Ann Arbor Environmental Commission Meeting 5/27/21

001this meeting is in accordance with the executive orders from the governor to affect social distancing and mitigate the spread of the covet 19 virus we intend to conduct this meeting similarly to an in-person meeting however please be patient if there are technical issues public comment will be via telephone only to speak during any of the public comment opportunities please call eight 888-788-0099-487 seven eight five three five two four seven and enter meeting id nine four three two four eight six four oh three four that's one too many digit this information is also available on the published agenda in the public notices section of the city website and on the broadcast of this meeting on ctn channel 16 at t channel 99 and online at www.a2 watch ctn is that the right meeting id gallon it's

002got one more digit in it than it usually does 943 hang on uh i'll tell you in a hot second the one that he sent me um it's uh nine four three two four eight no two four eight six four zero three four and that's again nine four three twenty 86 4034 okay no that's good so i stated the correct one at the beginning it's got one more digit than they usually have well i guess um the zoom or universe is expanding okay so i called this meaning to order um uh galen would you read the land heritage statement sure what land heritage statement uh i acknowledge that the land the city of ann arbor occupies is the ancestral traditional and contemporary lands of the aneesh including the ottawa ojibway foldy wagnee and wyandot peoples

003i further acknowledge that our city stands like almost other property in the in the united states on lands obtained generally in unconscionable ways from indigenous people the taking of this land was formalized by the treaty of detroit in 1807. knowing where we live work study and recreate does not change the past but a thorough understanding of the ongoing consequences of this past can empower us in our work to create a future that supports flourishing and justice for all individuals and that's my inheritance statement all right thank you galen um would you start the roll call sure okay just one second [Music] all righty um commissioner graham commissioner graham i'm here commissioner skinner okay commissioner needham commissioner needham here sorry all council member dish commissioner gibb randall here from inaudible right council member griswold from ann

004arbor commissioner collywood here uh chairman brown uh president in ann arbor okay commissioner overpack listen all right commissioner mursky you're attending from ann arbor all righty um commissioner bundia here from ann arbor all right and commissioner ferris all right that's our roll call we have a quorum and i'm here too oh in ann arbor vice chair uh mitchell i apologize okay all right we have a quorum all right thank you galen um so the next item on the agenda is the approval of the agenda um do i have a motion to approve it um lisa i do have a second kathy griswold um i guess we're open for discussion out does anybody wish to change it or no changes okay i hear nothing so um uh all who approve of the agenda as written uh

005please say aye or raise your hand i call anyone opposed anyone upstating okay the agenda passes unanimously um again we changed last month we changed the order of our agenda so this starts the first public commentary period um this is an opportunity for persons to speak for up to three minutes please call eight 1-888-7888 zero zero nine nine and enter meeting id nine four three two four eight six four zero three four this information is also displayed on the meeting agenda and video feed city staff will select callers that have raised their hand one by one using the last three digits of your phone number in order to electronically raise your hand to indicate your desire to speak please press star 9 on your phone you will hear an automated announcement that the host is

006allowing 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 is a delay of up to 30 seconds before a connection is established thank you galen is anyone on the line yet yes we have one caller uh caller five three four yes um and they want to speak okay bring one oh okay caller five three four go ahead and speak go ahead caller hello this is tom stahlberg i'm calling from lowertown in ann arbor and i want to talk about the natural features impacts of the proposed amendments to the adu ordinance i sent you all a letter earlier today i don't know if you've

007all had a chance to read it it's lengthy i won't go over it all right now but just give some highlights and some background on this issue there are extensive changes proposed to the adu origins which especially when taken collectively have significant impacts that have not adequately been addressed at the planning staff and planning commission level citizens have called for further citizen participation that call was turned down two years ago similar changes that were less impactful were brought to council again with planning commission recommendation and public the public asking for further engagement and education of the public uh planning decline but two years ago city council wisely said that without better education engagement of the public these issues weren't being addressed properly and voted it down so we've had two years to educate and engage

008the public and that did not properly occur so we have some unforeseen things that are coming up that members of the public are examining and we want to bring one of those to your attention and that's the rear yard trees so currently any accessory structure picture a one car garage detached in the back of them a lot can be three feet from the side yard or rear yard set back that's a detached structure if you have one you can convert it to a habitable structure now under the current ordnance but you can't create a new habitable accessory dwelling unit uh three feet from the lot line if you don't currently have one so we're about to change that if council passes this so about 20 000 lots would be able to build a haggle structure

009some up to 600 square feet some up to 800 square feet depends on the lot size but a typical r1c lot will be able to build an 800 square foot habitable unit within three feet of the rear and side yard setbacks so imagine what that can do to the rear yard trees and the side yard trees imagine what that does to the trees that are on the neighbors lot if you build that close to the lot line uh i've done development i can picture what it takes to uh to cut branches off one side of a tree to disturb the root zone of a tree you can you're going to kill trees on the neighbor's lot if not completely disturb them plus the trees on the rear yards of this lot that you want to

010put your adu in some of us said well why don't we make the setback a little further a typical r1c setback is 30 feet already so what if it was 15 feet and i asked some people who are professionals in this business you know what they felt was adequate and they concurred about 15 feet but we don't have to settle on 15 if you have other ideas but in essence what is the setback from the rear yard lot line that will protect the trees that are existing there and also when you start taking down trees and grading the lots and creating additional impervious surface and removing trees that soak up storm water we have to deal with the storm water issues so maybe there's some things that could be required like rain gardens other storm

011water management issues that simply haven't had enough discussion yet and i think you're the right body to at least have that discussion so thank you thank you mr stillberg duly noted and i did receive your email earlier today through rita mitchell thank you um is anybody else on the line uh there's no one else okay okay this will be the last call for public comment okay well let's move on to special presentations um the first item on the agenda is um the mapping of ann arbor by anthony bedouin is that how you pronounce your name yes badone madone yeah let me say falsett okay um so you have the floor tony um oh wonderful um let me go ahead and start by sharing my screen however that's been disabled at this time um galen can

012you um enable that thanks galen yup you're welcome talking about a map is not nearly as effective as showing one so a bit of introduction for tony here um sure christopher go ahead our natural features map such as it was was a print about half the size of a wall in a conference room in city hall for the last 19 years and i don't know how it came to pass and you should tell us tony but somehow he got assigned or took up the project to make our natural features map which is a multiple layers of steep slopes wetlands woodlands uh flood plains waterways etc in a digital format that could be accessed by the public and i think it was last fall that he did this and in addition to having the natural features

013layers which you see across the city in front of you right now and can manipulate by turning on and off layers there are behind these things photos going all the way back to 1947. so tony's going to show you this and i'm so excited that this is available to the people of ann arbor it's an extraordinary educational tool about what we have here in terms of natural features and and um it will give us guidance in what we can do and shouldn't do go certainly i certainly hope so um thank you uh chris for the introduction so like i said my name is tony bedone i'm the senior application developer for um the city of ann arbor for gis gis developer i sit in the it office um i've been with the city four years

014um so how did it come to pass so we are branding what we're calling map ann arbor we've been branding what we've been calling map ann arbor for almost a decade now but we're really making an effort to put these public map viewers in the hands of anybody that will use them this one is natural resources focused obviously as chris says i'll be honest much some of this information is housed within the city much of it is really in the public domain federal resources state resources regional resources and and and some the like so uh what a technology like map ann arbor allows us to do is compile information from a variety of sources and make it available in a nice neat easy to use hopefully easy to use bundled viewer for all of you

015so this is a public web viewer it's not exclusive to the environmental commission or residents of ann arbor if you know this url you can access this from an internet connection this is version 2.3 so chris and i have been through a few iterations of this uh it's based on one of the latest map viewer technologies we have access to and this like a lot of the map ann arbor viewers we have a commitment to maintain so with that being said i will just jump into showing the functionality this is meant to be interactive so i'm going to show a few things i think chris has some ideas for discussion but um i'm also happy to take questions and take notes for potential future improvements we know there's limitations but there always is with every

016tech so it's supposed to work well on a phone the other thing is we host this ourselves so you'll see this long url up here and without getting too techy what this basically means is we have the ability to track web metrics on this on this application and we can tell who's using it how they're using it when they're using it from what device from all kind of things like even um you know ses of of the people using it and stuff like that so it's actually kind of cool we're starting to put metric trackers on most of our uh city websites but you know for my focus almost all of our gis web pages are starting to have this and so it's not something we've always had ann arbor but it's something we're doing

017going forward it's in our gi strategic plan to track the usage metrics of all web applications mapping applications um so i will talk about the base map gallery first that chris alluded to so this is you start out with the standard base map but there's a number of different base maps to choose from this is i'll zoom in a little bit this one's plat focused so it kind of takes into consideration stuff you would see on a traditional plat map like dimensions and and um plat information um and then we have a topo focus one so these are one foot contours it came from um the 2018 um initiative and so these as you zoom in a little bit closer you can see the indexes so that's what we have here and then oops i'll

018get to layers a moment and then and then we have a whole host of different photographs in here dating back like chris said back to 1947 so you kind of see how ann arbor changed over time um these started as i as you can see paper or mylar maps in a drawer and so we've scanned them in over the years and geo-referenced them obviously this one's not geo-referenced perfectly i didn't pick this area on purpose so um there is you know so we can go all through the year so there's even infrared imagery where we have it available for the more recent years like here's our 20 20 20 imagery which we took hold of back in october this was flown in april it's very eerie because if you zoom to some of the parking

019lots in ann arbor not many people were moving around in april of 2020 so lots of empty parking lots something that will stand the test of time the other thing baked into here is we do have one for toppo so if you're somebody that wants to look at topography and aerials at the same time that's available to you and then we have our traditional standard ortho imagery for 2020. so the the concept here is that you can pick and choose from these different base maps and i'll show the print functionality in a little bit how um that can pass through into your prints so those are the base layers and then this is what we call overlay layers so these again like i said come from a variety of different sources this is from the

020national wetlands inventory and a resource from the state so this is compiled by our systems planning unit as what they deem to be important to know about wetlands so there's really not any information about the botanicals of the given wetlands because some are from the state's wetland inventory and some are from the national wetland inventory so really this is just an absence or presence of wetland so there's no detail in this one per se um woodlands is this woodlands is a historic layer in ann arbor and this was traced off an older version of a photograph so um in the 90s so admittedly this one's a little bit out of date then we have our floodplain information that comes directly from fema this is from the 2012. i believe i sat and spoke to this

021commission a few months ago with jerry hancock and we showed the floodplain viewer and so maybe that's where some of you have met me before but essentially this is the same information so here's our 500 500-year or it's what they used to call it for us old-schoolers but now it's called the 0.2 percent and then this is the 100-year floodplain here and then this is obviously the floodway so if you go to our floodplain viewer you can get a lot more specifics about floodplain but this is just supposed to be the basics next we have our street tree inventory i know we have tiffany on the call here and so she's much more knowledgeable than i about the street tree inventory but essentially this is our most up-to-date street tree inventory we have it's it's

022a live feed so as we're managing the street inventory as a city forestry unit the data is on this viewer for everybody to to enjoy and we have just a couple of attributes available with the balloon this is one that has a balloon pop up so a little bit of species information and the diameter breast height in range and you can actually see this icon grows a little bit based on the dbh so the bigger the tree leaf the bigger the dbh um so what else going on um these are some other pieces of information actually from our our nap unit sometimes we categorize stuff um as other public owned natural areas for example there's some county stuff on here let me try to find um county farm park i think that might show up

023in purple or not um so here here we go yeah here's some of that so i did these break it into populations is that what's going on here chris i forget exactly what we had going on here uh that's school property there so i think what we tried to do is yeah so the the the nap unit has traced some of these natural areas so yes this is school property but this is environmentally s specific i believe i can get more detail about what the purple layer is i'll be honest with you 100 and then we have our urban tree canopy which obviously students are going to talk about in a little bit this is our past urban tree canopy layer that dates back to 2012-ish era but you're going to learn about today in

024a little while here the update modernization once that happens obviously we'll be delivering the new and improved urban forest and whether we call it an urban tree canopy or just a tree canopy we can talk about that but that'll obviously be available on the viewer and then lastly this is soils this comes from the old soil surveys and they're put into these standard classifications for hydrologic classification you know some of you are familiar with this in the environmental sector a through uh d and then phil so this is that if you zoom out this is actually a county wide resource and this actually is hosted um with washington county but we're partners with them obviously so we're also making that available in the viewer so that's that's the functional layers and then i'll i'll just

025quickly show printing and then i'll take questions so if you were to turn on a few of these things that you're interested in for example maybe wetlands and street trees and some of this stuff doesn't draw until you get into a certain scale for um functionality reasons of the website you can't draw every single layer at the max scale otherwise slows the system down too much but the concept here is that you know there's this measurement widget which is just for you to use and enjoy and measure area grab a coordinate perhaps or or grab a distance and that's kind of for you to if you're doing some planning you can use that tool um the what is in here let me let's turn that widget off sorry clear that and so the print widget

026this is relatively new to the viewer we released this at version 2.13 and we're at 2.15 so what you can do now is export a couple different formats that you see here obviously pdf's really common so you can do just the map but there's also a few layouts available so i'll focus on this um you know like an ansi landscape layout and you can get into the advanced properties here and if you don't know what scale you're at you can press this current button it'll grab in the that's a representative fraction not everybody works in representative fraction that's one unit on the map is 600 units on the earth which is one inch is 50 feet so you take this number and you divide it by 12 if you want to inch to feet some

027of you might be familiar with that some of you might not so um what you'll get out of that if you can force your scale and chris and i were talking about how that's nice to have and whatever layers you have turned on or off in the viewer will pass through you can type notes in here you can put your name you can decide to represent the scale bar and feet or metric if you're interested in that and then you can go ahead and print this and what it does it generates a quick pdf that's available in the context of this browser refresh so if you leave the browser and come back it's not going to keep your pdf but once you get done with it you can open it and you can download this

028pdf so there's that map to scale there's my one to six hundred or one inches fifty feet and you know i happen to have the wetlands turned on and the street trees turned on so that's what passed through into my legend down here so um and what didn't used to work which does work now if you do have a photograph turned on you can you can create that same um so i can create yet another print so i can keep my first print that i created and here's my second print it's always going to be called this and urban natural features obviously the photo ones take a little bit longer but there's the photo one right there in the same legend it prints the time and see there's my notes i put down there so

029yeah that's that's what i had any comments or questions so perhaps you could go to firstenberg park you guys are going to test me i know where stuff is kind of parkway yeah i gotta drive over there so let's see i would probably drive you had it right right in here right yeah so back up a bit and turn on your turn on 1960 air photo i can do that and i i can turn off some of these wetlands perhaps so uh you maybe you can shut the layer list and back out a bit here absolutely just so over on the left um and down all of these hills is the arboretum and forest forest hill cemetery and much of those trees are what are now are native forest fragments these are trees and they

030show up on the woodland inventory but without any discrimination about species or or plant communities and we may learn something about that and then going back to the east toward firstenburg um this entire valley in here oh my goodness so this is before galloping was excavated some of you remember in 1968 the dam the dicksboro dam blew out and as a result of that dewatering of the river which is more or less what you see here they were able to get into the bottom of the river and move soil out of there and make islands and make the pathways and and make a much bigger pond which is now silting in as fast as it can go but so you can pass through time as we come up with more imagery i mean i feel

031like we've combed through all the the mylar drawers we've had but i hear rumors about more imagery around but we if we come across it or one of you comes across it we can work together to get it added into the viewer we'd love to have that as a resource so now you see the haram parkway bridge middle 60s and um through the miller creek wetland which was a terrific um which they really drained in the top just right of the huron parkway gettys road intersection is the ruston came which is a very interesting natural area with a lot of grasslands on it because it's just a big pile of sand you can see orchards yes you can there were many in ann arbor um if you go what does that look like today that

032orchard looks like a neighborhood smaller trees are almost all the trees are gone fence rows showing though with native trees in them um the river edge where there's a steep slope uh if you turn on your topo you'll see this deep salt there there you go well again you can't see the top until you get in nice and tight but um very steep as you can see very very steep and those areas were not never farmed and so they have big oak trees on them native forest fragments we call them and uh um probably the cicadas are climbing out of the ground just as we speak and beginning to begin to talk in those areas 1960 is probably better than 47 but you never know so what's wonderful about this viewer viewer this technology this

033service the city is providing us is the ability to look backward and forward to see how the landscape changed to see where our native forest fragments are and where they've been built under and see where they still exist in cap to see how the use of the land has changed um it's it's as i've said multiple times when we've seen this and i've talked about it and shown it i'm very excited thank you tony well thank you chris for being excited and so i share this with you all so you can be knowledgeable that this resource exists and other mapping resources share them with the teams you work with provide us feedback because it's with your feedback that these viewers get better and better and um you know shoot shoot big because a lot of

034this stuff can be now visualized in these viewers and we can share resources from bigger and smaller entities and we're already doing that with the county in the state so so just know that that type of collaboration is possible through this tech and um it takes you to use it to find out what you can use it for what you can't use it for as you say you're looking at the earhart orchard uh this is so the earhart mansion was um not long after this orchard was planted and there's a very interesting story in that corner of the city okay yeah well thank you anthony this is wonderful yeah great so um do you guys want to share so this is the long url but there's actually a short url which i don't know if

035galen will let me put it in the chat or not but it's a2gov.org slash a2 natural features so it's not very complicated and it'll do a redirect so a2gov.org slash a2 natural features all one word okay that was one of one of my questions um which browsers do you recommend using uh well it works in all of them um i.e not not as well but this this new viewer series of technology we're using is is compatible with all of them safari firefox um even the new edge that's out so so i i'm using chrome right now that's personally my favorite but it'll work in pretty much any of them it's it doesn't work as well on a phone i mean it's it's it's mobile responsive but it works best in a in a browser well

036yeah i expect so all right well thank you we have another one here yeah i don't want to take all night please okay tony please stay for a minute um galen just had some technical problems and he asked for uh you to pass the host ship let me stop my sharing here and all right thank you tony absolutely thank you for having me so we have we have some questions we have some hands up here whoops ask them as as i funnel through this host thing go ahead and ask okay so john mursky and then um kathy i think had her hand up next and then shannon thanks tony great presentation and great work for the city quick questions hopefully uh geographic boundaries uh i mean if i'm interested or someone's interested in heading over

037and using this towards ypsilanti or chelsea at what point does information drop off um and then the second question is uh it may not be in the public domain but is does the city have gis uh maps and data for other kinds of things like um city infrastructure and things like that we have a plethora so answer your first question you know i work for the city we have you have to draw the line somewhere right there are county-wide viewers the the county is a very successful gis program as well and map washtenaw exists and there's many resources on there we kind of shared the same base backend infrastructure so i mean the way these photos are cached and the way the base maps are cached you know i do about a two to three

038mile boundary around the outer perimeter of the city and then that's all we have and when we contract for new imagery we only go out so far for obvious reasons so um i will host everything i have access to but the the line does end and then as far as what are the resources we have we have tons of resources not all of our viewers are in the public domain because of security constraints but pretty much all interested parties can have um password access and we have many of our layers available on the ann arbor data catalog for download so students and researchers can compile their own and then of course there's always contact me and my team member john ranske from it and we'll get with you and and hand you data if we

039have to i mean we're you know so much of it is around if you just google it you can find it hopefully that answers your question thank you but check out map washington too i mean that's what i'd say yeah if you haven't already okay i am not able to pass the the host it's not letting me it says i don't have access to do that so um i will hang out [Laughter] please thank you very much i get excited about data visualization given that i've been studying it since before computers or at least desktop computers uh one question regarding your uh layer for wetlands would that be considered wetlands that cannot be built upon and i'm thinking about adus i don't know if anyone can answer that so it's a i would say it's

040it's managed by the systems planning unit so jerry you guys obviously know jerry he is kind of the champion of that piece of information so instead of just using an off-the-shelf resource like the federal national wetlands inventory we at the team of ann arbor they really systems planning has compiled this resource of what you just said places we don't want development to happen and i would say this wetland layer is more restrictive for environmental reasons than just your traditional off-the-shelf national wetland inventory but i would reach out to jerry from systems planning to get the full facts on that okay jerry hancock yes yes okay thank you you're very welcome so it's like national wetlands inventory plus okay yeah and and there's um there's size kind of uh restrictions and things like that kathy for

041that you know in terms of what like in terms of the real regulatory world about what you can build on and not but it's also just generally not good practice in a wetland because the soils usually are terrible for that kind of thing um so this gives people an easier way to be able to know if they're if they have hydric soils in their backyard um so that would be really important in terms of planning um yes um so it seems so i use map wash not every day tony and it's like it's such a fabulous resource and i am so excited to see this too when you were um moving around two things struck me that seemed different one is the scale it looked like you were able to zoom in closer than map

042wash now am i right about that and two the resolution also looked way more crystal clear uh with this uh than than map washington and am i right about that too you're right in both regards thank you for noticing um some of you may know i know you know shannon i used to be a county employee for 17 years yep and then i jumped over to our team um but um you know the reality is the size of washington county in comparison to the size of ann arbor we're able to produce stuff more resolute without using as many computer resources so that goes to what john was just saying about the scale but we've also put some extra love and heart into this to to do what the other one can't so and we do

043go down to um one to 240 for our tightest skill that that is that is super exciting because and i think that this will play into um i hope our discussion right at adus because it makes it so much easier for people to be able to um zoom in and see their lot and then understand some of the resources that are on there there are a lot too that the city may care about um in terms of planning and stuff like that so it's great that this is coming on board right now um so people can have just access to information that they wouldn't have otherwise so it's it's super exciting that you all are doing this and i can't wait to get my my my mouse into it i mean one of our strategic

044planning goals which you'll see later this year is we're going to have like a one-stop map page we have one but it's it's not as organized it needs some it needs some uh we need to readdress it so it's very very organized and all viewers are in the same place so all of our residents and and folks doing business in and around ann arbor can get to all these maps you can't have one map that has everything right right you know sometimes you got to use multiple pieces but right yeah well this just looks super exciting so thank you for all your work on this oh thank you guys i wish i could pass the host back so you guys could continue your meeting but um i think i can i think i can fix

045that i should have access to the osi zoom account as well so i can leave and then log back in with that account thank you sean okay thanks sean so um are there any other questions for tony tony i had a question about impervious service i don't know if you covered that or if i've missed it or is that something no so we have a we have an impervious service viewer a2gov.org a2 stormwater so that's actually built on our older viewer platform so it's the same gis but a different front face um so that exists and we are going to be using the 20 20 imagery we received last fall to take another poke at impervious but right now it's the 2018 impervious that's available on that viewer and there's also some really interesting stuff

046on that viewer like um um if you're getting if you're able to get credits on your property for participating in you know best management practices and rain gardens and storm water management and stuff so that information is available on there along with the impervious from our last two years from 15 and 18. so the plan is to move that forward to 18 and 20 and then we'll probably facelift it and use this new viewer format that's uh our our it's on the plan to do in fall so so that will be revised but there is a viewer out there a2gov.org a2 stormwater okay any other questions for uh tony well i just have a few uh a few more tony um one is that how often is this map updated you have different version histories

047or something right yeah so so the base technology at this point isn't really updated all that often but the information behind the map as we get information it live feeds into this so things like aerials we load in every two years or three years when we obtain them but like street trees that the forestry team manages as soon as the street tree is mapped in our base system it's mapped on this map and wetlands and all of the other stuff i mean things like a flood plain and a soil they don't change ever so they're never updated so the overall viewers are looked at usually on an 18-month cycle and we use the web metrics and things like i was talking about the beginning of meeting to see which web apps need more attention than

048others okay so eight every 18 months we kind of take a another peek at them or if chris emails me a bunch of times that's another way i look at him okay just one more question and that is if a citizen discovers an error how would they report it that's a really good question um i'm not i'm not 100 sure on this viewer um if the pop-up exists but we have a map feedback.a2gov.org email mapfeedback.a2gov.org email and that you can find that on the on the a2gov page under the map data catalog there's a link there and so we at the gis team see those emails and review them all the time i i have to make sure the link is on this site i'm not i'm not sure if it is okay wonderful um

049okay if there are no other questions um thank you so much tony of course thanks tony thanks gang what a what a work product thank you thanks guys i'm going to stick around and watch the students present on uh the other thing i'm interested in so okay so i'll mute myself so let's see um are there other presentations um on the agenda i don't see they're not on the agenda rita oh yeah right under second line there climate change and creating a healthy and vibrant community in ann arbor probably you're gonna have to admit him in uh galen i don't see him on the screen here yet sorry let me um make uh rita and steven because they know what they're doing that's you sean right okay how do you make two people host okay

050it says i'm a host now i do not know how to do this rita have you done this before i have not and i don't see the people that are supposed to be here um thank you tiffany they may need to be admitted to the meeting yep you'll be under attendees so if you click participants rita down at the bottom if you move your mouse see that okay it pops open a window yep 16 panelists seven attendees go to attendees uh-huh click on thomas's name there should be um more allowed to talk um there should also be promote to panelists anyway so do it for all of those people yeah well okay christian hello everyone welcome uh is bill decora to be in i don't know that name so i don't know okay and there's

051an alyssa alyssa sklar she is okay and um hi hi thomas bill bill in your group i don't think so right okay okay and i see two phone numbers so i think those are on the side i think everyone's here great okay welcome thanks so much chris do you want to do an intro of this group so thomas i hope you'll um lead the way but uh but i hope your group will introduce themselves and give a little of about their background on what you're studying and then um what you all seeking to do as as a project for master students at the school of environment and sustainability go for it thomas absolutely all right let me go ahead and get screen sharing going over here presenter view and i says i'm not allowed to

052screen share yeah rita you're gonna need to make thomas the host tiffany i'm glad you're here rita you're muted all right thomas it says you're the host see if you can do that now sounds good all right can everyone see my screen here i can yep excellent all right and i think is it lindsay or alyssa are you starting us off yeah i'll start us off um good evening everyone i hope you're all doing well welcome to an overview and brief description of our masters project for the school for environment and sustainability at the university of michigan in which we will be characterizing ann arbor's urban tree canopy next slide please and before we delve into some of these details for the project we will introduce ourselves all right everyone my name is thomas esterbrook

053i'm originally from central illinois and i got my undergraduate at grinnell college in iowa i just finished my first year here at seas and i'm in the geospatial data science track hi everyone uh i'm christian schroeder i'm originally from massachusetts um i graduated from salem state community college in 2018 with a degree in geography um i i'm now attending cs to get my master's in geospatial data science then hi i'm alyssa sklar i'm originally from eastern pennsylvania i graduated last year from depaul university with my ba in geography concentrating in gis and geotechnology and now i am a dual degree masters student first at cs i'm in the geospatial data sciences tract and then as well as the school of information where i'm studying librarianship and archival practices and i'm lindsay i come from washington

054state and i studied mathematics at university of portland where i graduated in 2019 and i came out to ann arbor to study geospatial data science like all of my teammates so first off we'd like to briefly review some background information on the importance of tree canopy coverage and the conservation of forest fragments tree canopy provides multiple benefits to the local areas such as preventing the acceleration of storm water runoff which in turn slows erosion of the surrounding land the presence of trees has also been shown to lower the average temperature of their environment particularly in urban areas that otherwise would see very little shade canopies provide a habitat for local wildlife and on a broader scale trees are carbon fixing meaning that they capture and store carbon that would otherwise occupy our atmosphere native forest

055fragments provide additional benefits to the surrounding land native trees are generally better equipped to survive in their local climate which makes them more likely to survive and thrive here they are also more integrated with the local ecosystem which means that they often provide food shelters seeds and other resources for native fauna that otherwise may not be provided by non-native or younger forests the city has had surveys performed in the past to determine ann arbor's canopy coverage most notably uh the partnership with uh davie resource group and the michigan department of natural resources to conduct an eye tree analysis in 2012 the results of the analysis revealed and harvard have approximately 1.45 million trees at the time removing about 405 tons of carbon annually in addition david your source group produced an inventory of the city's

056street trees recording metrics such as tree species and size as we saw in the earlier presentation so um right now for our project we have some data um of the urban tree canopy like christian said the street trees we also have data from nichols arboretum as well as the university's campus canopies and additionally we do have some information on shrubbery and grasses at black pond woods as well on this map also highlighted is different locations of parks natural areas and the golf courses in the orange color that we intend on sampling to fill in some of these gaps of the canopy data and we will continue to elaborate on this throughout our presentation so we have three main goals that we intend to achieve through this project first we intend to use remote sensing data

057to create a comprehensive gis layer of ann arbor's urban tree canopy that can be added to the ann arbor natural features inventor inventory second you use an open source statistical computing software package such as python or r to develop a script that uses one or more open source machine learning algorithms to reliably classify trees by species and estimate biomass from multiple input data sets including lidar and third in dialogue with local experts we will develop a story map that translates the findings of our canon beam map and biomass calculations into terms that are useful for public and private land managers who will be making stewardship decisions regarding ann arbor's trees so the question now is what methods are we actually going to use to create this comprehensive map of the city's trees and their biomass

058and obviously manually locating identifying and weighing all the city's million plus trees is out of the question but thankfully we have access to several remotely sensed data sets including 3d lidar point clouds and high resolution aerial photographs our aim is to harness the power of machine learning to create a computer model that when fed these data sets can locate classify and estimate the biomass of each tree in a given area with enough computing power we can then do this for the whole city and create a gis layer for the entire urban canopy in the images on the slide we can see a few examples of the type of data we have at bottom left is an example of the high resolution aerial photography taken by the usgs on top is an example of a lidar

059point cloud it's a 3d map basically where each dot represents a return from a laser scanner carried on an airplane and so it gives us a 3d map of surface features which we can use to identify individual trees within the canopy and finally at bottom right is an example of a secondary product derived from lidar in this case it's a map of individual tree crowns at the arboretum uh so on this slide we have a rough outline of how we plan to implement machine learning for this project before breaking down the process i want to briefly go into why it's appropriate for this task in brief one of the biggest advantages to machine learning is its versatility what it's good is taking whatever data is on hand and detecting statistical trends and differences that we

060might not even know to look for ourselves so as long as the data we have captures some of the differences in between tree species it's potentially useful for inclusion in a machine learning model and thankfully the datasets we are using should provide dozens of possible variables giving us a very good chance of being able to tease out distinctions between tree species or at least tree genuses so what we what we ultimately want is a computer program that can take in all of those data sets on the previous slide and output a really good guess as to what type of tree is in a given image and uh and also give an estimate of its biomass and in this that's the gray box labeled classifier on this map um and because the types of trees that

061we're interested in are pre-existing categories we're doing something called supervised classification and this requires that we supply the computer with examples of each tree species which are called training data so in our case this means that we need a data set of trees that have already been identified by species and we'll go into more on how we're doing this in the next section but when we have that we can then feed these into a machine learning algorithm which is the gray box there um which will then associate the information in the remote sensing data with the species labels that we gather on the ground and then essentially build a program that can do this for other data that hasn't already been labeled so training a machine learning model is an iterative process there are many

062possible algorithms we could use and each one has its own set of parameters that will need to be tweaked and tested um so the training data that we're going to be gathering it will thus serve a dual purpose so it will also be set aside to act as a testing data set so that we can compare the output of our classifier to things we've already classified ourselves so for example if the classifier repeatedly takes in remotely sensed data for what we already know is an oak tree but says it's a maple we have an indication that we need to go back and tweak the parameters we're using to train the algorithm better and teach you how to distinguish between those so finally after we've iterated through that training and testing process and reached an acceptable

063level of accuracy we'll be able to feed into our classifier the entire data set for the whole city not just those for the trees we've already identified ourselves and this will allow us to produce a final map of tree species and biomass for the entire city but with that said as a team we're still in the very early stage of this process and so our focus for the summer right now is just on building up a really robust set of training data that covers all the possible tree types we might be encountering in ann arbor um just to ensure that we have a really good chance at building a really good model um and i will try it over for more on that yes so like alyssa showed before in the map as far as

064training data goes we've gathered existing data like the ann arbor street tree data the nicholls arboretum stems and we've gotten permission to use other data collected like the u of m campus trees and so we looked at the geography of all of that and used it to identify gaps which then informed our list of sample locations and so now this summer we're delving into the forested areas around ann arbor to identify canopy trees within randomly located 30 by 30 meter plots um and in the top right hand corner uh that shows some of the four letter codes of species we run into a lot so lots of red oak black cherry and sugar maple so far um so then our current field work update right now is that we've collected data at black pond woods

065lily park and bird hills with a lot more locations to come we've been really having a lot of fun out there and especially on the hot days we are very grateful for the canopy like this one at bird hills and then looking forward so uh right now we're gathering our training and testing data within ann arbor and simultaneously doing some data cleaning and preparation to put them into the models like thomas explained and then looking forward into the fall we'll start testing different machine learning algorithms for the canopy classification and then once we've reached acceptable accuracy on that then we'd test biomass estimation models and within um with our data and imagery we'll also create a turf grass map and then to wrap it all up in the winter of 2022 we will compile these

066data layers like the tree classification turf grass map biomass estimation into a web map ideally and then we'd also produce our final project report and present and so before we open it up to questions or pass it on we'd really like to thank the environmental commission for proposing this project and for having us here tonight and thank you to the office of sustainability and innovations for funding our summer work and thank you to our advisors shannon bryant's and jason talent we are really grateful to have so much enthusiasm and support for us and for our project very good well thank you thank you everyone that was an excellent presentation um so um i see some hands up uh peck and then shannon hi everybody um it's great to see you on zoom um i'm sad

067that uh you've been here for a whole year and i have yet to see you in person um yes i'm sure you're sad that we had this kind of strange year but uh really great to see what you're doing i'm interested in the idea of of course you're going to be doing all of ann arbor and you're going to be trying to balance essentially the amount of information you can have with any at any one location with the bigger scale of having to do the whole city and i'm wondering have you thought about maybe zooming in on some sites like sagittal forest which is a seas property to try and push the envelope with this machine learning algorithm to see how much better you could do if you really were able to go in and

068sample more trees and the most interesting thing to me is would it be possible do you think to get it tree health you know there are a lot of trees say in saigon forest but certainly around michigan i don't know ann arbor as well as i should uh there are a lot of trees well they're oak trees here for sure i know in my own yard that are dying because of certain diseases and i know in saginaw forest some of the trees were planted by forestry students long ago and they're starting to die and they're certainly not doing too well anymore some of the big pine trees for example and i wonder if the machine learning would allow you to map out tree health and get a sense of where trees are are doing just

069fine and where they're not and then the second question i have for you is would you be you might not have time for this but then to be able to dig in and see why are they not doing so well some are just getting really old some are getting a disease an invasive pasture pathogen and some might be affected by climate change and the only reason i asked that last one is because michigan is warming more than the nation as a whole interestingly enough it's getting wetter more than the national hole in terms of extreme precipitation but at the same time paradoxically it's also drying out and so we might start to see trees uh suffering much as they are out west where it's much more obvious so two questions can you get it health

070and then uh well you have time to maybe understand if you could get at health why certain species are suffering right so go ahead sorry okay um i can take this one so so for the first question i can't answer definitively one way or another um the way you would probably go about it is when you're gathering your training data you would want to go ahead and find some systematic way to uh label you know each tree that you're measuring at with a certain level of health and if possible um if you want to be able to use remote sensing to get at why trees aren't doing well as well for any tree that's not doing well you would then create subcategories and then you would try and train the model and it's it's not

071guaranteed to work the question would be if these changes in health produce differences that are measurable in terms of uh you know the the way that they reflect light in different spectra that would show up on an aerial photo for example or the way that the lidar scanner would create a point cloud of that tree um and i can't say for sure and i also i am we're all geospatial data science students on this team so we don't have quite as much of the conservation ecology background view to address some of these questions but um it would really just depend on if the differences between healthy and unhealthy trees are in some way registered in the whatever data sets you're trying to train the model on um because if they are then with enough iterations

072and with you know the right tuning of parameters a machine learning model should be able to pick up on it and then you should be able to go ahead and feed it new data sets and get an estimation of which trees or what percentage of trees are doing badly or are doing well thanks there are a lot of different forest health issues that present a lot of the same symptoms so you might see a thinning crown or leaves changing colors and that could be a number of different issues so something might be able to tell you that there's something going on with these trees but it's not going to be able to tell you necessarily what whether it could be simple leaf scorch or it could be oakwood you know what i mean it's so

073it'd be really hard for a machine learning as as i understand this program right now to be able to differentiate and identify what forest health impacts or issues we're having out there so um shannon yeah so um this is so cool first of all i just think this is great i am um curious about um the same species of trees that presents in a really different way versus like when it's in open grown versus in a dense forest and wondering if you can tell like when you're feeding the um the information to machine learning algorithms whether they can tell are they looking at like really just sort of the leaves and and sort of its signature or is it also taking in information about form and um and size and things like that because you

074know a white outfit an open field may present really differently than a white oak that's that's super tall and skinny next to a bunch of other trees in a forest and i'm just wondering if you all can get to that level of resolution to really be able to tell the difference because different trees can present really differently in different situations so in general as long as when you're gathering your training data and feeding it to the algorithm as long as you tell it that both the the canopy oaks and the field oaks are in the same class of oak then the model should be able to adapt it should be able to figure out that okay there's a broader variance in ins and and to answer your other question with that 3d lidar data we

075should be able to also include information about the overall volume of the crown any even the shape of the crown um there's some papers that without getting too deep into the weeds that look at some ways to very simply you know get even if you have an oak tree or a deciduous tree of equal volume to a conifer that's very cone-shaped there's ways to distinguish between the two of them from lidar data and so it so the key is just making sure that when you have a classic that you're capturing the full range of variants in that class so we could inadvertently bias our sample um and and fail to capture those uh open growing trees if we don't make sure to gather training data for them and so that's one of the reasons we're

076hoping to sample at golf courses for example because we're going to try to also make sure in addition to canopy trees we're also getting at us yeah yeah that's really interesting um and then one thing i i just got into the um the website that tony was telling us about and i went into the street trees and and we're only getting just genus for that and i'm wondering if um when when you pull up your your your slide that had you know the abbreviation um going on of the species that um that included more detailed information are you all getting it would be awesome if we could get our street tree data to have um to to get the full latin name because again this relates to our adu discussion coming up i think in

077terms of taking trees down i am a total tree hugger i'm not a tree hugger of certain invasive species and i would be perfectly happy to put an adu in the middle of a norway maple that's me personally and so um like it would be great to know whether somebody has a norway maple in their yard or sugar maple which i would feel really differently about so i don't know if that level of information you feel like is is really achievable based on what you're um describing here tiffany we have that right yeah um shannon when when you click on the tree it says genus and dbh but above that there's a line and it says common name maple sugar or it is there so i just have to look a little deeper it's in

078the bubble that pops up awesome okay thanks great alrighty that's it for me thank you i'm excited to see your work thank you okay um thank you then john and then rita kudos from my side as well i have three questions i'm wondering if you are building on training and data sets um that have already previously been done and if you plan on collaborating with maybe other universities and municipalities to share what you're doing secondly i'm wondering um if there's any limitation in the number of tree types that you can identify and third i'm wondering um are you able to identify understory trees a lot of our invasives here are basically you know shorter trees and understories and i'm wondering if they're going to show up on the kind of lidar imaging and censoring that's

079that you're using as a base for this thanks very much so um as far as the understory trees go unfortunately anything that's over topped by a canopy we won't be able to pick up because we're using that aerial imagery and it um it's just not going to show up consistently enough to be accurately classified we are however making sure to take samples when when when invasive shrubs do show up in a canopy of their own where they're not over topped we're making sure to take sample points in those areas so that we have some training data to identify those and hopefully that can at least provide a sort of clue as far as what areas are most threatened and so forth um and then sorry can you remember your so i was wondering also um

080if there's any limit to the number of tree species um that you can identify and the other is um are you building on work done elsewhere in terms of training and data sets and if you are also maybe planning on sharing what you're doing so that other municipalities and universities can use what you've done and expand on this geographically or whatever so as far as the limit to the number of tree species it's sort of yes and no um because in in principle no but the key is that to accurately classify a tree we're going to be needing to gather enough training data to really capture the the range of possible variables that are encompassed by that tree and so looking at some similar studies that have been done and in our literature review and

081everything um i know there was one done for detroit uh by our advisor and i think it took the 20 most common trees uh and then classified everything else into other um and so it's really going to depend on what our training data looks like at the end of the summer both from the street tree inventory and also from what we gather so i can't really answer any more specifically than that but it really just depends are we getting enough information to really feel good about uh classifying those trees um and then as far as collaborating and so forth um no but we are trying to make sure that this process especially as we process the data that we've gathered and everything we're trying to do it using open source software so that this is

082easily reproducible by other interested parties okay um rita um i'm also excited by this information and look forward to seeing the result but i want to also call out and as much as i love trees i want to call out the really interesting thing that we'll get in terms of the turf grass measurements because we've been talking as an environmental commission and in terms of encouraging use of less turf grass in the city as a way of addressing some of the uh just a lot of different issues for climate change reducing greenhouse gases from extra mowing and thing and many many things so i just want to say i appreciate that the work will include um that kind of information that will help us see if we are effective in encouraging people and businesses and

083institutions to reduce their mode areas okay thanks um are there any other questions it looks like chris has his hand up well i think tony you're still on the line and i want to make sure that these students know that you've got some really recent aerial data that is very dense and very high resolution that may be of help to them and i missed the last meeting i'm not sure the message got through to them and made the connection but perhaps you can tell them what you have we've got a meeting light up tomorrow so so yeah that that's what i wanted to say so first of all um thank you for this effort this looks this looks amazing and i know the fact that you're working with both shannon and jason it's going to

084be a success because you have some wonderful advisors but but i do want to say that um you know we from the city of it's geis program are not like technically on the project but i feel like we should be and so um i really appreciate the office of sustainability for sponsoring this but don't be strangers with us and i feel like we should have some check-ins throughout the summer and fall i just want to put on for the record i also work part-time as an adjunct lecturer over in the urban planning program at tauban college in data science as well so um you i'm here for you as a resource um also and we're going to meet tomorrow and talk about some of the data we have if you don't put all the inputs

085into your model you'll never know what your model could generate so let's exhaust every possible option throughout this to make it as successful as possible that's all and you guys are gonna have fun and um i'm jealous i don't get to go run around the trees all summer but anyway thank you thank you are there any other questions well all four of you i really appreciate you and i'm so happy that you joined with us to do this thank you a bunch yeah thanks chris for setting this in motion so um yeah i just have one question and that is i i assume you're using like a neural net kind of um analysis package and then you um and so you have but you have lidar data now the question i have is um of

086course the canopy is evolving during the whole annual cycle so um i mean the basic uh the basic data input are you are you taking it from a particular uh just a particular short part of the year or are you considering taking data from the spring summer and and using that as part of the inputs we're definitely going to be taking data from different times of year because again that's it's one way to capture that full variance and also capture the differences between species and again the more the more ways we can get the algorithm to suss out those subtle differences in between species of trees the better chance we have of getting a really accurate classification so we have i don't remember offhand what we have but i know we have some leaf off

087data sets and i think we have some from from springtime as well and so we'll definitely be including that as another way of getting at those variances okay hopefully there's a good uh mid-october set because that's when the native forest fragments show up that's when you see the city's oak tree okay if there are no other questions i think we will close out and thank you again um you see's team for updating us on your work on your project and congratulations it's wonderful good job yes all right thomas you're going to need to make rita or actually it looks like galen's back galen you want to be host again make galen host so next month next month continuing natural features things uh we'll have dave bourneman who will talk about the city's natural areas and

088really get deep into what native forest fragments are and when their natural is and why they're important and how they can guide us toward a more sustainable city landscape maybe we'll also be ready to present an early version of amendments to the udc about better protecting trees in the city we'll see we've been working on it several months as you know and we're getting closer okay well thanks chris um so the next item on the agenda is the approval of the minutes for april 22nd meeting um i hope you all have had a chance to look at them um kathy you have your hand up i was just moving to approve either a second uh press seconds um all who uh approve say aye or raise your hands i any opposed all right any abstentions

089all right um the minutes are accepted unanimously um let's see so the next item here is a new business we have a resolution for the gelman monitoring plan and uh so rita do you want to do you want to uh lead this discussion sure i'll kick it off and and i believe that council member griswold may want to say some things as well i really actually consider this to be somewhat a continuation of work we've done earlier this year um so i just want to say that this is about the allen creek drain monitoring plan that we addressed in january and we're really fortunate i think to have knowledgeable and persistent members in the community who followed up on the gelman plume for years and vic now specifically is one who identified the 1 4

090dioxin present in the 1980s and he then proceeded on a career working in the epa excuse me somebody's somebody should probably mute and hear a lot of background he went to work for the epa worked on super funds and he returned to ann arbor in the last few years and he's continued to apply his expertise on the super fund cleanup actions to support our community where he identified the plume in the first place um so this commission unanimously in january commended mr ducknell for his long-standing dedication to assure the cleanup of the serious industrial pollutant of 1-4 dioxin and in january we unanimously voted to advise city council to support washington county water resources commissioner evan pratt in his effort to issue a notice of violation to galilean company about the infiltration of one foreign

091dioxin dioxane in the allen creek drain in it is a municipal separate storm sewer system called an ms4 that notice of violation was completed gelman responded with a plan that we saw just recently that was distributed to us by this mr bicknell along with some of his comments that that drew my attention and that of council member griswold to this issue um and so we we thought that it was worthy of of bringing to our group again to discuss and continue that discussion and to consider a resolution that we've put together we're asking for multiple things for council to reject the plan as presented and eagle the michigan environment and great lakes and energy department we're asking the water resources commission and council and other local governments to revise to suggest revisions to the monitoring

092plan adding some sampling and monitoring wells and that the that the those entities involved um require gelman to revise this objective and criterion for abatement that is uh those are the basic things that i wrote up as results um in our document so um with that i'll turn it up to um councilmember riswald and ask if you have any comments that you'd like to make oh okay thank you rita that that covers most of it and i just want to mention that i did talk to the washington county uh chair sushink today and she thanked me for this resolution and she also said that the statutory drain board had authorized evan pratt to get quotes to monitor it and and evan may be able to share more information about that um but it's it's probably

093going to take all of the community to continue to put pressure on gelman to to actually clean up and address this dioxane contamination to acceptable standards and uh evan is here so i don't want to speak for him if if he wants to say something that would be great um through the chair yes okay um yeah so we did we have seen uh the proposed work plan from uh gilman's consultant i have spoken with uh eagle michigan department of energy great lakes and other things in environment right so there are a couple of three areas where first off we do not feel that their work plan is is complete for starters um secondly uh as you all may be aware many of the folks at eagle who would be providing comment on this uh said

094they were sorry that they were spending a lot of time preparing for the court case which in my opinion went pretty well at the beginning of may so i believe that was time well spent but that did cost us on this so i'm awaiting uh a letter from them i'm not an expert in these work plans and in uh you know environmental sampling remediation and every single aspect of the statutes out there but uh i'm waiting for response from eagle i have agreed to be the issuer of the cover letter that says here are the things we expect from you and many of those things will be from eagle but in summary i feel that we do need to get some ground water samples i agree with anyone who has said and i think it's

095pretty easy to say that whatever was sampled in the water that is in the pipe uh we sampled that in dry weather and there was flowing water so that means there's groundwater getting in there and we know from the prior sampling regimes that there is also uncontaminated groundwater in there so i agree with anyone who says hey uh surely the groundwater in some places must be more contaminated than the readings we're getting in pipe right the in-pipe water is diluted in short so i feel like it's really important to get a good handle on where that what level that contaminated groundwater is at i think there is some debate and confusion including in my own brain on what is the threshold requirement and that is one of the things that i've specifically asked eagle to

096please make absolutely clear to me and in as well as uh gelman what their position is i have spoken to the assistant attorney general and the county's legal counsel uh that that's a pretty important thing and i think they agree that's a pretty important thing to pin down uh i i don't know what what they're going to say if it's this 280 groundwater surface interface or if it is the 29 for the vapor intrusion but regardless i'm looking for that specific direction from those folks and at the end of the day the reason for sampling in the groundwater is to be able to know exactly the groundwater right by the pipe exactly what is getting in there so it's a pretty narrow uh piece of the legal construct that this ms4 operates within uh it

097might be of interest to for people to know because i know it's very challenging to read every single one of those briefs from every single expert in the court case particularly when the judge seemed to have made up his mind fairly quickly uh without having to have those presented in the case so we didn't those of us who just viewed the court case didn't get to see it but the point is dr larry lemke proposed a pretty extensive groundwater sampling routine as part of the legal action so i just want to make sure this group understands that that's already in court that's something that's already been requested in court uh that is not in the amended consent judgment that the judge ordered up but that certainly is in the pleadings that's already ongoing that we

098need more information um at this time what i've been authorized by the county's statutory drain board which which governs decisions about expenditures on most of the county drains within the city is to take two samples i believe it's very evident from research that i've done and folks that i've talked to that the highest concentrations of groundwater immediately adjacent to this allen creek pipe are probably in the vicinity of the hannah nature area which is behind the salvation army off of huron if you're familiar with that area right the urbana here on mark hanna vicinity so we've got a specific location out there where i'm interested in seeing that information however what i've been authorized to do is to take the quotes one of the particular issues in the work plan uh which others have pointed

099out is they're not proposing to sample the groundwater yet and they haven't really described uh well when when will they make the decision whether or not to sample it what they are doing is a pretty extensive uh amount of research on what's actually in the pipe and their position is that will help them determine the best locations to sample the groundwater and my feeling is you know much as the city has done uh with some of the monitoring wells that they have already determined are necessary to uh be sentinels for barton pond that they're they know where they want to do them brian stiglitz at the plant has worked with a consultant to do those and if the city has to just pay out of pocket to do those because gilman can't get there fast

100enough they'll just go ahead and do that so i'm following that lead and saying i think we have a pretty good idea where the concentrations would be the worst in the ground water and that would really help us understand if we're uh you know on a precipice here or or if they do you know where do we stand i guess from from pursuing it any further standpoint at the end of the day i believe eagle is also looking for [Music] to provide me clarity on their expectations regarding um there's usually a corrective action plan so the the way this ms4 thing works is sometimes the immediate action is required but more normally there is a reasonable time frame sometimes a five-year time frame for uh you know providing some type of corrective action and just

101a reminder to this group and that will be my last detail and i'll take a pause for you guys to talk uh a little further i mainly came to listen um i'd like to make sure that i understand what eagle's position is on that corrective action plan because ultimately my office is a permit holder through through them my personal feeling is i'm not sure my office has done anything wrong where we should be cited or uh be responsible for an issue that i thought eagle was in charge of but nonetheless i'd like to help right we all want this to go away it's not going to go away soon but we need to take each little bite of that elephant as we can so the point is uh i wanted to have quotes available in

102case gelman is reluctant to be move a little more quickly with at least getting some amount of groundwater sampling and uh if they don't get there in time we'll go ahead and proceed through the statutory drain board and move forward with this i would certainly like to have some understanding what's in the groundwater in that area as we get towards the end of summer early fall you know at the latest okay evan i have a question sure that is um is there going to be a public hearing on this is that part of the normal process that eagle will have a will scheduled public hearing i i'm not aware of any public hearing i'm not aware that a public hearing would typically part of the public process as far as review of a work plan

103uh and this is not i guess the typical work plan that they just review internally and and uh make a final decision on you know they're gonna provide their written comments to my office and they're looking to my office to push that out much like with the pfas and the tri-bar thing up in whitson it was actually the community that had to pursue the enforcement of that situation although eagle provided some support okay and which um only one more question which uh which government entities have legal standing here do you think i am no attorney on this one and as i said i'm i'm feeling like uh i'm feeling like there's something that's already in court that's related to this as far as the sampling piece maybe not the make the ms4 go away but

104i feel like there is some legal standing for the county as i've mentioned before and other times and you all may have seen the county is a the county drain office county drain law in michigan is special assessment law so i want to be sensitive to the notion that any money that's expended on investigating or any further action beyond investigation really is the city's money so i've certainly alerted the city administrator and some of the staff that hey we've taken some quotes and if if we're not going to see gentlemen at least getting a better understanding for us on the groundwater in a reasonable amount of time why don't we just go ahead and do that ourselves we have the right to do that there's nobody can prevent us from doing that i have an

105easement um dan you wanted to um comment on those questions dan mcnell yeah i just wanted to thank evan for his comments and um i think you know we're pretty close here if we do get some groundwater uh monitoring wells in but the basic uh question that we have is what is going to be the criteria for remediation and in the uh washington county uh ms4 permit the municipal stepper storm server system permit which evan holds evan is the actually the authority um the enforcement authority on that and if we could look at that permit that permit says that an illicit discharge is anything above uncontaminated groundwater going into the storm drain and what's happening is gellman is trying to say well that's the definition of an illicit discharge illegal discharge but we want to

106apply a water quality criteria like a groundwater surface water interface criteria which is many you know generally it's about 280 parts per billion dioxane so they're trying to turn this work plan to their advantage by using a criteria that's much much less restrictive than background and as evan indicates the requirement is that gelman cannot have anything above background going into the pipe but yet in their monitoring plan they want to monitor the storm water and compare that to water quality criteria so they're doing a couple of i call it miss uh uh incorrect approaches to attaining proper compliance and that's why i think evan is totally correct that we have to and gelman has to understand what is along that allen creek drain uh as well on the shallow groundwater side because that's what's moving

107in and if the work shows that in the storm water this is the area of the allen creek drain that's being impacted by infiltration then their next step should be that's where they should put these shallow groundwater monitoring wells and that's why when gea reviewed it our comment was you need to have them committed please to this step they are not committed to groundwater monitoring wells and they're not committed to the illicit discharge being background so i would be very hesitant to approve a monitoring plan for gelman that didn't include the follow-up from the storm water sampling to include the monitoring wells in the appropriate locations as well as the requirements uh in the permit that background is what they need to attain if you if you approve a flawed monitoring program then that's just

108going to give gelman traction to fight and fight and fight so i would support what evan is saying let's get everyone's input uh let evan rightfully issue the letter back to yellman on comments on the monitoring plan and have that monitoring plan updated appropriately okay all right and i and i in and i fully support what would uh kathy and rita have proposed here in your resolution i think that resolution is a very concise uh statement of what needs to be done so i i would i would fully support the language in that okay great so i'll open up the florida questions uh kathy griswold has her hand up and then lisa dish okay i want to thank evan and and dan for coming here tonight and for evan um i didn't i saw this

109as what can we do as members of the community and members of uh political groups to help you in your negotiations with gelman given that in recent history uh eagle has either not had the time as you said or has not been as assertive as local community members would like so i see this resolution as a living document we're not planning to approve it this evening and i would be open to any edits that you suggest and i did talk to um our city attorney stephen postema today uh looped in tom crawford and also sent an email to brian steglitz so i know within the city there are many different staff members that are involved as well as the lawyers and we were at the hearing this morning so um i guess to summarize what

110can we do to help you i appreciate the invite to the meeting and keeping us in the loop i think as long as we stay unified and marching in the same direction we have the best chance you know that's been proven to be successful it proved to be successful in early may so i i don't have any specific requests or what have you i guess we'll we'll see what i presume that the attorney general is going to provide some input to what eagle shares with me because at the end of the day i i know uh they may not i'm looking for them to be very clear on what is the threshold that we're looking at and then let's move forward with what the threshold is we may not like that we may not agree

111with that we may see something that you know you city may pursue and say well we'd like to see some legal action how do we move that forward but again i think it's already uh in court here and again the the crossover between uh an ongoing site remediation and this ms4 thing is sounds like gray water to me i'm having a hard time pinning down well exactly what are we stating i like to state the expectations give people a chance to perform and if they don't perform then either i didn't do a good job of stating the expectations or they didn't do a good job of doing what they're supposed to do so i think right now what you're doing is very helpful okay thank you and as an elected official i try to communicate

112with the county elected officials jason morgan and sue schink but i guess i would say feel free to reach out to me if if there's a misstep or anything else that i can do again to assist you so thank you and i think dan had his hand up yeah i would just uh clarify that um the consent judgment relates to michigan part 201 remediation and what we're dealing with here is a federal delegated permit the ms4 permit so it's really two different enforcement actions that are incurring occurring one is being run by eagle as part of part 201 in the consent judgment negotiations and one is being run by the water resources commissioner because of the notice sorry because of the violation of the ms4 permit so two regulatorily different programs two different areas so

113there's not really overlap between them thank you okay hey um are you do you have any more questions kathy no thank you but now i know why i'm a bit confused it's it's more than just gray area evan yeah yeah bless you guys for being here alisa you have the floor yeah thank you so um i really appreciate the effort that's uh going into this resolution and the attention that people are bringing to the monitoring plan because it's obviously a crucial piece of the whole picture on gelman so again i'm always very grateful for the amount of work that there is here so um given what uh what uh commissioner pratt just said i'm not sure if i get your title i should call you by your title but anyway um what it is exactly

114but anyway um i'm a little confused by some of the language in the resolution because what i understand from the remarks that you made mr pratt um you are saying that you you do not it is not eagle has not made clear what the threshold requirement is nor is it clear what gelman thinks it is the language of the resolution however in the final resolved clause says that gelman introduces incorrect regulatory criteria it should be in multiple sections of the monitoring plan and then uh the first resolve clause refers in its last line to illegal abatement criteria it should be i think or oh the illegal abatement criterion yes that's right there um and then yeah okay that is okay and then the last resolved clause says that eagle the wrc and the local government

115should require that gelman revise its monitoring plan objective and criterion for abatement action to be consistent with federal and state environmental laws and regulations i suppose that one can stand because it's not making a judgment as to whether the criteria and criterion is correct or not but i think the the other two parts where i read i'm concerned about the language that calls it incorrect and illegal because you have stated that it's not clear from eagle and if you feel like you need clarification from eagle i don't understand what is the basis in empirical fact that would allow us to assert in this resolution that it is incorrect and illegal yeah i so i i did not have a chance to read closely but i did read it once and my quick take was i

116really like that last resolved clause just like you said we want them to be consistent with the law that is the conversation i had with my legal counsel and the attorney general we want them to be consistent with the law and uh since you asked because i was not going to offer unsolicited advice on those other parts because i don't know uh what popped into my head and it sounds like kathy has already started those wheels moving is you might have your legal counsel take a look at those phrases that are referencing what's legal or not legal just to determine uh you know you can still assert something right and you may or may not win in court uh but does it create difficulty if this has to be pursued as a legal matter uh

117i don't know i don't know that a resolution necessarily creates difficulty there but uh you know that that is the only thing i saw was maybe you want to have legal counsel review that to determine if that would bind you up at all because at the end of the day um it's sort of superfluous to that final be it resolved right they have to obey the law and they're really eager to get a clearer interpretation on whether it is as mr mcnell says anything above background or if it is one of these other thresholds that eagle has and again the reason they're intertwined is because you've got an active remediation site that is crossed over into a ms4 system so they got peanut butter in my chocolate is what i say but that's delicious and

118this is not um so uh yeah i think it's great that uh i i wouldn't be prepared to vote on anything tonight without advice from our legal staff and i understand from from councilman griswold that we're not going to vote on anything tonight but i think that it's more um i think that if we pass a resolution such as this we should be asking for what we need and if what we need is clarification then we should be asking for that and we certainly want consistency with federal and state environmental laws and regulations so i'm okay with asking for that but i don't think that we should have incorrect statements in a resolution regardless it doesn't matter if it puts us in legal trouble or not i just think that what we ask people to

119do should be based on fact and um and so we need to just make sure that if the facts are not clear we are asking for clarifications of the facts and certainly we wouldn't vote to approve a um the monitoring plan where the criteria are not clear so i think the idea of holding off on voting on this monitoring plan until it it is consistent with uh criteria that are clear makes total sense to me i just don't want to muddy the waters by putting accusations in a regular in a residence excuse me in a resolution um thanks lisa did you dan mcnell has his hand up um yes um council member i had a chance to uh actually as gea provide a number of comments on the monitoring plan and i sent it to

120city council washington county board of commissioners scio township ann arbor township you all in the environmental commission and if you take a look at that document it it helps understand what is really required by the federal and state laws and regulations so just as background you might want to take a look at that um to to help understand why there is this discrepancy between is background required or is a water quality criteria uh re required in this case and and i thank kathy griswold for getting uh city uh attorneys to to look at this as well okay kathy you had your hand up kathy griswold and then john mursky um just for clarification um yes the legal staff is looking at this and uh so um is the point of concern right now the first

121resolve clause with the the statement illegal abatement criteria i just want to point out to our legal staff what that one it's also the last whereas clause introduces incorrect regulatory it either should be an incorrect regulatory criterion or incorrect regulatory criteria the word incorrect if if mr pratt is not clear on what's legal and what's correct i don't think our resolution should be affirming you know asserting things like that that's that's where i am thanks for okay and i would agree to that and um appreciate that evan was here to give feedback today are you are you done kathy okay john you have the floor john mursky thank you i had um read the resolution before the meeting i don't have it in front of me right now there's one minor concern that i have

122with it uh by memory it's i think the last resolved clause where there's two points and i think it calls out for permanent monitoring and i don't i can't imagine that we're asking for permanent monitoring it seems to me you know there should be some some threshold 10 years 50 years 100 years i don't know but not permanent so i would just point that out and leave that to the experts to determine what that is i see dan has his hand up and that's the second to last resolved clause yeah john um in in the in this business there are temporary monitoring wells and permanent monitoring wells and you can sample the permanent monitoring wells on whatever basis you want and so what this says is that if you're going to put in monitoring wells

123i want those monitoring wells to be there so if i want to take samples in the future i can take samples in the future it doesn't mandate that throughout uh time they have to collect the samples and what happened to us is eagle put in these temporary borings a couple years ago and because they put in the temporary borings you can't go back and collect groundwater samples it's a common tactic that's used by some nefarious people in the business um and so if you put in the permanent monitoring wells then you can always go back whether it's the city or gelman or whomever so it doesn't mean a time commitment it just means that you're going to put in a well that can uh live on uh for a number of years okay so it's

124a designation of a type of installation yes okay okay great thanks very welcome okay any more questions um i don't see any hands up well kathy has her hand up i just want to say thank you to rita mitchell for all the work that she did on this and thanks to everyone who has provided um recommendations and revisions so uh as i said it's a working document and we we will continue to refine it well here here thank you very much rita oh rita you have your handout yeah i just want to say thank you also to evan pratt for appearing on short notice um and for providing a lot of good information and also to dan bucknell thank you yeah so my sense is that the action is that kathy and rita are going

125to continue working on this um resolution would we like to make a formal statement of that in some way is that needed i don't think so i'm just asking okay um my plan was to bring it forward um with any revisions that are received in the next few days and put it on the agenda for the june 7th council meeting for discussion purposes only letting them know that the environmental commission is continuing to work on it and at a future day they'll come from the environmental commission you know with with our recommendation or not back to council and that provides some transparency and keeps every all the different groups informed and also we would be communicating with the county commissioners that this is happening does that seem reasonable stephen no no i'm happy with that

126i'm now we can always call a special meeting if it's required before our next official meeting so just just let me know just let me know uh either you know rita or kathy just let me know about that and i can try scheduling a special meeting oh thanks and and we will do that on short notice if evan pratt requests okay all right and um so thank you very much rita and kathy for bringing this forward at this time um it does it's complicated matter and it's going to require some some tweaking here but hopefully that can be done quickly okay and just let me know if there's anything i can do to help facilitate this going forward okay thanks steve all right everybody and thank you again evan and dan for being here yeah

127it's great to see the rest of the commission members there's a few people i haven't seen before from past trips here so i appreciate the invite appreciate the interest always good to like judge connor said it's great to hear what the community's got to say right hey we're the voters okay um thanks everybody so um shall we move on to the next item on the agenda oh dan has oh by dan are you saying goodbye or did you have a comment no i guess he's saying goodbye okay thanks everybody thank you thank you dan thank you okay so let's move on to the next item on the agenda which was um a resolution that was drafted by rita mitchell about adus and natural features um rita do you want to um yeah oh i'll do

128it again um let me get my my place here uh okay um adus are accessory dwelling units they are um currently allowed by cert by certain aspects of city ordinance um and my reason for bringing this issue to the environmental commission was particularly to talk about trees and storm water and i think it was particularly helpful that we had some discussion about trees tonight and our expectations for future understanding of what's going on in the city um planning commission has revised some ordinances for like regulating the adus um and that may result in in adus being allowed in all residential areas as far as i understand them except for mobile home parks they've had two public hearings and this meeting is just another opportunity to add this element of talking about trees and natural features

129i'm going to hope that commissioners commissioner gibrando and council member dish can fill in some some gaps that may be there for my side but for background um i was one of members of the community who worked on the urban forestry management plan in 2014 and i just pulled some information from that plan that was referenced earlier tonight um based on a flyover of the city that was i believe in 2012 um the report was written in 2014 and it said that private property holds about 75 percent of the trees in the city um which i thought was pretty interesting um and that the remaining of the remaining about 25 are on public property so it's important to look at private property when we think about trees and the adu kind of thing has as

130one of our callers tonight mentioned the potential to affect trees that are on um lot lines uh in the center of any backyard or front yard and so it's just something that i feel like i've learned from chris graham over time the concern with development and how it can compact roots of trees not only on an immediate property that's that's the project for construction but also on an adjacent property if the roots of the trees travel underneath underground and we we just don't see them uh and so that's a concern so if if we are um to meet some goals and one of the goals of the 2014 plan um was to increase canopy in certain areas of the city and and one of them was to increase the the private land from 37 percent

131of the private land um to from 37 to 67 tree canopy um if that that may not be our immediate goal right now things you know we're now in in 2021 um but i think we do need to look at trees overall for for the long term and make sure that really i think we want to increase our trees and i'm worried that we're taking down a lot of trees for various sometimes good reasons maybe sometimes not so good and so it's just something to consider as we move forward and so i appreciate this opportunity to um discuss with you all as people who are really concerned with the environment and so here i am um i put out a resolution to suggest that we have this discussion uh and to get your comments and

132feedback and see what we may consider doing and whether you whether you agree with some of the suggestions that i had in that resolution sorry shannon you have your hand up um so rita and i talked was it yesterday the day before and so um um i'm going to tell you a little bit about some of my response um to this as well and also um response to the caller that came into the in in my mind um there's two big things going on one that the storm water i feel like is a complete non-issue because we already have a regulation that covers that if you build anything more than 200 square feet of impervious area on your property you have to manage for the one inch storm that's whether it's a shed whether it's

133more driveway whether it's new sidewalk whether it's in addition to your house nobody is going to build an adu that is under 200 square feet i can tell you that you you can't you know you can barely fit a bedroom in that so um the storm water piece in my mind is a non-issue because we already have um we already have that covered so that i feel like is is clean and done and not an issue um and we have an excellent system and as somebody who's worked in multiple communities around this um let me tell you we have a really good system compared to some other communities um so the bigger question i think is the tree question um and just also rita you would characterize it as front yard trees it's really not

134going to be front yard trees it's only going to be side and back because you can't put it in the front setback so it's not going to have anything to do with your street trees it's not going to have anything i mean unless you just have like some massive you know tree up in the front um so the tree issue is is a stickier wicket i think with this and um one of the things that rita and i talked about that i feel like um the city tends to get involved when you're at the permit level which is towards the end of your design process and at that point it's really hard to unwind things and so i guess what um i was really excited to see some of the tools that tony was talking

135about and some of the things that students were talking about in that um i feel like we need to be able to create some sort of very reachable system for people to be able to understand the resources that they do have on their site and that there may be ways to kind of work around them at the really early level of design and so um if people can see you know with the viewer where their property lines are where there may be trees and not if we could get down to the level of knowing what kind of trees they are that's like fantastic because then you don't need an arborist involved and things like that and i would love it if we could create some sort of kind of basic site analysis piece for people

136that would allow them to say oh maybe here versus there so that they could make incentivize them to make good choices around this and as i said earlier there's a lot of trees i can't stand too and i would be happy to take down some of these invasive things i truly would and i i actually feel like it's better to take them down sometimes because of the havoc that they are wrecking on our woods um and so it's not in my again this is my own personal opinion i don't feel like they're all equal opportunity i don't feel like every tree is is worth the same um and so um if we can get some of that more granular information on that that allows people to be able to say well maybe it's not such

137a big deal you know over here the other thing i would just like to be able to kind of set the context around is that you know adu serve a lot of purposes but one one of the things that we are trying to get out with this and it is not a panacea and it's going to take so many different ways of getting at this issue but one of the issues we're trying to address with this is being able to address some level of affordability in the city and it doesn't mean building these is going to be cheap or anything like that but it does start to be able to allow us to have more density um in the city in ways that are outside of our ability right now and so there's that is

138something we that is one of the goals and so we this is a balancing act of trying to figure out how to balance all of these goals uh together so um i think it would be kind of sad if like nobody could build an adu if it meant taking down you know a one inch tree or something like that because i think that you know we should we need to figure out how to balance those balance those things together so um it would take i don't know what it would take to kind of put something like that together and again like i know staff don't have bandwidth for that kind of thing but i would love to see some sort of way for people to be able to come up with their own kind of

139early study of where to put the thing and how to think about it so that people can make good choices around planning for these things um so that's my my two cents as it is lisa i don't know if you have other things to add in terms of our discussions on planning commission we we did have two public sessions um a lot of people participated so there had it it was sort of characterized we didn't have any public comment that's really not true i think that there's you can always do more um but there were a lot of people participating in those were long meetings um so um it's i think that was a little bit mischaracterized in terms of uh you know planning just turn them down that's that's not what it felt like

140when we were staying up until midnight listening people talk about this so okay um all right chris had his hand up and then lisa and then bob chris graham perhaps they sent in the the proposed code could include a requirement of early analysis process in other words um some sort of uh um i don't know whether it would be a city employee that would go out or you'd hire a private person to come and do a natural features assessment um uh i don't in the udc you're down to the regulatory building permit level already and and and sort of short of having a you can't cut a tree without a permit kind of rule where we on single family property where we haven't gotten yet and probably will find that hard to do getting that

141early information is really the secret to persuading people not to take down heritage trees never mind norways um secondly stormwater is not completely a free deal because you've got to pipe the water or run the water somewhere and that could be through the root zone of a big heritage tree so it's not exactly um that storm water controls are um are not an issue again uh some sort of an early study about where you would put drain tiles for a new roof um without damaging trees important trees um would be very helpful to people um that's reviewed by the city though just so you know like that you have to turn in you have to turn in a permit you have to turn in a map you have to turn in things like that right

142now i'm not persuaded that the way contractors do things are uh produce no damage to tree roots i've i'm maybe we're getting on top of that now but i'm not fully persuaded that we are perhaps you know shannon but um it's the uh one house i was involved in we collected all the roof water from the old house and put it into tanks underground and use it to irrigate with before we switched to city water but they went or wanted to go right through the root zone with a 130 year old oak and i said stop hold on not that direction and not there and the of course the heart was in the right place to for these for this client to collect their roof water but the to lose the tree would have been

143worse in terms of the public service benefit over time so um i really like your idea of some sort of a requirement in the new language that gets at this early planning early analysis um process so people can be informed um are you doing chris oh yeah thanks hands down the floor and then bob yeah just also by way of some context um i think the likelihood of massive you know of there being a run to go and construct adu has really really been exaggerated yeah yeah and um i want to point out that the original adu ordinance legalized 80 used to be built on a little bit over fifteen thousand properties this amended ordinance will add just under seven thousand to that uh bringing the total to about twenty one thousand so it's a

144one-third increase in what's currently eligible and that increase came from the fact that uh planning commission removed the minimum lot requirement and also removed the requirement that in order to have and that you needed to already have an accessory structure on your property by december 31st 2016. so there were two obstacles removed which resulted in just a 30 increase in the number of properties that are eligible since that first ordinance was passed in 2016 something in the in the range of like 22 to 24 people have requested permits for adus we do not know how many people have actually constructed them but that is a tiny tiny percentage and if these regulatory barriers that we that planning commission has lifted result in in growth of adus proportional to the cities in the country where they

145are most established and most popular which are seattle and portland we would we would likely see one percent adus built over the next five to ten years so that would be 280. so i don't want to minimize the concern about trees i think that that is an important concern and if there are ways that we if there are ways we can build into the permit approval and site development process i think we should really do that you know absolutely no question but i think that many of the arguments that we've heard and also the claim that there needed to be more public participation was based on the notion that this was a change that was going to affect 21 000 households and that is simply catastrophizing it's just it is not warranted by any experience

146of any other municipality and particularly now when construction costs have skyrocketed there are so many financial disincentives to building adus first among them the fact that when you put an adu on your property you do not get 100 return on that adu which is to say that it does not increase your property value by what it costs you so this is not something that people looking to make money off investments are going to do it's not that's not going to drive an expansion of this these things are typically driven by a desire to house a relative a close or extended family relative or by some other goal that somebody has but like i say we're talking 22 in the last five years so i am all for are considering the impact that this has on

147trees but i think that um we don't want to we don't want to hold up this amendment that has been worked on for a really long time and it serves another a number of really legitimate widely held goals that have to do with smart growth rather than sprawl i don't think we want to hold it up for um for these for these considerations hey okay lisa thank you i'm bob you have the floor yeah thanks um i agree with the points that uh council member dish and commissioner gibrano made and just to add a a couple more small points on to that um i too agree with the goal of preserving trees but um i'm not convinced that increasing the required setbacks for adus accomplishes that um i just i think i i don't see

148the the link between the two um and i think really what it would do is just reduce the number of properties where they can be built and to me that's the exact opposite of what we should be doing um i think you know i think that if a homeowner is going to build an adu and if they have a tree in the way that and they want that tree there um if they go ahead and build the adu they'll they'll replace that tree um the resolution makes note that the a20 plan talks about incentivizing planting of additional trees and maybe there's a way that we could incentivize um any trees lost to adu construction to be replaced at a two to one to increase the canopy i don't know how that would work but it

149might be it might be an option um i i i just um also in the a20 plan um increasing housing diversity is a specific goal and it specifically calls out adus that's one way to do that as part of their strategy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and i think um those things can work together and i yeah i guess that's it okay bob thanks um john mursky had his hand up and then chris graham i generally share uh commissioner negan's sentiments i'm wondering if there's a different way of addressing this and instead of just having a change in the setbacks that there might be a threshold where we say trees above a certain dvh or um that we introduce something with critical root zone area or something like that as opposed to just changing the

150setback across the board for every property whether there's a tree there or not and saying you can't um go within a certain distance of the lot line and there may be just a row of shrubs in the back of the property so what you know why should why should someone have to adhere to that i'm not that familiar with um exactly what's being proposed um but it seems to me some if if we really want to protect trees there may be a different way of doing it other than just changing the setback and increasing it so i i'd encourage us to be creative in in doing it that way and then i'd also point out that um um commissioner graham mentioned we're working on some changes to the udc that will increase the mitigation um

151for um for our heritage trees and the other thing is we're planning on i think that there's going to be language in terms of protecting critical root zones of trees so there's there's some things that we're doing to uh or that eventually hopefully will be introduced into the udc that will address some of those concerns as well so i'll leave it at that okay chris you have the floor oh i agree the setback change doesn't help um let's say that someone wants to build a udu beauty accessory welding unit 80 in [Music] in the backyard and the backyard of not only that house but the adjoining houses over a block or so are in an 84's pregnant which means very likely that in the backyard between the houses are landmark inheritance native three some of

152them quite old and elderly council members are you prepared to say no you can't build that structure if there's not room without taking those trees down if you're not prepared to say no then we have a problem because there's where the rub comes and i think i agree with you lisa that this is a small percentage of the small percentage of these projects that will happen but we're going to run into that somewhere hey lisa you're before yes so but but commissioner graham don't we already have that problem because as a private homeowner i can cut down whatever trees i want in my yard so the adu ordinance doesn't neither exacerbates nor creates that problem if if we need to protect heritage trees we need some kind of way to make them a trust that

153comes with property agree but yeah so i mean totally but then so that problem is a different problem that adus are part of but it's a pre-existing problem it doesn't come with the adus i could no more say no to that adu then i could say then i could go next door to my neighbor ed saunders and say don't you cut down that tree because it's his property but it was the adu under the code now and the amendment by right okay so in order to solve this problem we will have to get into at least in 84 fragments some kind of prohibition some kind of permanent some kind of defense of these big trees not just for 80s but in general it would have to be in general because you couldn't single out adus

154for something that a private property owner can otherwise do well we are in agreement and step two of our work we'll get the single family housing and we'll see where we come out it was that it didn't work very well in 1990. we'll see how we do in 2022. okay um does anybody else wish to make a comment i mean i'll just say that um i'm thinking about this as a as a rule it was just um by walking around my neighborhood in other neighborhoods i just don't see how you know having a just a setback rule and changing it from three feet to 15 feet or whatever is going to really really help the situation so um i mean i i i guess my sentiments are in the direction of what lisa and uh

155bob and john mursky have mentioned and i think there must be some way we can protect larger trees or at least require that if people are going to cut down small foods that they replace them somewhere else on their property um and so i think this could be a topic for our next meeting so i'm hoping that chris that we can we can maybe i'll put this on as an agenda item for our next meeting and discuss what ways we might be able to change the city code to incorporate these um positive suggestions like i heard like we've heard from shannon about um starting a natural features review process right at the beginning of the planet of any kind of uh construction project here in the city and maybe mandating um some smaller equipment sizes

156or anything because you know one of the common things i see i'm not going to elaborate on this much but i just see people using equipment that's too big for the site because that's what they have because they want because it's like all size fits all and so they'll want to just tear down everything so they can get their big piece of equipment in there you know even if it's a bobcat so um so i'm thinking chris maybe we can um have this as an agenda item for our next meeting and have a have a have a pretty good discussion about it um maybe not the next meeting um you really need to see what we're thinking about in the set of amendments we're working on now we need to educate a lot more people

157about what native forest fragments are where our big inheritance trees are where the what's important out there if we could do one thing as a result of this discussion is to amend the um [Music] the proposed changes to include some kind of natural features assessment the great number of people in the city don't understand how important a big native tree actually is it's irreplaceable you can't plant 10 little ones and make up for the loss of one of these guys no i think we all share that sentiment chris and so let's let's get it done and whenever you're prepared to discuss it let's all think about it next time maybe gorman's going to talk about native forest fragments and our nature areas which are composed of them and we can get in deeply into questions

158about what these things are across the city and perhaps what i can do is bring the map ann arbor back into my fingers and i'll show you before and after things in native forest fragments and parts of the city so you can really see where they are with development under them and but the key thing is to set rules that attain the goal that you want to without you know tripping over everybody well one way just to show you one way we're thinking of doing it is requiring very much tightening the requirement for a grading permit and in order to go off paved surfaces on any property you would need to do an assessment of the natural features there and indicate if there are any landmark heritage trees and indicate what you're going to do

159to protect them to keep from compacting soils on that property if you're going off the pavement and this would apply for anything above the size of a shed that sounds good okay well um let's let's keep that in the back of our minds kathy you have your hand up kathy griswold um yeah i i agree we need to keep working on this um i think that we need to clearly identify what the value is of some of these larger heritage trees because if we're trying to balance the benefit of of an adu the benefit of a building and then also the benefit of solar panels we have to have an equation that you know are the solar panels more important than this one tree that will have to be cut down and i don't you

160know i'm troubled by that right now and we can't make informed decisions if we don't have that information i'm also wondering if there are any progressive communities that already have uh tree management programs for private property unfortunately it's pretty much a taboo that's what i thought okay but we're trying to invent something as we didn't invent our original natural features protection we need a hobbit town so okay so um let's see it's getting late so um rita what uh what would you like louis do you have your hand up what would you like to do i you're muted i had unmuted it okay um i just want to say thank you all for this conversation because this is exactly what i think we need in terms of trying to balance out these multiple issues and

161i am um i'm glad that kathy brought up the issue of solar panels because there are many things it's not just the adus there are many things that are challenging our trees right now in addition to aging in addition to climate change um there are so many things and i think we do need some way to assess how to protect them as much as we can and i hope that we i really would like us to not just get down to a dollar and cents evaluation of a tree because i think they are so much more than what i've seen in the tree calculators that i hope is just not a dollar value it never is enough in those tree calculators as far as i can see and so i think there has to be

162some kind of a cultural respect that i don't know how to engender but i think i think we might be on the cusp of of doing that and i hope that that's the case that we in treetown can really live it out um i'm really worried that we may get 10 000 20 000 additional trees in in private property and and street trees but the net may actually end up being negative in some ways and and that that's a real concern that i'd like to avoid so i appreciate your discussion um the feedback um i um don't feel that we have to vote on this tonight what i brought um i certainly trust um commissioner gibb randall and councilmember dish to take this kind of feedback to the next level as you um work on

163the adus um and i look forward to continuing to work on the trees with with all of you okay well thank you rita for bringing this up thanks mila yeah so um okay so let's move on to the next item on the agenda which are reports from committees um how about national features do you have anything additional to add chris you're muted no we'll see you next month we'll do more for you okay thanks um solid waste um i don't have anything to report for um cmd um lisa we are losing a very important employee uh oh yes um i should say that elaine eileen naples is uh leaving the city her husband got her job in austin and so she's moving uh she's gonna be moving there as of uh almost now i think

164middle of june uh she will be working until she remotely until she gets a replacement until they hire a replacement yeah so lisa do you have anything you want to say about zero waste oh through my tears okay so yeah we're doing a lot john callaward and i are working on a grant for next cycle possibly two grants for next cycle that will develop not just develop well develop metrics that can actually be used with the information we can actually get from people who participate in the reuse refurbishment recycling economy um and uh there's a second larger set of grants that helps us actually further develop that network and we're looking at that as well um the group that was tentatively working on reusable food containers did i mention this to you before i feel

165like i did yeah so that is actually happening now next week we begin a one-month pilot of reusable food containers at miss kim's at el harissa at zimmerman's and at the detroit street filling station and we have a sophisticated set of labeling and qr codes that will enable us to gather data to to see how the how the containers circulate and we have an incentive program to try to get people to not stall them in their homes but actually take them out to another one of these four restaurants um and uh then we have a policy committee working on a set of goals that will help to align the work that we do in the within the parameters of the solid waste resource management program with a zero waste goals um we are depending on

166steve to make a lot of progress with c d because that's part of part of what we need in order to increase our commercial diversion rates and then the sustainability ambassadors are working on extending compost to multi-family homes that don't have curbside compost and can't get curbside compost because of the way they're set so there is so much going on in those subcommittees my life is just dotted with meetings every single one of which i enjoy so okay wonderful pollinators um we have um recently met with the um staff who work on the golf courses particularly the monarchs in the rough group and had a great conversation about their methods which you know shannon very well of establishing the pollinator supporting areas there and talked with them about potentially um starting with um shannon's idea

167not on golf courses but elsewhere in some of the city parks janna's idea to have test patches of other than turfgrass options so that's something that that will kind of work forward and we'll be in touch with you shannon for some more questions about potential species to use in such things um and we are continuing to work with the pollinator ambassadors who are going to be establishing um i don't know if it's a kiosk or a table at farmer's market to provide information so that's that's kind of their focus right now um so that's that's really about it at the moment thanks thank you rita um okay so the next uh so council i don't know other commissions sorry energy commission john yes the last energy commission meeting featured a presentation by the rocky mountain

168institute on uh electrification of the built environment and uh its benefits opportunities and of course some challenges uh and um just a couple of things that i'd like to point out uh one thing that i found was interesting they indicated that there was a survey of ann arbor done fairly recently where 22 of the homes in ann arbor are using uh electrical resistance heating i assume in baseboard heating and that is extremely expensive so hopefully that can be an area that we target for conversion to heat pumps obviously we also want to do that in all new construction we talked about moving away from gas cooktops to induction to cooktops where there is substantial health benefits particularly for children because of the controlled pollutants that are given off in addition obviously to the greenhouse gases

169and then also some safety benefits so for new construction and i know the planning commission has really been great allies and pushing that in working with all developers and we've had a number of successes on that on that front um the other thing that was presented was the so-called solar faithful model that the city actually um emily drennan um worked on that um several years ago and it's now fully launched there's about eight non-profits mostly houses of worship that have employed that model where basically investors invest in an installation of rooftop solar have a ppa purchase power agreement with the host building and are able to take advantage of the federal tax credits and accelerated depreciation that a non-profit like a house of worship or parochial school for that matter or any non-profit that owns

170their own building and that was presented i assume many of you know or are affiliated with a house of worship or know someone in the house of worship and if you know a house of worship that doesn't have solar on its roof um they can contact me i'm one of a little team that's trying to advance the solar faithful model not only here in michigan but try to promote it nationally um so i just want to make a plug for that and then just two other developments we're going to be working in the transportation electrification group on trying to advance ideas for multi-family ev charging there's a lot of people obviously in ann arbor that don't live in single-family residences and ev charging is is really going to be a limitation unless they have it

171at their place of employment and so we're going to try to work on solutions on that first thing that we're actually going to try to do is work with u of m and they have a off campus housing listing and right now that's not meant there's not any indication of whether there's ev charging or not so hopefully that will just even raise awareness and start to get uh landlords property owners to start thinking oh um i need to indicate whether or not there's ev charging on my on my property and that's going to be visible to potential renters so hopefully that will that's a minor thing that we can do and then lastly the city or i say the office of sustainability is close to being able to bring to council a couple of things

172related to energy disclosure and benchmarking both in the commercial and multi-family sector and then shortly after that in the single-family residence sector at one time in the latter we were looking at what we were calling a time of marketing uh disclosure it looks apparently legally like that could be problematic so it can be uh probably done at time of sale which for some reason is is legal with maybe some carrots for doing doing it at the time of marketing so that the buyer knows right away when they're looking at a house um if there's energy efficiency related issues so those are some of the things that are going on with the energy commission thanks yeah thanks john how about uh planning commission shannon um we continue to hammer away at a transit oriented zoning so

173that still keeps getting worked on um but i've told you all about that before and there's no like big huge changes with that um i guess the only other thing that i feel like relates is that there was um the first marijuana consumption facility uh for the state actually is is going to be on i think it's ashley and um the marijuana industry is just i i think we've talked about this a couple years ago just super super energy users and um as as john kind of indicated you know we don't have anything in the code but we've been pretty uh proactive about just asking people to put solar on and things like that with mixed results but they seem to actually pretty open to it they have great southern exposure um they are very

174aware of the the kind of bad reputation of the industry and um see themselves as leaders in the industry so we kind of ask them to step up and so uh we don't know for sure but i would say uh city council folks if you don't see it press them on it and lisa was there so she knows and um so we just again we we can't make them do anything um but we continue to uh just you know work work the channels that we can basically standing up in front of a bunch of people virtually or in person or whatever it is and asking them if they can do the right thing so that's that's what our strategy has been so far and we've we've gotten some response actually so you know um and

175other than that i think that's we had that joint energy commission meeting which was really interesting um so i think that's really it in terms of crossover unless lisa you remember anything that i'm forgetting okay okay well thank you shannon so um mike apple isn't here so we'll not talk about parks um so the next item is council um kathy or lisa kathy um it's getting late so i won't go into too much detail but today was a really great day for um the gelman cleanup there was a hearing before judge connors at 9 00 a.m uh he did sign an order today uh directing gelman to shall immediately implement and conduct all requirements and activities stated in the proposed fourth amendment in restated consent judgment gellman filed a brief as late as last night

176trying to interfere with the process and i see judge connor being very determined that we're going to move forward with this and the interveners are still a party to this case there has been continuous effort to uh remove the interveners that would be the elected officials from this process uh and just have it be um between eagle and gelman and we have prevailed and so that again is good news so i'm sure there'll be something in the council packet uh the order is very short it's um less than a page long when you take off the names of all the lawyers that that are being highly paid to continue this fight thanks all right thanks kathy anything that you want to add lisa no okay um out of the chair i uh yeah i don't

177have really anything i uh i need to talk about tonight um so report from staff kaylynn yes i uh like to announce next week um we'll be celebrating uh a 2-0 week uh we have a host of events that are coming up please check out our website um for dates um we're adding things um i think uh we have a mural that'll be um unveiled uh we have recognition ceremony we have a whole host of items we're really excited um this will be in celebration of the one year anniversary of the passing of the 820 plan so um looking forward to it come on join us whenever you can well all right thank you galen so um let's see so action uh report our action items um i have two written down here that uh

178kathy and reed are gonna continue to work on the uh on the ms4 response resolution and we may have uh we'll see when we bring it up at a meeting it will either be our next regular meeting or a special meeting depending on the timing um necessary um and then the second action item i have is that chris graham and the natural features group will continue to work on their ordinance change to preserve natural features and here it is so um let's see so our next scheduled meeting is there any other um items that people would like to discuss next month uh bob so i bring this up uh with considerable hesitation but um i i if i understand correctly i i think that uh funding for the dear cull uh was removed in the

179budgeting process and i don't think this body has ever actually taken a position on that entire issue we've talked about it from time to time but uh i wonder if maybe it's time for just sort of an open-ended discussion on that um you know are there alternatives should we ask the council to reconsider that you know yeah thanks for bringing that up bob um i know council meetings have been contentious when deciding when this uh topic comes up so it might be a good idea for us to bear some of that burden you know next month um let's see i i see a couple of hands up chris graham and then rita so um the issue is education of council members at least and and maybe a broader segment of people in the city um

180i the environmental commission going back to the beginnings of this controversy has been reluctant to be involved in the discussion because it was so intensely controversial council members who led the effort had unbelievable volumes of scathing threatening [Music] awful email from all over the world for their action to kill deer in ann arbor and uh members of the environmental commission and most notably matt nod did not want to get in the middle of that the controversy is much less now um those who pay attention i think are pretty well aware humane society is really oriented toward pets and deer are not pets and wildlife is the responsibility of department of natural resources and nobody else and we are working on natural features in ann arbor most particularly the regeneration of our force our native force

181which won't happen if the deer population gets out of hand again we haven't fully gotten it in hand when we stopped year before last and then well i think it's worth a discussion in this form now well if you're willing we can do it and [Music] be very facilitating for very um careful and expert testimony in a whole lot of channels for you okay but um you and i oh i could help you work on work on outside speakers and whatever you might have in mind okay all right arita you have your hand up yeah um i just want to thank bob for bringing up that issue i think it's great for us to discuss it and thank you okay um any other comments or suggestions for our next meeting no i don't hear any

182so uh our next item on the agenda is the next scheduled meeting will be june 24th the fourth thursday of june at seven pm as usual as regularly scheduled unless um unless stated otherwise yeah before then um now we reach our second period of public commentary this is an opportunity for persons to speak for up to three minutes please call 1-888-788-0099 and enter meeting id four 943-248 six four zero three four this information is also displayed on the meeting agenda and video feed city staff will select callers that have raised their hand one by one using the last three digits of your phone number in order to electronically raise your hand to indicate your desire to speak please press star 9 on your phone you will hear an automated announcement that the host is allowing

183you to speak when speaking please move to a quiet area and mute any television or background sounds so that we may hear you clearly please state your name and address at the beginning of your comments and be patient there can be a delay of up to 30 seconds before a connection is established so again please call 888 788-0099 and enter meeting id zero 943-248-6400 four um is there anybody on the line galen there are oh uh we have one caller with a question with commentary um caller five three four go ahead caller five three four go ahead and speak hello this is tom stallberg calling again first off i want to thank you for being brave and taking up the deer call issue uh it's been contentious it is important um so you are being

184brave but i thank you for for taking that step i want to talk about the adu issue again i want to thank you for having the discussion that's what we're asking for is to have a discussion about this i do want to make some corrections to the corrections on the numbers presented we really are talking about 21 000 new situations currently you have to be an owner occupant of one of the two structures to have an adu that's being removed from all 21 000 that's a difference that did not exist before so i think it's disingenuous to suggest that there's a smaller number of impacted residences also currently under the current ordinance you can't build a brand new construction constructed habitable unit in your backyard if you don't already have a detached structure it doesn't

185have to be habitable it could be a garage if you don't currently have a detached structure you can't build a new detached you could build an attached adu to your house which would be within the building envelope so we are talking not about 5 000 or whatever small number we are talking about 20 000 plus i don't know how many have a detached garage but let's say around 20 000 units where now you can build a detached unit in your backyard where you couldn't before so i don't have the exact number but it's way more than what people are trying to imply and now you combine those two things and you've got a different situation an investor can buy for cash a single family home say a 900 square foot home on a standard r1c

186lot and put an 800 square foot detached second rental unit in the backyard the combination of these two new items that really are more than just a few thousand they're for 20 000 residences create new incentives and new situations and new conditions cash investors will buy up modest homes make it even more difficult for modest home buyers to be able to buy in ann arbor somebody who's currently a renter who's trying to buy in ann arbor has enough challenges doing that this will reduce the number of opportunities for modest home purchase in ann arbor and it will drive the prices on the bottom end of the market however high they seem to be now they're going to skyrocket up because cash investors are going to shut out homeowners on the low end of the market

187and where are these homeowner wannabes going to go they're going to go into the townships and commute back for work we already have the large home bills of the area pulte toll brothers norfolk building in the townships robertson brothers is going to be building both inside they're all building inside the city and outside the city in the townships um there's a going to be something up at uh territorial and uh what marlin road perhaps just passing through that township um process we are accelerating driving people out of town to commute back in by this so i know you've already made your decision i'm not trying to change anybody's mind what i want to do is point out this discussion is being had by less than one percent of the impacted residences twenty thousand one percent

188is two hundred i was at both those public hearings there was less than two hundred people and the people there for the most part are the people who are pretty wonky about this on both sides of the issues the people who are already paying attention most of the 21 000 residences have no clue that this ordinance is more than trying to get some more granny flats so people can age in place or have family members living there they have no clue about the compounding of the different variables that are being introduced in this residence so please be open and honest in the discussions about the true number of people that are being impacted at this so when this gets to council i'll be very disappointed if i hear people trying to downplay the impact of

189this thank you okay thank you for your uh thank you for your statement mr stover um is anybody else on the line galen um let me check real quick i'm gonna say no wait amen okay we have another caller from uh four six four caller four six four four four six four go ahead and speak call it 464. they seem to be muted um i asked them to unmute can you hear me now yes yes thank you um this is linda burauer um a couple things um i tried to call in the meeting at seven o'clock and the number was the id number for the meeting was incorrect on the agenda i usually go by the top of the agenda because i only use my phone i don't use a tv or a laptop and

190i was very disappointed because i was on hold it was kept saying the meeting hadn't started yet and then it cut me off and i dialed in again and it again it said the meeting hasn't started yet and i was in the waiting room and it wasn't until a friend emailed me the correct id that i was able to get in the meeting so i wasn't able to speak earlier and i just want to bring that to your attention because it might have been it might have been correctly listed under the meeting information on legistar but on the agenda it was now and those two numbers really need to match so that people who want to call in have the right information so i i just ask you to be more careful with that in

191the future um and then i want to just say something i want to thank um council member um griswold and commissioner mitchell for bringing the resolution forward even though you didn't vote on it the resolution about the german violation of the multi-system stormwater um pipeline in the allen creek pipeline running through west park in the neighborhood neighboring areas and i'm really glad that you're going to bring it to council's attention and i hope that you will tweak it in whatever way is necessary but eventually past that to give some strength to the cities standing up to gelman they really need to fix that that violation of that multi-storm water system permit um and finally about abuse i do want to say i understand it's i know it's going to be passed at the next council

192meeting but i do want to respond to something council member dish said um and i respect the reasons for wanting this to happen and i can understand that there's arguments for density etc but i i i really take issue with something council member dish said that um well don't worry about it because very few people are going to use it and that to me is a horrible reason for saying something's okay i mean either an ordinance is good policy or it's not even if it doesn't affect many people or many units if it's bad it's bad if it's good it's good and it should never be used as an excuse well you know don't worry about it it's not going to affect many units so many people that that just please don't use that as

193a rationale um but thank you for all your work and all of these complex issues and um keep up the good work thank you all right um is there anybody else on the line galen no and i want to say to the caller that was my fault and i apologize too so yeah it was a glitch we discovered just uh before the meeting so we'll be careful to check that earlier so um so um if there were nobody and nobody else on the line for public comment um i declared this meeting adjourned to 10 pm thank you everybody see you see you later