Ann Arbor Environmental Commission Meeting 9/22/2021

001welcome to the september 23rd 2021 electronic meeting of the environmental commission this meeting is in accordance with executive orders from the governor to affect social distancing and mitigate the spread of the covered 19 virus we intend to conduct this meeting similarly to an in-person meeting however please be patient if there are technical issues public comment will be via telephone only to speak during any of the public comment opportunities please call 877-853-5247 [Music] or toll-free also nine 888-788-0099 and enter meeting id nine eight seven one four nine nine one two three eight this information is also available on the published agenda and the public notices section of the city website and on the broadcast of this meeting on ctn channel 16 at t channel 99 and online at www.a2gov.org watch ctn so galen would you like

002to read the land heritage statement sure a land heritage statement i acknowledge that the land the city of ann arbor occupies as the ancestral traditional contemporary lands of the anishinaabe including ottawa ojibway and bodhiwadmi and wind up peoples i further acknowledge that our city stands like almost all property in the united states our lands obtained generally in unconscionable ways from indigenous peoples the taking of this land was formalized by the treaty of detroit in 1807. um 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 is the land use statement uh thank you again do you want to make the

003roll call sure please note that we have two new commissioners we have edith juno joining us for the first time as a representative from the energy commission and we have ann morrison joining us as our representative from the parks advisory commission so we'll let them introduce each other after the roll call is finished all righty uh commissioner graham here commissioner needham council member dish present right uh commissioner gibb randall here in ann arbor uh councilmember griswold here ann arbor commissioner kelly ward here chairperson brown president in ann arbor uh john mursky commissioner mursky now he's been substituted by edith jr okay all righty uh vice chairperson mitchell here in ann arbor commissioner vandenbrot here commissioner oriol here in ann arbor commissioner zane here in ann arbor all right we have a quorum all right thank

004you um so as i mentioned before edith juno is a member of the energy commission who's replaced john morsky as our as our representative here i'm edith do you want to introduce yourselves hi everyone i'm edith i go by edie usually um i've been in ann arbor since 2017 i moved here for graduate school the university of michigan where i started environmental policy and conservation ecology um since then i've worked with the world resources institute and the national wildlife federation and working currently on climate and forest issues so happy to be here and i'm representing the energy commission as well thanks for joining us and uh anne marson is she present no i don't think no she i just got the email today so um so we'll see her next month so um that she

005was just assigned to us from the parks advisory commission that are at their meeting yesterday so the next item on their agenda is the approval of the agenda however this is the time when we need to elect new officers um the new officers the offices are chair and vice chair i'm stephen brown i'm the current chair and rita mitchell is the current vice chair um do i have a mission for nominations um to chair for the coming year um lisa oh you're muted i would nominate uh stephen brown as chair and rita mitchell as vice chair moving forward can i do it that way um and uh is there a second i guess chris graham is seconding yep um are there anything thank you are there any nominations further nominations um all who would uh

006agree with the slate uh raise your hand or say aye aye well congratulations and thank you i don't see any uh any no votes hearing none no abstentions either it passes unanimously thank you so much it's an honor to leave this group i promise i'll do the best i can um so now let's move on to the agenda um um is there a motion to uh are there any motions to add or alter the agenda yeah um i would like to include a discussion of endorsing the carbon dividends and pricing at xr2307 as i sent an email to you guys earlier yesterday okay as they're a second to that motion um kathy um all who are in favor say aye or raise your hands right i see um all who are opposed say no um

007hearing or seeing none are there any abstentions okay then um chris graham is instead abstaining i don't know enough okay so that's fine so um so we shall add that onto the agenda and it seems like the proper point would be um we'll add it to new business we'll add it at the end of new business uh before week before the reports from committees other commission's council and chair all right thank you for bringing up that topic going on so um the agenda is approved with that um addition so um the next item on the agenda is the first public commentary period this is an opportunity for persons to speak up for up to three minutes please call one eighty seven and enter meeting id 987-1499-1238 [Music] that's meeting id number 987 [Music] this information

008is also displayed on the meeting agenda and video feed city staff will select callers that have raised their hand one by one using the last three digits of your phone number in order to electronically raise your hand to indicate your desire to speak please press star 9 on your phone you will hear an automated announcement that the host is allowing you to speak when speaking please move to a quiet area and mute any television or background sounds so that we may hear you clearly please state your name and address at the beginning of your comments and be patient there can be a delay of up to 30 seconds before a connection is established um so galen is there anybody on the line there's no one on the line okay we'll wait uh 30 seconds is

009there anyone on the line as yet no there's no one on the line okay well this ends the first public commentary period um people have an opportunity a second opportunity to offer public commentary um at the end of the meeting so we move on to special presentations the first one is the water department presentation um so this is about um about the consideration of whether to continue uh the options are to continue um getting our intake water from the huron river and our wealth field and rehabilitating the current uh at the current site uh rehabilitating the water works or um getting our raw water from the uh great lakes water authority so um there's a presentation um and so i think uh so let's on the floor i'll give um glenn and and brian steglitz

010the floor let's see uh they can get the president all right well thank you very much and i'm going to let glenn will load up our slides and share his screen um i appreciate the opportunity uh chairperson brown and thank you for the for adding us at a late moment onto your agenda um we were requested by city council to to share and get some feedback from the environmental commission from the council meeting so i'm glad we were able to work this out so quickly so thank you just can i just get a confirmation that you can hear me okay i can see um yes i can hear you yes okay great so we've shared this presentation um i i think it's been shared with you so i'm not going to go through um the

011full presentation that we gave council because i understand your time is limited um so we'll have an opportunity to answer questions but i would like to just share a few points and um glenn will advance the slides for me so next slide please glenn so as a little bit of background you know our water treatment plant i think many of you are familiar with was built on 1938 so we're still using what i like to call infrastructure 1.0 um and based on feedback we've received from our regulators about some of the performance of the of the legacy equipment and um processes as well as just the general condition and the maintenance required this has been planned for replacement for for many years and back in 2015 we re evaluated a whole bunch of alternatives before

012we were making a significant investment in rehabilitating the water treatment plant and that's the report that's been shared and that i'll go through a couple of the points with you tonight the next slide glenn so in 2015 you know before we were going to make a decision to invest you know upwards of 100 million dollars in the water treatment plan it made sense for us to really evaluate what other alternatives were available to us so we looked at you know constructing a new water treatment plant in a new location expanding our well field i'm joining a regional water provider and of course that is the great lakes water authority who's the closest one and probably the only authority that would be able to um to serve a community the size of ann arbor um recognized

013in 2015 the great lakes water authority was only a year old so they were really still in their infancy at the time and so we took we looked at all of these alternatives and we used the decision analysis tool to evaluate um a lot of the pros and cons associated with these against several criteria and really only two two of the alternatives really fell out as really being feasible then being connecting to a regional water authority and reinvesting in the city's water treatment plan and all of that is incorporated in the 2015 study um and just before we move to the next slide you can see on on the left side of your screen you know two two dashed areas one in red and one in green and the one in green is the original

014plant that was built in 1938 1949 and that's what we're focused on is replacing that component of the treatment process and not focusing um at this point in time on replacing the the part the portion of the plant that's in the red box next slide glenn so we talked about the two alternatives so the first one rehabilitate the water treatment plant so we'll i'll share a few of the results from that and then the next slide is identifying the connection to the great lake water authority and can you move on to the next side gun and then this identifies what in some of the infrastructure involved in that so you know we're talking about 30 miles close to 30 miles of water main connecting existing points in the great lakes water authority system to ann

015arbor and this is large diameter through a lot of well-developed area so fair substantial cost in getting that infrastructure in place and it also involves some storage additional storage potential as well as some pumping stations next slide so this is i want to spend a couple of minutes talking about this because this is really where we looked at criteria and compared the two alternatives so you'll see um the evaluation criteria on the left and then we have these green yellow and red squares denoting relative risk associated with the alternatives green being better or lower risk and red being higher risk so if we quickly go down the list you know the risk to source water quality this is something that has been brought up by several since the since the presentation that we gave to

016council um and questioning you know why is the city's source water considered maybe a higher risk than the great lakes water source water and really you know we're talking both about inland river water supply so the future really holds a lot of unknowns associated with inland rivers um there could be development there could be a lot of impacts that we're just not aware of because we're talking about planning horizons decades into the future but based on what we know right now we do know we have some um you know threats to our our source water in ann arbor one of those being pfas from an upstream manufacturer and right now that there aren't similar types of threats that are known in the detroit river system which is why we conservatively identified um at what based

017on what we know right now the city's water source as potentially a higher risk but i think that's probably open for interpretation and some have thought that maybe we should that really the risk associated with both of those water sources are the same um the next is risk to treated water quality so why is the city's water system have a lower risk related to treated water quality and that really has to do with changing the disinfectant that would be required if we were going to be joining a regional water authority they the great lakes water authority uses a different final disinfectant than the city does that transition is likely to create substantial water quality challenges just because of the distribution system has been accustomed to seeing the disinfectants we're using so while it is possible

018to change disinfectants and that there are other communities that have done it there is a learning curve and we will probably have um water quality problems for some amount of time it could be upwards of um a year or more if we were going to transition to a different um different makeup of of drinking water which we would be doing if we were joining the regional water supply um and then the next the next four ability to respond to community value city's carbon footprint schedule impact on cost i think those are all pretty intuitive um obviously if we're maintaining control of the water system we are better able to reflect the values and the decisions that we make um the city's carbon footprint we can you know implement the sustainability zero and sustainability criteria and

019goals that are established by council um and much more easily if we have the autonomy of controlling the water system ourselves if we join a regional acquired authority we're going to be one of over a hundred member partners so we'll have a voice but it will be you know it'll be one of of a lot um and maybe not have the same influence that we would have in making decisions that we would if we maintain control of the water system and then the last item on the list is impact on annual cost and i'll talk a little bit more about the cost but it's clear to us that connecting to the regional water supply would have a substantially higher cost than if we were just to rehabilitate the city's water treatment plant uh next slide

020gun so this is the what was estimated and then and escalated into some 20 21 from the 2015 study so we're talking about about 100 million dollars for rehabilitating a water treatment plant compared to over 300 million dollars for all of that infrastructure that we'd have to put in to connect to the great white square next slide when you annualize that and you look at our annual revenue requirements and you know we built that up through these two um bar graphs you have a whole bunch of costs that would the city would incur under both alternatives because even if we were to join a regional water authority we would still be responsible for billing planning managing the distribution system so there's a lot of administrative and operational costs that we would have to maintain under

021both solutions um however if we were going to be joining the original water authority we wouldn't be needing to do as much water treatment so the reinvestment in the city's water treatment plant wouldn't necessarily wouldn't be necessary um however there may be some minor modifications because it's likely that we would have to do some minimal amount of treatment that's pretty common given the distance we would be from the from the source of the water that we would be receiving so a lot smaller component is the water treatment with the regional water authority solution however when you add in the um the fee structure that the great lakes virus already has which is based on um distance basically capacity to serve so because we're further we're going to pay um like more per unit than someone

022who is closer because of the cost that the great lakes water authority would have to deliver those services to us at such a distance um so we built in what we think based on other comparable member partners what those costs would be and that's built into the alternative to cost as that purchase water cost is estimated and then the next couple buyers on both sides are associated with debt service and capital costs that we would anticipate being needed to implement the recommendations associated with alternatives and as you build these up you can see the the and the the annual revenue requirements associated with each alternative becomes fair bit different with the alternative one is rehabilitating the city's water treatment plant from being substantially lower than the regional alternative thanks so our recommendations that we made

023at the meeting on september 13th to council was to proceed with the conceptual design to upgrade the water treatment plant and it is our intention to bring that resolution to council in the coming months the next slide so in addition to doing that there there was at least one council member who identified that they would be interested in us pursuing within a little more detail what the true costs of connecting to the regional water authority where so we intend to at this point in time unless we hear differently from from council we will likely bring that um that option forward in some fashion at a council meeting for their debate and consideration and um if if council decides that they want us to continue to investigate that then we would we would have a cost

024and a schedule associated with that work we anticipate that that would cost us about 300 000 and probably add a year to two years to the schedule to do the full thorough evaluation there's a fair bit of engineering that's involved in um that would be necessary to be done by both the city and the water authority in order for them to actually provide a proposal to us on what the cost of connection would be um so if that's something that the council wants it would be something that additional work that we would have to encourage council decides that that's not an um something that they would wish to entertain then we can just move we cannot you know waste that time and move right onto the preliminary design for rehabilitating the water treatment plant and

025i think that is our last slide and at this point i guess i'll open it up for questions or comments thank you okay let's see i see uh john callaway commissioner caldwell has his hand up sure thanks uh appreciate the presentation i was wondering if we could go back to the slide with the red yellow and green circles in your uh analysis great yes so this is really helpful i just had a couple of questions to kind of understand the work that's been done here with the risk to source water quality was there any type of modeling done to kind of model the impact of development over the next 50 or so years i i understand why it's you know you mentioned that generally but i'm wondering what's the the data or the modeling and

026analysis behind that yeah there hasn't been any formal modeling um this is really based on our understanding of the source water the water to two watersheds um what the land uses are in those watersheds and what the risks are so i would i would i would say that that's much more of a subjective um or evaluation than objectives okay thank you and then uh two other questions um is there maybe i missed it but is there an opportunity cost associate you know a lower opportunity cost associated with joining the authority now that is reflected or maybe not reflected in you know the cost estimates that you're sharing i mean if this would be delayed 20 years is there any way of knowing that it would you know cost twice as much at that point yeah

027difficult question to answer i mean their their cost model looks at um i think there's a lot of complexity built into how they which is the reason why we're we're um you know informing council that it probably would take a year and several hundred thousand dollars worth of work to get to the point where we can actually get a proposal they look at what legacy capacity that they have um which they have right now whether will they have that in 20 years or not i don't know um so there's a lot of conditions they're doing their own modeling right now they're um they're um you know mothballing water treatment plants they have excess capacity so um very much would like to bring ann arbor on as uh as a member partner because they have the

028capacity to serve us right now um but so it just would be hard to really know in the future about how that would how that would look i would anticipate i don't think that their their area is growing that substantially that they wouldn't have the capacity to bring us on several decades down the road if that was something that for some reason that the city would be considering um answer your question yes yes and i realized that there's a lot of what if's built into it and then the the last question that i have is how does it work with the authority you know bringing lines across multiple municipalities um is there a risk you know that we might be blocked if one municipality along the proposed route you know doesn't want the the line

029through their community or does the authority kind of supersede all of that i don't have a tremendous amount of experience in knowing how that would work but i would anticipate a lot of this would be going in most of it would be going in road right of ways and i i would anticipate that um between the communities that we would be able to work those kinds of things out this is i think a pretty common thing that happened so i think we'd be able to get an infrastructure in place to make it happen if that was the direction we were going to go great thank you thanks tom shannon you have your hand up and then kathy yeah a couple of questions um one is um just in terms of the water quality piece um

030i know that the great lakes water authority draws from lake huron and the detroit river um detroit river is also the source of where you know because of detroit's combined sewer system you know there are lots of times where because of excessive you know like big events uh rain events it just spills their raw sewage spills directly into the river and so i'm just wondering if that in terms of the quality piece that you were looking at that that was considered i don't know if they just basically kind of shocked the system with a lot of chlorine to be able to deal with things like that i just know that since we are lucky enough to have our storm water and our sanitary system disconnected we just don't have that same kind of risk and

031i'm just wondering if that was considered within the water quality discussion between the two alternatives as well glenn i'm not sure are you able to go to the we have a slide with more detail on each of these um evaluation criteria do you want to go to that one and we can identify what was included so this is the the more detailed comparison and i think this was provided to you these were the things we looked at from a source water quality so um i don't think it looked at sewer backups it looks like but um you know i the our consultant is pretty familiar with the detroit system and i'm not sure that those the the this overflows that you're talking about impact necessarily the water um supply i just don't know the answer

032to that question and we could we can investigate that more and see i i guess i would anticipate that maybe it doesn't um but all that being said um we we wouldn't have a choice in terms of where we get our water from if if we connect i mean it's how the system is configured and designed because that source is going to prop is going to be the closest to ann arbor we'll primarily be getting water from that particular plant right um the other question i have is did you all look at kind of climate scenarios in terms of the huron river having flows that were too low for the future was that ever part of the discussion because i know most of the arts you know come from barton pond and things like that

033was that ever part of the um evaluation so we looked at um drought contingency as part of a master plan that we did back in 2000 um so we have you know contingency plans and we did look a little bit at what the um but i mean this this is a renewed issue right i mean climate change has been progressing and it's probably it would probably be something we would need to re-look at and make sense to be part of the scope of the work as we pursue this but it wasn't really captured in this particular analysis i guess my thought on that is um and we we've been seeing you know much more um more violent storms um so uh less frequent so that's definitely the the climate change that we've been experiencing over

034the last five to ten years has made the river more flashy um we have we haven't had since i think maybe 2003 um like a drought condition where we were concerned about not being able to extract enough water out of the river we have plans to address that if that were the case but i think based on where our projections are it seems like that there would be ample capacity of the river to be able to meet the needs of the community at least in average for sure in average day condition okay great um yeah i i agree with you i've heard that prediction before but it seems like it's more that we're getting sort of crazy big events you know rather than but who knows you know where this is all going to um

035and then i guess i'm sorry no go ahead i i just wanted to just mention you know also our we do have blended sources so if we were in some type of an extended drought condition um we're fortunate that we have a river supply and a well supply and some of our future plans include augmenting that well supply we haven't had the need to do that but i would anticipate um you know if we did have some upcoming years with more severe drought conditions i would anticipate that we would um maybe move that that up in our capital improvement plan to augment our well supply so we were able to for example provide an average gauge just with groundwater yeah okay and then since you've got this slide up too i'm just wondering about the

036dioxane issue recording in progress if if you could just kind of summarize where you all fell with that in terms of what this i'm sure you all have been following this closely yes and we're you know we're our farmland closely um the you know from the city's perspective right now our our approach is is to make sure that we have monitoring in place um to intercept the plume you know if it does decide to migrate towards our water supply we have sentinel wells included for next fiscal year in our capital improvement plan and the the intent is that those would be located strategically between the leading edge of the plume and barton pond to be able to contamination um with time for us to make decisions and and intervene um it's my personal belief that

037whether it's the eagle um or epa or whoever ends up regulating and overseeing this cleanup that they will not allow the contamination to migrate and impact towards the city's water supply that intervention would be implemented before that would happen all that being the case we have been asked to identify how much it would cost if we needed to build treatment for dioxane because it is treatable for sure and we do have some of the tools in our toolbox to do that but it's my belief that we would never get to that point because the regulator would intervene and with additional pump and treating there would be options to create capture zones for the plume to prevent it from reaching barton ponds great okay thanks a lot i appreciate your presentation okay kathy here before and

038then lisa yes i've seen this presentation before and i really appreciate all the effort that brian and glenn put into preparing it uh council agreed to refer this to the environmental commission and i really appreciate council's action there but i have to remind everyone that democracy is about majority rules minority rights and this exercise is really about one unnamed council member driving this process as a council member i have no idea who that is it's costing considerable staff resources and tax dollars to go through this process dan bicknell and professor crusoe both spoke with their concerns about the great lakes water authority and i'm extremely troubled that whatever this process is is similar to some of our other processes like we spent almost a year arguing about whether a dual process meaning the legal process

039and the epa process was viable when common sense told us and the epa told us yes it was so again i just want to go on record saying i believe this is an undemocratic path and i'm deeply troubled i appreciate that the environmental commission has the opportunity to weigh in thank you lisa and then chris i just wanted to raise um one more in in response actually to commissioner callaward when you asked about um bringing the water pipes across multiple municipalities a different concern there with the gl uh glw ra i hope i'm art i don't know if i got the acronym right sorry it's been a long day um is is precisely that we would really have to do a lot of piping we would be um we'd be really far from the source

040and the farther you pipe water the more um uh disinfectant you have to put into it and so our water quality would be well i don't know if it's right to say not as good but from what i understood from the presentation mr steglitz and i'm hoping you'll jump in and make this mush of what i'm saying more clear and clean is that we do much better to have our low treatment plant because the farthest distance that we pipe from our own local water treatment plant is just minuscule to what it would have to be coming from the coming from the great lakes water authority so um um so anyway so please kick that throw that point back in mr steglitz um yes so thank you for raising that i mean clearly distance is is

041an issue for a lot of reasons energy is one of them but other the other is disinfectant so um you know they'll be disinfecting the water so when it reaches us it would meet you know criteria for delivery but we would likely have to boost disinfectant so there is there will be more disinfectant in the water just because of the journey that the water has to take to get from um you know the authorities plants 50 miles over to the city of ann arbor well chris you have the floor and then rita um i have i share the concern that shannon brought up about a drought i'm wondering i think 85 percent or so of our water comes out of barton pond and 15 from the well field down by the airport could the production

042of that welfield be expanded in a particular dry period well right now we have the issue is is with conveying the water from the well field to the water treatment plant that is the the limitation so we have some capital improvement plans in the future to augment that which is upsizing water made and adding a pumping station between um the well field and the plant in order to boost capacity so those are two things that are currently planned that would help us double what we can currently get from the well field and then there's some future project projects looking at adding also additional wells so we have a few things there um i would anticipate that we probably wouldn't be moving forward with adding additional well capacity unless we felt like there was something driving

043that um like you know like climate change that demonstrated that we had um you know drought conditions and that we weren't able to meet the demands of the community um i can also tell you that when we did have some we had a crisis with a major power outage in um 2003 i think many of you who maybe you know remember that but the whole eastern seaboard lost power um in that case the detroit water authority was um they had issues with boil water notices in their systems because they couldn't they didn't have pack up power systems and there were parts of their system that lost water we were able to provide water to our customers through that whole event but we our plant was only rated to provide an average day demand um during

044that time so we were talking were we going to need to issue water use restrictions and things like that but interestingly enough during a crisis situation even in the heat of a very hot summer people tend to self-regulate so the demands dropped immediately and we didn't have to issue any boil water enough oil water any water use advisories and just because it's sort of naturally people use water in those certain situations just for essential uses and i would anticipate during a drought condition that ann arbor people would probably self-regulate and that we would probably be able to manage it just because people would stop irrigating and only use it for essential services so the lead time for adding wells and the location of those are already determined and they're not long that is the same

045it would take several years to site and install um we have ideas about some general areas where there that in 2015 we looked at where groundwater existed where we may be able to augment our current well system but um there's a regulatory process that we'd have to go through to add additional wells and i would anticipate it would be several years so i would guess if we got into trouble it'd come faster than that the other concern i have is the resiliency of our piping system i've seen evidence of the gulf stream getting wobbler wobblier and wobblier um all the way back to the 1980s or early 90s one of the impacts of climate change that was being talked about was that if the gulf stream slowed way down or ceased to flow that the

046northeast u.s and europe would become much colder and that would mean we would have much more serious winters um are we i i see a lot of broken pipes in the winter in ann arbor are we really pressing as hard as we can on the weak links in our system to make them resilient to winter freezes we have a pretty aggressive capital improvement plan associated with our distribution system piping and this is regard regardless of what alternative we make um you know choose with our water supply we're still going to be operating the same distribution system and we will we are continuing to invest um the there's challenges there um some of them are financial but there's also just community tolerance for um tearing up roads and um we call it orange barrel fever in

047the summer so we have been increasing the rate of water main replacement to closer approximate what we need to in order to stay on top of this need um but you know we're going to continue to have main breaks in the winter that that's not something that's going to be going away in the short term well so i i both for storm water and especially for sanitary sewer and our water system for a hundred years ann arbor has been doing a wonderful job and i i i certainly am not one that suggests we go to detroit except if that's the only alternative if we're in trouble about supply and so i'm i just i think you guys have been doing a wonderful job and i don't mind paying the additional fees um thank you chris

048rita you have the floor thanks um i want to touch on the um on two items one is cost to consumers comparing the two sources and one of my concerns that that comes to mind with the great lakes water authority is the water shutoffs that we've heard about in detroit and um since we would be um coming the water would be coming to us from a long distance what would be the risk to us for um water shutoffs if if and in with respect to the cost of this service has there been an assessment of the cost to the users um i'm not i'll i'm not sure i understand your question but i'll take a stab at it you can let me know if i'm off track um in terms of water shutoffs um you

049know that would be if you're talking about shutoffs for things like non-payment um for individual customers we would still have complete control over that because we would still be operating and distributing water to our customers we're just not going to be providing the supply so when you're seeing those kinds of things in detroit that's really not this great next water authority that's probably the municipal detroit dwsd detroit water and sewer who is responsible for delivering water to customers in detroit so it's their policies and their their implementation so we would have complete control control over that um in terms of you know the rates to our customers you know right now um i i know that councils aren't familiar with i'm not sure of the environmental commission with the rate structure we have but this

050inclining block rate structure um where users who use more money uh use more water pay more per unit we would still have to maintain control of the structure of our water fees to our customers um that wouldn't necessarily have to change um it would be it would remain under the discretion of the city but we want to make sure that the red the sorry go ahead i just wanted to just wouldn't the cost per unit be greater because of the cost of developing this system so for comparing 100 million versus the 300 million it seems like that we would ultimately bear that higher cost as customers yeah absolutely what you know the back to the the chart that we showed on our avenue annual revenue requirements glenn if you want to maybe jump back a

051couple of slides um you know this this is the cost that it's going to cost the city to operate the system we anticipate if we were making this change now in fiscal year 22 so we're talking about you know maybe 25 30 more um cost revenue that the city is going to need in order to operate the system under a regional water supply alternative so that 30 percent is going to be um covered by our customers our water rates are going to have to cover that difference um how it's distributed amongst amongst all of our customer classes is based on the rate structure we use but if you assume it's distributed equally across the board everyone will be paying that that increase okay thanks um and the other question is a quality one um about

052um industrial pollutants that might be in it excuse me in addition to the the kinds of things that that you have listed on your one slide with the quality concerns um i understand that at least one of the intakes is in the rouge river area is that correct oh that i'm not sure of okay um there i think there is more industry that has been raised by several people who have commented and some around some of the detroit intakes um so there is you know a fair bit more industry um so you could interpret that as being an additional risk okay and does the water as supplied to if it was to be supplied to us does that what are the treatments that the detroit system uses to extract those kinds of pollutants uh there

053they have different treatment processes at each of their different treatment plants so they're not all the same um so you know i don't i'm not familiar enough with the the details of their treatment processes um i mean i can tell you that they're i mean the great lakes water authority um is is a very reputable um authority that provides you know great great quality water to their customers so i anticipate that they have um just like we do you know a multi-barrier approach to drinking water quality which means that they have several stages in their treatment process that would address the the water quality that they see in their source waters and the potential risks but if there were specific questions about what treatment processes they have to address certain things that would be something

054we'd have to plug into okay all right thanks thanks rita brother if you have if any other commissioners have questions please raise your hand you know using the zoom feature otherwise i can't see you if there are no more questions i have a few um first one is people um have asked about floods about uh drought but the flip side of that are floods um well the climate model suggested we'll be getting more intense and uh frequent rainfall so i was wondering about the uh because i assume that the uh the intake would be the water intake would be jeopardized department dam failed um and i was wondering what uh my understanding is that the city is doing a great job of maintaining it and this is really a black swan of that type of

055event so i'm just wondering um if that's been included in any of the contingency planning we we spend a lot of time and resources to ensure that that damn barton dam is maintained in proper condition and meets all of the safety guidelines that's happened because we generate power there it's regulated by the federal energy regulatory commission um and there are um you know as glenn can attest to because he's he's the person who's mainly responsible for ensuring that we're compliant at our dams um there are many things that we do to ensure that the integrity of the dams are maintained we have you know whole capital project improvement plan in order to continue to maintain those um in terms of flows and being able to handle it the dam is capable of handling a very

056very large amount of water you know we've been getting a lot of rain now you know four inches and we haven't even scratched the surface on what that dam is capable of passing and we haven't in its life so i don't see the the climate change risk um being an issue for damn to be able to maintain um what flows we could see even with a you know a very very significant storm so that's that's great that's been my impression so um it's good to hear that well i have one more question and that is that um um during this whole discussion i was surprised to not hear any mention of like a reverse osmosis option for water treatment i don't i i guess this wasn't originally considered as part of that but i'm just

057wondering um what city staff has been doing to evaluate that kind of option yeah we we've discussed we discussed it a little bit during the 2015 study and our intention would be to address this as part of the future and plant improvements that the direction council um likes would you know would ask us to go um to evaluate membrane processes reverse osmosis is one there's other ones as well um the reality is is that the cost um the cost of putting in reverse osmosis for a plant of our size does not i don't know if there are any and there are there are very few of that size um in the country it's just not really a cost-effective solution um there's also issues with the amount of reject water that that process generates um and

058then what do we do with that there you can have so in order to treat for example um if we have a 50 million gallon capacity plant which we do um and it's going through a reverse osmosis system 25 to 30 percent of that is wasted in the process and has to be handled by a wastewater plant or or discharged into the environment and we don't really have that opportunity in ann arbor we can't we couldn't put that back into the environment and our wastewater plant which is just renovated doesn't have capacity to handle it and it would derate our plant by about 25 to 30 percent so a 50 mgd plant um becomes a 35 to 37 million gallon per day plant which gets very close to some of the highest flows that we've

059seen over the past 10 to 20 years so if we were going with that technology then the state would be asking us what are you doing to expand the capacity of your plant to be able to address the fact that you're you're achieving over 90 percent of what your potential flows would be so it opens a lot it raises a lot of questions and it creates a lot more challenges and we i think we need to do a better job of explaining and completely evaluating it but i don't anticipate that that would be a solution that would be appropriate for ann arbor okay yeah it just came to my attention that yeah you know brunswick county in north carolina because of the extensive gen x contamination of the cape fear river they've recently installed a

060reverse osmosis plant that i believe is rated at 35 gallons per per day 35 million gallons per day and on the capital costs for 170 million at least what you can see on their website i was just assuming that they ran the water directly back into the river um it's possible um you know it's basically a concentrated brine so it depends on what what the environment is and when they can whether the the river has the capacity to absorb it i would anticipate that we wouldn't be able to do that with the huron because of the sensitivity of the ecosystem and but you know it would have to be more thoroughly evaluated but it tends to be used as a last resort when there's no other options available and we have the ability to treat

061our source waters with the current technologies we're using more cost effectively than reverse osmosis okay well thank you very much um so chris graham has his hand up chris here um last question i've watched with um considerable dismay over the last 20 years as the water weeds in barton pond have more or less stopped sailing entirely there which was a big deal for a hundred years and i i think i know that the toledo water supply had the algae that was so toxic actually encrusting their intakes are you watching the developments of algae and weeds in barton pond really closely and and have plans in place to [Music] deal with anything toxic that might erupt out there um yes we you know we're regularly monitoring the water quality um and we we also look at

062it over time to see how the the watershed is is transitioning um so yeah it's something that's definitely on our radar um we don't have you know a harmful algal bloom issue along the huron at this point in time we do have um you know uh a algal toxin response plan in place so we know what we would do if we were going to run into a situation like that um so but it's not something that we have experienced at this point we don't see that being a current risk in the huron wonderful thank you okay um thank you uh if there are no more questions um i don't see any um so thank you very much glenn and brian uh for presenting to us so um but in about 45 minutes we're going to

063discuss a resolution that's been post-owned um and uh and it'll be a first reading only i believe so um if you care to hang on and answer any questions it might happen at that point um that might be useful or we could defer that to another another meeting in october probably okay all right well thank you for the opportunity to talk to you this evening um lisa has her hand up lisa nish i'm just wondering i don't i i imagine that mr steglitz might have other things to do so i wonder if we could pose a couple of um i guess there were three resolved clauses at the end that might benefit from feedback from him i wonder if we could just i i don't know if this is allowed in the order of meetings

064but if we could um pose those questions to him quickly and just ask for his thoughts i mean he's not a chance to deliberate over it but i mean yeah that's uh that's a good idea i mean um yeah deal with resolution now yeah we could deal with it now okay we'll have to move it up in the agenda uh kathy that's where i moved to open the agenda and move the resolution to directly behind this discussion is there a second second second with great gratitude raise your hand okay it looks unanimous so uh let's move it up um i can share my screen and i have the resolution up here so okay so i have it up can everybody see it okay so um i guess we should i should read through the whole

065thing so whereas the city of ann arbor has scheduled needed upgrades to the municipal water infrastructure and the capital improvement plan projecting uh my understanding is this a 50-year service life is that correct um and whereas four scenarios for city water infrastructure were investigated and reported by black and beach in 2015 and include detailed financials and risk benefit analyses whereas city staff and several consultants under contract have since updated and refined the cost-benefit analyses focusing on two alternatives of the four either rehabilitate the current facility at the same site and continue using the existing water intakes or contract with the great lakes water authority to deliver process drinking water to ann arbor for further processing and distribution whereas risk benefit and capital cost comparisons clearly favor rehabilitation i think is the proper word of the

066current facility which was about 108 million dollars in 2021 rather than switching to glr uh wa delivered source water which was projected to cost about 355 million dollars and 20 21 whereas the operating cost comparisons are also projected to be um 30 to 30 to 100 percent higher source water switched to jlwa i think that's wrong because i think they're uh estimated to be about equal is my understanding now um is that correct um mr stiglitz or um i would say operating costs comparisons are projected to be higher for the if source water is is switched to the great wakes water authority i i think we have a difficult to identify how much but it will we expect it to be higher yeah i i i got those numbers out of that projected operating cost

067but there would be 30 potentially 100 higher okay and whereas long-term risks to water quality are not under the control of the city of ann arbor that reside in state and federal regulatory agencies um i believe uh i'm what i'm speaking to here is that uh igla and the state and federal entities are responsible for water quality in the city has very little control of water quality which would be an issue for both both options however i would think that ann arbor might have more through working through the uh here on the river watershed council and other municipalities in the watershed we might have more control over it than we would have if the intake was in the detroit river which is an international boundary as well um one one edit i might make to

068that is i might add source in front of water quality because we do have control over our finished water quality it's the source water quality where we don't have that's true that's true thank you for that correction yeah um whereas risks to intake water quality are anticipated to be less likely and more manageable for the huron river rather than the detroit river i know that the black veatch analysis some indicated that there was more risk with the huron river but um in terms of catastrophic events i would think that there are prob there are more problems with the detroit river given that the water treatment plant is upstream of the uh of the water intake at uh fighting island and there's also another intake upstream just upstream of uh bell island um you know where

069i imagine um i imagine there was some i know there was some discussion of this in the black and beach report that if there were a catastrophic spill in sarnia which is a major major petrochemical site in canada um just upstream and then we have the rouge river and the clinton river and we have uh you know the industrial facilities down there at the foot of the louis river so um i'm i'm not sure how strongly to express this uh concern but i think it's uh it seems to me to be more manageable partly because the huron river is a smaller watershed compared to the detroit river and it is um relatively free of industrial uh development and it's not internet international boundary so i'm not sure whether it's uh it's appropriate to keep that

070or not that we can work on these whereas clauses we could refine these later um are there any uh comments so far raise your hand no i don't see any concerns here rita mitchell racer and rio i did i just want to mention that we received a comment from the ann arbor township supervisor in support of continuing with the source from the huron river and i think that that's significant because you could say that our water processing is not just for the city of ann arbor but also for another township since they source their water from us there are three others three thank you i know there is yeah yeah i believe their board passed a resolution yeah a few days ago so it's not just the supervisor but the board in support of option

071one yeah and that was sent to us uh prior to this meeting so whereas the ann arbor department of water services has been acknowledged as one of the best in the state of michigan traditionally being proactive and monitoring potential threats threats such as pfas parasitic microorganisms and responding with timely improvements in treatment technologies whereas the superior quality of ann arbor municipal water has been acknowledged over many years staff has nourished a culture of transparency and responsiveness to customer concerns whereas water is a public good and proactive local management of water quality based on routine ongoing scientific testing is a public value benefited public benefit valued by the community it resolved that the environment these are the clauses that were drafted there for them the first one is the environmental commission advises ann arbor city council

072to proceed with rehabilitation of the water treatment facility at the current site in ann arbor and continue to use here on river water and local groundwater wells as a source of amnerable water so are there let's have a discussion caused by clause so um on if you have a comment please raise your hand yeah i'm just wondering if we could maybe just whip through them for mr steglitz to comment and then we could discuss them in a painstaking way but maybe we just want to let him fee because that that clause seems pretty on controversial council gonna do everything in our discussion is pointed to this but they're the further resolved clauses um i think are things that i would like to hear mr steglitz's and again we could just notice by him later i

073also don't want to help the raa folks but while we had mr steglitz here i thought it might be interesting to show him the resolved clauses that seem to be asking further action oh that's good um mr steglitz can you see the uh the screen yes i can oh okay that helps so the second result clause is that the environmental commission advises river city council to direct the city administrator to continue to monitor and take actions to improve the health of the huron river through coordination with the michigan department of environment great lakes and energy washtenaw county uh particularly water resources commissioner and the heroin river watershed council and i should add other government entities within the heroin river watershed potentially what would be your comment on that on that clause um i'm struggling with

074the you know some of the things that really are not part of our you know our responsibilities to some degree are not to improve the health of the huron river um while we support that um you know directing staff to take actions to improve the health of the huron is um is probably not really within our our scope of our capabilities i i don't have an issue with it but i just don't i feel like it doesn't have a lot of meaning no i believe you're correct um um so i think uh before our next meeting i think it would be important to to discuss this issue um one one way i mean the monitoring portion i i don't have an issue with maybe instead of take action is maybe advocate for the um maintaining

075quality and of the something like that yeah i like where we're advocating on behalf of improving the quality of the of our source waters and who upstream movements do you think has the power to help with that well i mean this is a really great place for the huron river watershed council right because they're this is their thing this is what they do is they they um go across jurisdictions and they can help you know help the advocacy they have the connections with the upstream entities so um in partnership with them and you know we we meet with them and we coordinate regularly so it would be leveraging that relationship to improve the health of the huron okay all righty so i'll read i'll read the modified one that the environmental commission advises ann arbor

076city council to direct the city administrator to direct staff to continue to monitor and advocate to improve the health of the river through coordination with the eagle of washington county and the river watershed council um is there any chris graham you have your hand up about this class but this one there are a couple i'd like to add and comment later on on other ones okay you don't have a comment right now no advocating for the protection and improving water quality river is great okay all right thank you kathy you have your hand up um yes i don't think we need to direct staff i think that's redundant if we just direct the city administrator uh he will make it happen and he's made comments to that effect at recent council meetings um and then

077um you mentioned other local governmental entities and i would like to add that phrase in because i we work very closely with scio township ann arbor township and maybe that's it in washington county yeah it's already there thank you okay thanks um any other comments okay i will leave that as it is now and then now the third clause i'll read it resolved that the environmental commission advises ann arbor city council to consider well this is a big congolet uh to instruct staff to post contingency plans for a potential sudden interruption of municipal water services on the city's website i think it would be a good idea to i i looked on the city's website and i could not find any posting uh for that um so that if anybody any resident of the city

078had a question that there would be a place where they could just see what the current contingency plans were um it's a relatively minor point um but uh kathy you have your hand up and then chris i don't disagree with it but i don't know if it belongs in the resolution as opposed to just a memo or phone call to the city administrator um offering recommendations for improving the website yeah but i'll defer to brian if he thinks it's needed i just i think it's a little too prescriptive um i mean i'm not sure i don't see how this belongs in the conversation about what we're discussing this is sort of a separate issue and i would want to you know understand what the commission and maybe council thinks is missing and is needed i

079mean we have pretty robust emergency response plans and for in certain cases for very specific reasons we don't make components of them public so there are um you know security components of some of our plans that we for a variety of reasons we would we keep in-house so there may be things that we could post that would maybe meet some of the needs but it wouldn't be my intention to post our contingency plans and make them publicly available well i understand there are some homeland security concerns about that okay well i'm going to delete that clause then um chris you have your hand up well i was going to suggest a little bit alternate thrust of the clause and that's to make sure that we have contingency plans in place that can be promptly put

080into place for low flow conditions in the river are there any other comments about that suggestion a drought circumstance might happen a whole lot faster than two or three years i support it but i don't think it belongs in this resolution whatever um yeah okay firstly we have we have drought contingency plans in place currently so they don't need to be developed okay okay i'm kathy you still have your hand up um i would recommend deleting the final resolve clause as well i think some of that's already in place and it's not related to the resolution you're right it's a minor it's a minor point it was there as a whether i put it in there as a or as a place saver for a reminder all right so um i think it will delete

081i'm thinking of deleting these last two resolved clauses um because they really don't fit into the scope of this resolution and uh we would so and these would be just a minor relatively minor request to city staff um chris you have your hand up so again i i i don't know that it belongs here but the city is increasingly inspecting flow valves on irrigation systems about every two years when they know about them including that process ought to be that there should be an operating rain sensor on every irrigation system that's inspected many rain sensors many irrigation systems don't have them and run merrily along when it's been pouring rain maybe it doesn't belong here but uh it would help okay you know that's so that's an excellent idea but um i think that's another

082excellent idea but i don't think it's within the scope of this considering of this resolution of this resolution which is about the water source yeah let's bring that up at a future meeting okay well somehow i don't know where the regulation comes from to inspect backflow valve so wherever that comes from this could be added this could be another change to the udc i guess okay well i'm going to delete them so the city had i'll just just quickly the city does have a cross-connection control plan and that's all part of it what you what um commissioner graham was just describing so you could inquire about what the city's plan entails and what frequency we're doing some of that i know some of the issue has been um you know we're we are doing what

083this the state requires but we could be the city could be directed to do more some of the things that were just mentioned and i think that that really becomes a funding issue and whether we have the current resources in place to execute a more robust cross-connection and you know looking at the things that the commissioner just mentioned so it would be i think it's resource limited is really the challenge um but it was something the council directed the city to implement then we would have to um build that into future budget okay all right well let's see um i wasn't planning on a boot on this right now or if i thought we would have a voter go next meeting after after some consideration so uh kathy you have your hand up um two

084things one is um i support what chris said and i would be willing to work on a resolution if needed i just want to point out that the city had to replace about 40 feet of laptop multi-use path in front of walgreens that was due to over irrigation and a faulty sprinkler head and so it was the path was just washed out so it would save us money in the long run as well and then i'd like to move that we consider this resolution tonight because the sooner the council acts the sooner we can uh minimize the amount of time staff have spent has spent working on this separate path with great lakes water authority that does not seem to have any support from community experts or the surrounding community okay all right um i'm

085prepared to have a vote um if uh if there are emotions uh if the motions come up um i think uh i i think i should delete should i delete these reference documents and and links at the beginning here this is um unusual i think for for other resolutions that i've seen the city commissions and the council pass as well but i'm happy i think it's important to keep these kind of um information resources in there you can put them at the end steve okay sometime i would move past you to the resolution subject to editing by steve in accordance with the comments made this evening and um let's proceed second second um all who uh can i sorry i'm yeah i'm wondering if i can just make a a quick comment on this the

086second resolved clause before you i mean if we have an opportunity maybe to think about this a little but i think it would be clearer um when you just scroll down to the second resolve clause the second result was okay yeah so um i think it would be clearer direction for staff if it said contin to continue to monitor monitor and advocate advocate for source water protection to ensure the huron river is remains a suitable source of drinking water for the ann arbor community something like that yeah very good let's see to continue to monitor and advocate for source water quality source water advocate for source water protection to ensure the huron river will can continue to be a what did i say i don't even remember but source water protection to ensure the huron

087river will can serve as an adequate supply of drinking water for the city of ann arbor um in the future or for the first the next several generations i don't know something like that okay but i think the source water protection piece is sort of important to advocate for source water protection to ensure the health of the human river for future generations or i got it i'll send it to you in the chat i'm sorry i'm tired thank you let's see you can't see this um since i'm showing the screen so let's see lisa your language you want to just read it to me um and i just send it to you by email i noticed chat so i'll just send it to you to save time okay but i don't think i can i'll

088just no it's okay don't worry about it now okay yeah right we'll we'll we'll worksmith that to make it uh more appropriate okay based on lisa suggestion okay so do i have a motion to vote on um on chris's uh suggestion amendment i think you got a motion in a second and a second all right tom all who say i raise your hands or say i i i hey any objections any no's hearing and seeing mine any abstentions [Music] yeah so um all right so this red this uh resolution passes unanimously um i will write this up and um email it among the email the commissioners uh early tomorrow morning by noon tomorrow and uh if it's appropriate i'll ask alan to forward it to the to the city clerk okay all right so now

089i'm going to stop sharing my screen and uh we'll move on to the next item on the agenda thank you brian and uh glenn thank you participating in this commission meeting thank you and um so we'll move on to the recycle and orbit presentation so we have two uh we have two separate presentations here so let's see is um we have it loaded uh brian um brian yukena are you still on the on the meeting good evening how's everyone doing i'm fine thank you great great thanks for having me steve and and uh environmental commissioners i wanted to uh just update you on a few things that we talked about at our at the last time i presented at the environmental commission meeting and and uh some pretty exciting things happening in the community that

090uh i i think are important uh for you to be aware of but uh you know first uh uh brian you can i'm ceo of uh recycle ann arbor and nonprofit mission-based organization um for four brians um at uh rea and i'm the i'm one of them um just uh just briefly um you know you've you you're all reading about the climate crisis and and the related events historic flooding heat waves uh wildfires the things that you were discussing earlier that really do impact a lot of the infrastructure so so um you know right now is is a perfect time and i've never been more an important time uh to act on these climate crisis issues and i think the general public and and uh most people are are aware of the issues and and

091uh want to act on them on a local level um just some locals you know look a couple local statistics the the the ann arbor area has seen a almost a 42 increase in extreme weather events and you've heard the previous presentation talking about that over the last 60 years that's that's uh that's mind-boggling um but uh building zero-waste systems uh will empower our community to act locally on those climate issues so um these things keep happening to us what can we do on a local level and and so that's what i'd like to talk about is some of the zero waste building blocks that are going to help us act on a local level on on some of these uh global issues um and just to the to the importance of zero waste um

092you guys have all i think read the the uh 820 carbon neutrality uh report and it it talks about the impact of waste but if you if you look at uh the carbon emissions statistics uh from a zero-waste perspective and from a materials life cycle analysis um it's clear that that that waste contributes 42 of the carbon emissions not the three percent that shows up in in other reports so it's a significant issue and it's something we can all uh work on on a local level it's a that's something we can do so you know forward thinking look forward looking and and and thinking progressive communities like ann arbor um we can really lead in this zero waste movement and and it is a movement this is happening not just in um michigan not just

093in the the united states but around the world and it's uh it's a significant movement so it's something that we we can do locally and and we as leaders of the more progressive communities in michigan can really have a huge impact um be surprised how how impactful examples are and demonstrations are so um just uh one had three things i wanted to talk about three there many things that uh recycle ann arbor and and uh this city is working on but um three i wanted to mention um talk a little bit more about uh firstly the the eco site um recycle ann arbor just purchased 17 acres and is currently uh we're planning the future for our our future zero waste demonstrations for the site and i'll talk a little bit more about what the

094eco site is and and some of the opportunities there um we're also uh building the zero waste materials recovery facility i uh uh steve asked me to to definitely mention and update the group on the materials recovery facility things are going well i want to talk a little bit about that but the idea what's a zero waste materials recovery facility versus uh the old materials recovery facility and it's you know it's the they they look similar but the principle is the highest value and best use of the material and that that that's being generated so so highest and best use transparent credible recycling we've gotten away from that in the recycling industry and and i want to talk more about um transparent credible recycling and the impacts that can have and then um we've got

095this pile of stuff right on on platt street but really looking upstream of that pile and looking downstream of that pile um so downstream where is the stuff going what is it getting made into how recyclable is it and then looking upstream hey what's coming at us sometimes we tend to just stare at the tailpipe and and it's just coming at us so really crawling up that tailpipe or looking at the source of that material and starting to influence the source of that material those are really components that make a zero waste materials recovery facility and then the the last thing i want to talk about is a an organization that's been formed in the last year that uh recycle ann arbor was a founding member of uh amber the alliance of mission-based recyclers that

096and talk a little bit about some national international policy that's going on that we're part of so uh i think the last 18 months have really shown that supply global supply chains are are easily disrupted and and we rely heavily on single-use packaging i think those two things have become really um we've become really aware of them through through the pandemic and and so rea is is uh connecting that local circular supply chain um by using this eco site um to really incubate and house uh zero waste infrastructure and that's uh you know what does that mean creating that that infrastructure what would that look like so uh refillables um is a is a a good possibility and and definitely ripe in in the ann arbor area reuse you you saw during the pandemic we

097had to shutter our reuse center but uh reuse it comes in a number of different forms so what does that look like um in the future um and recycling businesses um but all of them um that address waste at the source instead of at the tailpipe so we're really looking at the source of where that stuff comes from influencing that the brands and the manufacturers and then creating demonstrations here in ann arbor that can actually address that that issue and and create a more sustainable future so that's kind of the the idea of the eco site we received a couple of grants two to ten thousand dollar grants to begin the planning of what this site will look like this is the the site on jackson road where the the uh construction demolition strike site

098the recovery yard currently sits where um construction demolition material gets recycled and and then what can get what can be recycled so it sits on that site there's an additional 17 acres there that we're really excited about creating this uh visionary eco site secondary is the materials recovery facility i spoke last last time we we met about the materials recovery facility of rea invests about seven million dollars in basically taking all that old equipment out of that existing building that sits on uh pratt platt uh the 4150 plat road so we pulled all took all the old equipment out or most of the old equipment out and replaced it with new state-of-the-art materials recovery facility um uh equipment and um we uh if you'll remember we we signed the contract the 10-year contract with the

099city to reconstruct that facility remanufacture that facility and then um process the city's recyclables and so we signed the contract in november and then we've been doing the the construction the demolition and and recycling we've recycled over 100 tons of of that scrap equipment and uh and replacing it with new state-of-the-art optics orders and new new equipment and we'll actually be starting the what they call wet commissioning which is basically where you start putting material on the line and sorting through that material doing stress tests getting it up to ramping it up to its capacity and which is about 18 to 20 tons per hour is what the facility will operate at and the materials recovery facility as you know it brings the recyclables from all the community from all of ann arbor to the

100facility and then sorts that material out either by people or by machines or other technologies so um that's scheduled to open november first and begin processing so we as i mentioned we're doing the wet commissioning we start that on october 11th where we fire the equipment up and start operating it starts doing stress tests and those kinds of things and we will be operational as planned by november 1st quite a feat during the pandemic with uh all of the metal shortages and all the the supply chain issues so we feel really we're really excited about that there's a shakeout period um uh up to november but then when we're actually operational they'll be what they call shakeout which is where you operate um for a period of time until you get sort of the kinks

101worked out so look in the spring around earth day um that might be a good time to think about uh ribbon cuttings kind of that kind of thing so the community can be more involved but um facilities um being built so on schedule uh it's looking good um all indications are that we'll start the first week in in november if you set your recyclables out at the curb they'll get processed locally and you know where they're gonna go and know what they're gonna get made into hi the principles of of the materials recovery facility as i mentioned highest and best use of the material what does that mean first of all what comes in the higher the quality of material that comes in the higher quality of material that goes out a lot of cleanup

102requires a lot of money and does dirty the other material so i guess from an education standpoint when in doubt please leave it out for at this point until we're you're you're feeling comfortable that it is actually a recyclable item um but uh but the idea is uh is highest and best use is not just how we treat the people who are processing that material not just how we treat that material as we collect it and bring it in not just how we how well we process it and how we think about residue and try to capture as much of what comes in as we can and recycle it but then when we bail it up and we send it to markets what happens what are those markets where does it get sent where does

103it um what does it get recycled into and how can that be recycled again and again if we make it into a low value mixed plastic product that can't be recycled again we're still on that linear path where that material doesn't get isn't used in a sustainable way so how can we recycle that where it gets recycled again and again because that's the real value of recycling and that's where circularity and and and real sustainability comes from so highest and best use of that material um like i said living wage jobs good benefits uh people can raise their families on those kind of um those kind of jobs um good path to the future but then transparent credible recycling um so you know a lot of people hear and read and there's a lot of

104articles out there new york times a number of them um that sort of indicate that recycling is broken that hey my community isn't recycling it's going to the landfill well that goes to credibility and transparency um let people see it gets recycled here in our community where does it go we're gonna let you know where it goes and what it gets made into so it's a real process and that that there's uh there are uh there are reasons good reasons for people uh feeling like um recycling isn't as credible as it should be um so so really doing it on a local level um the city's determined they want to do it with a local non-profit recycler like recycle ann arbor and that just lends more credibility and to the to the process and and

105uh like i mentioned it's a it's it we take it very seriously if we accept an item uh for recycling we're gonna do our best to recycle it we're not gonna greenwash the the uh the recycling's uh and also i think that again the transparency and credibility um is targeted zero-waste education i really think um a lot of you know that education is key um it's not just recycling it's not just about what's recyclable and what's not recyclable but what's the benefit of recycling people i think sometimes just say recycling check done now i'm on to my next sustainability thing i'm going to get a solar panel for my roof or buy an electric car or something like that but really recycle more more people recycle than vote obviously it's a it's something that people

106do on an everyday basis and they want to know that and the reason that they're recycling is that they they want to know that it's it's being done um sort of right and that the most environmental benefit is being uh brought to it so targeted zero waste education we're not going to tell you something's recyclable if it's not and that may feel a little disingenuous to some people and they may think oh man i can't put as much stuff in my recycling bin but the thing is you know what you put in the bin and you know what we tell you is recyclable is recyclable and we we we know because we've conducted our due diligence and we know it's a credible source where that material is going what's getting made into and then watch

107dogging the industry everybody knows that uh for everyone's probably seen um people put the chasing arrows the triangle uh recycling emblem on a lot of things that aren't necessarily recyclable and i'll talk a little bit more about that here in a minute but but uh but truth in advertising is important and uh truth in recycling is even more important right now so so really watch dogging the industry and and sort of calling it out as as it's uh as it becomes apparent that uh it's not authentic and then as i mentioned the upstream and the downstream of it looking upstream being able to the the materials recovery facilities it's a little bit like a laboratory um we kind of get it all in you know from the curbside bin um we can feed back to

108those brand names we can feed back to those manufacturers and say hey your material your pa your fancy packaging that you just generated it doesn't run through our facility and it comes up the works or boy this is very recyclable item thank you very much so being that feedback loop for the manufacturers and the and the brands is a another big part of the of the materials recovery facility so looking upstream and then downstream like i said um highest and best use for the for the material that gets generated then the last thing i want to talk about is the alliance of mission-based recyclers um so the recycling has gone through many iterations and so a lot of you will remember how recycle ann arbor's program got started it was uh a lot of young

109guys with ponytails hanging off the back of flatbed trucks picking up newspapers and and that type of thing so it came from a place of uh of genuine genuinely wanting to make sure that the material gets recycled and and there were not mostly non-profits that started uh a lot of the recycling infrastructure way back in in the uh actually late 60s early 70s all the way until about the 1980s when the uh the multinationals of the the municipalities had taken it over and the multinationals was were just getting into um recycling and and just sort of saw it as a logistical issue of am i picking up garbage am i picking up recycling and and it was just became this sort of function of logistics so we these these group of of uh uh mission-based

110recyclers they've seen that whole arc they've seen that whole curve and they've they've been advocating for the same things um through every iteration of of the recycling industry and that's uh to rebuild credible transparent and just recycling systems uh there's a lot of justice issues in uh in waste and incineration and landfills and recycling so it's not just about where you get the best price for material but there are other issues with that too so so the the amber members and just for your information their their four founding members and recycle ann arbor is one of them another one is eureka recycling in in many in minneapolis um eco cycle in boulder colorado the ecology center in berkeley california and then and then recycle ann arbor here and uh we we are bound together and

111um uh committed to the goals of rebuilding credible transparent recycling strengthening state and national uh policy most all of these organizations have been very involved in policy um they're not just uh recyclers with trucks these people are they understand the entire industry and are very involved in in local state and national um policy issues as is recycle ann arbor and then one of the major goals is actually to reduce plastic consumption and this is where you see a lot of information on on media about doing away with plastics plastics play a role um if if someone if an entity is say saying it's a recyclable item we want to make sure that it's the recycling is available that it's authentically being recycled so we want to improve that plastic recycling infrastructure so we're not all

112or nothing we're improving recycling infrastructure plastic recycling infrastructure where we can and then reducing that consumption where that material isn't recyclable necessary needed and then raising the standards for recycling operations as i mentioned fair living wage jobs good benefits good working conditions um uh safe you know for collections and processing so that's kind of what uh amber represents um i just wanted to talk a little bit about the policy that uh we're kind of seeing the fruits of the labor of amber and and many other groups um there's a renaissance happening around recycling policy and zero-waste policy uh and has been for the last several years um the fruit of that sort of show both coasts uh maine and and california uh sort of to two coasts but two issues two zero waste issues that

113are very important um so the first is the state of maine uh past the first extended producer responsibility legislation in the nation and uh just uh so you have a sense um extended producer responsibility is an effort to hold the producer of packaging waste responsible instead of the cities which is the way it works now the city is paying for for uh those recycling services and us through uh you know the citizens through paying their their taxes and that and recycling organizations that's who's been responsible in the past now there's a very uh substantial movement to make those producers uh uh accountable to the products that they're creating i mean they're amazing packaging products that are doing amazing things but we have to look at the tail end of that and how that's impacting us

114overall and they need to be participating in the handling of that material that they're creating so that's what it is is creating that partnership among brands and and manufacturers with recycling entities and cities and and states to share that responsibility and to cover those costs because those costs need to be borne by someone but the state of maine the first extended producer responsibility legislation in the in the nation it will hold uh packaging manufacturers responsible for the waste they produce so if you if you uh sell a cardboard box in in maine you're responsible to share in the cost and the recycling of that of that product and what that does is drives the manufacturer to account for to think about that in their design so that they are designing for recyclability um so that

115their their cost can be reduced and so this is really common in other countries in the eu countries and things like that and canada has had producer responsibility for a number of years so this is the first legislation first extended producer responsibility bill we're seeing in the in the us and it's actually an authentic extended producer responsibility legislation that we're really excited about on the other coast california i talked about truth in recycling those triangle chasing arrows with a little number that you can't really see in the middle of it that doesn't denote that it's recyclable it never did it was uh it was very confusing for the general public so um so the state of california is tackling that misleading chasing arrow uh plastic numbering system um it confuses i i can't tell you

116how many thousand calls we get each year about confusion around that very issue so what you can see is california is a huge economy and um so the packaging that comes into california and therefore the packaging that leaves california is going to have to be rebranded and changed and there has to be more truth whether it's recite whether that product is truly recyclable or not and that's going to impact the rest of the country you've seen that with a number of other things that california has done so this truth in recycling is something that i think everybody is really excited about i think it's going to impact us all so so that's that's some really nice legislation that's happening on both the coast here in michigan just so you know all of these things uh

117amber is involved in and recycle ann arbor is involved in so so that you know the idea is to for recycling arbor to really connect um citizens and and the community of of uh ann arbor to local national state national and and international policy and we work closely with break free from plastics and a number of other international groups and then another a a number of national groups so that we our voices heard in ann arbor um something that's happening here in michigan um we're in a really good place and i think some people tend to discount the value of our redemption bill we've had a some people call it a bottle bill but it's where you take your carbonated um containers that are empty back to your grocery store that redemption law that's been

118in place for a number of years over 20 years and and there's only 10 states in the country that have that in place and this chart shows the impact that has when there's a redemption law of bottle bill in place you get 62 percent recycling rate on your uh on your soda pop bottles and and that type of thing in bottle bill states versus 28 percent recycling rate in non-bottle-built states glass bottles 64 for bottle bill 40 for uh for non-bottle built states and then aluminum cans probably the most impressive 77 um [Music] recycling rate versus 46 percent in non-bottle bill states so um really the idea of this new legislation i don't i don't know how good a chance it has of passing i i think with the current legislature it's it may not

119have a good chance this session um but what it would do is also include so right now the the legislation in the bottle bill only includes carbonated beverages and this would actually open it up to non-carbonated if you can imagine the water bottle issue that everybody talks about the disposable water bottles this bottle bill doesn't currently address that if we went to a non-carbonated um bottle bill to include that you can see how those numbers would greatly increase for uh for uh bottle recycling too so so a number of different uh things happening on a national level on a on a local level and on a state level and just wanted to make you aware of those um i wanted to just sort of sum up by you know talking a little bit just a

120minute or two about what we can do as the environmental commission is recycling arborist as citizens and and uh this may sound right but uh being a a champion is really important um not just a recycling champion but a zero waste champion what does it mean to be a recycling champion versus a zero waste champion but but it's so impactful to to your neighbors into the community um staying informed super important as this stuff just changes day a day literally day to day so staying informed and engaged really we need local support of these projects so many of these projects that i'm talking about are so they're ready to take off they just need to be resourced in a sustainable way and they will take off there is tremendous energy in our community to to

121get these some of these issues implemented and and uh and really community community-wide zero-waste uh education and and and programs is where people have the most energy um so yeah they're they're definitely interested in and carbon neutrality this is a way for them to demonstrate this in a very real way so helping us fund those programs helping us support those programs but most importantly and a big gap that we have in ann arbor um over other communities i've worked in is that we need ongoing investment in in zero waste education and infrastructure we we don't currently uh the city hasn't been able to um get a contract in place for k-12 education in the schools so there's really nothing uh formalized there that's happening both of the invitation to bid and the and the rfp

122for the materials recovery facility and the collections didn't include any resources for education so so that's a that's a gap we have that we need to work on on trying to get in place so i appreciate your time i went i think i went just a little bit long but if there are questions i'm i'm happy to answer them or or email them to you okay thank you brian um lisa dish has her hand up um yeah this is so exciting thank you what is your timeline on the eco site and um on the extended producer responsibility bill um i guess the remarks about the bottle bill being expansion not being likely to pass i can imagine that it would be hard to pass something like that in michigan now with the current legislature but

123um how many states would we need to get those bills passed before it would just be that all producers just had to do it um throughout the nation because uh other you know their markets would be all messed up um so should we be advocating i don't know in other states in california certainly to to get that moving yeah that's a ah these projects when they happen on a state-by-state level it it really drives the manufacturers and the producers crazy because they have to create different systems in oregon than they do in california than they do in in michigan so it sort of reaches this tipping point i don't know what the number of states is before it reaches that tipping point i can tell you i've been doing this 30 something years now and

124i've never seen as much momentum for extended producer responsibility we have coca-cola pepsi cola proctor and gamble all of the major bottlers every single one of the major bottlers coming out and saying yep we need extended producer responsibility in some form i have never seen that in my entire career and honestly i never thought i would but they're all seeing the writing on the wall their service delivery method is single-serve packaging and they will do anything they will do anything to keep that in place and so i think it reaches a tipping point i don't know what the number of states is but uh but yeah i think what's really nice about michigan is we already have the redemption in place with an ext so it makes it easier to implement an extended producer responsibility

125model in michigan and i think there's interest among the manufacturers and bottlers to to to actually get something in place that'll be successful and i think michigan has a really good chance as far as extended producer responsibility as far as expanding the bottle bill i think you're absolutely right i think it's the current legislature i don't think it's the moment the momentum is definitely in favor of expanding the the uh the bottle bill but uh but not in the legislature it's among people and i think we're seeing the the uh the fruits of our labor uh with manufacturers and bottlers saying yep i'm on board we need to extend it so we're looking at a number of where where this legislation is in michigan is there's a number of different options that they're looking at

126whether we set up depots and because the grocers are getting they're growing tired of having to deal with this stuff they're not recyclers you know every square inch they've got is is valuable to them so how exactly it looks might not be exactly like it currently looks so there's a number of discussions i'll be speaking with tamra uh next week um stay in touch with amcor we stay in touch with the with the big manufacturers and the and the uh big players in the in the issue so we'll we'll see how it moves but it feels like um with a different legislature we can we really have some serious momentum i've i forgot the other question that you asked lisa i'm sorry that's okay you're uh the eco site the timeline right so we purchased

127the property uh late last year i think december of last year uh we got uh the two grants this state grant and and a county grant to do the planning so that's the gap analysis of the land and the and the projects so we're trying to get clear on what our vision is so that we're really focused on what we implement in the eco site and that that with the thing that takes probably the most time so we're looking at probably the end of next year having that focus and being ready to to start implementing our our first step is to move our headquarters to move recycle ann arbor's headquarters out to the eco site and that'll happen late 22 early 23. that'll be the first step probably the the actual implementation of the eco

128site will happen over a number of years um are there other questions um and then chris yeah um i just have a question question on how you in um include diversity equity and inclusion in in recycling because i know like communities who don't speak english or like they probably also earn minimum wages or like low income in the country and i feel like for information important like recycling and composting is really useful to include languages that's other than other english and um i was looking at the recycling enabler website and saw the drop-off station and the other i forgot the authorization the recovery yard probably yes the recovery yacht and then i saw the two um pdf on what can be recycled and what can't be recycled and those have a really good information but

129i think those information can be easily translated into different languages and post it on the website for people to access because i yeah it's so important and we're just so far i think we only we haven't translated even into one language what the plan right now is to move it over to three languages by the end of next year and then 12 total of 12 languages when we're completely uh finished but it's a it's a an issue of timing and and we're we're doing what we can do but um it's we we need to do some work in that area you're absolutely right and diversity inclusion that's where it starts is a basic understanding and a basic understanding of who your customer is and being able to speak to them and understanding that culture and

130uh i've been here three years we're doing our best to create fertile ground to uh include to to make sure diversity inclusion are are included but um i i will say we're behind the curve we we need to do some work in that area i see it is it possible that you guys like offer volunteering opportunities for volunteers to like translate the material for you guys yeah we were using a service that does it and they got the messaging off quite a bit so we need to it was so we had to quit doing it but but yeah we could use people you know actual translators that understand what we're trying to do and they aren't like it isn't like a computer generated thing that this actual contextual cultural um [Music] considerations we we could

131sure use that help yeah and earlier i was making a presentation on recycling composting for my parents because they don't know much about it and i translated all two of the recycling java station and recovery yard pdfs i can definitely send them to you if you want to include them on absolutely yeah and uh i'll i'll uh i'll let erica who's our communications person know that uh that you've done that and that there may be some interest there and she'll reach out to you i i'm assuming your contact information is on the environmental commission website yes okay i don't think my email is on there but if you can send me your email later i can i can do that i can do that i'll get you all in touch okay thanks thank you i'm

132chris you're on the floor uh brian so what happens to the uh drop off center out on plat and ellsworth and your new plans and your new properties yeah uh so the city wrote a grant um to take a look at moving the drop-off station and they partnered with the county so washington county and the city of ann arbor uh wrote a grant to the state to look at relocating that because you got you guys that have been out there probably know it kind of looks like the tilt and hilton with the with the old building that's out there and it's it's not going to last too much longer so we got to find another site and that is one site that's been kicked around is that jackson road site um we're we're calling it

133the mega dos this is a drop-off station that could potentially do a lot more than what our current drop-off station is accept new items do more processing um do better education things like that and the jackson roadside or the eco site is one that we're looking at and the city's looking at the city and county are looking at a number of other locations but they're looking at setting up drop-off stations in a number of locations around the county so i think that might be don't quote me on this because i don't know for sure but i think that might be a fruit of uh the authority and the city working together to try to get drop-off stations uh more broadly available but uh but yeah jackson road is is one that we're looking at and

134uh and then the city i think and county are looking at other sites as well so the same question for the reuse center um that's highly missed it sure is i get more i get so many calls about it all the time and and uh the drop off the the reuse center might not look the same at the at the jackson road site it might have a different reuse component but that's one of our base components that's recycle ann arbor's one of their base components is is reuse reduction reuse and recycling so so we will have another reuse center i don't know exactly what it'll look like it will probably be at the jackson road eco site though i don't know what the timing is for that either because i did i don't have an

135exact time on that there is now bus service past there isn't there going to chelsea or dexter or something um i'm i'm not sure if there is or not but i know there are many many reuse centers along that we call it the jackson golden mile yeah there's a lot of reuse centers along there and and that's right in that path of the other reuse center so it's not a bad location the nice thing about south industrial was it was really convenient for people without transportation so well yeah and that those are our constituents man those are the people so how can we create opportunities for them to the previous commissioners talking about uh inclusion and diversity yeah well i'm i'm glad we're going to see it back someplace thank you we will and i'm

136sorry i don't have the timing on what it looks like but we will have a reuse component okay are there any other questions for brian right well thank you brian thank you we look forward to seeing the murph in operation again so let's end the screen sharing here and move on to the next item on the agenda which is unfinished business chapter 40 update um rita and kathy hi um i'll give a brief update and that's just not ready and i but i do want to um acknowledge and thank um input from chris graham chris vandenbrook and shannon gibb randall um to uh kind of give me information that i can use to kind of combine um and i'm hoping to return it to a kind of a simplicity that we will bring to you

137i hope soon i'll be reaching out to staff um on the city to consult on some whether there are any legal issues um and that's really about it for for the moment um kathy would you like to add something yes one of the reasons it's taking so long is this touches on so many different areas in terms of trying to naturalize safety different types of vegetation and it's going to require i think that before we we offer um the revised ordinance it's going to require uh educational materials that staff would prepare so that people really understand the intent here as well as reducing the enforcement efforts in my neighborhood we still have vegetation invasive species basically six plus feet tall growing over the the curb at school crosswalks and if i report it the city

138comes out and trims it or has the property owner but then there's no follow through there does it's it seems to be very reactionary and somehow we have to get in front of this and be proactive just like with zero waste it's gonna take a change and mindset and so if anyone has any ideas i'd really appreciate them thank you all right thank you kathy so anything more on that item rita not right now thank you okay thanks thanks for moving this forward it's very important so um new business um next item is a resolution honoring card and roger rail so let's see um can somebody put it up on their screen [Music] i think i don't have it i think i can get it up on my screen nobody else has it has anybody

139had a chance to look at it and while you're doing that i just like to say that this is very similar to uh the resolution honoring dan bicknell a few months ago and the intent was to honor both dan and roger but we didn't want to do it at the same environmental commission meeting or the same council meeting and uh roger has not had a chance to look at this but as we did with dan i intend to uh send it to roger just to make sure it's technically correct and and give him an opportunity to make minor tweaks right so i got it so i can share it for you okay good dude let me have the host function i think i've got it now all right okay i've got it now chris okay

140thanks so see this is the resolution um as rita was saying it's it's similar to the one that we uh we passed uh some time ago now for commanding dan bicknell for his work on card um in the dioxin dioxane remediation by the gilman so um so let's see uh should we read this out loud i will do that resolution to acknowledge and command roger rail in the coalition for action on remediation of dioxane abbreviated card for a long-standing public service to monitor and protect residents of ann arbor from exposure to harmful chemicals in ann arbor freshwater sources whereas the environmental commission advises the ann arbor city council on issues relating to environmental policy environmental issues and environmental implications of all city programs and proposals on the air water land and public health and whereas

141roger rail founded the founding card and has served as the chair since 2006 and whereas roger rail and members of card have held quarterly meetings to educate and organize members of the community about the threat of one-four dioxin in the groundwater and whereas roger rail has collected data analyzed and shared detailed information and encouraged members of the community to learn about the risks to water quality in ann arbor syrah township and ann arbor township whereas roger rail has provided support to members of the community local state and national elected officials via the card organization and the group messiah residents for safe water with respect to addressing 1-4 dioxin cleanup processes and whereas roger rail and members of card have advocated for remediation of the 1-4 dioxane plume by the environmental protection agency and whereas meetings

142of card have routinely provided a forum for review of data on the 140 dioxane plume tracking trends and communication with staff of both mdeq and and eagle therefore being resolved that the ann arbor environmental commission commends roger rail and members of card for their long service to the community through professional activism and the use of scientific modeling and resolved that the ann arbor environmental commission requests that ann arbor city council provide the coordinating resolution of appreciation and respect to roger rail and members of cart for their service and resolved that the environmental commission recommends that the city of ann arbor send the commendation of roger rail and members of card for decades long service to the leadership of washington county the washington county delegation of the michigan legislature the director of the michigan department of

143environment great lakes of energy the regional the regional administrator of the united states environmental protection agency region 5 attorney general dana nessel and governor gretchen whitman prepared by commissioner mitchell council member griswold september 15 2021. so uh this is the the uh draft that we have before us um kathy rizzo has her hand up uh i just want to mention that there's a e missing from the first therefore clause well yeah therefore well this is a pdf file oh okay i will have that corrected um and the other thing i want to say that um we can't underestimate the amount of political power card members have had in uh encouraging the governor to authorize the letter to the epa a protest was planned on the lawn of the capitol on a tuesday and the day

144before the the governor authorized the letter and without card i don't think that the governor or the uh the ag or the director of the eagle would be as familiar with the situation in ann arbor we sort of take it for granted that everyone knows about and cares about the one for dioxane but they've really elevated this situation to a new level um along with the long time advocacy of congresswoman debbie dingle in fact i said something at a political event to the ag is talking about my concern about the 1 4 dioxane and she actually said oh you don't have to worry the epa is here and debbie dingle is on it um and so that that's not the way things should be but it's um but card has made all of that happen

145and raised the visibility of the problem so i want to thank them thank you kathy our reading i just want to say that card is one of the groups that shows the impressive um effect that multiple um local government groups and um individuals can have working together it's really really impressive well thank you any other comments i i would just like to add that for those of you who don't know card has a website um you can look for further information and it includes representatives from local elected representatives from local government uh and governments in the region where this groundwater plume is impacted and um it also has a representative from ego um the state uh department of environmental lab environment um so it's been an intergovernmental organization that has um held the polluters um

146try to hold the polluters accountable as far as michigan law and federal law allows and without their activity not much would have been done because i'll remind people that this plane was discovered in 1984 i believe and nothing's really and it's been very difficult to get anything done in a meaningful way so uh this is a great this was a big step and i would not have happened without card i believe that myself so um let's see do i have a motion to uh um except uh i think we've done with the discussion so let's have a motion for a vote um i move that we passed this resolution um do i have a second chris graham i believe um all who approve say hi raise your hand um anyone say no any opposition any

147abstentions hearing and seeing none um it's passed unanimously so we'll forward i'll i'll edit the syntax and um and send it on to you know and we'll send it on to uh galen and he'll send it on to the county clerk i mean city clerk all right thank you thank you so the next item on the agenda is young youngway and jen wanted to discuss carbon taxing and uh carbon fee and dividend potentially so young when you have the floor yeah the um the egg i'm advocating for is carbon pricing and dividend act is hr2307 um the act advocate for implement a 15 carbon tax on all fossil fuels at the source excluding military and farming related um [Music] related fossil fuel fossil fuel inputs um and to and then from the tax collected it

148will be returned to the low and middle income families as a form of dividends and through this carbon taxing it can drive fossil fuel prices up and provide an opportunity for and in renewable energy to rise in the market thus move the economy to a more sustainable and renewable energy site um what action would you like to see the environmental commission take on this issue um i would like us to endorse the act okay um i should uh i should remind people that the energy commission in 2017 passed a resolution and passed on to city council and city council i believe uh acted on it as well to uh roughly approve um the concept of carbon fee and dividend we did not i'm not aware of either on the environmental commission certainly nor the energy

149commission or city council endorsed this specific act but uh they did endorse the concept um all right um john mursky sent an email and with the link on that was a specifically passed that time but not that was like actually report on the resolution yeah um personally i am a member of citizens climate lobby you know which is a long-standing organization that's been advocating for the solution to the climate crisis um i believe in it myself um there are equity there are um issues have been raised by uh you know by um by um you know by ipoc communities you know indigenous and people of color communities about uh whether um this represents you know an equitable means of of uh of um you know of addressing a climate emergency um and so um i

150circulated some materials of the naacp in particular you know has some said some things about this so um my personal recommendation here in this forum is that we need to start a conversation with these communities about this issue and and we need to broaden the coalition of understanding because i do believe that there is a significant amount of misunderstanding about what's in the bill and also um and how it's going to be how it's going to go through you know the whole legislative process in congress um it's because of uh you know as bismark said the sausage is being made it's hard to tell what it's going to look like um nobody will get what they want completely um so this endorsement of this bill could be an important step but i think it would

151be my personal opinion is it would be better to draw um to draw these communities into the discussion get more of a broader social and political consensus on this um i know there's some urgency because of the um you know because of the buildback better bill including um legislation and discussions in congress that have been going on for a few weeks about this i just want to add that the university of michigan the seeds department and the naacp are going to have a joint discussion online about this issue on september 22 7th i believe from 4 p.m to um to 5 p.m um you can look at the university sees our website the events website it's event number eight six five five one so anybody who wishes to can register for this event and observe

152it online and uh and post questions i believe so that uh so you know this is my personal opinion um just to initiate the discussion so i see other people have their hands up um kathy griswold and then on john calwick you have a fork i'm wondering if it would be appropriate to schedule a community conversation or like an informal public hearing uh at our next meeting and allow maybe 30 minutes for public comment so that people who are concerned about this issue and and the impact on equity could could speak out and we'd have a better understanding of all the issues i personally support it but i i admit that i don't understand the equity issue at this time okay thank you john you have the floor yeah i'm just wondering young women if

153you've had any conversations with city staff about this and how this aligns uh with a20 or they might have any concerns because of the different timelines 2050 versus 2030 and i'd be very interested to have their input on you know ann arbor taking a stand on that how does that align with our current commitments around um carbon neutrality yeah i haven't talked to city staff but i think of this like ann arbor is moving a faster pace than the nation but i feel like if another endorses act is also showing our support for the nation to move forward because like showing support from the local government is important for the nation and like if like this act can be passed at nation level it also can help local governments to move forward i think it's

154like it's a two-way street i agree i would just like to hear from the osi staff um of their what what they think of this if if they're you know fully supported and i feel much better about you know some type of endorsement from the from the council on the commission sorry all right i'll tell you [Music] okay thanks chris you have the floor uh it looks like there are five bills in congress which one are we talking about what number is hr2307 okay thank you all right um let's see john you still have your hand up john callaway and chris um so uh rita has her hand up yeah um i have done a little bit of reading about it and it is a very complicated bill in terms of its administration um so

155i do think that it's worthwhile to review it and and have it have that opportunity to ask questions um i'm a little concerned about some of the exclusions that are allowed um that have um greenhouse gas emissions related to them as just one thing that i'm aware of and i have to do my own homework on it as well okay uh chris you still have your hand up oh and you're muted sorry i don't mean to okay so um yeah i'm also wondering if uh if the energy commission has had any discussions about this issue recently i know edie's just joined the energy commission so i think it would be important to ask them as well as city staff if there's been a recent discussion there since 2017 when they passed the original resolution you

156know which was i again i'm just just agreeing with the basic concept which does seem just to me i know part of the problem that i've heard with ahr specifically with hr2307 is that there were some exemptions of being carved out for uh conforming to the clean air act in the meantime i'm not sure what the implications were but i certainly front line communities which are generally communities of people of color and indigenous communities um um we need to hear their voices i think on this issue and see see what kind of a consent that broader consensus that we can get i mean to me this is just the way you have to build political will so um um i think i would advise you young women i mean we could bring up this discussion

157and i also want to remember that the environmental commission we can call for a public hearing outside of a regular commission we are empowered by our bylaws to call for a public hearing and we could schedule a public hearing just on this issue but i think it would be important to um line up the docs first and if young went if you could let me engage with both osi and the energy commission and see make sure that we can get the voices in the room for a public hearing that we could that we can schedule and i would be happy to try to schedule it before our next meeting in october has a special meeting um i think that would be beneficial to hear puppy comments i'm sorry oh i said that i think it

158would be really beneficial to hear public comments and people who are like minorities in here okay is there um i see oh i see i think galen raised his hand yes he did um i just wanted to add that both the ann arbor branch of the naacp is against it as well as the national branch or national organization is against us and i think it's good you know even if we have public commentary it has to be uh those comments from the people who are impacted because black folks and other you know poor communities we bear the brunt of pollution and for you know another community that's that that doesn't go through those issues to say that we endorse this you know that kicks equity out the window you know i'm saying so i think

159it's good from those you know for the folks who bear the brunt of the pollution you know because you're gonna give polluters an opportunity to say okay we're gonna uh keep polluting as opposed to saying just quit polluting you know don't put a price tag on it because they're not going to act in our best interest they never have so that's just something i wanted to say so i think these concerns need to be addressed um if we're going to get abroad if we want to get a broad consensus so um i would suggest young women if you're willing to drive this if you try to get a spokesperson from the naacp a local naacp a spokesperson for a citizens climate lobby and a spokesperson from the energy commission and somebody from and uh from

160the environmental commission of course and uh and let's see where we can go from there and somebody from osi from this from the staff of the city staff okay see if you can get a spokesperson from them um we'll try to i'll try to i can try to schedule a meeting a public hearing on this issue online um sometime in early october but in the meantime i would encourage everybody listening or anybody here to attend this uh to to register for this event um on september 27th it is um so it's not too far away it's only four days away i think it's the 27th but it's so you know you can go to events.umich.edu slash event slash and it's um event number 8651 that i noticed just today so i would encourage everybody to

161uh to you know to attend that and see what the discussion see what happens during that discussion and so uh kathy have your been done is the proposal then to expand the topic to be carbon taxes in general uh not just this bill and would that be necessary because this bill is going to be considered in the next couple of weeks i just wonder what the the timeline is um young one yes okay so uh were if we miss the window when this bill will be considered uh well first question is what what is that window do you know the window for which bill for h.r 2307 um i don't believe it's been discussed recently i know like biden is trying to pass it in by november so i think i think there's definitely time

162oh okay good all right i just wanted to make sure that it wasn't going to like influence the budget which we don't have that much time all right thanks yeah that's kathy um edie you have your hand up yeah i i think at least in my understanding this is also being talked about as possibly a carbon tax be included by senator wyden in the reconciliation package in which case we would have neither time nor probably a lot of ability to influence that one aspect necessarily um yeah so i guess i just wanted to flag that i think i would uh agree that you know a general conversation might be um warranted but this could all happen very quickly um potentially in the next few weeks if it does make it into reconciliation so yeah just

163something to fly yeah i mean of course we have very little influence on the federal government here and uh city council does not have much influence on the federal government either but i think it's important as our part of our role as the environmental commission i think it's important for us to try to engage in setting up public conversations to try to broaden you know understanding and um and uh of these various issues and potential solutions to the climate emergency so uh i i i would intend to go forward and uh i'll try scheduling after young when if you've gotten some commitment from from for spokespeople for spokespersons um i will schedule a meeting a separate meeting outside uh outside of our normal monthly meeting to consider just to have a public discussion about this

164issue a public hearing okay i see i'll go find spoke presence okay thanks thank you yeah because uh this debate has doesn't end probably with the um with the reconciliation bill this is this uh i'd remind people that this legislation has been crafted over a period of decades um through many communities but as usual in this country and societies in general i think uh uh people of color communities of color have not been consulted as much as they should have so i think that should be the major point and i would and i will send out i will circulate some basic information that people can review before on such a public hearing okay thank you okay is uh is that acceptable to everybody any more comments okay all right well thank you for bringing it

165up so the next item on our agenda is reports from committees other commissions council and chair so let's start with natural features again i wrote you all today expressing my apologies for being quite remiss the next couple months and i will soon correct that yeah that's okay for us so even there's nothing to report pollinators um yes there's a little bit of progress here um i just want to say that uh um that's not where my notice is okay um we've um had a really good response from the con smith and parks and i'll be talking with one of the park staff next week about exploring implementing implementing some test alternate lawn spaces in parks so that's just like the very start of it to see if we can get some demonstration sites that people

166can look at and see if they want to use something other than regular turfgrass for their yards for those that want just plain open green space i have connected through john mursky's help with jan culbertson of the um 2030 district and um we'll be working on a presentation on native plants and transformation of large spaces for large space landowners um at one of the 2030 district meetings probably in february or march ideally in time for them to actually implement something for the coming season the climate ambassadors thanks to galen are working on to develop some more educational information that we're hoping to link to the napwed's website about pollinators would be just some changes to what's there already and we'll be looking at connecting with some of our pollinator allies in the community and and

167getting uh um a bigger kind of push to um support in implementing native plant gardens explain expanding people's gardens uh etc to support pollinators and and sort of pollinator pathways in town so that's kind of it i just want to close with saying that um at this time of the year this is a good time to think about yard and garden um cleanup for the season and i'm making a pitch to commissioners and people who may be watching to leave the leaves which often contain pollinator cocoons eggs pupae that needs some shelter over the winter so it may not be necessary to fully vacuum up all the leaves in your yard you might want to just put them in another place and save your grass as you wish but but save some leaves and don't

168put them all in the compost because we really want the insects that may be there so that's it for now thank you all right thank you rita um zero waste um we've got two things going on uh at least but we are still waiting to hear from um next cycle about the grant that um jenny patoski and john callaward and i wrote and i heard from someone who works for the county this weekend when i went to the trash talk tour which was amazing i loved the trash talk tour i hope it happens every year and i hope next year i can be more helpful but uh it uh it was great um anyway that the the announcement of those awards is coming soon so that would be excellent and there's still work going on

169on a white paper around zero waste where there's an attempt to adjust to staff feedback there are thoughts about possibly reshaping the thrust of it because right now it proposes a zero waste goal and i'm not sure that's the most fruitful way for us to move forward based on staff feedback but we're clarifying the feedback that we've gotten and figuring out uh just how we can best uh you know expand composting and recycling and at the same time um really promote reuse alternatives and change people and and help thinking about alternatives that we all have to um buying new things so um that's where we are okay all right thanks lisa um i haven't done anything with construction and demolition a little last month um i did lead a bicycle tour for the trash talk

170tour we had seven people riding bikes around the sites and now regardless i just mentioned that there is a new business down on liberty street across in the basement across liberty street across from the post office which uh called byoc or bring your own container which will uh where you can reuse your containers from some bulk containers on site there so that was a delightful place and i found some actually some compostable doggy bags so i've been looking for them for years well not years but months now they're very hard to find online even so uh these are these are bags pet waste bags that uh you know you can bury you can bury and they will dissolve to nothing they're made out of corn you know polymers from totally biological sourced not petroleum sourced

171so um so i encourage everybody to go visit that place so um let's see so that ends i think for committees on other commissions let's have the energy through report from the energy commission hi um yep last um in the last meeting we spoke about first the kind of context around community solar we had a presentation from the national renewable energy laboratory and as well as some colleagues from michigan and kind of contextualized and explored possibilities for community solar in michigan as well as the future of community solar in ann arbor we also talked about the help program the home energy labeling program which is intended to kind of inform and and create a benchmark for prospective buyers and then therefore kind of stimulate um improvements in energy efficiency and other home improvements um at

172the time of sale um so kind of an inspection and then a rating given at the time of sale and so there will be a resolution on that um at their our next meeting along with a conversation on municipalization of power system um from some representatives from other municipalities that have taken that route in the past okay great thank you um is that it okay so um um planning commission china yeah not a lot was directly applicable i would say that one thing is that we had a working session um that gave us a lot more clarity about what we can ask for from developers in terms of sustainability elements and i think we've been pretty cheeky with what we've been asking in terms of uh uh plans that come through and you know can't

173hurt to ask kind of thing but we we uh the planning director really gave us a much more fine-tuned sense of where our lane is with some of those things and there's a lot of things that have to do with building code and things like that we have really no no control over at all and there are some things that we can do more effectively that are really in our lane like around parking and things like that and really trying to um influence uh transit and transportation and things like that that may be we may be better suited for so um i guess that's the thing that sticks in my mind the most otherwise reviewing different developments that have come through we're also looking at a kind of a site plan light for smaller projects

174too but that again doesn't relate directly to environmental commission issues so that's what i would say unless lisa you can think of anything else that i've missed yeah okay all right thanks shannon um uh we don't have anybody here today for parks but we do have another assignment from the parks advisory committee so um let's see let's move on to council i can't think of anything that we didn't already cover this evening [Music] so okay um and uh chair um i was just gonna mention the trash talk tour but uh police already did so and i can i can say that this will be an annual event probably in september so uh so uh it was fun standing on top of the old city landfill it's so bad i could tell you it's the best

175view of ann arbor that you can get and uh it's a lot bigger than i thought it was a lot bigger than i thought it was so um a landfill or ann arbor oh yeah landfill yeah the early years of whacking buckthorn in ann arbor i remember going up there with loads of buckthorn on top of that hill really wow well they're mowing it pretty well now the only thing there now besides grass is uh thistle yep and methane and methane yeah that's all being pumped and bottle linked desks so uh all right so um items for next agenda um i intend to spend um the bulk of the time for october and november i would like to discuss solid waste issues we haven't had a whole lot of that lately and i think there's

176a lot to talk about um um now that the work is starting up and so uh um are there any suggestions for items for um october an october view i'm hearing none um yeah stephen is the humane society going to come and speak about deer or is that in november no that's still a possibility that's still a possibility chris but they've been uh they've been dragging their feet and i think i think we should go on and deal with a resolution about that for the council yeah i think um i think november would be the proper time for june would you like to see in october yeah no okay you got them fine so that'll be on november that will be on the november well it's a joint november december meeting remember that's in the

177first thursday of december right that'd be fine okay and uh so let's see this um we're getting so the agenda the next item on the agenda is the public second public comment period this is an opportunity for persons to speak for up to three minutes please call 1-888-788-0099 and enter meeting id 987-1499-1238 that's meeting id number 987 [Music] this information is also displayed on the meeting agenda and video feed city staff will select callers that have raised their hand one by one using the last three digits of your phone number in order to electronically raise your hand to indicate your desire to speak please press star 9 on your phone you will hear an automated announcement that the host is allowing you to speak when speaking please move to a quiet area and meet any

178television or background sound so that we may hear you clearly please state your name and address at the beginning of your comments and be patient there could be a delay of up to 30 seconds before a connection is established so galen is there anybody on the line there's no one on a lie okay well let's wait 25 seconds so meanwhile i'd like to thank everybody um for uh staying awake until 10 o'clock um i'm still going to try to keep these meetings down to two hours instead of through so but uh is there anybody on on the online yet there's no one on the line okay i'll call this meeting adjourned at 9 40 9 54 pm see you all later bye now you