Ann Arbor Environmental Commission Meeting 6/24/21

001i'm going to declare i'm going to call this meeting to order at uh 702 pm um welcome to the june 24th 2020 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 program 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 or 888-788-0099 and enter meeting id three 935 two nine seven zero five seven zero zero again this meeting id is nine three five two nine seven zero five seven zero this information is also available on the published agenda in the public notices section of the city

002website and on the broadcast of this meeting on ctn channel 16 at t channel 99 and online at www.a2gov.org watch ctn so um so josh josh mcdonald this step has stepped in for galen hardy um as our staff representative so josh would you please do the land heritage statement and then the roll call of course i acknowledge that the land the city of ann arbor occupies is the ancestral traditional and contemporary lands of the anishinabe including adawa ojibwa and bottawatomi and wyandot peoples i further acknowledge that our city stands like almost all property in the united states on lands obtained generally in unconscionable ways from indigenous peoples the taking of this land was formalized for the treaty of detroit in 1807. knowing where we live work study and recreate does not change the past but

003a 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 with that i'll go ahead and call the role uh commissioner graham here uh commissioner needham here council members excuse me we're supposed to also be indicating where where we're located that's that's the official request so thank you for the reminder john uh commissioner needham is here from ann arbor and aubrey michigan all right council member dish you're from evanston illinois uh commissioner gibb randall council member griswold here from ann arbor commissioner cal work here ann arbor chair brown here in ann arbor uh commissioner overpack commissioner mursky you're from ann arbor uh commissioner mitchell you're from ann arbor uh commissioner buendia commissioner ferris um so both

004of them are youth commissioners josh and uh cycled out okay for the commission and so we have new commissioners here we have um chris vandenbroeck um we have um lunia oriole and um young john chang should i call them or um yeah if you want me to uh commissioner oriole you're from ann arbor commissioner zhang you're from the number and commissioner vanderbilt you're from ann arbor great okay i believe we have a quorum okay right thank you josh um so the next item on our agenda is approval of the agenda i wish to propose two changes one is that we eliminate the approval of the main minutes um i'd like to postpone that until july 22nd and um the other thing is that i want to add dave uh dave bournemouth's um nap presentation uh

005during the special presentation session uh dave is on the line here he's going to give a presentation about the city's nap natural area preservation program so um do i have a motion um to accept those changes or do or do i have any other suggested changes to the agenda not here so move second um all who approve say aye or raise your hands i i i all who are any opposed abstentions gave the motion carries unanimously so the next item on the agenda is public commentary um this is an opportunity for persons to speak for up to three minutes please call 1-888-788-0099 and enter meeting id 935-2970-5700 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

006three 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 with your comments and be patient there is a delay there can be a delay of up to 30 seconds before the connection is established so let's see josh do we have anybody on the line yet okay do you want to proceed yes let's go ahead i'm not seeing anyone oh these you don't see anybody no i'm not seeing anyone okay well we'll wait um we'll wait

00730 seconds all right uh we do have someone who just raised their hand collar917 caller 917 hello can you hear me yes we can hear you great my name is jared hawking i'm a recent graduate of the university of michigan's master's program in the environment and i live at 536 south south forest avenue which is uh basically on campus and i'm wondering i know that in 2017 there was an anti-or no idling ordinance passed specifically for commercial vehicles and also for passenger vehicles and i still see many especially commercial vehicles that are emitting quite a bit of carbon dioxide and other harmful pollutants into the air and idling for quite a long time close to the university of michigan campus where i live and furthermore i haven't seen any signs posted no idling zones around

008campus so my question is twofold first can you share some updates on whether the police support department is enforcing the no idling ordinance and any specific uh numbers you can share there and uh and possibility of working with the police department to make sure that they do enforce that that ordinance and secondly if there's any plans to put up the no idling zones around the university of michigan thank you for any response yeah thank you for your comment um i can say that i do not know how how this is being enforced i have personally made comments to several drivers uh commercial drivers and even members of the city's police department but uh i see some hands raised so um john's was first and then lisa dish john you have the floor so i'm not

009aware that um the law is particularly strenuously enforced maybe someone will contradict that i do know from matanod when i joined the energy commission in 2016 that there was some outreach to contractors asking them to inform their employees about the ordinance um but i'm not aware of any additional outreach or any enforcement or any other signage that's really gone up one one thing we should know though is that um you know university um property is separate from um the city of ann arbor property so we would if if we want to have have this addressed on on campus then my guess is that that would have to be done through the university particularly for those properties and their contractors that's all thanks uh lisa you have a report yeah i would just add that the

010ordinance is being enforced but but the most effective way to get it enforced is to either speak with your council member or put a note on the aapd website they have a contact form there you tell them the time place and location where you're seeing the idling issues um i am not sure if if we just leave it to the university to enforce that ordinance on its property so i think it's probably worth contacting aapd and typically what they try to do is they'll go and just remind the drivers that there's an ordinance and if there's no response or there's a continued pattern then we start getting active with no idling signs but a no idling zone is really something that then gets it then gets it has to be patrolled and tickets and all

011this and that and so that may not that is not generally what they want to do but they certainly will patrol if you have specific times and places that you can give them okay um kathy you have the floor um i want to say that i received complaints regarding police vehicles idling and what i've been told is the computer equipment within the police vehicle requires that the vehicle be left on i don't know if that will be true once we start using electric vehicles and the university of michigan follows state law so we would probably either have to get a state law or a university ordinance specific for them but i i share the frustration because it seems like such a simple thing to just turn off your vehicle and in most cases the vehicles

012that are running are running for 15-20 minutes sometimes so i hope that we can uh better enforce this in the future and next time i talk to the police chief i'll mention it again i know he's he's really um overwhelmed with all the other police citizen issues right now in community policing and non uniformed officer responsing responses that are happening so this seems like a minor issue within all the things he has to do but from an environmental standpoint i think it's very important he's got the uh chris you have the floor oh um something's wrong with that picture uh if you wire your computer in your vehicle to the battery and not through the starting mechanism it doesn't go off when you turn off the ignition i don't and these guys are driving eight

013hours a day there's no chance there's going to be a low battery problem so i just and it's i've seen those cars idle outside the police station for two hours it's not necessary i share your frustration and i've said the same thing all right thanks chris yeah myself as well usually these vehicles are unoccupied to boot yes so um there's something discordant here all right well um let's see uh does anybody else wish to speak on this topic um rita you have your hand up you're muted sorry my question is the ordinance was initiated prior to my joining this commission and i just wonder which commission initiated that particular ordinance are we are we the right ones island yeah did that come through the environmental commission goes back 10 or 12 or more years and

014it was the environmental commission okay thank you um yeah and i think i mean i think it's some i think every citizen would have a right to just mention it when they encounter it so i whenever i see this happening i just politely mention to the driver that there's a no you know filing ordinance here in the city so if they you know if they could turn it off that would be appreciated um and i i think that's a right that every citizen could take as long as they're polite nice thing about police vehicles of course is they're not diesel motors all of those vehicles are gas at least until they get their mustangs and so the pollutionist and air quality issues are way less than diesel truck motors idling in a loading zone okay

015well i think uh i think we can follow up on a few of these things individually um well thanks everybody um if there are no more comments on this uh thank you for your comment mr hawking and let's move on we've stricken the approval of the minutes are postponed until until the july 22nd meeting so the next item on the agenda is special presentations so i think we have um why don't we have mr um bournemouth um discuss the nap first okay and then we will have uh the presentation by mr dick on the deer call great let me get my screen up here i should introduce dave first um back in the day uh when it began to be obviously clear that our parks naturales such as they were then not just them but

016most of the city were was being overrun by especially two invasive shrubs buckthorn which is native to poland and the caucasus mountains and especially amerur amur honeysuckle which is native to the amer river valley and between china and russia were completely filling the understory of all of our forest lands in the city and some other areas besides [Music] there came a movement led by the sierra club and kim waldo to [Music] ask the taxpayers to support natural areas management in the city on the city's parks and it was very overwhelmingly passed when presented to the voters and has been renewed as part of the parks and recreation village ever since the early 1990s i think and dave bourneman has been the director since then he was the first person hired to do it and he's

017still here and we're very grateful thank you david thank you chris good to be here um and are we am i sharing my screen or are we looking at the the sustainability offices screen i think so i'm sharing my screen is this the same uh presentation that you were looking for it is so then uh are you going to advance the slides yeah so just let me know when you need me to to move forward all right well that's me next okay and uh i work for the parks um go ahead you're probably all familiar with 160 so parks next we have under a quick little background here 164 parks um 85 of which have some kind of natural areas in them over 2 100 acres and more than two-thirds of those have some kind

018of natural area as well next i have been around since nap started 93 i have three other permanent staff that that i oversee and a dozen or so temporary staff at any one time and hundreds if not thousands of volunteers helping us throughout the year our offices are located um on east here in river drive that's in the background there it's on the banks of south pond just east of huron hills golf course i'm not there now and most of us aren't there these days i'm working remotely and right now i'm joining you all from our place up north in alcona county so hopefully the connectivity won't be an issue for us next our mission in app is to protect and restore ann arbor's natural areas and to foster environmental ethic among its citizens next

019and what we do in a nutshell is first try to identify where are the nice areas in the parks we do that through a variety of plant enamel inventories we're also involved not just looking at parkland but whenever new developments come in we're checking those for environmentally significant areas and trying to minimize impacts to any of those we're writing management plans for the sites and the big bread and butter what we do is ecological restoration and then a lot of education and outreach to all of our volunteers into the public next terms of restoration what does that mean what are we trying to restore to you might be familiar with the michigan natural features inventory and their pre-european settlement maps that they're done statewide if you were to look at washington county there you'll see

020quite a bit of oak hickory and savannah grassland for european settlement time next if we zoom in on the ann arbor area all those black polygons are actually city parks i don't have any roads in there but that shows you where our parks are and this tells us that historically most of our natural areas were some variety of oak hickory forest black oak baron is the orangish color the yellow color is a mixed oak forest all of those have what in common oak black oak mixed oak oak hickory so we know that pre-european settlement time we had lots of oaks around here in one form or another next um another way i like i think it might be maybe more colorful to get a sense of what ann arbor used to be like is going

021back nearly 200 years shortly after we became a city to some comments made by travelers through the area i will read these to you and the audience the first is carl from carl nighthard riding from ann arbor to pleasant lake in august of 1834 he says the monotonous landscape ceases near ann arbor and here the country becomes more interesting as one approaches the high plateau the dense forests disappear and lakes surrounded by pretty hills and park-like woods which the americans call oak openings meet the traveler's eye next i'm going to share a few of these because i think it's important as we talk about restoration to first get an eye a clear sense of what it is that we're trying to restore to and what our vision is for what our areas could look like

022and used to look like carl went on to say for the first few miles we passed through the woods soon we reached the so-called oak openings where the trees stand a few paces apart and where the ground is overgrown with luxurious grass passages obstructed neither by bushes nor by fallen trees small knolls alternate with lovely little valleys no park let out by human hands could compare with this natural setting next jw wing talking about scio township just west of town near dexter in june of 1834 says at this season of the year the country was beautiful beyond description the planes recovered at intervals as far as the eye could reach with widespread forest trees which gave the appearance of an immense park and the earth was covered with a rich carpet of beautifully variegated wildflowers

023and grapes i've italicized oh go back there i've italicized some of these words just for emphasis uh wide spreading forest trees if you go into most of our forests today the trees are not wide spreading they're tall and skinny because there's many trees packed in there they're trying to they're all competing to get sunlight so they're reaching up tall to the sky all right now you know the next slide but historically if you grew up if a tree i think that grew up in a open oak savannah or an oak barrens uh it wouldn't have needed to reach so tall it could stretch its way its branches out wide and get lots of sunlight without having to grow so tall this image of wide open grown oak trees shows up repeatedly around the city from

024our city logo to the parks and recreation logo to nap's own logo next just a couple more quotes john gordon in october october of 1836 says oaks of the circumference of 9 to 15 feet and a little quick math uh diameter times pi is the circumference so if a tree has a circumference of nine to fifteen feet it's uh sorry circumference its diameter is roughly three to five feet that's how big these oaks were and they bounded in the forests in the country between dicksborough and ann arbor a little rolling for the first few miles and then the oak openings begin white oak and burr oak at intervals of 30 to 40 feet with an undergrowth five to six feet high which has the appearance of being annually burnt down as i am informed it

025is so these are big trees three to five feet diameter and uh they aren't packed in sight close to each other real tight because they spread the branches out real wide like this beautiful oak tree in barton park in the picture and so they are only every 30 or 40 feet in the around the landscape next i think this is the last one from jw wing again in scio township the scene was beautiful beyond description the timber consisted of large oak trees standing several rods apart a rod is 16 and a half feet so several rods is maybe 30 or 40 feet and the intermediate space between them was covered with bright green grass and beautiful flowers the whole country had been burnt over every fall or spring i presume for centuries and everything had

026been destroyed except these giants of the forest it did appear as if one half of the vegetation was flowers most of them were about 18 inches high and when moved by the wind the effect was wonderful i have never seen in any of our large cities a park that was its equal but we're trying to change that and to make some of our parks in our cities look like that again next another way to get a sense of what ann arbor used to look like before european settlement or in the early days go back to some old old photos of the city cedar bend was one of our oldest city parks maybe our oldest natural area and so we found some old photos old glass slides from the early 1900s next and a couple of

027these images give us a real clear picture of what the area looked like just a hundred years ago if you've been in cedar bend before this is near island park here the ground is covered with beautiful wildflowers these are all um i believe blood root and you'll see in this picture lots of there's a couple trees in the background but lots of sunlight getting in and lots of wildflowers there next and just below baitstorm at north campus there is a cedar bend there's a hairpin turn there the road was actually closed a few years ago but there's still a path through there but this hairpin turns real easy place to get back to be able to take some photos so look at this picture from early 1900s still some sunlight coming through there's quite a

028few trees there it's been 100 years now since those earlier quotes probably more trees than were there before we talked about 30 or big trees three to five feet diameter these aren't that big and they're much closer so this is already looking different than it would have 200 years ago this was all logged i'm sure but you can still see it's still open enough there that sunlight gets down to the forest floor and that sunlight is what those wildflowers need so let's jump forward now um that's the end of the historical ones november 97 shortly after nap started and this is the middle of november everything should be brown by then but all the green in this photo are some of the shrubs that chris talked about earlier that various bush honeysuckles and buckthorn still

029going strong and they have completely choked out that area so this is what unfortunately too many of our city parks looked like or looked like um and some of those earlier quotes that i had i'd italicized some of the lines passage obstructed neither by bushes nor fallen trees this is uh these are impenetrable areas we can get into all sorts of discussion about you know how bad it is the kids don't spend more time out in woods these days and the forest various books about no child left inside and all of that well these are not very inviting places these are city parks but to wade into a dense ticket like that is not very appealing to anybody so this the sort of thing that nap was was created to do to take care of

030these areas and to try to restore them now we'll get into a little bit more about the things that nap does so how do you tackle something like that well you recruit lots of volunteers you do lots of cutting of those shrubs hauling them away reintroducing fire into the landscape next and within a few short years we could turn it back to this i think this is a much more attractive scene here we have uh stills december there's a little bit of green there left those are all non-native shrubs still have a few to get rid of and they keep coming back but um this is much closer to what it was historically much more open much more inviting this is the woods that people would like to walk through or snow shoot through in

031the winter go bird watching that sort of thing next and when we did that work starting in 97 we did our first controlled burns in 97 and this plant popped back up we had done a pretty complete plant inventories of all of our parks and this plant was not known from the parks before then this is the state threatened species next photo and this uh the last record of this in the county was from 60 years prior from an herbarium record and location there very much fits that that in cedar bend so we think we brought back populations of this and many other rare plants with our restoration activities next bird hills is another area that uh if you ask most ann arborites where is a good natural area in ann arbor bird hills certainly

032has some nice high quality areas here's some more before and after photos nearly 100 years have passed between these photos unfortunately this area is not overgrown with shrubs so this part of bird hills along cascade glen along the east side along here on river drive has always has been a forest in recent last century or so and still remains that way next photo but uh but trees can be can be deceiving another place in bird hills a little further north near the north entrance off of bird road you might pass this big rock called cherry rock and you're in the middle of the forest there lots of trees is this one of those native forest fragments like the other areas well again historical photos can reveal something for us next photo and there's cherry rock

033that hasn't moved at all but i'm not sure if there's a year on here again probably early 1900s that part of bird hills was a cattle pasture there's actually photos of cows grazing out there [Music] much has changed in that area so when nap is is looking for areas to restore when we're talking about native forest fragments although i'm sure this was forested at one time and it's again forested the quality of that forest is much different than what was there historically uh in this particular particular area there are a lot of pine plantations and some other non-native trees so even though it's green there and it's a great place to walk your dog and go bird watching and commune with nature doesn't offer this part of bird hills doesn't offer the kind of opportunities

034for ecological restoration as some of the other of the other areas so we would call this not a native forest fragment next i mean i actually want to skip part of this so uh the way that we talk about prioritizing our areas we use a system called floristic quality assessment and you can skip the next couple slides i am happy to talk about it there's other questions but it's a rating system that basically gives us the number you stay there though it go back yep it's a it's a score that helps us identify how natural an area is um based on the plants that live there we use that information and we to get that we've done lots of plant inventories in all of our parks and again i can talk more about that if

035there are questions but we basically use that forest equality assessment to prioritize our different natural areas how how natural is this park how close to it being a native forest fragment is a and we've given our highest quality sites of priority one on down through four and actually the the lowest quality of them we give a quality uh priority five again they're great parks for lots of reasons but in terms of areas to do ecological restoration where we have the best quality forest fragments those are not those are not the ones um let's show you what this looks like in practice next please here is black pond woods just north of lesley science center and the numbers there the white areas are trails but the black boundaries are different management units for us and you'll

036see some numbers number one our high priority areas down to numbers three and four and even some fives in the lower center how do we make those determinations next photo current day aerial photo this is the same area and a little bit of lesley science center it doesn't look like there should be that much variation next picture let's go back to an earlier 1940s photo and this gives you the answer those areas that were quality five were uh old either old orchards or ag land or pasture it was all be forested the part of the land of the park that is was forced in 1940 and still is forested is our higher priority one area so where we can go back and look at old photos it helps a lot to identify with where those

037areas are but even more so looking around doing a plant inventory and seeing what's really there on the ground now helps support our rankings of these things is top priority down to lower quality next so we are in bandamer park and uh remember the quotes passage obstructed neither by bushes nor by fallen trees you know we as much as we are trying to control buckthorn and honeysuckle and things there's areas like this in banimera where it just doesn't make sense for us to tackle that now there's nothing growing there but buckthorn and honeysuckle so when we're looking for places to put frisbee golf courses and do more other perhaps more intensive activities in the parks the natural areas this is a good place to do something like that next ferstenberg is one of our higher

038quality sites and i've got a couple of fun before and after pictures there it says 95 october 95. again all that green is non-native buckthorn and honeysuckle next and there's the same area a few years later after lots of cutting and burning in there and you can start to see those pests those uh passage obstructed neither by bushes nor fallen trees the trees are not yet three to five foot diameter but the spacing is kind of right there and when you get more spacing you get more wildflowers more sunlight the more wildflowers on the ground next that work is done mostly by a combination of cutting and burning and i give long talks about prescribed fire we do a burn public meeting twice a year where i can talk more about this i'll just give

039you uh this one set of slides here we did a burn in first and bergen just for a comparison we we burned the left side but not the right side of this little patch next photo five weeks later you can see pretty definite line where that low fire was enough to kill those shrubs or at least to top kill them next three and a half years later that same photo point you can still see the left side is still less shady and the main issue with buckthorn and honeysuckle and those other shrubs is just that they completely shade out the forest floor remember all those photos and the descriptions we shared earlier the area on the left is closer to what was here historically than on the right and one last photo from here and

040now finally uh after taking out all those shrubs this uh places like firstenberg start to give us an idea of what the areas used to look like i think it's a much more attractive certainly more diverse ecosystem than those dense buckthorn tickets next so another way to say what nap does we identify the highest quality natural areas are our native forest fragments in the park system and we work to protect and prioritize protect and restore those areas first then we work on down to some of the lower quality sites so wrapping up here i will leave you i think with one more quote next another oop this is from mrs harriet noble who in 1824 said the next day we left for ann arbor we were delighted with the country before us it was beautiful

041in its natural state and i've sometimes thought the cultivation marred its loveliness this is an area of barton park we call foster out on the banks of barton pond the south banks of barton pond a nice oak example of oak savannah lots of sunlight coming in there supporting some some sun-loving plants still working on the big trees check back a couple hundred years and we'll have those for you and the last slide is simply my contact info and with that i'm happy to take some questions anybody yeah i have a question from you oh i'm kathy i can go after you i'm sorry okay um so dave this is all really wonderful work that you're doing on the city-owned properties on the parks um i wonder if um like this hunt for invasives also extends

042to all city properties or is it just the parks uh certainly it the you're right we have a lot of other non-city park property places like the wheeler service center parts of the airport um and so we do some work there as well we've we've inventoried all those sites and where the higher quality sites are we do some restoration work there we've had some great success with the wheeler service center staff for example just by altering the mowing uh the timing of the mowing that they do out there on the hay fields we've been able to create habitat and protect habitat for a lot of grassland birds out there so although we talk a lot about forest fragments and invasive species we also work to restore wildlife habitat where that's possible too well thank you

043kathy hi thanks for the presentation i have one question and two comments uh the question what's your position on poison ivy my position is uh usually uh scratching it i i'm a more sensitive to poison ivy than most people it's one of the job hazards i suppose for me i've had it every year my life for forever um it is a native plant however and there's over 100 species of birds that that like poison ivy so we are not actively going out and eradicating or controlling poison ivy in the woods in general but it uh we recognize that if it's if there's if it's growing right along a trail or near a playground or something that's not doesn't make sense there so we do control it and get rid of it from high high traffic

044areas like that oh okay thanks i saw a lot of it at parker mill and i was told with glo global warming that we're going to have more poison ivy i don't know if that's true but um yeah no one knows pregnant that's all speculation oh okay um i have two ques uh comments i want to thank kathleen goslin from your department she's going to be at a uh a nap workday out at narrow gauge uh natural area on saturday and it's not just invasive species but there's water that flows through the bottom of that area it it it needs to be able to flow with without being blocked by trees and shrubs etc and um just a reminder that corner sight distance is very important and napa has definitely improved trimming at those corners

045in recent years so thank you are you welcome and uh yeah you know we besides the work that we i talked about here we do a lot of trail work native seed collecting the sort of storm water control projects where it's possible so we do a lot of different sorts of things and regarding site clearance you know there's been sometimes people say oh you can't trim that road edge that's the natural area i'm first to say i don't want our natural areas to cause sight issues and safety issues so if there's a corner issue a site clearance we're happy to have those areas clear to make the areas safe oh okay thanks and i worry more about pedestrians sure than i do about vehicles but both are important so thank you um john you have

046your hand up thank you thanks dave um i really appreciated the presentation especially the old quotes and the photographs that was really great i'm wondering about what can be done and what maybe the environmental commission can do in terms of invasives on private property if i walk around my neighborhood i don't live too far from the arboretum basically any area that is not maintained has been completely taken over by invasives and no matter what you do i'm afraid in the natural areas if there are invasives in adjoining areas seeds are going to be dispersed by birds and other critters and it's just going to be an ongoing battle i met with steve yesterday and we were wondering could there be an ordinance that dictates removal or could could we do education and outreach what can

047we do to i mean these these these thickets are all over the city now and they're really i was in um uh what is it called mary beth doyle park um and it's also getting really really bad too yeah you know my answer now is maybe different than it would have been 25 years ago i i've been here long enough now i um that reinforces why we do the prioritizing that we do of those areas the truth is we're never going to get rid of buckthorn and honeysuckle from our landscape in ann arbor and you know we could spend lots and lots of time and energy and resources trying to remove those things from lower quality sites you've heard that nature pours a vacuum and if those plants aren't growing there something else is going

048to grow in and so unless you can get everybody even areas where we as professionals try hard to take out the things we don't want and to get things that we want in there it's a lot it's hard work especially in those really disturbed areas so i'm just not sure yet um i understand and appreciate the sentiment behind it but i'm not sure it makes sense to try to get rid of and to make that as a goal to try to get rid of some of those invasives in some of those lower quality sites you know the best defense is a good offense so in our natural areas we have the most luck where we can really really try to help the natives and get a lot of native biodiversity there to help keep some

049of those things out but you know we we're very it's hard to get rid of eradicated species like that another quick story we recently were um discovered that there was a the first populations of uh japanese stiltgrass known to michigan showed up on the west side of town and we and it was at some city an area we have a city conservation easement backing up to the county park banking up to a legacy land conservancy property we thought well this is a perfect opportunity we've caught this right away in the first couple years we can maybe eradicate this and then we start looking around and doing a more complete inventory and those weren't the only spots there's some over there and over here and over there and over there and pretty quickly realize even with

050that new population we're not going to get eradicated so all we can do is to pick the best quality spots draw a line in the leaf litter and say you're not going to get in here and try to protect those areas and in terms of what what can be done i still think it's it's great for people to to promote native landscaping and that's why years ago we had nap came up with a whole series of native landscaping brochures giving people some suggestions of what else they could plant besides some of those invasives that you might get happy to make those available um they're available on the website we sell paper copies which help us promote those if you want to give people something positive that they could do real quickly do you think it's

051possible to work with osi's 10 000 tree initiative so that when anybody gets a tree through that that they also get a brochure sure maybe you can touch base with missy stols and her yeah her group sure thank you good idea good idea a great idea john um okay rita you have your hand up and then chris and then kathy again thanks dave that was great presentation um and um and i've also enjoyed working with nap for quite a few years and appreciate what i've learned um i just have a question that's come to mind recently because there are so many uh pretty intense invasives some you know that we're not talking about just right now and i wonder if you or others that you know have tried any competitive plantings of a native species

052that's known to be pretty hardy and and intense in its own growth to work against something that we consider invasive as opposed to you know the the kind of of um efforts that that you've used so far yeah yeah um well thanks rita and thanks for all your work over the years you've been a pretty active volunteer with nap um sure we do that all the time you know that was an early lesson for me when i started with the city it's easy to get focused on killing the bad plants and getting rid of those things taking them out but nature pours a vacuum and if that's not growing there's something else will be growing there so lots of our activities if we don't think that there's a native seed bank that's going to come

053back we're often seeding in natives there and especially in some of our more open areas doing a lot of native prairie grasses and things that will that are pretty aggressive and that also that we can use fire as a good control effort with controlled method because those areas burn hot the native grasses burn hot and that fire is a good way to give that competitive advantage to the natives and help to discourage some of the exotics so yeah i think that to just remove the exotics and add nothing else in that there's no natives there is not going to be very successful and we haven't you know if you're that's what we've done in a lot of the natural areas in some of the areas you're dealing with in worcester park and things you know

054we could look at something like uh canada goldenrod which is a native however in parts of europe it's considered pretty invasive because it's really aggressive and it can be one of the aggressive natives here as well that might be something to consider planting in some other areas that uh would be even even if it's not as diverse as some areas you might like it's certainly uh better than some of the alternatives out there thank you sure hello chris and then kathy you're muted there you go so um dave greatly underestimates the naturalize program's impact on our community and uh the what i have frequently called sea change in the great majority of people's understanding about invasive species dave's job is to worry about managing our naturals my job is to go meet clients on their

055private property every day and when i first started in business in the early 1980s nobody understood buckthorn and honeysuckle as a problem the great majority understand it today and many of my clients say get them out of here and that that impact across the city has been extraordinary to me i am hoping that our effort to encourage people to not only do that but restore the native landscape in their own private property will grab equally a hold and we'll have great success especially where we have native force fragments on private land these are the brochures uh your landscape and our natural areas is it showing not very well yeah native grasses sedges and ferns these things are what 25 years old david they've had a great impact and have been distributed widely native shrubs there

056weren't so many here native trees oops sorry mr mr uh monet is getting in the way here and the last one native wildflowers so i have a question for today but i'll defer until a little later okay thanks um kathy just to follow up on john bursky's comment uh rita and i and christopher and maybe others have been looking at chapter 40 of the city ordinance excuse me and um one of the sections has to do with um vegetation on private property and i spoke to missy schultz stultz um a couple of weeks ago and she is very interested in doing something uh with her ambassadors from an educational standpoint so i i think that there's a lot of thought there and we just need to get it organized um and i did mention it

057to the mayor and also to the city administrator and and no one thought it was a bad idea it's more just getting the the resources and getting it organized so it sounds like there's there's a huge amount of expertise and will in the community to do something so this is good i know in my neighborhood in some areas we have buckthorn that's been trimmed into shrubbery designs it's pretty sad yeah hold on him growing i'm i'm all for you know getting people having you know encouraging people encouraging people to get rid of buckthorn and things uh i just don't have my hopes up that i mean you know if there were rule that you have to get rid of all the buckthorn we in the city uh we have a lot of parks that are

058nothing but thorns so it would be a hard challenge for us to do that but yeah where people can do it in their own backyards um more power to them we need more natives and you know besides just getting rid of those things there's a benefit of getting the natives and the native pollinators that come along with their so i think it's a great effort and i was involved with changing chapter 40 years and years ago um it's been changed a couple times and used to be when i started there was a rule against any rank vegetation whatever that was um that could grow there so a lot of people that were some of the early native landscapers around town were battling that ordinance and hopefully we've gotten the language changed so they can better

059grow those native things okay well we'll make sure we loop you in on uh on the draft version then thanks yeah please do thanks yeah well thank you dave for everything all the work that nap is doing um yeah i know uh commissioner mitchell has and others have been involved in door-to-door campaigns um about pollinators and uh native plants and i think it could be good to engage the public schools as well yeah you know educating the young is probably if if you're patient and persistent i think that's one of the best routes to getting improvements like this uh culturally and socially acceptable yeah well my background is in environmental education uh that was my previous life uh our offices for about 20 years were out at the leslie science and nature center we worked

060pretty closely with them and we all of our all of our work days involve a nature hike of some sort uh to help educate the public about the things we're trying to do we've also partnered with the public library to run some hikes that they've advertised as well so yeah certainly educating children and everyone else is an important part of what we do i didn't i didn't stress at the time but our mission i have two parts there to protect and restore ann arbor's natural areas and to foster an environmental ethic among its citizens uh and i i learned years ago that i realized years ago that even the budgets being what they are we're never going to be able to hire enough people to do all the work that needs to be done in

061the parks and even if we could that really wasn't the goal these are city parks they belong to the public and a big part of our goal is putting the giving the parks back to the people helping to get them in touch with um with the parks it's been said that what's broken is not just nature but humans connection to nature so we're trying to help heal that relationship as well yeah and i think steve jobs had it right when he said that most people don't know what they want until you show it to them example in the city parks is a great it's a great thing for private citizens to see what's possible yeah so let's see chris you have your hand up you need it chris you're muted chris we can't hear you

062you're muted muted i apologize so a topic i'd like to get to is the impact of deer on our natural areas particularly plants and oak trees and but i would like to hold that until we hear from dr dick christopher dick who's now the curator of the university of michigan herbarium so hang on there david don't go away okay okay great so um are there any other questions for uh my dave bournemouth okay i hear or see i don't hear or see any so uh let's move on to the next special presentation uh which is by uh professor jack i believe on on the d on the on the uh on deer management let's call it so thank you thank you for inviting me to talk um i'd like to actually share my screen because

063i made some changes to my talk um if that's okay i think i have could i get the uh sharing so i just turned into co-host and let me know if you can okay let me give it a try okay how are we doing there looks good um so i'm not a dear biologist but i am an ecologist and i teach ecology in bodney at michigan and i also was the director of the es george reserve and and that's where i basically learned a little bit more about deer management than i would have otherwise but i think it's a really important topic and it was worth my while even though it's not my specialty area to learn about it so i'm going to talk about deer over abundance ecological impacts societal impacts i'm going to

064be talking about the different kinds of carrying capacity of white-tailed deer and some lessons from the es george reserve i'm going to present a little overview of ann arbor's deer management program i wasn't sure what level of knowledge the audience would have so i'll just go there i'll try to move through it quickly and let you ask questions i want to address this question was the ann arbor dear cull a success and so i'm going to present some results from the deer cull and sterilization programs and i want to also present some select um results from jacqueline corteau's dear browsing studies and uh and then conclude with just some lessons from other communities we can't because ann arbor is not alone in dealing with deer over abundance um deer over abundance is an issue throughout

065the eastern united states and many communities are grappling with these very same issues so there's something we can learn from them so um a broad history of uh whitetail deer and in the early 1900s deer were basically extirpated in southeast michigan due to over hunting and using deer for for market um selling there was no regulated hunting in the in the 1920s um they are reintroduced selectively into areas in southeast michigan or they migrate from upper peninsula other places during this time hunting laws are enacted but they are not adequate in the 1940s in many areas in michigan there was a deer abundance to such an extent that deer reached their biological carrying capacity and starved in some areas and had population crashes um the 1990s saw historically high deer densities in the state and

066in the 2000s we see overabundance particularly in urban areas suburban and urban areas and numbers the whitetail deer now are believed to be higher than what was encountered at the time of initial european settlement in michigan and throughout the us so in general um why are dear more abundant now than they were say in 1491 um one improved forage from agriculture second and this is a big one is the loss of major predators including especially cougars and wolves from this area there's an increase in favorable edge habitat in suburban areas and because of fragmented forests we have warmer winters warmer winters are contributing factor to deer abundance fewer hunters in general in michigan and in urban suburban areas there's anti-hunting sediment sentiment that develops over time and reduced access to hunting locations so there's no

067hunting does not play a role in regulating deer populations in urban settings so i i said i would say something about the the george reserve um the us george reserves consists of about 300 acres and is located in livingston county about 25 miles from ann arbor and this was an estate of es george and it was land that was given to the university it consisted of about 12 farms that were bought and cobbled together and fenced in and it was intended as a hunting reserve at one point and so um in 1928 uh es george introduced four does and two bucks of white-tailed deer into the reserve into the fenced reserve and six years later there were 160 deer and people were just amazed by these numbers and by the reproductive potential of the white-tailed

068deer and this became a case study that was uh studied very broadly um the understory vegetation was really largely destroyed and at that time sort by by early 1940s there were other kinds of biologists that were interested in studying ecological processes and vegetation and they saw that that was not compatible with having this deer herd that was so dense and so the university implemented calls starting in the 1940s and um and that was just through hunting basically and that led to a return to diverse understory vegetation that botanists could study and appreciate like i said it was it was a case study um for aldo leopold and elder leopold wrote a lot about it although leopold was one of the founders of wildlife and natural resource management and he mapped out how he envisioned the

069carrying capacity to be you know when there are no predators in an area this shows the different years from when the herd was entered when the doze and buck were introduced to the es george reserve up to uh 1933 when it reached 160 deer you can see this growth trajectory of the population um before the call was implemented and the herb was brought down and so aldo leopold envisioned the population continuing to grow as long as there are resources for the deer to get until it hit this point where there are not enough resources for the herd and it would have crashed and when it crashed it would have left behind it a very degraded landscape so when the herd was able to recover it would recover at lower numbers lower maximum numbers because the

070landscape was permanently altered and that's this idea of the biological carrying capacity um yes george today uh this was last earlier this month i was at the at the reserve and i took this picture um dave bournemouth probably appreciate this there's a understory that stents with white oak seedlings hickory seedlings a variety of saplings of different stages it's a healthy understory and we have deer there and we don't call every year sometimes we we go several years without doing the deer call it's somewhat informal in how we assess the abundance but when the deer abundance does seem to be high then we have sharpshooters that take the deer out this brings up some different notions about carrying capacity i introduced the one the biological carrying capacity which is the maximum number of deer that an

071environment could sustain before the numbers dwindle due to starvation and that's from a very dear centric point of view of managing maximum numbers of deer but then there's this concept of the social carrying capacity and this is when you you talk about urban ecology and that's the number of deer that is acceptable to a community considering vehicle collisions potential for disease like lyme disease property damage and impacts the natural areas and then finally we have this third idea that i've just kind of modified from some other people who've written about it the biodiversity carrying capacity that would be the maximum number of deer that an ecosystem can sustain before they seriously degrade natural areas and that might be more of the ecological perspective so some ecological consequences of urban deer over abundance here you can

072see this browse line in minnesota when there are way too many deer and they've eaten all of the vegetation up to the maximum area that they can stand up and reach and so there's basically no leaves from this point down that's a browse line that's uh that's way over herbivored so the deer in urban areas they can inhibit forest regeneration they can increase invasive plant species especially ones that are not palatable to them like garlic mustard japanese barberry so there's a synergistic effect with them promoting invasive species over native species they can cause an increase in soil erosion and sediment runoff because of taking out this understory layer and they reduce the amount of habitat that could be used for understory birds especially ones that nest in the understory small mammals and insect pollinators and

073they can promote an increased incidence of diseases that affect the deer themselves like chronic wasting disease or ticks and tick-borne diseases that can affect animals and non-human animals and people so um in nineteen and sorry in 2015 um there was a lot of concern that uh probably the deer are reaching their social carrying capacity um there were concerns about the increase in deer vehicle collisions i don't know if we can see this if i um you see they're about 40 to 50 and then all of a sudden in 2015 we have 90 deer vehicle collisions that's quite quite a few there was a great concern for lyme disease potential and the potential of increasing the black legged tick abundance that could lead to lime or bringing lime into this area which uh in harvard didn't

074have lyme disease at that point in concern about the impact of parks and natural areas and damage to landscapes and gardens so as a consequence ann arbor and city council developed a deer management program that was approved in 2015. in 2016 the city contracted usda sharpshooters that was controversial and and it didn't involve a research component in 2017 to 2020 the city worked with a private company called white buffalo which is a deer management company that in addition to doing calls they also do deer research and um and do sterilizations so white buffalo advocated an integrated approach consisting of lethal methods for removing deer which is the call the deer cull and non-lethal approaches which was female sterilization and the sterilization was to be done in areas where the lethal methods were not possible due

075to density of people and houses and so the goal was to address two main concerns of the city to restore ecological balance to the city's natural areas and to reduce deer vehicle collisions and in addition to contracting with white buffalo they contracted with an independent ecologist jacqueline corteau who had gotten her phd working at the es george reserve to monitor the impacts of the deer browsing the ecological impacts on plants so there are many other aspects of the program and they're described in the ann arbor cities uh web pages so the the call was very controversial um i have often regretted at times getting involved in it um i mentioned to my daughter this morning is 12 years old that i had to get back because we've been traveling i said i had to get

076back so i can give a talk about a deer call she said well what side are you on dad and i had to say i wasn't on the deer side and she said this is going to put a very big wedge between us [Laughter] and so i i'll have to explain to her all of my justifications and things but um but it turned out that there you know there was just a lot of opinion about the deer management program i counted from 2015 to 2016 53 headlines in m live um i have some of them here some of them are somewhat whimsical um but there were serious you know people expended a lot of political capital to get this call done and and i i have to commend the council members that did that um

077you can see that some of these um stories attracted huge numbers of comments it's back when m live had comments like up to a thousand comments to people from all over combat and giving an opinion um and so the uh and one one thing that i that i'll mention before is this um in other communities that have had this kind of polarization political polarization around deer management this is tend to abate over time and and i think maybe it's analogous to prescribed burning at first it just seems so counterintuitive for a city to kill deer but at some point when people are educated and understand that this is an important thing to do to preserve natural areas for safety reasons and other reasons um they begin to accept it and it becomes something that's more

078in the background of what the city does on a regular basis um so so i think that that's that's hopeful and i think that um i think that there has been less attention on the recent um discussion about the call than there was in previous years just in these past few months so i think i think we'll be moving that direction so a little survey of the white you know a little overview of the white buffalo um approach here this shows how they surveyed with helicopters um in 2020 a really intense survey and using infrared cameras this is the best way to survey deer and get good numbers there's always going to be some error associated with trying to count them from the air any other way the other way that they were trying to

079count them was with camera traps and using approaches where they can use that as a way to sample the deer population and identify unique males and with antlers and try to figure out what the density is so um so every year white buffalo got an estimate of the overall deer number in the city limits of ann arbor these are the sharp shooting locations these are you know highly trained professionals that mostly sat up in trees around baiting sites used rifles um when the deer came into a in a particular grouping um they would shoot them directly into the head so they just fall immediately there's no suffering this is considered a humane way to euthanize deer by american veterinary society um the meat from the the kill deer was harvested um by local groups and

080distributed to people with food insecurity needs which i thought was really great thing to do with that that meat so it really is a kind of hunting the sterilization program um i had i was very skeptical that this worked this would work at all but it turns out that it actually was very useful in these areas that could not be entered for sharp shoot shooting um but there are some limitations on female sterilization it it cos it costs quite a bit more than sharp shooting two to three times as much up to a thousand dollars per deer but like i said it can be the only option sometimes uh sterilized does can live longer than unsterilize those that are not getting pregnant they can live in cornell they've had those that were sterilized live up

081to 17 years so you're you're stuck with these deers for quite a long time um and you know when these deer were sterilized they were tagged and some were some had radio colors they could track their movement and see what you know how useful was it because if there's a lot of migration of deer into an area and out of an area it's not really helpful to sterilize but if there's just a lot of local what is called phylo patchery or a very small home range then it can be very useful to do sterilization and when these deer are monitored with you know radio tracking or whatever in different communities it turns out that almost all of them if they're going to die their death will be by a vehicle that that's the way that

082these urban deer die they don't have any other predators so they they will die from a vehicle 90 of the time um and these were the uh the three study areas where they did the sterilizations uh the south study area east and north study areas so to summarize the um the results after three years white buffalo estimated that a 53 population reduction from year one to year four um so they initially counted 289 deer with some air uncertainty and then year four 137 deer and they weren't able to reduce the population in the area with surgical sterilizations but they were able to stabilize those those numbers that they weren't growing so really it seemed pretty successful um and i just want to point out that when you look at these numbers these numbers they estimated

083for each year of the numbers of deer going down to 137 it's not just that they just took out these this number of deer but they also took the reproductive potential of those does that they had removed and so the population could have continued to grow throughout those four years with nothing to stop it so you're really talking about the difference between a much larger number of deer perhaps a thousand and the 137 that they ended up with in 220. so that's uh the potential growth of the population okay i mean chris uh-huh i have a question what's you you say on the previous slide that deer sterilization was banned in michigan until 20 oh yeah sorry um so i think that there are hunters that really uh disapprove of this whole idea of sterilizing

084beer and it it is kind of like a in some ways it is a concession to anti-hunting groups um to control deer by sterilization instead of by hunting so in the state legislator the legislation there has been a temporary ban on any kind of deer sterilization activities until the year 2022 so i'm not sure what's going to happen with it but at least now it's it's not an option maybe next year it will be an option to continue the sterilization again um in terms of the deer vehicle collisions this is where ann arbor was in in this peak point in 2015 uh there definitely seems to be a decline whether this was just an outlier um and statistically significant i don't know but uh considering that the main mortality of these deer is going to

085be by vehicles it makes sense that there is a relationship between the deer cull and a lower incidence of deer vehicle collisions in the city and so there's a 55 percent decrease in the deer vehicle collisions um okay i want to any any questions about the white buffalo work or you can hold on to that until the end so i want to talk a little bit about jacqueline corteau's oak study so jacqueline corteau did browsing studies of of trilliums and other wildflowers i was really i'm kind of a woody plants person i like trees and so i i focused a little bit more on her studies of red oaks and i think that these are kind of elegant experiments that she did in which she planted up to 400 red oaks each year in different

086natural areas where he had one oak seedling that was open and exposed and then another one that was protected with some kind of cage so it couldn't be browsed and she planted these and oaks red oaks are of intermediate preference to deer they don't really like them a lot yeah they don't like to browse them as much as they like trillium and other plants that have less lignin and less tannic acid so the idea if the deer are browsing the red oak that they're probably also going to browse all kinds of other plants those kind of good indicator species and there was a study by the cornell group particularly a guy named blossie in 2014 who estimated that if there's um if there's anything more than a 15 percent damage uh by herbivory or visitation

087to these seedlings per year if you add that over add that damage up over a few years that's basically going to indicate that these oaks and these forests are not going to be regenerating that forest regeneration is going to be severely inhibited there might be some woody plants that the deer don't like those will grow but for oaks which as dave bournemouth indicated are important in almost all of ann arbor's uh natural areas it's going to have a real big impact so um jacqueline found that over you know from 2015 to 2019-2020 there was a trend toward a decline in browsing intensity in these different planted oak red oaks and that's good and perhaps with more you know even lower deer density there would be even more of an impact that you could measure but

088you can see where these numbers are most of them they're still uh you know the lowest amount of braze grazing and browsing intensity is 40 and so for the forest to be healthy and regenerate for oaks to be regenerating in this forest it would have to be down to 15 percent so the forests are still not regenerating there does seem to be an impact of the call on you know perhaps reducing the amount of browsing damage on these on these seedlings but it's still not quite there um there's still a big impact on um forest regeneration and i don't haven't thought about this a lot but certainly this does affect carbon neutrality you know if you if you have forests and you're expecting the trees to take up a lot of carbon and some of

089the the trees the highest wood density and the most importance in the community are not growing um that definitely could affect carbon flux so surprisingly even with all the negative publicity the deer management program in ann arbor has broad support i think it's broad support over 70 percent of people surveyed in the different wards found that the deer management program was acceptable despite inconveniences of having parks closed despite the distasteful idea of having deer killed by the city um and i think that the the support like could increase could be increased through better communication i think i think there's a lot of misinformation about the deer call and deer management program that's still floating out there and uh and i think even though the city did a great job and look at their website they

090did a really good job of communicating and summarizing information um there could be some better better communication i think so some recommendations from the cornell group cornell i think as the premier deer management program and research and they say that you know they'd studied a bunch of different communities that implemented deer management programs would there have been controversy and you know what the first step is to develop a deer study committee that is comprised of people that are different stakeholders you know people interested in the environment people in safety people interested in public health other aspects um to study not these general patterns about deer upon over abundance but but how they affect different parts of the city in different ways and what are the particular issues in the local area i think that these

091could combine university and city resources and expertise and you know come up with local problems you know and solutions for them cornell recommends that their knee communities that are implementing deer management programs need to build trust um with the community through effective communication so the anti-calling community animal rights groups need to be heard they need to be listened to they need to be given honest information and you know one way of doing this is to have workshops where different speakers are invited have outreach activities also cornell says that you know you'll have to plan that lethal methods are going to be part of the toolkit that you're going to have to use because in most cases sterilization especially when there are open settings where there's lots of movement outside of an area and lots of

092migration into a community the sterilization methods are not going to work and like i mentioned previously you know prepare for the political controversy but in these different communities that were studied that controversy diminishes over time and it becomes something that's accepted part of natural resource management so on the uh on the handout i put some of the readings that i think are really good general readings especially this in the indiana urban deer technical guide really good information i have the different reports and then here's the cornell study as well in in our deer management program website so i'm happy to take any questions or about that or we can start a conversation about it all right well thank you very much professor jack that was very thorough um that's a very thorough information not packet

093you put together so um oh i just had one question and that is um you know you have these three targets um there's the biological you know carrying capacity target number of deer density and then there's the social one and then there's the ecological one so you just presented some information about i believe pertaining to the ecological one that that would be 15 of seedling you know um browsing per year but um how close would those other numbers be do you think to that ecological number roughly they're close to each other or are they far apart i think the um i think the biological carrying capacity is going to be way way uh different it's going to be a number that we're not ever going to see probably in ann arbor hopefully i mean there

094there's just so much food in people's yards and along parks and everywhere else in protective cover for deer but i think that the population could could grow very large and very quickly so i think that number is going to be very high um i i don't know what it could be i could speculate it could be triple what what there is now quadruple um and and that will you know potentially triple or quadruple their vehicle collisions you know so so we're already gonna you know have more intense uh social frictions and um and then in terms of the um in terms of the biodiversity carrying capacity or the ecological carrying capacity you know in in some areas i think we've already exceeded that and so we'd have to go lower than what we have now

095you know based on jack and jacqueline cortez studies and um in some areas that you won't find uh a lot of herbaceous plants that deer prefer like trillium and other um other plant resources okay yeah so it does sound like that's the target number that i think most of us would prefer yeah and i should mention just briefly that um the um the huron valley humane society was um offered um was given the opportunity to present during this meeting of the environmental commission but no one felt that they were prepared to give one so um they will be scheduled at our next meeting i believe on july 22nd um so they will be in a position then to offer a rebuttal or their own opinion um about the deer call at that meeting um so

096um i'm sorry to take up time here um lisa um lisa dish has her hand up first and then bob needham i just wanted to um thank you very much professor dick for we've spoken so i'm laughing um i i i wish that the city's website could do a better job of showing a link between the cull and and forest regeneration and its its clearest graph is the graph about reducing vehicle deer collisions but that is not persuasive to people who are um who feel that we should have an eco-centric not a human-centric perspective on this issue um and it's it's difficult to get through all of the various studies that i mean it's difficult for people who don't do that as a normal thing in their life her studies i think are are clear

097and very informative but most people aren't going to do that kind of research they're looking for a graphic or two and so um i don't know if it'd be helpful to for nap to help to feed in here to provide some evidence or pull pieces from the corto reports that help people make the connection between culling and forest regeneration but i just wanted to offer that because um right now the argument isn't the website's not making that argument very well in my opinion i think that's a really really good point and um i think that you know there's lots of information on the ann arbor city pages but it but it's not connected and it doesn't form a narrative and i think like a dear study group would be able to make those connections and

098linkages and um and go from the general like what i said what i presented as general consequences of deer to the particular of of how it's affecting ann arbor natural areas but i i agree that that is one way that could be communicated okay i just wanted to also uh thank professor dick for um making the time to do this for us very informative and just um fyi for for everyone i just heard back from the humane society uh today and they um are unavailable at both our july and august meetings but they were wondering if they could present at september so that's where that is in just an fyi i kind of organized this this talk in response to some of the emails that came out from the huron valley humane society um one

099statement they said is the call was not a success you know so here i present a perspective where i think it was a success another one is it's not it's never going to work you know nature abhors a vacuum if you take out deer they'll be replaced almost immediately um ideas about you know if you remove some deer then the reproductive potential of the remaining deer goes up these are ideas that are just not that just don't pan out you know and i didn't want to really get into that in particular but i do keep that in the back of my mind as this may be work what people are thinking about the deer call um in in trying to provide these explanations okay um john yeah uh i'll add thanks for the presentation uh

100question one if you can speak to the fact that we know the deer aren't residents of the city and what you can say about what surrounding communities are doing and you know to the point of the comments you just made about nature aboard the vacuum what anything can we say about deer that are coming in from surrounding townships following the cult or not yeah i think um i think one interesting finding from the white buffalo study of the sterilized dough is that they they really had a limited home range they were not moving out of that south study area they were staying in there and this was this is a finding that a professional named porter from from lansing from msu also found that the maternal lines in whitetail deer are very localized and do

101not move a lot um so in one study where deer were called even in a continuous forest the densities remained lower for quite a long period of a number of years even though the forest is continuous and could have easily been reoccupied by other deer the the deer that do move around a lot are the bucks so the male deer will move around a lot um the female deer not as much so that that gives some um some hope that if a call is implemented for a particular park it may take several years for those deer to to recover through migration and so that that does bring that if there is an attempt to manage deer within the city limits definitely um the city has to consider just outside the city limits what's happening those

102areas are a little bit easier to address with hunting um thank you i'm john mursky a comment and a question my comment is uh anecdotally i mentioned before i live about five blocks from the arboretum and i've noticed um in and around my property a significant decrease in the presence of deer when i first moved here they destroyed my vegetable garden um i planted nine fruit trees um they were also heavily damaged um and um also i lost saplings some um that were naturally regenerating and some that i planted to uh deer rubs um where they girdled the trees um things have not gone away but i've seen a significant improvement i mean they used to come into our vegetable garden which is about 10 feet from our side door and just mow things down

103multiple times and that's basically um cease so that's that's my at least personal observation and the question that i'd like to pose to my fellow commissioners is after we hear from the humane society and potentially other voices would we be willing to consider drafting an ordinance either in support of a deer call or other measures is that sort of where we're heading is that the case steve what's the thinking on this thank you um yeah i mean i would propose um that we consider a resolution to city council about funding the dear call because i know that was dropped from the budget uh for some reason um and i think it was only a hundred thousand dollars is what i recall so um it doesn't seem like that big an expenditure and i'm not sure

104why it was dropped but it has my impression as as well as most of the people i know um is that uh there was an effective program that deserved consideration for continuing and um um that's all i'll say about it at this point but i think um i already put that in the action items for um for example that i think i'd like the suggestion that we could form we could help facilitate um forming a dear study group you know with uh nap and whatever other um you know city staff might be indicated as well as um professor dick if he's willing to help and um also having maybe a representative from the humane society on that as well so you could have a study group that could also recommend different actions but i think

105even independent of that um i mean i feel like i've heard enough to um to consider a resolution to counsel even before we hear from the humane society but um i think in all fairness it would probably be good to wait until they've had their chance to make a case um you know i'm not sure how they would uh align with the city's budget process it's already been passed but of course it can be amended at any time during the year so um and i i believe any all the culling activity happens during the winter um well that's my impression so um in any case um any contract or any actual culling hunting work would not be done until the winter january february time frame so i think we have time you know it's not

106an urgent issue at this point um meaning that if we did a resolution then we'd have time um to maybe have the process the whole bureaucratic process to move forward to have a call happen this winter that's my impression um um so i see several hands up um commissioner zhang um you're muted at this time but yeah yeah i just have one question um about the sterilization program so why is only female theory sterilized it's like easier to do or it's a good question um and the main reason is that um male deer male white or there are polygamous and so um if you stay if you give a vasectomy to a nine out of ten deer the tenth deer will go and impregnate all the remaining does and so it's very difficult um to

107have an effective program like that because you can still end up with the same number of does reproducing i mean same number of fawns it's just that one buck will inseminate them instead of all of them and so for for uh for sterilization program involving vasectomy to work it really has to almost be like in an island uh where you don't have migration of bucks coming in from the outside and staten island has tried this and um i'm not sure what success they've had but they've invested several million dollars in sterilizing with vasectomy a deer herd that's about the same size as the herd in ann arbor and so um so it can be extremely expensive not likely to work unless you get all of the bucks and and it won't reduce the population it'll

108just stabilize it very good question now okay yeah um okay chris you have your hand on your screen i'm not muted so i'd like to follow up on john mursky a bit about the northern half of the anne over hills neighborhood i'm sorry um we benefited from the boundary of the river on the north we benefited from the university being willing to let us call on that property we benefited from the city lands to the east which involved here in hills golf course and a couple of very nice native forest fragment parks [Music] we uh we benefited from a location where sterilization that is to say darting and then carrying deer to a surgery center was easily possible and that result in the north half of anne arbor hills was when we had 20 or

10930 or 40 or 50 deer marauding in the neighborhood we went down to four very nice ladies with white gear tags the change in damage to the arb to a local park owned privately adjacent to the arb was extraordinarily dramatic [Music] however one of those four deer got into my backyard and left a deer tick i've lived on this property since 1960 i have never had a tick get on me and i work outdoors all day anywhere in this neighborhood much less on my property but she left me one i came inside and was working in my studio and she was crawling down my arm folks some of you have friends in long island or connecticut or rhode island or wisconsin where lyme disease is epidemic some of you probably know people who have never

110recovered from being infected by that virus i guess it's a bacterium um and there are other diseases these ticks are carrying and when you get more than one of them the problem is way worse this is a public health hazard if we allow the deer population in ann arbor to get out of control we're going to have this problem here in serious levels the deer vehicle collisions are not troubling anyone that hasn't hit a deer but if you hit a deer you're spending five thousand dollars and a lot of time to get your vehicle repaired if you don't swerve and hit a tree or an oncoming vehicle david bourneman i'm sure you can confirm jacqueline crutoes studies on your natural areas about the impacts on the ecosystems and herbaceous flora and the regeneration of trees

111please confirm this for me it's a problem yeah professor dick gave a great presentation i've got no uh no disagreement with anything that he said and dr cortez studies have been very convincing um towards earlier comment about those being hard to hard to see on the website or on the city's website i think that's somewhat intentional the city um is trying to present all the facts and let the public make their own decisions about things and so dr corteau does have some two-page handouts that kind of summarize some of that information that that ought to be a little bit clearer for people but we're trying to lay everything out and say here's here's what we're finding and make your own decisions about things rather than trying to there are people that that as we know

112are opposed to the call it's been a very controversial issue but yeah in terms of impacts on natural areas no doubt about that so a couple other things um a lot of people say oh god we can't have firearms in the parks and of course we can't have firearms in the parks generally or any place else generally the guys who are trained as sharpshooters are are specially licensed by the state the particular company that ann arbor hired is the best in the country they use handmade very low velocity ammunition [Music] when it hits a leaf it breaks apart they work at extremely close range with night optics they do not miss they do not have any question whatsoever about what they're shooting at this is a completely safe operation that they undertake the idea that

113we have wild men running around our parks shooting everything and everybody is just completely false and ridiculous even though people try to say so and i would recommend that we don't hire general hunters and do things in any sort of way like that and i don't think we ever will lastly i build gardens for a living my clients have paid me tens of thousands of dollars over the last well 20 years 40 years ago we didn't have deer in ann arbor over the last 20 years to protect their old evergreens their gardens from being factually destroyed when you have a 75 or 80 year old very large u which is a really wonderful evergreen shrub and within three or four years it's it's eaten to pieces you have lost a very valuable component in your

114landscape that's irreplaceable a few years ago and had a really bad winter the deer in in barton hills and the bad parts of ann arbor were eating juniper evergreens the last existing ones unprotected by people in the winter they came away with bloody mouths because junipers are very prickly as some of you know but they were on their way to destroying them i have fenced my back garden it was a pathway for deer in my neighborhood i went ballistic i have tens of thousands of dollars of deer friendly vegetables in my garden and many people do and many people don't have the resources that i have to defend against them i don't want think we want a city full of fences i don't want a neighborhood full of fences mine are very inconspicuous they're made

115of black polyethylene they work but gosh uh it's very expensive very difficult we cannot fence our natural areas there's what 3 500 acres deer can jump 10 feet um i'm soap boxing i've been so boxing on this issue since trillium disappeared from barton hills village about 20 years ago there were great wraths of them there there were great rafts of trillium and bird hills and there's not a single one today and it's not just trillium there are dozens of native wildflowers that we don't have anymore including orchids i um i wrote you i think but especially the council back when they were making the decision that the city developed the naturalized program and has spent a quarter million dollars in tens of thousands of hard labor volunteer man hours trying to recover our naturalis from

116invasive species and and to make them really rich in diverse habitats again well thank you chris i think most of us share that sentiment so um several plants have been up for i think lisa was first and then kathy and then rita i'll be quick i just wanted to not in a contentious way appreciate mr bornman what you said about the city's desire to present information in an objective way or in a balanced way i think is a better word than objective um people respond sorry about that noise um people respond to graphics and the there's a really crisp graphic case being made for reduction in vehicle deer crashes the slide that professor dick had with the projected deer population would be great to have some somewhere on the city's website i don't know if

117the city would put it there but for people to be able to appreciate what the cull can be argued to have achieved by way of reduction and just some kind of graphic that treated this the the ecological balance picture would be great because my feeling is that the information on the site isn't really balanced because it isn't addressing all of the objectives that the city said the um the cull was meant to achieve and mr delacourt won't won't buy it so he'll say oh yeah we already talked about that but i'm still and i don't know if it's a study group that's needed because there seemed to be a lot of information that's gathered i think there's education i think the council needs to be educated we didn't have a work session on the call

118so when people were looking for money they could use for stuff they wanted to do they picked an unpopular project because we had to find the money before we could spend it so they picked an unpopular thing that they didn't want to have to vote yes for and they took its budget line and you know i it was hard this year and it's going to be hard again next year and hard again the year after that because we've got a structural above budget deficit so we need to get a commitment or at least an appreciation for that we are undoing with one hand what we've done with another when we when we don't when we aren't consistent about calling okay lisa um are you are you finished and then um kathy i agree with everything

119that lisa just said and also i lived through the deer call drama for many years in fact i was tracking deer vehicle collisions probably since 2010 on michigan traffic crash backs and and was tracking the fact that they were increasing um if we're going to have the huron valley humane society in and i wouldn't oppose it but i think we need some ground rules for their presentation in terms of providing data driven statements to us and we need to make it clear that we do not want the national organization to be sending hundreds of emails to members of this commission um it it needs to be a very professional process because there is so much emotion involved and there are some members of council who do not support a call for for emotional not factual

120reasons and and that is fine that is the right but we don't want um the community or the country to be exploiting that and there were vicious personal attacks on some council members as as a result of what happened and i i don't want a repeat of that so i i think we need to be very clear before we have this presentation exactly what it is and what our expectations are thanks okay thanks um thanks kathy that's duly noted um let's see rita has her hand up this is gonna seem really obvious i think but um it's not just the plants we want to save the plants provide the food for the pollinators that i work with and other people and the pollinators provide food for people uh for birds or other things and so

121it is the balance that i think we're looking for um and it's it's it's huge um and um woven together and i think that that's the emphasis that i'd like to see is that it's it's not just about plants i love plants but you know it's all those things that that require plants and especially native plants when those are gone there are certain fauna that really can't live um okay chris you have your hand up and then we should uh close out this topic so i'd like to thank both dave and dr dick for coming here tonight um [Music] i think both guys are as general principals very smart people who are reticent to get in the middle of politics and unfortunately this issue has a lot of that as lisa just said and i

122chris dick has been quite outspoken and that's not normal for a university professor of high rank and dave ornament has also been quite reticent to get in the middle of any kind of politics and he's had a struggle all the way along to teach people that gosh why are you cutting all those plants down in our natural areas and then why are you burning them for heaven's sakes and so the controversy has followed him for 30 years and thank you both gentlemen for coming here and thank you environmental commissioners for dealing with this yep yeah thank you um thank you um both of the presenters so um let's move on to the next item on the agenda which is um anthony's business which uh the first item is the gilman plume update uh rita do

123you want to let us know thank you sorry um yes thanks thank you um i just wanted to bring this back as a continuing item for our um consideration and just to keep us in touch with with what's going on um and um i'm hoping that councilmember criswell will chime in but we want to i think that what we want to do is to show that the city is moving toward a path of superfund cleanup we hope the governor has received a letter of support and it was supported by our commission here and i want to thank everybody who worked on it and supported it and i think it is just the right way to go um there have been some some actions that have taken place recently and i guess i'm going to ask

124kathy if you wouldn't mind stepping in to um comment because kathy has her hand up so the floor is yours oh okay i've i've been uh all of the hearings not that i know all of the legal jargon that's being used uh but the main theme is gellman is doing everything possible to stall the cleanup through the courts so we're very fortunate to have the epa involved a couple of examples there was a hearing on june 17th and fortunately judge connors denied gelman's uh motion for partial stay of the court's original response activity order that was to implement uh the fourth cj and it uh the court also denied that bellman's request to add uh the 20 2017 document to the court record i i don't understand all of the details of that but the

1252017 document included some agreements between eagle and gelman and the court denied that also i don't have any documentation on this but there was a second hearing and uh gelman filed an appeal to the appeals court either um today or yesterday and again they're they're asking for a stay so they don't have to start the cleanup that was um specified outline in consent judgment four and for anyone concerned about the first sister lake there there's agreement by gelman eagle and um and everyone involved that we do not want discharge into the first sister lake so there that will be worked out but there's none of the parties are advocating for that um there is also work regarding the ms4 permit that was mentioned before with the allen creek drain and um i can say that

126the city is continuing to be supportive of the process that's underway and there's been a number of communications between eagle and the county and eagle has changed some of their criteria but i don't have that in writing yet either and when i do get it i can share it with the commissioners if there's interest in that and and one thing that that might be helpful would be to have a a water working group because there are so many water-related issues so maybe we could consider that at our next meeting no thanks kathy i'm certainly supportive of that myself um so let's think of what uh please suggest any agenda items for our next meeting that would be appropriate and um i wouldn't be shy about emailing all the commissioners about any actions as soon as

127they occur if you have any significant information if you can just email us oh okay i i will definitely do that including any court documents i receive thanks okay yep thank you and thanks rita too so um so are there any other comments about the gelman plume i'm hearing and seeing none so let's move on to the chapter 40 update uh who wants to take that um i'll start um so kathy and i have worked on some revisions we we talked quite a bit at our last meeting and got some great comments from you all about some of the specifications that we can change and i started putting those into the chapter 40 document and once i started doing that i realized that it would be a lot more make a lot more sense for

128the draft version of it to go to people like chris graham and shannon gibb randle with their particular backgrounds to give some additional advice on this because there were some questions that came up that that i thought would be easier to address before bringing to the whole group because i think there's some professional issues on some things that came up tonight you know should we consider um uh asking the public to i'm sorry the private property owners to manage some of the the vegetation on their property so since i was looking at this chapter 40 you know that kind of thing came up and so i would just like some some advice um and so i did send that to you chris and also to shannon gibrando um and i'm hoping that that it will

129work out that you'll have some time to give it a glance and and have a discussion i apologize i haven't i know shannon's away so that's okay um that's why i didn't bring the you know i didn't want to bring it to this meeting um and uh anyway that's that is my proposal kathy do you wanna oh there there is go ahead um there are a couple of things and um dave mentioned how many years this has been amended and we really need to ask staff to probably rewrite and and consolidate the ordinance because private property is mentioned in at least three different places so if you're a property owner and you look at the ordinance to find out what you should do you might look at one of the areas but not the others

130so it needs to be at least referenced so the information is easy to find and i believe our biggest challenge right now is enforcement and we need to come into compliance not through having uh community standards knock on someone's door but we really need to educate the public and as i mentioned before um we're gonna meet with with missy stouts i always mispronounce her name uh there's interest there because it is aligned with sustainability and she has um a team of ambassadors who she believes uh might be interested in this and so um i'm i'm optimistic at this point that that there's community interest in that that we can get something done and start educating the public and use the school district um and in many the park system we can probably brainstorm at a

131later date to talk about all the partners that we want to include in this so thanks well thank you yeah that sounds great i mean it's time for a more comprehensive look at this especially with all of our initiatives with pollinators natural features you know and i i'm just to recap um last communication i had from the transportation and the disability commissions were that they were happy with the way you know with a higher height limit oh okay good and i guess i'd like to encourage the new commissioners if they have some opinions on this take a look at chapter 40 and let us know if you want to be involved in any way we definitely welcome more partners okay so are there any other comments um rita you have your hand up yeah i

132did that was intentional um i just wanted to be sure that um we know if if this is going to have to go back to the transportation commission as well um for their review of of it's the site distance and the the visual kinds of things yeah i think that's probably necessary um after you know after the next uh the next iteration okay you know you know with chris and shannon okay so um so let's see um are there any other comments on chapter 40 at this time hearing and seeing none uh let's move on to new business and uh the only new business i uh i have is that we have three new commissioners so i would like an opportunity give them an opportunity to introduce themselves um let's start off with the youth

133commissioners um how about uh lunia and then um young when and then chris vandenbrock so lunia you have the floor would you want to spend a few minutes and let us know something about your background and interest certainly i um my name is luna i am a senior at the university of michigan majoring in climate meteorology i moved to ann arbor about a a year ago and i wanted to become as involved in in my city as possible so i went through the 8-0 ambassadors program and the ann arbor community academy and i was inspired by these experiences and and and meeting other other like-minded residents as well as meeting some of the city staff to apply uh to serve on the environmental commission so i feel very fortunate to be here and um i'm

134very much looking forward to working with all of you so thank you for this opportunity to speak thank you um um youngwen you have the floor hi everyone i'm your i just graduated from pioneer high school this year and i'll be entering the university of michigan and college of engineering to study environmental engineering also physics and over the past few years in high school i was involved in the sustainability club and the freeman environmental education news council and also helped organize the a2 0 8-0 youth ambassador last year um those were the main environmental work i've done but i'm really excited to serve on the environmental commission to see what i can contribute to the city okay thank you i'm chris vandenbroeck uh well i'm a tony lifelong resident of ann arbor in fact i

135lived within half a mile where i was where i grew up and at that time pauline was a gravel road so i've been here a while um i kept going to the university of michigan until i ran out of degrees i got a phd in mechanical engineering and then followed up with a relatively long happy career in automotive automotive parts and i also have some experience in the meatpacking industry in iowa uh now i'm retired and i've got a lot of interest in environmental issues climate change all the stuff you all are talking about and i'm i'm thrilled to be here so it's a little bit of a learning curve for me because i'm still getting familiar with all the issues but boy this is great and thanks well yeah thank you chris um so

136i want to point out that a lot of the basic scud work that we do is done within committees and working groups so um i would encourage all all of you to look into what the working groups are and see if you might attend a few that are around the topics of particular interest to you and um and we hope you will join these working groups as well and help contribute to to advancing you know the business of the entire commission and uh i would um i might read and i thought it might be a good idea for all the present commissioners to also introduce themselves to talk about their background but i think you know given the late hour that we have here i'm trying to keep these meetings to at least 9 30

137at the most so um i think that um if you participate in the working groups you will get to know us uh better over the next few months so um let's uh let's get that for now and proceed uh to the reports from committees other commissions council and chair so um chris do you want to update the commission on the national features um we're getting very close to having a good draft of amendments to the udc about woodlands and trees and grading permits and some site planning requirements um maybe perhaps even two weeks away from beginning to spread it further and wider at least to the initial groups and to you um that's our main job to get that done okay would you like this to be in the main agenda item for the july

13822nd meeting i well you don't have to decide now you know yes i'll let you know chris or steve um this has taken and been way harder than i expected um than any of us expected it um [Music] it's there are many sections of the udc that are coming into play and it's complicated no apologies necessary chris so it's a great task that you've taken on and we're all looking forward to the results uh you know because i know you'll do a great job um okay uh but just let us know when you when you'd like to just give us plenty of notice when you'd like to have it in there because i think this is probably because of the complications and everything i think we could devote a whole um commission meeting um you

139know to reviewing what the what this work has done regardless of how it turns out in the end that meaning passage by council of these changes um it will be extremely educational and exciting i'm looking forward to it so um okay so the next uh it's a pollinators work group um rita yes um thanks i have to say that i had to take a a pause on um meeting with our group we have a meeting scheduled for next tuesday uh if anyone um new to this group or who's been on the in the on the commission wants to join the pollinator work group please be in touch with me we are talking about educational types of things that have to do with helping to reduce turfgrass encouraging people to use less pesticides and just generally

140um supporting a a beneficial environment for pollinators um and it occurs to me in our discussion tonight that are i believe that our next steps may be very educational oriented things and i wonder if there's something that we as a commission should talk about in terms of working with city staff on developing educational materials how they get expressed to the community how in in various ways um it just seems like there's kind of like a baseline way that maybe we can all learn to develop materials or work with staff to get things out effectively so i'm just raising that as something that that is a concern of mine because i think we all have things that we want to be put out to the community for that for understanding um so that's that's all that's

141my pitch i'll give more information on the pollinators next time okay well thanks rita um yes and um so solid waste working group um let's see uh lisa do you want to talk about the zero waste working group sure we're a little satellite of the solid waste working group and um john callaward and i have been working with jenny patosky john were you going to update us about our grant we're happy to do that lisa that is excellent yep um so we are preparing to submit a grant to nexcycle under the micros opportunity uh six month ten thousand dollar grant with the focus on identifying and developing and testing uh some metrics around circular economy so working with uh city and several community organizations or non-profits or businesses about what does that mean circular economy

142what metrics might be appropriate for things like reuse recycling um trying to get a better handle down that to advance some of the city's objectives and also there's a ghd reduction component of that an equity component so it's in pretty good shape uh i think it's due july 21st so we're running it through a couple more channels in the city it would actually be submitted by the city um and the main focus is to hire an intern for that first six months to really work and dive into that literature and material but then there are subsequent faces of you know more implementation and then education around it so the grant we're working on now is just for the first six months but we've got some ideas about how to fund the work kind of moving

143beyond that um yeah i think that that's pretty much it unless you have anything else lisa i think that's yeah that's it well thanks john yeah that's great progress um in this respect i'll mention that i'm working on a uh construction and demolition ordinance potentially for the city uh but you know one thing i've learned over the last several months is that um you know for this program to be economical we really need to make it a county-wide program so this is a political um political thing i'm juggling with now is the city could have an ordinance but on the other hand it would have to be coordinated through the county as well in order to get the kind of volumes of scale to make it more economical less costly so i'm working on that

144right now and i think some pilot projects are a good idea the ann arbor public schools is doing a lot of renovations of its schools so i plan on doing some data collection studies there so and the city and city staff particularly jenny potoski has been engaging much more with me so um i think you know i'm building and trying to build up uh uh build up the work group until we get to a point where we're gonna have a meeting soon of the of a work group uh including stakeholders from the community including builders i know contractors things like that um to move forward on this issue but i think politically this is a major item that i appreciate advice from anybody about um and it's fortunate that we're now officially i think part

145of warm-up you know the regionalization agreement with the county so um that's going to greatly facilitate this sort of work so um theo eggerman is part of the core work group that i've i've developed so um we'll see how that goes but i'm not quite sure how uh to make this politically happen between the city and the county and the townships so i'm looking for any advice and uh and uh suggestions that anybody may have about that um so i think if there's no comments um or questions i think uh i think we'll move on to the other commissions and i don't hear anything so um how about john murski how about an energy commission update sure uh in our last meeting we had an uh update on downtown solar installations commercial solar installations and

146educational opportunities um we're seeing more and more downtown solar that are visible from parking structure rooftops so um we might end up putting some signage to point those out uh also it was mentioned that the solarize program has been wildly successful last year we had almost one megawatt installed that's probably four times what we had three or four years ago and year to date so far we have installed almost the same amount as we did in all of last year and that's also in spite of the fact that net metering was eliminated so yeah that's really really great progress and shows a high level of awareness in addition we had an update on a benchmarking energy benchmarking and disclosure ordinance that's been proposed that's being worked on quite some time now for the commercial and

147multi-family sector um we reviewed um a resolution on that and we will probably vote on that resolution of support in our july meeting so that will hopefully be headed to council soon in our next meeting uh there is going to be a review of a sister ordinance that is directed at the single-family residence sector so that we have a balance not only just for commercial and multi-family but also single-family that will be a little bit different but it will require a home energy audit that is done according to department of energy process and standards and the idea is that that would have to be disclosed at the time of sale and hopefully even we can't mandate it but um at the time of marketing so not buyers have a sense of how energy efficient a

148home is just like you buy a vehicle you know the fuel efficiency of that vehicle the intent is to do the same thing so we're going to have a review of that in our next meeting with a resolution to follow and that will then also go on to city council and i think that's it thanks very much thanks sean um any questions for john no caring and seeing none um i'm shannon's off in the red rock desert so um we will not have an update from the planning commission uh today and also we don't have a representative from the parks commission as yet assigned to us so um we will not have an update on the parks and parks commission um so then um then moves on to the report from council who wants to

149go first i'm kathy or um wait joe sorry china the only i i forgot to give one quick update and that is um and this is sort of a heads up also for our council members um we're we've been working on um actually i have with some other people outside of the commission on a resolution that would promote the use of low embodied carbon materials in construction in ann arbor there was a first review of that resolution and that will likely be voted on the idea is not to mandate anything but to encourage the use of those materials by the city and by construction companies and architects and so on and so forth so i just wanted to mention that i'd forgotten to mention that thanks go ahead kathy um the only thing i can

150think of and and lisa really knows more about this than i do is that city council passed a a resolution to approve a legal settlement to limit our phosphorus output and that was a settlement with with eagle and it's it's something that we've been we the city of ann arbor has been negotiating for over 10 years so i don't know lisa if you want to add to that add tiny things so some of you may know much you must may have a longer history with this but apparently it's been since 1999 that we've been battling over this and um the the what wasn't then called eagle imposed on ann arbor um and one i think one or two other municipalities much stricter restrictions on on how much phosphorus can be discharged from the wastewater plant

151but the targets that they imposed were not well crafted and also somewhat unclear and so the advantage that we're getting out of this settlement for now is that the restrictions are tiered and so there's a time limit in which you have to meet one one threshold level time limit to meet another and then the strictest is farther out and the reason why that's important is that the scientific research that's been done into this suggests that the phosphorus that's in the um these are not it's not in our water but it's downstream from us that phosphorus phosphorus is not probably not getting there from our wastewater treatment plant it is getting there because these are static bodies of water and they they um they get into a state of low oxygenation where when there is a

152shift in temperature or a storm event then the blue-green algae bloom because that shocks them gives them you know gives them an influx and so what you need to do is aerate the water better which is not a wastewater treatment plant issue and so the the better thing to do seems to be to use water to aerate water which is one way of talking about mixing um and so that's i think that what the the tier structure that we've just agreed to hopefully will give us is a chance to fully make the case that there's a better way of achieving the ends that we want and also it's there's clarity around what we need to do which is also very helpful and so i'm not saying that oh we don't need to get more phosphorus

153out of our water but but the thing is is that the problem in the solution aren't very well linked still in what eagle's asking for okay um so let's see kathy you have your hand up and then chris i just want to mention that the two bodies of water that are of concern it's a belleville lake in ford lake and i was actually at a zoom meet and greet probably six weeks ago for when dana nessel the attorney general mentioned that she was surprised about this and ann arbor's response i guess and and mentioned uh lg overgrowth and and i had no idea what she was talking about at the time but the important thing is that it's it's got the attention of people at the highest level so hopefully we'll be able to work

154on a solution that's that's scientific rather than based on 20 years of negotiations [Music] indeed um thanks kathy chris so is it true that the city water treatment plant is adding [Music] phosphate to our water supply and and most cities do um flint didn't when they switched to river water to coat the inside of our water lines so there are not [Music] so the water pipes don't disintegrate and contaminate especially if you have lead pipes our water when we drink it is that true i don't know i've heard it's true and i've heard the largest single source of phosphorus in our whole community comes from our own water treatment plant that's not that's not what the study that was shared with us shows and this is right it's downstream and well not just that but

155it's an epa funded study and um so it's it's both this issue around storms that produce the algae blooms but it's also um uh it's also runoff and so when ann arbor enacted a its runoff legislation which was recent phosphorus levels went down yes there's no doubt we have a lot of phosphorus in our soils and and i'm i get that i i i'm i just i i'm questioning this because i need to understand not what happens to fort lake and belleville lake or the or that issue but what we are actually doing to protect our pipes and whether there's another way to do that and what really i mean if we're releasing phosphorus at all we are sort of violating the spirit if not the letter of our ordinance not to allow any phosphate

156in our fertilizers or in other words we 15 years ago went through quite a deal to eliminate the ability for vendors to sell phosphate turf grass fertilizers in our city and and yet are i believe i think maybe i'm totally misinformed and i'd like to be better informed which is why i'm asking the question i will ask mr steglitt thank you um you know um i mean among all the commissioners i'm probably the person who's most kind of familiar with the uh state and federal regulations um about things like this and so um why don't i why don't i talk to brian steglitz about this um and i'll review the data i mean you know um the the city has in what's called an npdes permit and it's you know and then the relevant the

157relevant number is the tmdl or the total maximum daily load of phosphorus that's coming up in the water and it relates both to you know the sanitary sewer and the stormwater and there are technologies to use to reduce it and um the only thing i can say about adding the phosphorus is that yes this is the most common technique for preventing lead bleaching from lead pipes yeah but if the city has replaced almost all of its lead pipes it's not clearly any pipes yeah sorry the steel pipe's out there too which is yeah and a lot of lead solder and a lot of houses so yeah so um you know it's the the legacy stuff i'm not sure which reservoirs or blood might be residing you know in the drinking water system that might be

158re-released if the city stopped adding phosphoric acid you know at the water treatment plant so i'll investigate that further i have that written down as an action point for me and i can report to the commission at the next meeting not doing that was the main problem in flint when they switched correct that's correct that's correct because um that's commonly necessary to prevent the lead from reaching for lead pipes but as i s as i said i'm not sure how much um how many reservoirs might be existing um that that might contain lead that had leached already from lead pipes that might still be there that might that might be mobilized by or you know by by preventing um by not adding you know the phosphoric acid in the future so i'll look into that

159i'll look into all those issues and i'll send an email update before our next meeting and we can have a discussion then about it okay but yeah it would surprise me when i first heard of it too that the city's been wrangling for what 30 years 32 years about this i mean you know yeah because what the issue is that they cause harmful algal blooms or hags both in forward-like and velvet lake which are you know are potential threats to human health because these microcystins can be airborne you know through aerosols and it can cause significant health problems um okay um well thank you for pointing that out um kathy about the phosphorus you know the phosphorus agreement with the city so um so are there any other um reports from council okay so uh

160move on to the chair um i got a um i want to say two things first uh you know they will take up the uh uh the uh minutes from um may 23rd at our next meeting and then the other thing is that um i got an email from from the mayor's office about the green fair there the city is scheduling a green fair it used to be called the mayor's green fair and i think it was held in june most years and previously but now uh they're scheduling it for the first friday of october which is october 1st so i propose what i'm thinking is i would like i would like to con the ann arbor environmental commission to consider having a table at this event i'm not sure about the hours you know

161it's going to be downtown i believe um on main street so i would um i would like to have a brief discussion about that and whether we'd have enough volunteers from the commission to table such a meeting for the hours at which we're open i'm happy to provide the table on the chairs and maybe we can develop get a banner um so that you know we can drape over the table or we can say well we're the ann arbor environmental commission so and i'm happy to finance that or find some whatever means unnecessary to make that happen so um i think it would increase our public outreach and our public's knowledge of our existence and so i'm um i'm waiting to hear if there's any kind of agreement or uh discussion about this and then

162if anybody would like to make a motion did you do that yeah kathy um kathy raised her hand kathy what would you yeah i'll i'll move that we participate in the green fair in october and also volunteer okay great great um any other comments about this okay do i have a motion to uh accept this as a it's not a resolution or anything at this point but uh is there a do i have enough uh enough positive votes here from the membership not volunteers at this point but just ascend to doing this tabling event rita you have your hand up so rita i have a first motion is there a second anybody cathy and rita okay let's have a vote on this that the city that the commission will have a table at the green

163fair on october 1st and that people will volunteer as they're available always say aye raise your hands or say aye hi hi any news any abstentions hearing none i'll assume it passed unanimously and i look forward to more volunteers uh for this tabling event i'll keep people updated as it goes along but i the cities i'll fill out the survey that was requested and uh and we'll see what develops um okay so let's see a report from staff josh yeah so i don't really have a report from staff in part because this is actually my last week at the city uh i did want to thank many of you i've worked with many of you over the years and i just want to say a quick opportunity to say that uh i feel very fortunate

164to have worked in a community that has always kind of pushed the envelope with sustainability and i know i've learned a lot uh you know just being in this job and working with many of you and i hope to take that on to my next position so thank you all well thanks for all you've helped the city accomplish josh thanks jess and um and uh galen is on vacation which is why josh has stepped in so caleb will be back next month um so the next item on the agenda is the action item so i have several listed here so the first is that um the nap brochures um would be considered as being part of the osi 10k tree program events um so do i have a commissioner that would take that on to

165to to see to see if that could be how if that could happen and report back to us john john is volunteering for that action item second one i have noted here is um how we need to facilitate communication with citizens about the deer call uh is there a commissioner that would they would try to try to work with city staff and council to try to see what might be possible that might lead to a resolution or a judgment by the commission [Music] in terms of setting up some sort of a um improved improved communication with the citizens um i've heard um the focusing on the city website would be a good idea and maybe a deer study group is not really worthwhile at this point given the history so is there a commissioner who

166would want to take on that work and report back next month anybody [Laughter] okay i'll do it i'll do it okay even i'll join you i i just need to stick with the [Music] udc stuff no i understand chris that's right so um i'll take care of that um and then um in terms of and then some and then the chapter 40 the current you know title three chapter 40. um language and the city's code somebody should forward that to the new commissioners how does anybody want to do that my hands up reader will do that and then the last one i have here as an action point is uh uh is my uh my investigation into the phosphorus issue and the history of that and i will i'll update the commission on what i've

167learned at the next meeting on july 22nd so are there any action items i might have missed john has his hand up kathy i'm going to run first and then kathy steve um the energy commission uh has done new commissioner orientation outside of meetings um about an hour long um going over the structure of the city and the bylaws and things like that i think i shared those materials with you i could do that again um and i would encourage you to do that potentially with galen's support and rita's support that's the way we did it and we'll be doing again obviously we're going to be getting new commissioners so that's i'm just want to throw that out there is something to potentially think about you know thanks for bringing that up john my understanding

168is that galen already accomplished that but i'd like to hear back uh directly from the new commissioners about this um and then we'll go to kathy yeah chris uh could we have a email list full name list of of all commissioners sent to us so that we can update our list there's one in legistar that i'll make sure that uh robert mulsahy i think is responsible for that but i'll make sure that uh that's all updated my understanding is that that happened but i need to verify that okay so legistar gives us it does it gives us commission members right yep gives us the commission names and my understanding is that everybody's been added already to the environmental commission distribution email list thank you okay so kathy sorry kathy oh that's okay uh we we

169still have one opening and i thought it might be helpful to create an inventory of our skill set who's on the environmental commission to determine if there is an area of need and i don't know if that's ever been done before no and uh like steve you just mentioned your water expertise and and i wasn't aware of that so that's great but it and i don't know what is lacking but i think it would be helpful and would possibly improve our performance sure i think um yeah that's good to do an inventory but also let's also have everybody identify a need that they think is is missing so i think maybe i should i'll add this as another action point for myself where um let me just send an email among our list here and

170um with a set of questions and i hope everybody can respond in a timely way and then um and then actually you know what i've learned over the last couple of years came through my pfos work i mean i'm working with the national sierra club about pfas and uh i've had quite a lot of interaction with empire staff you know um in the state government and i've also had conversations with brian steglitz over over the years so um i've learned quite a bit about you know how these things are regulated and so um that's something um that i was well aware of and i'm sorry i haven't really you know made other commissioners aware of that but i think that's a great idea kathy so i will do that i'll get that started okay okay

171so i think are there any other action points that people would like to suggest okay i'm hearing or seeing none so um it's the items for the next agenda i think uh i heard chapter 40 uh might be kathy and rita might be ready to have a discussion [Music] you know possibly have a draft resolution to submit um with uh shannon's and chris's input and then um and this is the july sec 22nd meeting and then with the uh the deer call we should probably wait until after we've heard from hvh from the heron valley humane society until then and i um and i will i will actually that's a sixth action point so i will make sure that um so that chris doesn't have to do this all the time i will let me

172contact the huron valley chris could you give me the contact information for the huron valley humane society and i'll try to set some ground rules for their september presentation i've i've been in contact with you i can send you there okay bob thanks that would be for the september meeting is what they suggested that's correct yep that's correct um and so um let's see so um so bob do you want to take care of that directly or if you've been in contact with them why don't we discuss it offline because i'm not entirely sure how to set ground rules i mean i've already invited them to come and present well yeah yeah i'm not thinking about anything greatly restrictive you know just like i do think that things need to be data-driven as much as

173possible okay so let's have a discussion on that offline um so if there's no other items any other proposals for items for our next agenda hearing and seeing none so um our next scheduled meeting is july 22nd at 7 00 p.m the fourth tuesday of the month fourth thursday of the month july 22nd so this uh the last item on the agenda tonight is the public second public commentary uh this is the second opportunity for persons to speak for up to three minutes please call eight 1-888-7888 zero zero nine nine or eight eight eight seven eight eight zero zero nine nine and enter meeting id nine three five two nine seven zero this information is also displayed on the meeting agenda and video feed city staff will select callers that have raised their hand one

174by 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 may be a delay of up to 30 seconds before a connection is established so meanwhile i see john's hand is still up yeah two quick questions about meetings are we we have an august meeting and secondly is a work session planned and if so when yeah um i have not uh thought about that yet

175um i think we will definitely have an august meeting um i'm intending that and that's generally been a working session historically so um so the energy commission is having a normal meeting in august so we will meet um also in in august oh um are there any um so let's move let's see if there's any public comment at this point and now uh josh is anybody on the line i am not seeing anybody okay well i think um all right so um i tell you what um if there's uh if there are no objections i would propose that we schedule the august meeting as a work session uh provided we can get a quorum you know or a significant number of commissioners present okay all right everybody um thank you um if there's no other

176business um no other nothing anybody else wants to discuss i declare this meeting adjourned at um 9 50 p.m thanks everybody see you next month if not sooner thank you steven you