels like if we're really really that's really what i'm telling
127another 45 minutes of presentation plus two other i just don't want to do things that i feel like we are being cursory about because we just want to get through it fast because it's getting late so these okay these are things that that you wouldn't have known that happened and so they will be short okay subsequently i would love to wrap up by 9 30. that's right just in terms of you know so we're supposed to be until nine so i just would like to think about our overall approach for how we think about agendas because this just feels like no matter how we slice it this just had too many things on it so um i know you suddenly got catapulted into the chair position so this is all because steven called in sick
128today but i just want to just be mindful about our our time in terms of evenings and things like that too so i just want to put that out there okay thank you um are we ready to proceed thank you i can uh share my screen if you're ready for me and i will be uh be short um let's see can you see my presentation we can thank you okay great slideshow here so i'm thi argemont i'm the washington county public works director um i'm also the the manager for warm-up and stephen just asked me to give you a quick overview of what warmer is some of the who house and what we're working on um so warmer formed in 2019 it's a solid waste authority and ann arbor was at the table as part
129of the the formation with staff members president who provided a lot of input and then ann arbor did not join at that time your city council decided to to hold off but they have decided to to join recently um we've been working over the last year to get all the approvals because it takes a long time to amend our articles of incorporation and we just had the notice published in mli on sunday and so we just have to file it with the secretary of state and the county clerk and then it's official so you will soon be a member of warmup um so just to give you an idea of who's involved um city of ann arbor dexter ipsilani in saline as well as the townships advance ann arbor pittsfield gypsillani and scio together when
130everyone's when ann arbor joins that'll make up about five sevenths of the county population uh the goal of the short-term goal that the warmer members have agreed on and this comes from our strategic plan we created a document that's a working document that outlines what our strategic plan goals are and how we're going to accomplish those so the the first one education based we're working on uh increasing the quantity of quality recycling through analyzing data standardizing our communications and media outreach and implementing a cohesive and comprehensive media campaign and we've done a lot of that accomplished a lot of that by applying for grants which is great because it's a very affordable way to do a lot of education but result we've also partnered with um nationwide organizations that have a lot of know-how in
131how to change behavior and improve the quality of the recycling stream so long-term goals looking at analyzing and pursuing collective contracting for recycling services as a group for member communities and also monitoring and supporting regional full-scale full-service drop-off stations to increase recycling access and i just want to note that we just at our most recent meeting on monday started looking at what would it take for us to have some kind of common contract together and that's an opt-in process so right now it's more of a thought experiment of what are the services that municipalities would like to contract for together and then how would we go about doing that and what would the savings be so just uh one thing that we've talked about since we have been working on increasing the quality and quantity
132of a recycling stream we could we all send our materials to the same murph and then get a long-term contract with that murph in order to get some kind of discount even if it's a couple percentage points so that's one idea of what we'd be looking at just to give you an idea of what we've been up to lately we through the grant that i've mentioned reduced the recycling contamination for warmer communities from just under 20 percent to just over 11 percent um so it's a 42 reduction uh we gathered a lot of data and so we're we know what each municipality's contamination rate is we know what material makeup they have for their recycling and we all have a lot of household data household level data of what kind of contamination we have so
133we we can do some very targeted outreach in the future um we also provide a lot of education to residents so through these campaigns we were working to get plastic uh films and bags out of the recycling stream and so we've we've made some grades a thousand dollars in your packet it says a 144 we had applied for 144 and got a 137 to continue to reduce contamination um and increase the crap the capture of recycling and i'll note that we applied for that grant with um the assumption that ann arbor would be a joining member of warma and so the majority of the grant funds are actually going to be targeted towards the ann arbor community and i'll go through what um just a little bit about what that looks like so um here's
134i'll start with what we're going to work on next or this year first we're going to learn more about collective contracting our attorney bob davis works for a different authority as well and has had some success there he works for sakura southeast southern oakland county um so look at common contracting and then we're going to prepare for the grant we're going to look at what materials we need for to do our education outreach campaign and get that underway may through june we're going to launch ann arbor your first up because we want to run you through the grant that the rest of warmer ran through last year i'll include more detail on that next and then warm up as a whole with ann arbor included is going to go through the app to action grant
135and what that does it takes all the data that we gathered during the grant and then uses that data to target our goals and the warm uh board will decide what those goals are most likely going to be related to either reducing contamination more or trying to get those people who are not putting their cart out to the curb to start recycling so last slide here um just summary of what the audit will look like or what the grant will look like for ann arbor the first part is we do an audit we look at what what does your recycling look like how much contamination is there um and they actually sort out you know they pull a couple i forget how many samples it'll be but it's probably like five or seven different trucks
136um from different parts of ann arbor and then they'll sort those or they'll take a sample from each truck and sort it into 30 different categories and say okay here's how much contamination you have here's how much cardboard you have here's much other materials different types of plastics and whatnot so once we have that data then we send out the information about here's what you can recycle here's what the program's going to look like let people know do a lot of education and outreach and then we actually send uh they've been called recycling detectives to stop by so they walk up and down the streets they just open the lid see what's on top if there's contamination that's visible they'll mark what it is in the particular category and they move on to the next
137place and then they uh well i guess they punch it into their phone of here's what contamination was found or no contamination and then they move on and then after that there's another audit to see what kind of outreach or what kind of impact the outreach and education had so that's the overview um and it's just for single family homes so there's something like 26 000 single family homes uh within the grant so with that i'll turn it over for questions chris um i that's great so one question i have comes from looking at the training video from the u of m for what can be recycled and the u of m has i don't know whose trucks but it all goes to your murph which i think is located north of chelsea right and
138there's little itty bitty differences and i hate to be picky but for example the u of m training video says you take very carefully take all the caps off your bottles because we don't want the caps mixed in and it's a contaminant and the ann arbor um which is we have our own murph they say well keep your caps on the bottles because that way they won't get mixed up and and lost so there's little differences and i'm wondering if part of your program you know you're gonna do outreach and get everybody on the on the right train but what's the chance of getting i mean because your murph is not that far removed from our murph are the resulting materials more or less the same and can we harmonize those so everybody's marching to
139the same drum you know we got the university island and then there's a mayan part of the university or who picks up my stuff and have i asked a question i'm rattling on um i can i could start with um warmer doesn't have a murph um i think you're referring to to western washington recycling authority which is a separate authority uh which includes like chelsea and others so just i'll start with that but they're also going to be running a similar program to reduce contamination but as far as getting the information out regarding differences we send a mailer to the residents that includes what is what is not recyclable it's not going to get into the level of specificity of things like putting the caps on or taking them off it's it's really focused on
140the the bulk of people who are trying to do better and are going to spend just a little bit of time looking at it but we're probably not we're not aiming to reach those folks who are the 20 super recyclers um that are you know looking for those kind of specific differences we we will end up hitting some of those things because we have a hotline uh people call in and then we can answer those questions so we can start to um try to reach that but we're really trying to get that bulk of material that people just don't they aren't quite paying attention and so we're trying to make that material more available but your to your question about um there are little differences so you know we ran through this program last year
141and city of ypsilanti did not take glass whereas the rest of the warmer communities did take glass and so we we had to specify that on our all of our outreach materials and part of the part of warmer's goal is to have a common collectible list of recyclables that works for all communities within the borders and one of the things that one of the ways that we can achieve that is by sending all of our materials to the same merv and so when i mentioned that kind of that common contracting that would be one of the major benefits is all of our educational materials can be the same no matter where you're at thank you you're back i'm not sure who had their hand up next let's go yes wondering um you mentioned collective or
142collaborative contracting is there any likelihood that you might use ann arbor smurf uh yeah so right now um one of the things i'm working out is where do all of our because a lot of things have switched in the last you know two or three months since the ann arbor came on board and so i'm i'm following up with haulers and with municipalities but i i get the notion that at least five of the seven current warm-up members um likely send their materials to the ann arbor move so some of this is gonna you know it might be an easier push than than we think john yeah just a quick thank you theo for this i'm just really pleased that we're at this point i think it was just two years ago the commission was
143kind of stuck of how to get ann arbor into warmer and here we are so thanks for your update and just very happy that our persistence has kind of moved us forward thanks yeah thanks for um those of you who are on the uh commission at that point for the multiple resolutions i believe you passed to help with that process kathy i wasn't on the commission then but i do remember that unionized labor was uh an issue and can you just give us an update on that where you use unionized labor and where you don't uh yeah so it's it's completely up to the municipality for what they put out for contracts or not so um warmer has no authority over who you would use for anything unless you grant warmer that authority and so
144the the way that the collaborative contracting process would work is that the city would contract with warma and then warmer would contract with some kind of larger some kind of hauler or or murph so for example if we were to do collective contracting we would start with asking the city of ann arbor what would you like to have for services to be put out to bid and most likely you would say well we have trash that's hauled with unionized labor within our organization within uh the city of ann arbor's public services so we're not even going to put that out to bid and then we'd say okay great so you're interested in recycling services to put out to bid um what are your requirements or particularities of you know we have you have a living
145wage ordinance um so you'd say okay we're gonna put us out to contract here's what the requirements are for that contract if you have to meet these standards and then you the benefit of it is if you have a neighbor that has a similar requirements as you you now have an economy of scale so by putting it out there you also um callers can transfer over borders more seamlessly and so they can optimize their routes and now you save greenhouse gas emissions because you have a very efficient route going back and forth so there's that's what we're trying to take advantage of here but it all starts with the city saying here's what we want here's what our requirements are okay and could a requirement be unionized labor absolutely oh okay thank you so i'm
146uh acutely aware that our time is moving on are there other questions on this particular topic with the warm-up i really appreciate you staying theo and um thank you for that presentation it's great to see that we're making this progress thank you um all right so with that i'm going to move on to just briefly say that we have on the agenda emergency ki distribution which is potassium iodide which was addressed by the environmental commission a couple of years ago um and apparently it has not moved forward and steve was going to lead that discussion tonight and had some additional information so i'm going to specifically say that we'll defer this to a future meeting um since he is not here um we have our next item on the agenda under new business um was
147a referral or as a deferral referral from the city council about discussions with the university of michigan for housing units for workforce housing specifically on u of m north campus i would appreciate some discussion from council member griswold who was um involved in initiating this and perhaps we can figure out a plan for moving forward with this particular item oh okay thank you i see this as a multi-month review i haven't had a chance to talk to missy stouts yet um and if there is anyone on the commission that is interested in this and would like to talk to me more about it before the next meeting uh i would welcome that discussion but i don't want to take a lot of time tonight because it is getting late and you know it's it's going
148to be a multi-month process in introducing my resolution though it was really uh very general with the idea that the commissions who were touched by it be the transportation commission the planning commission economic development energy commission that they would provide some data and metrics to support this coordination and in talking to derek dela court these types of discussions have been going on with university of michigan staff however we've never had any policy direction on this topic um and so that i don't know if that answers any questions but it's it's really uh just the beginning of a discussion and it's going to take i would say many months before we're able to have a city council and regents discussion about this we've we've tried to have meetings in the past with the regions and and
149with code that they just continually get i mean it's been years now they just get bumped down the road until we have a healthier condition and that hasn't happened um okay it looks like chris graham sorry i just see your hand um lisa this is this is suggesting that people who work for the university of staff have housing provided in some way i presume for rent but by the university um it it could be by the university it could be co-op housing because the part of north campus like there's some land along green road it could be sold to a private developer it could be a 99-year lease to a private developer there are many options and i'm not a housing expert so that's one of the reasons that i think it needs to go
150to staff and to the commissions to see what's what's feasible and what is going to be most effective in terms of our 820 goals it probably is true that most people who are staffed to the university are driving in from out of town some even from detroit or bay city or whatever that studies show the people coming more than an hour away to work here thank you um the university has uh home zip codes for all employees so again it's it's a very complex issue but i i think that we should at least start the discussion shannon um we talked about a little bit of planning commission and one of the comments from the planning manager was that i bet many commissions are going to want to meet with u of m and so there
151might be some if there's going to be maybe there's some sort of coordinating something that can happen with um meetings between some of the various commissions and um so they're not meeting with every commission so i just asked that if that is a next step in any part of this that we might think about how to make it a more streamlined company oh okay thanks yes and right now city staff um meet with university staff on a quarterly basis including the university planner sugat and others and i just received the minutes from that last meeting so i would expect that the city administrator would coordinate any such meetings and i'm i'm not sure who who else we might want to include are you thinking about like experts in sustainability at the u or i was
152just thinking that if um if each commission is interested in meeting with representatives of u of m that perhaps there could be some sort of collaborative setting where several of the commissions meet at the same time so that it's not them you know going to every commission i guess is what i was thinking if there's some way to do some sort of joint something um okay so it's just a good idea i'll i'll ask the city administrator to coordinate anything like that and so so that commission members aren't dealing directly with the university of michigan does that seem reasonable yeah and and i know that the planning director was going to be reaching out to them um brett leonard and so it just you might even talk with him or something like that to just
153so that it's a more coordinated response oh okay and i know that brett is part of those quarterly meetings already okay thank you for the idea is there uh well any other questions in particular i guess my question is how do we want to go for tonight in terms of closing do we want to suggest a work group or sending you questions kathy or what would be a best way for our commission to proceed to potentially contribute to moving forward on this issue um i guess if anyone has any suggestions for me or questions just send them to me and i will respond to everyone i don't want to create a lot of administrative overhead at this point but i want to make sure that anyone who's interested feels included so send your questions to
154kathy all right so our next item on the agenda has to do with the dear call resolution which we um passed last month um and it's back on the agenda um today and there i recall that um lisa sent me some information about the dear call as a potential instead of having us vote on it again that's not the intent for tonight but if i could ask you lisa to comment on some of the thoughts that you had had with moving forward with this so um this anything having to do with the deer call needs to needs discussion with city staff and so so that that has to happen um budget discussions with the city are starting really soon and if we want to get the deer call into consideration something's got to get to
155council fast those two statements are in tension with each other um so i don't know what's going to happen um i'm i've conte i'm trying to get a meeting with mr delcort who reached out to me and is willing to talk about it um and so i that's all i can say i really right now i don't know exactly what to say um the the deer call resolution that environmental commission passed is not going to go to council in the form that it was written um in part because of the form in which it was written it's just written in a way that we don't typically write them and it asks for city council to ask for the call to be resumed and funded and that is i don't think that's the best way to
156go because i'm afraid that's just going to get voted down i think what we want to ask for is that consideration of resuming funding for the call and the trade-offs of that about with other funding priorities gets into the budget discussions for this time around because you know this isn't the big budget year this is this this is the we're we're in the second year of a two-year budget and so it is difficult to change the budget um and last year council voted very deliberately to take the dear call funding out which neither council member griswold or i supported um so we will do our best but um there i think it is pretty unlikely that anything on the deer call will come back to ec to vote again on you voted a resolution we
157voted to approve a resolution that expresses the spirit of ec's support for not not making a big darn pause in dear management right and so whatever councilmember griswold and i are able to bring to council will be noted and in the spirit of what you all said but probably not to the letter of the ec resolution and i really hope that we can get some staff mobilized and supporting us so that we can get this into the budget discussion thank you um i think that does address the approach that we wanted which is well or our mandate which is to advise counsel and so um taking that forward is something that i very much appreciate it is uh one of the issues that i'd like to see us move on so uh looks like chris
158graham has a comment oh um is it both of your opinion that that there aren't the votes on the council to proceed with the request of the environmental commission at this time [Music] if you frame it as voting to agree to fund it to which is a kind of pre-commitment before we've seen all of the things that are on the table for this budget you know for this second year re-evaluation of the budget i think that would be very difficult to get the votes for because it's not the even the snow sidewalk thing that we voted on in the past meeting was worded in that way let us consider it in in our discussion of all the priorities that we have on the table for this budget and so i think that is the way
159people are feeling good about supporting things right now so should we or some of us who are on the component side of this um be meeting with city staff or with a council member no no just i will be meeting with mr delacourt if council member griswold wants to join me she will i don't even know when that's going to happen did i did i say did i say the wrong i'm i'm sorry i'm really tired did i say that i was going to meet with mr delacourt or did i say i was going to meet with councilmember griswold i don't know of course did i say the right thing okay yeah yeah so no it would not be uh there's no need for the commission to lobby at this point it's really um it
160is a better process to consult staff before voting on resolutions so that's we're kind of backing up the process it is great to have the ec support and to be able to claim that the ec is concerned about a longer positive deer management all of that is excellent and i'm really grateful for the work and thought and support that you all have and so now we'll um we'll hope that we can work with staff to produce something that can come to the table i'm kind of worried that it wasn't i mean in the last budget go around staff was fully supportive of continuing deer management and the council voted it down i where i i assume that i assume council is going to change next november but uh that doesn't get us very far in
161the in this coming fiscal year's budget discussions um is there any sign that any council members are amenable to discussion about this matter um [Music] we might be able to go another year before the deer population really begins to get ramping up fast again but we can't go two years more before before they really begin to bite quite literally um so i would suggest that we wait until uh we are in a budget discussion and at that point um your lobbying efforts would probably be most effective but not at this time so will you let us know um please when uh we can be of help uh we can yes we can i don't mean we the environmental commission there are other people interested there we can push um uh as constructively and as positively
162as we can okay i'd like to suggest that um chris's comment shows the urgency of concern as well as the unanimous passing of the resolution by the commission so i hope that's useful to you thank you thank you i'm sorry this is a tough problem it shouldn't be um so with that um we will leave the resolution in your hands your capable hands council members and thank you for moving it forward and supporting our our recommendations um all right i'm gonna try and do a speed round of um maybe i should just ask of any of the standing commissions committees the work groups are there any particular reports out that anyone would like to make of i'll just go through and quickly natural features well you'll be pleased to know that uh two or three
163sections of amendments of udc got discussed today with a couple of members of the committee that are working on that um you'll also be pleased to know that there was a michigan association of planning webinar a couple nights ago discussing um uh woodlands ordinances across the state and how not to do things and how to do things one of the court cases involved in that is in ann arbor township and there's a petitioner up there who does not want to comply with any aspect of the anne arbor township code that requires work on natural features as a part of the petition and the courts have resoundingly denied his claim hanover township's ordinance is substantially based upon ann arbor's that we wrote 20 years ago it um suggests that you should have a master plan that
164fully defends your point of view about protection of natural features you should have a code that does what ours does and theirs does which says as a part of your petitioning process you should minimize the effect or impact on natural features in a development proposal it does not say you shall not it says you'll minimize it the code says there and here that you will provide as part of the planning process alternative plans to show that you really truly have studied how to minimize the impact on natural features each part of the code describes very clearly why each natural feature is important in enough detail to say to a judge you've really thought through this you really know what you're doing you've really exacted a reasonable level of regulation on your petitioners and i'm very
165proud to say what we did 20 years ago is standing up where a lot of places are not um as you know we're trying to work on increasing protection for trees in ann arbor and um i'm hoping we finally get through this process to be able to do that and still have very great success in the courts if we ever have an issue thank you thanks chris lisa did you have something you wanted to okay thank you i'm going to do a quick one on pollinators um i'm working with the pollinator work group to provide some really interesting updates to the city's website and perhaps energy a connected one in the future i want to announce that you all are invited and i'll ask galen to send out a link to a 2030 district session
166that will be held next tuesday february 8th from noon it's a lunch and learn session on native landscapes and green infrastructure for which i recruited some really great speakers david mendel from plantwise katie whitachak from the city of the county rain garden program and brad smith who is a um professor who created a prairie in his backyard and they'll show the transformation our goal is to get and inspire larger landowners that ten or developers that attend these kinds of sessions to see if they will switch over or install native plantings in their space so that's that's something that i'm pretty excited about so the next group zero waste any reports on zero waste nothing nothing to report okay there are things to say but it is 9 41 and i i see a lot of
167really tired faces on this screen okay um construction develop demolition i know that chris or steve is not here anything from planning shannon just super briefly we haven't met a lot because the holidays but we did get reports on the um new um affordable housing projects on washington and on fifth so and both are targeting um eight to zero goals so let's just say that great uh anything from parks i'll defer to next month since it's so late and there's not that much to report all right thank you energy i think our energy rep is not here uh city council lisa and kathy okay staff feeling anything that you would like to say oh chris graham let's see your hand and um i've heard that there's a movement of foot in the planning apparatus in
168the city hall to greatly condense our master plans to some document that's a hundred pages long so it's not so complicated the master plan component that refers to natural features is itself 100 pages long or so it won't work in court for natural features in ann arbor to more or less do away with the natural features master plan component i i'm respectfully requesting that you check this out and stop this process at least insofar as natural features is concerned but i'm worried about lots of other details that disappear in such a condensation don't know if this happening i may be completely misinformed i don't you're not the one doing it i'm not just please uh called out in that court case in ann arbor township was the existence of a master plan supporting natural features
169in the township that was very well detailed doing away with it wouldn't be good thank you um galen is there any report from staff no staff report this evening all right um with that i have to move to um public comment general time i'll quickly read that statement which is that this is an opportunity for people to speak up to three minutes please call the phone number [Music] if you would like to make a comment and it is one it is 888 788 009 meeting id 989-2851-1637 and um if you would like to speak you'll be given a prompt to raise your hand and you'll be called on with the last three digits of your phone number so um galen ask if anyone is available to make public comment there's no one available for public
170comment all right thank you um and with that i will entertain you a motion to adjourn kathy second investigating thank you very much um so of everyone in favor of a journey say hi very good job rita hi thank you all right thanks so much thanks for sticking in i appreciate your watching me fumble through this and thank you for all your input tonight and first this extended meeting i'm sorry all right good night thank you all thanks you