001um so uh welcome to the april 22nd 2021 electronic meeting of the environmental commission this meeting is in accordance with executive orders from the governor to affect social distancing and mitigate the spread of the cove at 19 buyers 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 by a telephone only to speak during any of the public comment opportunities there are two one after the presentation and one at the end of the regular uh business this meeting so if you want to speak during either of these public comment opportunities please call 877-853-5247 or zero 888-788-009 nine these are both toll-free numbers and enter meeting id number nine nine seven three four one two six three four seven this information is
002also 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 18t channel 9 and online at www.a2gov.org watch ctn so um i call this meeting to order it is 705 pm um josh would you read the land heritage statement sure i acknowledge that the land the city of ann arbor occupies is the ancestral traditional and contemporary lands of the anishinaabe including adawa ojibwa and bottawatomi and wyandot peoples i further acknowledge that our city stands like almost all property in the united states on lands obtained generally in unconscionable ways from indigenous 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 the thorough
003understanding of the ongoing consequences of this past can empower us in our work to create a future that supports human flourishing and justice for all individuals all right thank you josh would you do the roll call sure uh commissioner graham commissioner needham i was here oh okay great and it is on lake superior split rock lighthouse okay about halfway up there ahead uh commissioner needham uh council member dish yes all right uh commissioner gibrandal here from ann arbor uh okay council member griswold here from ann arbor uh commissioner kellewart here uh chair brown uh present in ann arbor commissioner overpeck yeah and i am in a hammer commissioner mursky here and an hour uh co-chair mitchell here in ann arbor uh let's see commissioner buendia here from ann arbor and commissioner ferris all right i
004think you have quorum all right thank you josh um so the next item on the agenda is the approval of the agenda um do i have a motion to approve the agenda as written i can't see anybody's hand so move their lot raised okay i have a comment or a question i guess for you steve council members and maybe staff you mentioned i think we talked about this at the end of the last meeting um public comment where we have put at the end of the presentation i thought the convention was that uh public comment was always at the beginning of the meeting so people don't have to stay on the phone for 15 minutes half an hour 45 minutes depending on how long the first presentation goes um am i mistaken with that and
005if if not could we move then public comment to the beginning of this and subsequent meetings so i hear a motion by john mursky do i hear a second yes rita okay a second okay so the floor is open for discussion raise your hand if you'd like to be recognized um yeah i can't see anybody oh uh i see no hands raised but i'll comment that i think this is a good idea um for the flow of our meetings and for public participation okay so um all who say aye raise your hand and say or say aye aye aye all opposed looks like it passes unanimously john good thank you so um i guess maybe i should have uh we should so um i guess this would constitute changing the public commentary now to rate
006before the uh right before the presentations which is the next item on the agenda all right so um i'll initiate public commentary then now and then i will mention it later so uh public comment this is an opportunity for persons to speak for up to three minutes please call nine 1-888-788-0099 or eight seven seven eight five three five two four seven this information and enter meeting id number nine nine seven three four one two six three four seven 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
007automatic announcement that the host is allowing you to speak when speaking please move to a quiet area and mute any television or background sound so that we may hear you clearly please state your name and address at the beginning of your comments and be patient there is a delay of up to 30 seconds before connection is established so josh is anybody on the line yet i don't see anyone as of now give it a a minute and see if anyone joins us oh no i'm not seeing anyone okay let's wait another few uh seconds okay nice not hearing anybody um this is the end of the public first public comment period there will be another uh public comment period at the end of the meeting so uh the next item on the agenda are special
008presentations um so i'm going to uh trans i'm going to um give up the chair to vice chair rita mitchell and she's going to matter to special presentations and i will take the chair back for the next item on the agenda which is um approval of minutes okay i'm rita would you like to proceed yep thank you steve first off i want to say happy earth day everyone and um i am really pleased to have earth day as an opportunity to bring in information about the pollinator subcommittee that's been working to do outreach for what we are calling our pollinator allies in the community um and it's been um really gratifying to see the involvement of many groups and we found some people who are willing to share their expertise and observations for this part
009of the meeting prior to something that we'll be considering later so um our our mission just to repeat something that we've said to the group before for the pollinator subcommittee is to foster culture of acceptance and appreciation of pollinators in order to preserve and strengthen pollinator populations in ann arbor and we hope to do that through how we advise through the commission as a whole and how we help to work with others to educate members of the community and we're really fortunate to have three really great presenters tonight um our first one is mark charles who i've come to know through the group called wild ones he's been involved for over 20 years in the ann arbor natural areas preservation group as a volunteer he ran a nationwide program for youth-led habitat projects and he
010organized the first public culinary education event in 2009 in ann arbor yeah mark um and he's still and i can say from many conversations with him he's still pr appreciating local ecosystems and learning how to support them i think that is a really great way to start us off and mark thank you very much for joining us tonight we have things set up so that you can share your screen and your presentation and i'll just turn it over to you right now thank you commute got it sorry thank you rita and commission i'm welco i'm feel very privileged to be able to speak to you i'm mark charles i live at 2326 easy street in ann harbour and that's where i'm speaking from today um start my slides if i can manage that okay um
011why do we why are we interested well i guess i guess first a couple more things about me the the uh i got involved with native plants in the first place which preceded my interest in native pollinators and that happened through my daughter who was in an after-school program with our neighbor janine palms and as a part of that they had adopted a stream and and they ended up uh with with adult support creating rain gardens in ann arbor's brewer park and i know some some of you have been hands-on participants in that process i got it from there i got to learn about native plants found pretty interesting and as i learned about native plants i learned that a great many a great majority of our interesting native plants uh certainly those that have
012showy flowers all depend on pollinators for their existence the the the fact is very simple with if there are no pollinators there can be no fertile seeds for these large groups of plants and with no fertile seeds eventually the current individuals will die out and the species will go extinct the more we learn about pollinators uh the more we see how they are important to multiple environmental goals and and that we'd me to increase my efforts uh for supporting cultural and landscape practices that are healthy for pollinators primarily bees especially native bees certain other native insects primarily native insects that are we consider beneficial to humans but also to beneficial to the whole functioning of ecosystems which as we continue to learn is a more and more complex than we had imagined and each time
013we think we've got a a a a bit of a full understanding we've learned soon after that that no there's another magnitude beyond that that we don't understand the tiny things that run the world as eo wilson says this happens to be a service barrier in my backyard one of the big reasons for supporting pollinators is simply that they're interesting they're beautiful they are complex their relationship with flowers and plants are complex and if if people are free of uh in taught if they have not learned fear and not learned that every insect is something to be destroyed uh they're capable of just seeing them on their on their own uh the photo on the right is from our first uh pollinator education event that rita mentioned 2009 uh co-sponsored by bird park children's wet
014meadow ann arbor chapter of wild ones and ann arbor city natural area preservation photo on the left is from my front yard and this is uh a native bee uh kind of a small thing on uh coneflower echinacea purpurea now supporting pollinators is supporting a number of other goals that i know are important to you all one of them is they support home gardens and local food production certainly a matter of interest to us all they support native plants in the broad way as i've already mentioned and native plants are the fundamental along with soil quality native plants are the fundamental uh participants in the ecosystem they're important for a lot of reasons but in direct functional terms environmental services you might try to call it they absorb stone water they need less supplemental watering
015than most cultivated plants they require less of the kind of mowing and and tending that we tend to rely on gasoline-powered tools they're fire they call for less emissions and finally they tend to be more resilient in the face of climate change and extreme weather events now we've just experienced one of those in the past 24 hours and it'll be real interesting to see in the next three or four days how many dead tulips you notice in your yard and what change you notice if any if you're growing native plants it's important to know that as as more and more people learn about the value of native plants and native pollinators more organizations are implementing programs that encourage their members and the broader public to support these organisms wild ones is a national organization with
016a chapter in ann arbor since i don't know sometime in the late 1990s southeast michigan butterfly association is focused on butterflies master rain gardens is a organization we'll hear from uh in a few minutes uh broad environment groups like sierra club ottoman the nature conservancy various land preserve organizations there's uh just a great deal of increasing interest increasing support learning is happening and the word is going around there's there's lately a facebook group called pollinators and native plants and it has recently passed the milestone of twenty thousand uh members a number of the things that the city does uh certainly impact almost everything the city does impacts pollinators but there are certain things the city does already that are very actively benefiting pollinators so i'm pleased to say there's there's a lot of good news
017here uh habitat preservation includes active support for rain gardens a wonderful system of natural areas our system of green belts and green preservation both within and outside the city protection of of variegated stream banks and medians vegetated i'm sorry vegetated stream banks that have something other than turf grass i think your plan changes to chapter 40 also fall in this category in terms of cultural practices uh certainly integrated pest management which i know the commission has supported control of invasive species not only invasive plants but invasive insects and other organisms the increased use of native plants in all possible places that includes city streets and street extensions street medians it includes the city's own uh property includes uh private corporations and homeowners uh very broadly the support of native plants helps make our city more
018sustainable more resilient and a happier place to live in finally the efforts to train staff and promote training broadly through the entire city staff very very helpful and the gradual addition of appropriate requirements to city contracts for from everything from mowing um tree maintenance other things certainly will continue to benefit pollinators and the ecosystem there's a number of things the city has experimented with and there's certainly been a learning process it's certainly a good idea and probably a good year a good a good time period for us to think about what has worked some things that haven't worked so well some things that have worked that we can expand on success and the kind of initiatives that i think we have a start and can can really go forward with include the ones listed here
019on the right i'll just mention in terms of the uh the photograph that um this was the this was actually a county ef a joint city county effort in mary beth doyle park and on the banks of mallett's creek which as you know malette's creek flows and drains through most of a great part of the east side of ann arbor this involved third graders planting native shrubs with support from that volunteers and city staff and staff from the washington now county water resource commissioner's office also a volunteer to the photographs volunteer associated with that office and of course they had releases signed privacy releases from parents of all the juveniles why is this not going down i'm sorry i've got a minor technical glitch here there we go that ends my presentation the the contact
020information for the wild ones chapter which does monthly programs by zoom these days and hopefully with vaccination we'll be going back to doing them at the methi botanical gardens the photograph here is willows which is a native species very valuable to pollinators even though it's not pollinated by insects and this is part of a stream bed project at the mary lou murray recreation center here in ann arbor thank you again unmuted thanks mark that was great um i just wanted to ask one thing that you and i had commented on before and just to have you comment on the the um specifically the cone flower that had holes in the petals and what you see is the significance of that um that would be good for people in the community to understand oh see if
021i can get that slide back here some reason here we are okay what uh rita is talking about is here in the the purple coneflower image on the right you can see in this case you have a pair of semicircular cuts in the leaf petals just happens that they are a pair that are opposite each other and you can see another one here at the sort of the three o'clock position and maybe you can see one over here about four o'clock there are certain native insects that native bees that provision their nests with pollen they lay the eggs and then they seal up the nests and certain of them called generically called leaf cutter bees cut with their with their mandibles uh semicircular pieces of flower petals or certain leaves and use those two to
022to seal the opening of the tunnels in which they have laid their provisioned with pollen and laid their eggs for their young and and i guess my reason for finding for really appreciating that is that for me it's an indicator that when we see holes in leaves and petals that's actually very often a good thing absolutely yeah it it's a necessary thing if we have a world with no insect damage to plants it means we have no insects that are eating and that means we will have no insects and as i mentioned before if we have no insects we will have no flowering plants and possibly no food yes in the past our people 10 and 20 years ago very few people had this understanding so i can remember when there there was an outbreak
023of uh gypsy moth and gypsy moth larva and people were panicking that uh it's going to kill all the trees and so must be stopped at any cost well any cost turns out to be an enormous cost because the things that were sprayed even with people opting out and balloons and all of the uh discussion around those issues um those sprays killed desirable insects right along with gypsy moths they killed monarch butterflies every other sort of butterfly they killed dragonflies native bees you name it um so while they did succeed in knocking down the gypsy moss they they uh killed a lot of other desirable things and really damaged the ecosystem i think approach to invasive plant management is what we've seen with purple loosestrife and the people at that university down the road that
024that with considerable effort and care found an insect from the plant's native habitat that could survive here and that would not spread they had the biggest part was guaranteeing it wouldn't do any unwanted damage and spread to damage other plants they did that research it took time and money of course and introduced the insect and at this point purple loosestrife which was formerly a very bad pest in any kind of wet areas and a lot of roadside ditches and so on is really not a problem it's it it survives in small populations but it doesn't get out of hand pretty impressive i see three other people who would like to uh ask you a question mark so i'm going to start with john mursky okay let's see your hand john thank you rita thank you
025mark thanks for all the work that you've done in this area at the end of your presentation you listed a number of actions we can take and i'm wondering if there's one to add to it and if people on this meeting have more expertise than i can comment i've heard that it would be much better for insects i don't know specifically about pollinators but i assume also pollinators if property owners would delay the cleanup on their property until um the early part of may because if they're going around and raking up and sucking leaves and everything like that then there's a lot of insect larvae that are either going to be damaged or killed or sucked up and carted off and composted or whatever happens is is that indeed true and is there something we
026can do to better inform not only residents but in a town like ann arbor where a lot of landscaping and lawn care companies do that kind of work get the work out word out to them yes thank you for bringing this up um let me get click the right buttons here it just so happens that the uh the document that's shown on the screen here from the xerxes society speaks to that very point and i'd be glad to send you a copy of that where you can find it and download it from the internet uh and those practices that you mentioned are are right on target and they can be done at all levels they can be done by homeowners they can be done by landscape and landscape contractors they can be done by city
027staff on city property a lot of cultural practices are widely applicable and require widespread education specific training and in some cases enforcement through the city contractual process thank you and it would be could provide that copy of that and we can distribute it amongst the entire commission thank you sure steve you have your hand raised um yes i do yeah thank you very much mark uh for that presentation um i had a question about um you said that um some native trees were supportive of pollinators um which ones are in particular stand out besides willows that he mentioned oh thanks for that question uh i'm i'm sure you know that a great many of our shade trees especially are wind pollinated and of course all evergreens all pines and spruces and so on are wind
028pollinated but even among those one genus in particular is very helpful to pollinators and that's willows so any kind of willows whether it's willows weeping willows native or non-native are vital because they provide pollen that early bees can use early and they're especially important in the very early spring because a number of bees species emerge in fact two or three weeks ago now and are hungry and need food for fuel and they can get that from willows and and i've had a i'm sorry i had a an illustration on the last page of my presentation was showing up a native bee called a generically called a cellophane the colleagues genus on a willow other trees include some that the cities are is currently planting and some that perhaps could be included lyriodendron the tulip tree
029very beneficial something called the kentucky coffee tree doesn't really make coffee but it's called that gymnoclatus is the genus there tulip tree is lyriodendron also everything in the genus prunus that includes wild black cherries wild plums so those are those are trees that are they're commonly used in landscaping and that are beneficial to insects there are other the other thing that's beneficial to insects is native shrubs native woody shrubs for the same reasons okay well thank you very much see another hand chris graham and here i am uh still working on dinner i apologize uh uh wild ones have been a force in our community among those who care about natural features for a long time i uh regret i don't have time to be participate in more organizations than i do and do more
030than i do i would be there a couple of interesting observations over the last couple of days um red buds hawthorns our native plant survived the cold of two nights ago and last night just fine um some of you may have noticed magnolias around town that were extraordinarily beautiful this year because we had a southern spring where most of the magnolias come from great well at least yeah that we plant in our landscape and and uh they were completely crushed night before last just more crushed than i've ever seen them at the same year that they were the most beautiful that they have ever been so native plants are really important and i'm sure you agree and the wild ones all agree i'm not sure i'm willing to go to the place where we don't
031plant anything but native plants but at least we should do a lot more of that and i'm sure you agree yes indeed we could we could spend an evening on this but uh and we'd probably end up agreeing to disagree but i would assert that that any landscaping need any landscape design need uh can be met with the appropriate native plan i saw gabby raise her hand gabby that's throwing down the gauntlet do not disagree but a lot of clients would say oh but i need a magnolia people yeah hi mark thank you for your presentation i also wanted to thank you for sharing how you got involved with this and sharing your personal story on it which leads me to ask in terms of education and awareness you know you got involved with this
032because of your daughter what do you think would be impactful ways to get more families involved oh wonderful question um number one keep doing the things that the city is already doing hosting a a an open house and walk at mary beth doyle park this sunday morning from 10 until 11 and welcoming parents and and families with children to come with appropriate coven precautions and there would be somebody staffing an information table there and telling people about the wonderful wildflowers that are blooming at this time of year natural area preservation has had seed gathering of events which are wonderful for children because you base there's no way to there's no way to make a mistake gathering wild plants at native plant seeds wesley science center has programs washtenaw county parks has naturalist programs all of
033those things are very helpful and and we have we have to sometimes you engage the children and that engages the parents as i as i found out uh right there thank you thank you um are there other questions all right um i think we should move on but mark thank you so much these were um i think really helpful observations and um thinking a little bit about how we could maybe enhance what we're thinking about doing from our subcommittee approach so um we'll we'll let you know what happens next but thanks so much you're welcome to stay and uh watch with us um i'd like to start now with our our next speaker um and this is leslie kellman who is a master rain garden volunteer and known as the plant guru in the washington
034county um rain garden program i think that's great um and i have been very appreciative that she agreed to come and speak with us she has personally built three rain gardens in her yard and has some data i think on on the number of rain gardens in the city and their benefits so i'd like to just turn it over to leslie right now and leslie if you want to say anything more an introduction please do um and you said that you were okay with running your screen is that correct um i'll give it i've never done it before but i'll give it a try okay well we can help you if you need that don't worry just okay okay oops here we go is that out not yet okay um might be better if j
035if josh i can run it for you sure thank you i didn't change it so thank you yeah i know where it is let's get here we go all right i just want to make sure this is the right presentation this is the right one all right let me uh okay maybe get it zoomed in just slightly so that way we can here we go can you all see that all right yes okay okay okay and as rita said i am leslie kellman i am a master ring gardener i've been so since 2015. um this is two pictures from different angles of one of my three rain gardens it's the one that i actually did for the class the other two that i did well let's just say they were i learned a lot from
036the class i tried them beforehand the class taught me how to renovate them and make them work uh next next slide okay so why why put in a rain garden um if you take a look at pretty much you know your typical landscape around town we've got the buildings we've got a lot of concrete and we've got a lot of turf grass the buildings in the concrete you know the sidewalks driveways and that are impermeable and the turf grass it's it does soak in the water but it takes a while because it's so dense and so you're basically interrupting the water cycle when you do that when that water ends up flowing into say the storm water system instead of into the ground so the purpose of a rain garden is to collect that water
037on site in a lower area so that it will infiltrate into the ground and so you are replenishing that ground water instead of having it running stormwind water system running into the river and creating issues downstream there um and there are really two parts you can think in a sense two parts the rain guard one is that low depression where the water is flowing in but the other part that really helps are the plants okay and i'll talk more about those in a couple of slides okay go ahead to the next slide there if you would okay um the mastering okay one of people instrumental in putting together the course and teaching the course is um shannon gibb randall along with susan bryan who is the master the rain garden coordinator for the county so
038shannon jump in anytime here on this one um okay and i got this slide from susan bryan um the nest you know mastering the rain garden coordinator for county and this is a slide that shows a number of great men uh i'm sorry rain gardens built in the city of ann arbor since the rain garden program started and as you can see there are about 380 as of the end of last year and in 2 2010 the first master rain gardener class started and that was in person class that met for about five weeks and primarily taught by susan and shannon with some other people staff coming in in 2015 they got an online a rain garden class too that people did again once a week and it class walk through basically how to put
039together a rain garden and both classes ran up until covert pretty much stopped the in person when the end of last year and it's now all online and even last year with the shutdown you can see there were still 47 rain gardens built and from what i understand okay the 380s in the city was a residential raid gardens that doesn't include the ones that you see that have been put in like for example down miller avenue at the schools at municipal buildings it private built private buildings and so on so we've got a lot more than that and from what i understand throughout the county there's about a thousand of them okay next slide please okay an important part of the rain garden as i mentioned earlier are the plants that you put in and
040as part of the program native plants are very strongly encouraged and they have very important port part now i was a high school science teacher that was primarily earth and physical science so i i tend to think more about what was below the ground here and one of the important parts of putting the plants into the rain garden is those deep roots the native plants have and the plants themselves help filter the sediment going into the rain garden those deep roots actually go in there and they help break down the soil so that for example if you've got a clay clay soil which we have a lot of here in ann arbor um the water those roots will help the water infiltrate into the ground soak into the ground within a day or two so
041you aren't left with standing water that people tend to become considered concerned about if you talk about things like collecting water from your property so they do that also those plants they require water so water is pulled up from those roots to enable the plant to survive but then you start taking a look at what is above the ground the part we see okay plants that we choose um they're host plants for a number of native species you think about milkweeds and the caterpillar not a native species but you can also think of and not a rain garden plant but if you've ever looked at say fennel or dill they are decimated by the swallowtail caterpillars okay so host plants that insects need for example in order to survive you've got the seeds that are
042for birds for small animals so they provide food they provide shelter to a lot of these animals so the more of these pollinator plants that you have in your gardens in your rain gardens the more diverse plant and animal life you will get and that really does help kind of stabilize the environment when you have that and the other thing that doesn't usually get mentioned is those plants are pretty and so as you look at them you know i when i put my rain garden in for example one of them is sitting near the deck and my one of my goals in retirement was i want to sit back and just read books because i never had time to well i find that i have a hard time reading them now because every time i
043see something land on one of those plants or scurry around or hear a frog i've got to get up and go investigate it and i see a lot more of that now that i've got that rain garden nearby um one of the plants that i can think of as an example when you start talking about diversity is mountain mint and i one day i was just chatting with somebody standing by the mountain mint i am not an expert on bees but i was able to distinguish on that one mountain plant in bloom probably about five or six different species of bees all on there at the same time so you know pollinators choosing pollinator plants for your rain garden as well as the other gate gardens very important both above and below ground okay so
044next slide okay and these are just some examples i took from rain garden in the rain garden in my backyard one of the rain gardens um you can see the monarch caterpillar on the swamp milkweed bumblebees and a couple of plants here one of my favorite plants just because it's so interesting is the rattlesnake master and that grape that wasp on there five ten years ago you wouldn't have caught me walking near a wasp but i saw that and i'm so fascinated just kept getting closer and closer um so so much diversity that you don't see when you don't have a lot of these native plants in there okay last slide please okay the master rain gardener program itself is still still going strong during covet in fact they've actually found that there's an uptick
045in people taking the course as there is a lot of interest in gardening now that we're home a lot more so here's a little bit of information here as i mentioned susan bryant is the master um the rain garden coordinator and she's with water resources commission you can get a lot of information from that master rain gardener website there including the information on the course how to put in your own rain garden and so on also available on that address is a copy of the regards um handbook you know how to do it and this is an older copy it's now downloadable that i got but it walks you through the course does week by week you know how to choose a site how to calculate how large your rain garden is needs to be
046how to i mean get in there and get your shovel in there how to dig it and so on how to get the water to the rain garden from your downspouts um and so on and then as you mentioned the course that susan and shannon teach is now available online youtube so you can do it at your own pace between the two of those by the time you go through the handbook and the video you really are ready to put you've got your rain garden planned and you are ready to pull out the shovel or hire somebody else to do it however there's also one more source of information for help if you want it or just advice or just a chat and that is there is a facebook page that you get access you
047can get access to when you sign up for the course and i have no idea how many of us are now on it but if you know people have taken the class that have this is their first gardening project ever they want to do something good for the environment for their families for their home and don't even know what kind of shovel to buy and i've talked to people when i've helped with the in-person class that are really at that point and then some of us have been doing it for years but you go onto the facebook page and you ask you know okay here's my site and you put up a photograph that you got off um google earth or something you know this is what it looks like water flows here what can
048i do and people jump right in you get your questions answered um and one of my problems was and the reason i got started was i was getting water in my basement and you know people ask about that well i'm getting water in my basement what kind of things can i do how can a rain garden help what kind of plants should i plant i've got sunny clay sunny and clay what works one of the discussions that's been going on last two days is what do you do about the rabbits the rabbits are eating everything what kind of plants are rabbit resistant and so the program itself is it's great as far as being able to do something you know as i've just mentioned for your own home for your family and for the environment
049as a whole keeping it more diverse keeping it more stable and so on okay thank you thanks leslie um so i think one of the questions that just comes to my mind is um where does someone find these beautiful plants that you've used in your rain gardens there actually there are a number of places you can get them there are a lot of native plant vendors um that you've got some that come to the farmers markets and urban ipsy farmers markets that are somewhat local and one of the handy-dandy parts listing oh here it is in the course pack is a list of resources to buy a rain garden no local made of plant producers also if you find that you want that rain garden but your back says this is not a good idea
050for me there are a number of landscape companies engineering so on that have taken the course and you can hire them to do it for you that's great um and again one of the handy-dandy things that susan and shannon put together as far as i don't know what to buy here's a spreadsheet that will also give you ideas so you can go to the farmer's market go to the native plant nurseries that are around and that's really one of the best ways to go in non-cova times though my favorite are the plant swaps and the master rain gardeners have a couple times a year other organizations have them and then if you go on the pace facebook page if you go on say if you follow the next door part gardeners love to share their
051plants we don't like killing them as many of us probably know so and then if there's something that you really want there are some online places but you can really do a great job filling up a beautiful rain garden um locally great um i see steve brown had his hand up first let's go with steve yeah hi thanks leslie that was a great presentation um so i around half of all ann arbor residents live in apartment live in an apartment complexes so i was wondering if you were aware of any programs either governmental or non-profits that try to encourage you know the owners of apartment complexes to put rain gardens as part of their landscaping um i don't know of any we've had people though in the courses um because i come i have been
052up until they were kind of down for a while i would help out in the morning before the class actually started and i know i talked with not with people that in their condos they would go through the whole process and then approach the condo association um i don't know for sure um shannon are you yeah there were a number of people that were from apartment complexes or that that wanted to do it or that um somebody who couldn't do it in their own site would work with somebody who was from an apartment complex so there definitely were people that came through the majority were homeowners for sure um but there were definitely people that came through to do that it is a bigger hurdle to get through the approval process for whatever your your
053um your building is but um yeah there were people that took advantage of the program to learn how to do it and execute it in that way okay um is there any way that we might be able to promote that um what do you mean promote it like that in terms of um the the master rain gardener program itself or being able to sort of reach out to um reach out to apartment complexes themselves to see if people are interested yeah i mean reaching out to apartment complex owners to see if they would consider that as part of their landscaping plans that's an interesting idea to think about because oftentimes there's a landscape committee it would be interesting to be able to give like the resource to a landscape committee that those kinds of things
054exist because i think one of the powerful things about rain gardens is leslie was saying is that you're you're dealing with a couple of different goals that the city has one is storm water management and one is the pollinator piece and so it's a real twofer in that way um and uh that's an interesting idea is to think about how to promote it with um many times those things are a little harder to control in those systems because um sometimes the things are piped underground and it's a little harder to get access um but not all the time you know so i think i think that's a cool idea yeah because the program is really set up to be able to help people in whatever the circumstance um is and if you have a difficult
055technical situation like there's folks in the program that help you through that yeah so okay um kathy griswold i just want to say that that i took the class from susan and i agree with everything that leslie said especially about how the facebook group is so helpful um i don't before covid there used to be at least one if not two potluck picnics and plant swaps every year and they were a lot of fun uh and all of the plants that i received in the plant swap are still alive so and multiplying so i would encourage other people to uh to take the class at least online so thank you um john risky yes i think since this is an ann arbor body we should also say that the city of ann arbor on its
056website has a web page on rain gardens and maybe that's a place to steve's question i was just picking up on his statement that would be a place where maybe we could actually explicitly have a comment that says people that are living in condos or apartment complexes um this is what you can do this is who you can contact that's all thanks leslie okay welcome anyone else i guess i would just one question leslie did you solve your basement problem yes i did i mean i had a little little trickle last year but i think once we yank that deck which is planned for this spring i'll be able to we'll we'll do a little regrading there too so yeah definitely great well thank you very much um uh any other questions for leslie among
057our group okay let's say you're welcome to stay um and josh i have to ask for a little bit of assistance um becky gayevsky is uh trying to get in she says she can see us but she has not been able to um get visible and audible interesting okay i'm not seeing her oh here we go oh thanks yeah got her hi becky wherever you are there you are okay hi i'll just give you a really quick intro and i just want to say thank you to becky gayevsky from for joining us from natural areas preservation she is a conservation steward and i've been fortunate enough to work with her a few times on on stewarding that i've done in parks and she is a great resource for us in the city and i'm so
058glad that she's part of our our team of people that work with us um becky i'm gonna just turn it over to you now and and um you know our theme so thanks yeah sure thank you rita um did you have the slides um yes josh is going to be running them for you okay awesome well uh while we get that going oh here comes great thank you very much josh um so again my name is becky guyeske and i'm with natural area preservation just a little bit about us for those of you who might not know who we are we fall under the umbrella of parks and rec at the city of ann arbor and we are funded by the parks maintenance and capital improvements millage our mission is to protect and restore ann
059arbor's natural areas and to foster an environment and environmental ethic among its citizens and the way we do that is through ecological or habitat restoration so kind of by definition of what we do we are restoring pollinator habitat and protecting pollinator habitat every day basically the way we do this work is both through staff using staff and volunteers and we have work days where folks can come out and help us do things like removing invasive species or doing prescribed burns collecting and scattering native seeds all the things that would kind of try to enhance the quality and biodiversity of pollinator habitat and we even do special events and work days that are focused around pollinator week so we'll do work days that are only focused in prairie areas or wetland areas where we've got lots
060of good butterflies and insect diversity we also support independent volunteers in restoring this type of habitat we have park stewards who adopt certain parks as their own and kind of work in there independently we'll make work plans together with them to try to achieve maybe goals that they have or goals that nap in general has and we'll kind of guide them through that process we'll give them support with our staff time we'll do volunteer work days with them so in addition to us doing all this sort of work we also empower other folks to do it if they have a particular park that they're really passionate about and they really want to see uh restored and mark is one of our stewards as a matter of fact from mary beth doyle good to see you
061mark um another way that we are supporting pollinators through our work is we use an integrated pest management plan which is basically we try all different kinds of methods to control our invasive pests we're not just going straight to chemicals or things that could harm pollinators we're going to first try pulling hand pulling or we'll try manually cutting or burning we want to use the methods that are the most effective with the least amount of impact on non-target organisms so we want to minimize as much off target impacts as we can so we're always thinking about what is a good way that we can accomplish our goals and not have any negative side effects we also provide a project guidance for different big projects that go on throughout the city so for example several years
062ago there was a big restoration of traver creek at leslie park golf course and this year as we speak right now there is a restoration of ben's creek at huron hills golf course so we are providing input on what native plantings would be good how can we attract more birds or get more wildlife into these areas so we kind of we get to dip our hands into all kinds of different projects in that way we also do site plan reviews when those new big developments are coming into the city we're looking at impacts that those might have on natural areas and pollinator habitats as much as we can we want to minimize impact to high quality natural areas sometimes you're able to get new park land out of that and we're also providing guidance on
063native plantings again like what what would be a good seed mix to put down here to get a good diversity of native plants to attract more pollinators next slide please so we also do a lot of outreach to the community and we involve folks in citizen science efforts we've been the ann arbor hub for the michigan butterfly network for about six years now i think and that is an effort that's out of the kalamazoo nature center it's a statewide effort they want to get all these different hub cities is what what they call them on board where these hubs can recruit volunteers that will go out and survey different butterfly habitats and record all the different butterflies that they can find so every year we train volunteers to go out to i think we have
064routes in about 10 or 12 parks now um and they'll go out and they'll record the butterflies they see the type of habitat they see them in how many they see and this all goes into a national database that can be accessed by researchers and other folks that are studying pollinator diversity and distribution so we're always actively recruiting more volunteers for that program and sort of collaborating with the folks at the butterfly network to get people trained in the survey protocol every year we partner with the leslie science and nature center for their annual monarch migration festival we will set up a table and talk about our native habitats and why they're important and why we need to restore them and how we can restore them we'll do little walks to help people identify native
065plants that are good for butterflies and will sort of assist them as they release tagged monarchs which is pretty cool they weren't able to do the festival last year unfortunately because of the pandemic but we hope that maybe this year we'll get back on track and we will have a presence there again we've also partnered with nwf ann arbor office in the past to distribute educational materials at public events like the green fair um or i think maybe there were some pollinator week materials that we distributed so we're we're always happy to have those educational materials and try to get them out into the community more we are also reaching out to the public through our informational webpage on pollinators that we maintain on the city website we've got posts on our facebook page our
066twitter page about pollinators and the importance of pollinators so um fostering an environmental ethic among ann arbor this is one of the ways that we do that we want to let everybody know what what sort of cool pollinators they can find if they plant more native plants in there in their front yard for example we just kind of want to spread the enthusiasm about pollinators that we all have as well next slide please and we've also collaborated with some external partners with nwf ann arbor is a signatory of the mayor's monarch pledge which is a program where mayors from cities and villages around the country commit to doing certain actions to benefit pollinators and there's a whole list of pre-determined actions you can pick and choose which ones you want to sign on for and
067then at the end of the year you submit an annual report talking about how did you achieve all of those different things that you committed to so we've been a signatory since i believe 2015 and um since then there are two levels of commitment i guess to this pledge there's like a leadership circle and then there's just like a signatory level so we've been in the leadership circle um for several years i'm not sure if it was from the beginning or not but for the last several years we've been in the leadership circle so we report back to nwf every year about all the things that we've done at nap but also throughout parks and um any other organizations that i may know of that's help that are helping pollinators will kind of just let
068them know like hey here are all the cool things that we've done um a couple years ago we also received a grant from the nwf to purchase native seed in order to enhance some of our pollinator habitat that was very cool we've also collaborated with the ann arbor office of nwf and a group of citizen leaders called the wolf pack to establish a pollinator garden at west park and that's been going great an additional project that we've been a part of is called project wingspan and this is um by the pollinator partnership we had an ecologist from project wingspan come out a couple of years ago to evaluate our pollinator habitats and give us some advice for how we could improve them like doing different timing of our prescribed burns to try to favor some
069more of the wildflowers that could come up and be beneficial to pollinators and as part of that after we kind of got all of our habitats evaluated then we also collaborated with project wingspan to have them send out teams of trained volunteers to collect native seeds from our prairies with the idea that those seeds would all be kind of collected and mixed together um based on the region of michigan that they came from and then redistributed out to other communities that may need some assistance with getting more seed and more diversity into their own habitats and as a part of that we were actually awarded some seed material this year that we can redistribute back out into our habitats to try to enhance uh pollinator plant diversity we've also worked with the washington county water
070resources commission hand in hand with some of their rain gardens where we've performed prescribed burns and invasive species control in some of these gardens that have good habitat for pollinators so we are always happy to partner up with other folks in order to sort of further our our pollinator efforts we're always looking for new ideas and uh new ways that we can get folks excited about pollinators and making better habitats for them and i think that was those were all my slides so there's lots of stuff that we've done and i probably went through it pretty quick um but yeah happy to take any questions thanks becky uh i think john mursky has his hand raised quickie i just realized we haven't talked at all about the university and i'm wondering uh what we might
071know about the university in terms of resources staff students arboretum botanical garden dot dot dot yeah that's a great question and actually we yeah we don't have as much collaboration with the university as as you might expect um you know we're on kind of friendly terms with the folks over there of course but yeah we haven't collaborated on a lot of projects we have had students from seas doing projects in our parks for like the general ecology classes um and we've pitched the occasional masters project over there so we're we're connected with the folks in seas pretty well but yeah not not as much with the arb or the bot gardens mark you look like okay sorry i just sorry i'm looking at electronic hands oh i see it mark thanks uh let's go ahead
072and mark just just to that point there's a brand new director now for nichols arboretum and mathi botanical gardens he just did a public session on tuesday evening so he's very interested in partnerships generally so i think that prospects in that particular direction are are very good right now and that was all i was going to say but emphasis i think mark hit it just perfectly because tony really wants to have partnerships that's great yeah anyone else well i can just say that i have learned a lot from nap and really appreciate the the kind of education and the um kind of the uh encouragement to um learn about a particular area and apply uh the kinds of training that they provide that that you've provided becky and others and i i just really appreciate
073nap and i love that um i didn't know until i saw in your slides that knapp had been involved with project wingspan which i think is really fabulous oh wow more hands uh shannon um i guess i would just like to say how important i feel like your organization is to the city and that with very few people you all leverage hundreds of us working for the city and i think that model is very powerful and um i just i think it's a really critical part of how we have the quality of life that we do because there is no way we could ever afford to pay for the amount of work that gets done by ann arbor citizens because you all run a great organization so i just think it's an incredibly critical and
074important piece of what makes ann arbor what it is and i just want to offer my gratitude that you all exist in the way that you do thank you so much yeah i think the total number of hours that we put in every year um it's something like a third or a half of all the total hours is is by volunteers the amount of work that happens so it is pretty amazing nowhere in our nowhere other than ann arbor would we have that amount of effort so i am also very grateful to all of you kathy griswold i want to acknowledge your excellent communication program uh i'm on city council and whenever i see one of the nap communications i say why can't city council have excellent communications like that and i have volunteered for
075nap and i i'm sure i will again but congratulations thank you thank you so much jonathan overpack sorry i just forgot to put my hand down oops okay uh chris graham a short story to tell um back years ago the university and the va hospital made a deal about a route for connecting fuller road around the va without using oak way or oak whatever the road was that came up the east side of the va hospital so they could enlarge the va hospital to the east and the route that was picked went right through a grove of native baroques that were 36 inches and there were a whole group of us that said no and while we were debating that issue it was very clear that that tract of land between what is now full
076of road and the va hospital was completely full of ammo honeysuckle and big buckthorns big guys they've been growing in there since the 1960s probably and in the process of this big debate almost the entire council and the mayor came out on that property to look at those trees and in the discussion it was pointed out that these plants these invasive exotic plants would completely destroy the natural areas of ann arbor and were in the process rapidly of doing so one of the guys who was present was a sierra club member and took the matter back to his group and said we need to do something and of course the question was what to do and what they did was mount the campaign to establish the millage to establish the naturalist program in ann arbor
077to do stewardship on our parks many of which had the best natural areas existing in the city first of all to control invasive species and with plants that large and that well established across the city in ann arbor this was a big deal and so in come all of these wonderful volunteers all the way up to becky and many employees over the years that have transformed our best natural features in the city into um in many cases thriving native ecosystems um and uh so 30 almost 30 years later we have this wonderful program that becky's a part of that um reaches out not just through the park system and on our public lands but has educated the majority of citizens in ann arbor when i started in business in the early 1980s none of my
078clients understood what a buckthorn was what a hammer honeysuckle was or what any invasive species were and now almost every client i meet knows very well what they are there's been a complete sea change i'm hoping that we have an equal secret about the native landscape across the city as a whole we really need to go back to that to have um the most sustainable landscape that we can have the most energy conserving landscape we can have the most pollinator-rich landscape we can have we're working on that but um maybe next month we'll talk about it the big deal is we have this really unusual program that becky represents and um the people of ann arbor have spent their tax dollars repeatedly in subsequent millages to keep supporting it and that's what's really special thank
079you i'm preaching i'm apologize i totally agree with your comments and thank you chris for the history and becky thank you so much for for coming to talk with us tonight um so that's really the end of our uh special presentations for tonight does anyone have any other questions or comments for any of our speakers right now before we move okay um you're welcome to stay if you want because we do have discussion of something that might be of interest to you if not you know i'll just say thanks again um and uh steve i think it's back to you for just a couple of quick agenda items yes um thank you so uh are you giving me back the floor i am okay so the next item on the agenda is the approval of
080the minutes from our march 25th meeting i hope everybody's had a chance to look at the draft minutes um do i have a motion for to accept them to begin discussion or of the minutes so moved by mursky uh do i have a second um um are there any the floor is open for discussion please raise your hand if anybody would like to discuss or make some amendments to the minutes um i see chris graham's hand is still up but chris apologies that's hard to remember to take that down that's okay all right so i don't see any other hands so let's proceed to a vote um all who all who agree to accept the minutes as written uh please raise your hand or say aye aye aye aye all right anybody opposed hearing none
081on scene nine uh the minutes uh are approved as drafted uh the next item on the entire is unfinished business so we have one item on the agenda here that is the chapter 40 the title iii chapter 40 um modifications to try to encourage more natural features um and so let's see there was a document attached to the um there's a document attached for this um i think it'd probably be a good idea to display it and um um josh could you put that document up and on your screen um and while that's happening let me just say that i i finally got heard back from the transportation commission and from the disability commission and they both said that they've looked over these looked over they discussed this sometime last fall and they both had
082sort of decided that they were okay with raising the height limit from 12 inches to 18 inches and that they didn't want to revisit it so they did not want they did not accept my proposal to have a joint working group with the three of us to work work through these uh they wanted to wait and see what the environmental commission wanted so um i don't think we'll let's see how far we can get today but i think this is something that will probably take up more time than we have left tonight so but let's get started well thanks josh for putting this up josh can you blow that up a little bit more so i'm not sure where this document came from rita um this is a combination um so it has a sort
083of a header page um identifying some goals of what we wanted to do with chapter 40. and then subsequent is the um actual it's a cut and paste from chapter 40 from the city's municipal code for the section on trees and other vegetation so this is a what is displayed with the red highlights is just areas where we had some comments about height when we first talked about this um this chapter of the city code the issue had to do mostly with height and safety and i worked with council member griswold to come up with a list of goals that you see on the left then we wanted to talk about why are we doing this and it does have a number of environmental reasons and it also has an important one with respect to
084safety and even and the last one i think is also important the education in the community um from my perspective i would like to see us make some changes in this potentially more than just the height things and that's why it would be great to just have this discussion tonight um and the the reason is from my perspective that we passed i'm sorry i wasn't on the commission when when the integrated pest management resolution was passed by the commission and by city council but this really i think goes with this we would like to see um as chris graham and john risky and all of you have said we'd like to see less turf grass and the minimization of use of pesticides for control of whatever may be of concern to someone and so this
085is potentially a way for us to to start moving in that direction the relaxation of height of plants and the location of plants i think will help and i think that the other thing that as far as like a point of discussion that i'd like to have um is is the how do we enforce something or do we need to enforce something um when we're asking people to um install more native plants that make yards look different from the the simple um mowed turf grass yards um and i think we saw um particularly with with leslie's presentation tonight with the rain gardens that there is great beauty in these different looking gardens and and great function um and i think we'd like to see that and it really fits in with sustainability so um i'll
086just leave that as my my opening comments um and uh hi john what would you like to say i have a process question you uh want to present this and open it up for discussion you want to assume that we've all read it which i have but i don't know if others had a chance and um then just open it up for discussion right away what's the process or approach you want to take in terms of yeah um well could i ask um has everyone had a chance to read it that's really the fair kind of thing yeah and i can't tell um yeah yeah yeah okay is it pretty much yes for everybody i hope okay um so i guess i would like to discuss um i don't expect us to come to a
087decision tonight or necessarily to get into the very very specifics but i'd like to go over the concepts and talk about how things might change and i'd like to hear kathy has a comment or question right now too okay yeah i just have a suggestion in terms of process and that is if we can agree on what our goals are and we can compare our ordinance um to what's being done in traverse city and grand rapids just for comparison um i think that would be helpful and then we can go back and i don't think we need to wordsmith the actual ordinance i think if we agree on the goals and the other thing is we need to agree on what needs to go in the ordinance and what supporting documentation we need because if
088our goal is going to be to be education oriented rather than enforcement then we're going to need quite a few documents or references references to rain gardens would be one i mean we've talked about some of this tonight uh pollinators and i did talk to the city administrator today and i said we want education not enforcement and he said well i don't have the staff for that but then as we talked about it he said well maybe neighborhood so if we had education material online and we also had opportunities for neighborhoods to be educated rather than individuals i think we could significantly reduce the enforcement and i really see sustainability driving this and my main concern is vegetation hanging over sidewalks and corner site distance issues that i've had for a couple of decades but
089i'm willing to let that be secondary to sustainability because i think that's the community's interest right now and i also so think that's where there's funding to get something done thanks daddy thanks uh lots of hands um john a few quick comments um i really like the goals i like um all of kathy's comments i would make uh one two suggestions relative to the goals we emphasize pollinators here and i'd like this to be maybe a little bit broader and say something maybe like i don't know ecosystem benefits or something that takes into account also birds and other other kinds of creatures so whatever the professionals on this phone call that know this stuff better than i do i'd like to see a more expansive uh view of that reflected here and in terms of
090and i don't know if this is a goal or if this it should be reflected somewhere else when when i was still working uh the company that i had had large properties where we did a lot of conversions of turf grass to native prairies and other ecosystems and when we had to go to the city our discussions focused on intent versus neglect the city did not want this to appear that we were neglecting our property uh but that there was there was intent for a prairie here or there was intent for whatever it was and that will also then prevent people from coming back with an excuse who are really just neglecting their property and saying oh i'm just letting everything uh go to a natural prairie state which may be fine but i think
091we should have some kind of discussion along those lines of what is intent and with what is neglect relative to all this stuff so those are some initial thoughts thanks thanks um great shannon a couple of things um i think this is a great idea um i um there there are very few rain gardens that are in the right of way just just to kind of it's important to clarify this because i know of of two where people have the rain garden in between the sidewalk and the back of the curb there's very few places where people have that because it's full of utilities you have to get special you know i mean it's it's it's not an easy task to do that there's a lot of trees that are in the way and so
092most rain gardens are really happening on the other side of the sidewalk on your property side of the sidewalk so i think we should just be careful about how we're awarding this because it's really like we never allow you know developers to put anything in the right of way in terms of stormwater really stormwater should mostly be outside you know of the right-of-way because um it is important to be able to have a visibility and things like that and again there's just a lot of conflicts with um with the utilities and things like that they can happen it just has to be done really carefully so it's not your sort of low hanging fruit easy thing to do um i would also say that um i think we should keep it to 36 inches and
093not 42 inches um because i think 42 is really getting into the zone of blocking people's views and i i know that um you know providing view lines not destructive blah blah blah i think it's just easier for people to have a clear number than to have to kind of prove the case of you know whether this flower head is you know is blocking the view or not and there are plenty of plants of native plants that that fit that bill to be in the in that what they call the health strip you know um that can be that short and and there are lots of native plants that are taller too but we really don't want the super tall ones in that section because you know it is really important to have the safety
094piece here it really is i'm all for the native stuff in here it's a terrible place for grass to grow in general i think that all makes sense but um it's super important that um that we just see somebody coming i know there's some places like and i i'm also curious about this with like you know there's some places where there's like big shrubs and things like that that people have in these zones where streets are coming at intersections they're just behind the the sidewalk where they're just completely blocking right people's ability to be able to see around the corner and and there are some places like along huron where i bike on the sidewalk because there is no place for the there's no bike lane there and i need to connect to you know
095into the neighborhoods and if i'm coming down at this intersection of seventh and huron people coming up seventh they can't see me and you're coming too fast on a bike and so i think we really need to um start looking at these places where there are crashes and there are issues to really start some enforcement in some places where the safety really is an issue and i get it that people want to screen their house from the busy road kind of thing but we really have to be careful about that too so um i i would kind of like this to do two things one is to promote native plants and to be able to give people that you know the idea that you know that this can work to be able to plant things
096um in that health strip area but also to be really mindful about um just not not creating undue um you know challenges for people to see for drivers to see pedestrians and bikers um and again as somebody who works with nato plants all the time you can do it in 36 inches and under you really especially in that area because things tend to get shorter in that area because it's so hard to grow in that zone um so that's that's my two cents i i think it makes a lot of sense i totally agree with john too about you know intent versus neglect because it gives everybody it gives every anybody in native plants a bad name if you just stop mowing and then say if this is my native garden when there isn't one
097native plant in there you just don't want to mow you know so i think it's important to um for people to have intent and to have you know a design or whatever it is to be able to kind of pull that off and so i don't know if we can walk both sides of this thing in terms of the encouragement as and as and the enforcement but um i think it's great that you all are taking this on because i think that it can serve lots of goals of the city uh with this so thank you for for taking it on thanks we'll be back for advice for sure okay no problem um but i also i just want to comment that i kind of think of the things that that you just raised and
098john's um as one that of kind of courtesy that you design and maintain something in a way that's courteous for your neighbors so that they that people can see adequately and they can open a car door next to the curb adequately so that your plants that you like don't get broken by a car you can there are ways you can place things i think so just that's my comment um steve you're next i know yeah i agree this is good no this is all good i i agree with all the comments that people have made i would just like to point out a few things and that is that yeah that intersection between here on its seventh is a bit unusual because seventh has a significant dog leg there you know so that's a peculiar
099situation and uh but it is bad and um i do i think 36 inches is probably adequate but actually you know in my neighborhood uh it's not any of the vegetation that's blocking the view it's the parked cars especially the suvs and the pickup trucks so you know they are a much bigger problem than anything i could plant there and they i would say you know standing on the sidewalk they go up to five feet so that's 60 inches so uh i don't know how uh you know i when i think about relative risk it's more the parked cars for me than anything that i see here because you know the city has planted a lot of large mature trees in the lawn extensions and so these trucks can be up to two feet in
100diameter and uh and uh they can be you know uh they do certainly block a view but uh it's um not as bad as the cars that are parked along the street so um i just want to point that out and uh and the other thing is that i thought you know about the rain gardens and the lawn extensions i thought it might be a good aspect for storm water management to actually try to divert some of the runoff from the drains into like uh with a curb cut into a rain garden on the curt you know in the lawn extension but from the street to the to the extension yeah what you're thinking really has to be super planned um because they're generally not big enough for all the road runoff that's coming towards
101them and it has happened in certain places but it really has to be something that's kind of on a larger scale to be able to do that so it's happening in places where it's a new development and you can look at it that way but piecemeal it's pretty tough to um to be able to make that happen because it's generally they'd have to be very low your your sidewalk would get exposed on the side because you'd have to have it lower than the road right so it's tricky i understand that yep and uh okay so um but uh i think this is a great initiative now the question is um um who's going to uh who's going to take responsibility for this as a goal who's going to lead it kathy kathy's been the main
102person here okay kathy so you want to form a work group uh to share the some of the work if you need if you need one um i'm hoping that rita will will join me and possibly shannon will at least provide a review because she's she's got a great perspective because she agrees with me no just i'm happy to review yeah i can't be a normal part of the working group but i'm happy to review things oh okay that that would be great and just before for background i have been working on this since 1995 and i believe in the last two decades the situation has worsened at corners and ravina and jackson is another area that gets reported as being a violation on a regular basis and the hedge gets trimmed about six inches
103and then it grows another foot so i feel very strongly that that this is the right time because not only um is it sustainable in in terms of the plantings but if we want more people to walk and bike instead of drive they have to feel safe and we also have our vision zero goal um and just one of the technical details is that most people tend to if they're approaching an intersection they stop where they can see the oncoming traffic and if they can't see the traffic at the stop bar then they keep going and many times they're not stopping until the middle of or past the crosswalk and at that point it's too late to stop for the pedestrian who might be there so that's that's another real reason that that this visibility
104is very important um so i just want to mention one other thing and that is we went to court the city did uh regarding the language in 3.6 and this gets back to john's comment about intent and the language states that it has to be a planned natural landscape so it can't be just something that's developed or that was natural when you bought the land but uh when we tried to um argue that it had to be planned natural landscape in court and that was a matter of two neighbors disagreeing the judgment was against using the term planned natural landscape so i did i confuse people with that it okay wouldn't it all come around to like um you need to show the plan you need to have this documented in some way shape or
105form that doesn't stand up in court and and this was sort of a little wild area on the side of a property that was still being renovated and the neighbor next door didn't like it as i'm told and and sued and so um the the neighbor with the unplanned natural area was uh was fined and he fought it in court and the judge found in his favor not the cities because a planned natural area was considered to be vague and not easy to define could you scroll to that section josh so that uh that's that 316. right yeah on your screen right okay so it's uh the area that's in red on the first line so i agree with john we need to have intent but i think we need to be careful in what
106the language is especially in the ordinance and i'd like to see less detail in the ordinance and more supporting documents that could be used for educational purposes and and i'd suggest that um we have some great consultants with that came and talked to us tonight too yeah from wild ones and then the rain garden group and others that we can test out you know the the direction that we go with this i hope um i would hope that you all would consider that um i see chris has a comment so it seems like we're talking about a number of different things here 316 refers to vegetation on private property and i see no business of the city on private property unless there's a view line problem or unless there are noxious weeds and one tends
107to get noxious weeds if one just lets the european grasses and weeds grow rather than having an intended or tended landscape with our native plants for example um one of the problems was when housing was being repossessed a little over a decade ago banks would repossess property and not maintain it at all of course not and so this ordinance was used to require the bank to maintain the yard because it negatively reflected on the neighborhood okay i think that's a really different issue than what we do in the right-of-way oh absolutely yes but that's that's why one of the reasons is here well it needs work okay yeah i agree so right away um this is some of the most inhospitable planting territory we have it is highly compacted soil it's often fill soil it's
108full of salt it gets snow piled up three feet deep in the winter it has trees many of which have serious roots along in the soil which makes it almost impenetrable [Music] apart from view lines safety view lines at corners and curves i agree with shannon 36 inches is quite adequate to do a native planting that works i don't i don't think we need to allow 42 inches there ever maybe an occasional flower but and not rain gardens that's really complicated as shannon says not to speak of highly compacted soils that don't perk so i it seems to me the most important part of this is view lines on curves and corners and that might extend into private property which means 316 needs some works work on curves and corners um i um i've often
109said that one cannot just quit mowing in our our european dominated flora environment we get weed grasses and we get european weeds some of which are very noxious like canned thistle an intended landscape a tender landscape has to mean not our invasive exotic weeds it also i think means at least your goal should say no woody plants in the street lawn except limbed up trees um most of them either need serious pruning which tends to get out of hand or they get out of hand and block views um [Music] this is such a complicated issue i i but i think you really need to separate private property from the right-of-way and keep heights and in the right-of-way low and make sure the landscape there really makes sense from the standpoint of ecology i had one
110client who had managed her front yard for decades as a knee-high kind of woodland prairie and and she'd manage the street lawn that way this was on a cul-de-sac where there was absolutely no issue about view lines safety view lines neighbor complained when some nice flowers got up about mid calf or just below the knee last spring before last the city zoning official came out and ordered my client to cut it down i'm i i've always been offended about the way this city works with its zoning enforcement it issues an order to respond to a complaint before it even investigates the complaint with the person complained against and then in this case which that didn't happen but in this case she might have learned that these were native plants and well within the height restrictions
111of the city and didn't need to be cut down despite the fact the neighbor complained um judges wouldn't be much better if someone goes to court and sues judges aren't going to know really need our zoning enforcement people to be first of all uh easier on their orders they need to look before the leap and maybe a bit more educated and not just in this area um so there's a lot of stuff involved in dealing with these street lawns and um and neighbors and complaints and all of these things that are behind this discussion 36 inches is high enough tended or untended or planned or or um authentic ecosystem elements or something needs to be fit in there that makes the things that get planted in street lawns not including woody plants except limbed up
112trees work and be defensible and uh um somehow make the job for the city easier at the same time safer for people the issue about blocking of views on private property at corners and curves that's a tough one anything else crust think i know there's a lot there this is difficult but i'm beginning to understand why we're talking about it and thank you kathy for being here and explaining some of the background i i i've been welcome i don't know if people can see this very well probably not but it's actually a diagram of a sight distance triangle that used to be part of the ordinance until it was taken out and i found it very helpful because people could understand it and if we can't put it in the ordinance we need to have
113it in the training material so i'll i'll have this to share at the next meeting we have other diagrams in the ubc okay yeah i i don't know it just the problem is that it varies from street to street in terms of um the the um in terms of uh the speed limit so site triangles change based on how fast the street is so it's not a one-size-fits-all kind of thing but i think it's one of those things that they're i don't know it feels like just having some simple something to be able to get the point across um to people but it does change if it's a 45 mile an hour street than if it's a 25 mile an hour but the our ordinance refers to the ashtow green book which isn't available uh
114for download unless you spend about 200 or you go to city hall and ask to borrow it so it would be good i think to have at least some guidelines yep i agree does the green book have diagrams in it that work at every speed limit every 10 miles an hour or whatever as i remember has multiple diagrams shannon probably is more familiar with it and it has formulas for all the different speed limits and there's just different conditions so um but i don't know it seems like there's got to be some simple way to get the point across and and address 80 of the situations you know i mean so i kind of like i'm sorry i was just going to say there's there's not a lot of 45 mile an hour streets that
115we have that have residential driveways coming off of them you know very few so i was just going to say that if we take a neighborhood approach people know their neighborhoods and can analyze and if we do get that kind of coordination that would be a great thing it's big but it would be really good and i think that people could then help each other solve the problems even if we had them for the most common speed limits for neighborhoods which would be like yeah most of them is 25 but if you live in a busier street you know most of them are up to 35. and so even if we had diagrams for those three scenarios of 25 30 and 35 you know maybe that would go to you know 97 percent of all
116the different places that we have in ann arbor thanks um whose hand i thought i saw another hand um i see john and stephen yeah john mursky josh could you go up to page one and the goals i'd like us to consider whether or not in light of the last goal focus on education of the community we can include a statement under goals that says something to the effect that we are trying to promote a new aesthetic when it comes to both extensions and private properties and what i mean by that i'm thinking uh and i think the advertisements still run but they ran all the time when i was a kid this aesthetic that the scots company tried to promote of a perfect green monoculture supported entirely by chemicals as the the desirable aesthetic
117and admittedly i fell for that in the past and i think what we want to say is in the town of ann arbor we want to promote a new aesthetic that does all of these things that are reflected in the goals and say there's a new we want to see beautiful in a different light than what is portrayed to us on television by the scots company and by by others and maybe we can include that in there and i'd like to also plant a seed that i've thrown out before and i don't remember the context i know rita and i have talked about it and that is with regards to 316 on private property there are still in ann arbor areas where there's very very large sections of turf grass and i'm just going to
118call off some that i think are examples uh and this is a part of town i know better than say the west side so i'll use some on on the east and northeast side like glacier hills like concordia like the lutheran city next door like pittsfield village like some several of our schools in some of the corners apartment complexes condo complexes where there are just huge swaths of turf grass and you know some of those some of those are necessary and nice for kids to play and things like that but it just seems to me that it would make sense if we can through the education in the community and through this new aesthetic get people to appreciate that uh natural habitat what like we've been talking about the whole evening is really something that
119we desire in in ann arbor at least we value it equally put it that way um to the old aesthetic and i think in the past what we're talking about here has been uh let's say undervalued by the vast majority of sort of traditional property owners and homeowners so that's my thought i like it steve um yeah so um i have um a few comments but uh or suggestions but uh so josh could you turn it back to the second set of pages the 316. and while he's doing that i just want to say that you know in terms of neighborhood education my neighborhood at least has a lot of block parties at least before covet and i think block parties are known by the city city staff knows where they are and when they
120are and that this is an opportunity to try to get volunteers or city staff out there to just talk to the people that are out there at the block party okay so i would just suggest that as a neighborhood outreach um actually and i'll hire you steve as a black party crasher i've done it before there's there's usually good food and beer on my bike yeah on my bike um so and then by i only have two more comments one is with 316. you know when i read this about uh this language about obstructing or blocking the sidewalk or the street must be trimmed in order to allow eight feet of clearance for streets and sidewalks it's not it's kind of ambiguous to me you know where you count the eight feet like where does
121that calculation start and end you know so it used to be the surface of the roadway and it's eight feet of vertical clearance i know staff recommended the word vertical be added yep oh okay so we're just we're just talking about eight vertical feet yes on the street but how far back from the sidewalk do you go just to the edge of the sidewalk it used to be six inches from the edge of the sidewalk uh that's no longer in our ordinance and i don't know maybe shannon knows if that's in the green book i don't know that it is and i definitely agree with eight feet of vertical appearance because i thought that i i was thinking the same thing that steve was thinking like how are you managing that um and but i
122know that it is in the code that you like if you're planting street trees that you have to have eight foot clear you know for the until you have the first few branches but i think that um there also is code i know that says that um anything around of um a fire hydrant has to have six inches uh no no higher than six inches in height with a a radius of six feet around the whole thing so just in terms of you know how this would work that's just good information to have in general i don't remember if there's anything about in terms of the orange book like where what where you know um that there's a thing with height in there i can't remember okay and my last comment is that in terms
123of the enforcement i mean i think three days there's nothing in here that i saw about issuing a warning first nothing about a warning and uh and then and then it says the city can uh come in with at least three days prior notice to commencing the work and then billing the property owner three days is not a lot of time somebody can be out of town on vacation and uh and just fine and just find out about this so i think you know it seems like just too short a time you know without a warning and then you know at least a week or two so you can make sure that people have at least had their chance if they're on vacation and they come back and and find it or that have notice
124is put up on their front door or something you know i've been asserting that it's not just sending a order it's contacting the homeowner or property owner and saying what's going on that's we you've had a complaint against you what are you doing why are you doing it what's your thinking yeah exactly what's going on before order gets issued it's more than just you know giving more time it's entering a dialogue with people before you come down on them with police power yeah order is into that okay i'm done so um i subscribe to john's complained about such large areas of grass that is not recreational so is there a way for us to um this doesn't have to be solved tonight but i would like to know a way to do outreach to those
125large landowners landowners of large properties that is currently turf grass i feel like that's a definitely an issue but it does need to be understood those are those are mode every week and in many cases you know there's chemicals applied and it's just seems crazy but unless you factor in where the cost the environmental cost the true costs of those actions grass is the cheapest thing to do for property owners it's not just a cliche that plays out it's also the least expensive to install the least without factoring in the true environmental cost the least expensive thing to maintain i i i think we're all learning that doesn't make sense anymore i hope we are yeah but um i i can talk to the sustainability office because i'm wondering if it would make sense to
126have a goal of like eliminating 10 of our turf grass by a certain time and then actually uh estimating what the cost is of having that turf grass and what the savings would be to the environment okay i know you'd like that john if we do the true accounting it's measurable it's achievable yeah well i see an unintended consequence potential here because um california decades ago people just replaced their turf grass with astroturf plastic is not necessarily a better answer but no we have we have at least one example of that in town and it's frightful we should remember that when this ordinance is when this is rewritten that astroturf is not okay i'm writing that down uh any other comments the pollinator group is taking front and center in the lead on getting rid
127of turf grass and i'm very excited thank you very much rita okay and uh leslie has her hand up oh good leslie you're muted leslie okay um yeah i would say you know when you get to the education part you know one of the things that i found successful with the rain garden program is you know this give this you know show the pictures of you know some of these that you've seen around the neighborhood you know of these successful ones um and also mention things that really you know like you mentioned the invasives you know most of us recognize well some of us recognize that buckthorn for example buckthorn seedlings canada thistle and a lot of these other things in some cases that people think are native that really aren't and you know so
128make sure that kind of is in there i mean obviously treating it very positively but also putting in there no this doesn't this isn't the native stuff um and but i think the education also has to kind of include you know the parts about maybe not specifically saying when rain gardens make sense or when you know a desert type landscape makes sense but you know that's that that needs to be in there too those kind of options and because you know i've seen i have seen a few like shannon said there aren't very many some really well done rain gardens and people do have the conditions for those but like i've got you know three rain guards in my yard if i had a better stronger back i'd put more in but that extension i
129cannot do that it is southern exposure big fat sycamore and dry so you know the whole condition part two has to really be included when you start when you start talking education and that you're giving those suggestions great well done thanks very much yeah thank you this is really really helpful um so you can tell that there's going to be some significant work here um but i think it's going to be worth it um i want to just mention that i also attended a webinar this week that was um based in toronto that was phenomenal and when i got the the video the recording of it i want to pass it around to you all because it talked about biophilic approach to um their city and that was that sounds really really vital is the
130way i would say it and it's based on um to some extent some some native traditions which i think will you'll all find very interesting um so anyway that's yet to come um so i i thank you all um oh leslie did you have another thing you wanted to say is your hands up and okay thank you um all right i think um i appreciate this and um i'm ready to turn it back to you steve all right thanks for you doing kathy so um next item on the agenda is e-business and there is no new business um so we pass on to reports from committees um natural features um we're still working on [Music] the amendments of ubc which has become really significant actually um um the core of it is trying to protect
131the native forest fragments of the city and there really are three levels of those one our native forest fragment natural areas most of those are on our parks and are being cared for by the nature various preservation program if they're not on our parts they should be the second are typically younger native forest fragments that can be identified in i think best in that in the 1960 aerial photos to the extent they cover the city um the reason for that time is that it precedes the invasion of ann arbor by invasive exotics which blurred the ability to see [Music] these features which have been undeveloped so far and there aren't many the third level of native forest fragment are areas of the city with those second growth native trees that have been developed mostly with
132housing under them otherwise they would have been utterly destroyed and most of those where the trees have survived were developed prior to the arrival of four wheel drive lifts and vehicles parking all over the property and trenching all over the property and things that fundamentally destroyed trees in the vicinity of houses there are neighborhoods on the old west side for example with 36 inch oak trees six feet from the house perfectly happy if that house was built today they'd be gone um so viewing those three levels and saying that those are core areas for expressing sustainability on outward into the neighborhoods they're in for doing what we need to do to regenerate those trees which generally is not happening especially in the developed portions for using them as anchors or guiding posts uh in the
133neighborhoods where they exist to increase the sustainability of our landscape the recognition that um these trees are what were here before europeans came here and they came back on properties that were not farmed or otherwise had their soil turned so that the seed stuck and the soil was destroyed and weren't developed roads and paving and housing and buildings we have this treasure source to build on so the amendments that udc that we're trying to do is really inventing a um something more than we had in the early 1990s an understanding of a basis on upon which we can build a base of sustainability a base of ecological restoration work across the city and do so with an outreach program that reaches out to neighborhoods i think two sets of neighborhoods one set has an 84s
134fragment one set was farmland and needs a different kind of restoration effort but where we reach out to um [Music] try to gain more sustainability based on on the ecosystems that were here in 1824 okay we're trying to reflect that in the amendments and we're getting close okay great chris thank you um um pollinators gabby i think is planning to talk gabby i don't see her she seems to have dropped off i think she did okay well um i'll just say that um we have met we've been kind of moving through our pollinator allies talking with them and kind of compiling lists of of the groups that we feel are active and contributing to pollinators in the city and um our ex-commissioner carrie slavic has been putting together some information that we're hoping to submit
135to nab to update the pollinator website and appreciate that support um so that's really primarily where we're going i will say that one one other group that we're going to be talking with soon that lily and i are going to talk with is some the the city golf course staff that maintain the monarchs and the rough um properties um because i think we can learn a lot from them as to how they deal with large spaces and i know that becky you certainly have that experience and shannon as well but um it's just another perspective that i think might be helpful so that's where we are okay and uh i think we'll be looking at all the notes that i took from this meeting tonight um and trying to get some things back to you
136soon all right oh shannon has her hand up yeah just a thought that occurred to me rita while you're here and while becky is here um that i think would be interesting is to to to pilot um some alternative kind of clover lawn types i know that there's some interesting kind of micro clovers and people are using white clover as some lawns and i think that it would be interesting to have some places in the city where we're testing this to see what it looks like on city land people can go and visit it and see what it looks like and um it's something that kids can still run around on and things like that um these are like their real thing in these two i know like uh one of my employees used to
137um work in the arm and she used to go walk barefoot there once in a while and got stung several times going through the clover lawn thing too and so that's a real thing also you know it's um but i just think it would be so many people don't use the lawn for recreation then i think it would be kind of cool to have the city try that in a few places and it just seems like we could use one of our city parks or one of the you know something where it gets mowed too and people can just see what it looks like and have the city test it out because it's one thing to kind of find these things on the internet and it's another thing to actually test it here here's what
138the seed mix is here's where you can find it this is what it really takes to put it together and i just think that it's great for people for like on our website or whatever to say go to this part to see the next product and see what it looks like that is just less vague about well you could try this or this and you're kind of not really sure if it's going to work and i just think it would be an interesting partnership um between your committee and some of nap's work and the in the parks work to be able to promote some of these things and just evaluate them see see how they work see how they hold up see what they do so i know there used to be one in the
139botanical gardens there were like four different grass types and the traditional turf grass that that was available i don't know if that's still installed or not yeah i don't know i think it'd be neat to put it in a place where people really use it yeah you know i mean not just a little square somewhere but like a section of west park where people are walking on it and their dogs running on it and you know what i mean i think it would be um interesting to try that so yeah while you two are both in the room yeah thank you okay um so we moved to solid waste um i'll just say that uh recent conversations with city staff uh the city staff is busy um extending contracts and developing rfps for the downtown
140alleys problem to try to solve that and also the um you know still working on the murph development for the c d ordinance work uh the city staff is uh is becoming a full co-partner with me in trying to develop this ordinance and gather data and move this project forward which i i very much welcomed you know that's very important to buy in is getting the staff involved in a leadership role as co-leaders for this um lisa do you want to say anything about the zero waste work three yeah first i want to um thank john mursky because you have turned my procrastination into a virtue in fact i have not yet peel the leaves out of my garden has now made me a star so [Laughter] the zero waste working group is so busy
141so we have one subgroup that's working on a definition of zero waste and that's floating the idea of setting a zero waste goal with a timeline we have another subgroup that is working that is researching reusable carryout containers reusable food containers and there's a couple of different ways of of establishing these programs one is each individual restaurant does its own thing that's okay but the fact is is that people don't eat out at the same restaurant every single night and so to my mind the better approach is if you get a network of restaurants together and they get the reusable stuff from the same place and you can bring your reusable thing back to any restaurant that's part of this network it means that the reusable plastic gets more use because it's all polypropylene whichever
142way you go it's polypro and that does not recycle but if you you can use it up to a thousand times so how do you get those thousand uses not going every single time to the same place so we're looking at this there are a couple of restaurants that are interested in doing this i'm not sure which model they have in mind we're hoping to catch them early so we can steer them towards the way that might make more sense um so that's another then there's another subgroup and that group uh is is uh sean callaward and me and jenny patosky and we are working up a grant a next cycle grant to produce metrics for a circular economy so it's they're very there's very little operationalizable measures of approaching circular economy and most of
143the measures that we have for tracking our progress on solid waste tracks diversion from the landfill so it tracks end of life it doesn't track what we're doing to reduce waste at the start of the process and design it out of the process and reduce consumption and all of that so we are working um on a grant for next cycle or there are other places we can try that and then finally there's a subgroup of sustainability ambassadors who are working on composting and food waste so that is lots of stuff going on and many meetings on my calendar and also jenny patosti's calendar who is just amazing so sorry i muted myself sorry uh well thank you thanks lisa um so let's move on to the planet the other commissions planning commission shannon um really
144the most pertinent thing in terms of uh crossover is the um the tc1 zoning the transportation oriented zoning and we've continued to work on that it's getting very close at this point and so i think the council's uh what was it june i think that it was supposed to come in front of them and i think we're gonna you know hit our target but um it's just continuing to be fine tuned we continue to get uh more feedback from the community and the general idea is kind of make it more broad if you can and so that's essentially i think what from the time that it has started uh where it was just one area to now like multiple areas and now it's not even naming specific zones it's more like a little bit more
145generalized and then also um the uh gis department created this really cool tool so that you can see what the setbacks mean for some of these different areas and uh it's it has a it's kind of full steam ahead and um and just getting more and more refined so um and i know people that are um thinking about you know doing development under it and so it's it's interesting to see see it going so we'll see we'll see how it goes but that's i think that's pretty much it though in terms of things that really lisa any uh other ideas you would have yeah okay well well thanks shannon yeah that's great news um so let's see uh parks is not here like apple's not here uh energy two highlights from the energy commission in
146our last meeting um the first was we had a presentation on the green belt which i sent to all of you because i thought it might be of interest the key takeaway there we were interested in terms of what types of opportunities there might be in terms of renewable energy generation but also biosequestration in terms of renewable energy generation there is a limitation that buildings and structures must be less than two percent of the property and there's another problem with generation and that is a generation someone is not allowed to generate energy and transmit it across the property line uh unless that's in concert with dte so it makes it difficult for someone to do it on their own they basically can't because they're not going to be using that much on their property and
147if they do more than that then they have to coordinate with dte and uh if they wanted to do more on their property then the two percent is the limitation the other thing that we talked about is planned updates to the energy code and those will be decided this year and what the process is going to be how to influence it and the highlight there is that there's probably going to be an increase in the base efficiency right now michigan is operating on a 2013 code and there's been two revisions since then and we're hoping that the new the newest revision will be form the baseline and those revisions are done every three years and the other option that we're hoping will come through is an appendix that municipalities can adopt that would allow us
148to mandate what's called the zero code uh and i won't get into a lot of details but it basically is what it sounds like is that you're you're basically targeting uh net zero with as much as what you can do on the property and then requiring that offsets or sinks be bought off the property to get to net zero and one last thing i just saw becky drop off i was gonna tell her i was admiring the photo the posters behind her the whole evening so that's all thanks steve okay thanks john so um let's move on to uh council um is there a report from council kathy lisa um i have something on the golden plume that i've been working on that i guess is council related i think everyone knows that it was
149determined that a dual process was feasible and allowed by epa the concurrence letter from the governor's office was sent on april 12th it was actually sent by lisa clarke who's the director of eagle um and that's something that we've been working on for probably for years um i'd like to thank ryan stanton from mlive he wrote what i would call a very assertive letter on friday april 9th and the concurrence letter was sent out on monday morning also congresswoman debbie dingo was meeting with the governor on monday morning visiting uh vaccination clinics so a number of things happened that i think just created this tipping point to get the letter sent so that's really great and then i've also been attending meetings with the attorneys because the other part of the dual process is a
150hearing before judge connors in early in early may and so there was a meeting today with the attorneys along with uh representatives from the ag's office and eagle in preparation of that hearing and hopefully that's not confidential who was actually in in the meeting today but that's just common sense that that people are all working together to be better prepared for the hearing great okay um lisa yeah i guess i could mention um two things one is that we approved a consented a consent agenda item to uh spend a hundred thousand dollars on bike lane year-round maintenance um and the other is that we had the first reading for the um site plan or rezoning and i think i'm not sure if it's site plan approval or just rezoning for uh shannon can correct me
151for the valhalla development project which would go in um by uh uh well it's across from a dentist's office that's how i think but it's approximate to the michigan golf course um never pioneer across from pioneer yep and that as you probably know um uh will be an all-electric apartment and condo development so i think that's of interest to environmental commission and i think that's about it for that last meeting okay great well thank you thank you both um so in terms of the chair report i just um had three things to say and that is that uh today governor whitmer announced that state facilities are going to go to 100 renewable energy by 2025 collaborating with the lansing board of water and life dte and consumers to make that happen um yesterday the house
152budget committee looked at the eagle eagle's budget now the subcommittee that's responsible for eagle's budget and uh they recommended uh reducing it by 25 and then by revisiting it quarterly and suppose the justification was that because of kova they're not sure how much money they'll have for evil so the governor's remarked on this so anybody out there who's concerned about it i have a video of the half hour session that was recorded of course and uh i'm willing to share that with anybody so they can see what happened it was rejected on a total party line vote and um the the key the only key thing here is that sri fanodar he's the uh vice chairman of that committee and he proposed um four amendments that would have improved the the situation with eagle in
153terms of actually freeing up money that has is related more to bond proposals and uh federal money that's available that was rejected by the uh you know by a party line vote as well so um we'll see how this shapes up but this is going to make it very difficult for eaglet to do any environmental cleanup um for mi green waters pfas and several other things so this is very important so we should watch this issue and weigh in with our state representatives on this and the third thing is that uh i noticed that uh there's a today there was a it was published in uh m live under giuliana lumage's byline today in m live there is an article about the dte and ann arbor's osi department came to an agreement about the voluntary
154green pricing that dte offers so you can look for that mlive article again it's under the byline of julianna lumage l-u-m-a-j it was published today online around noon so um those are the only things i i wish to report at this time so um if there's no questions um we'll follow on to report from staff josh um let's see kind of following up on that the energy thread a few things that we're working on on the city we have uh one megawatt of solar so on-site solar uh an rfp that went out so i'm currently working on uh basically wrapping that up we're in the selection process and and so we'll hopefully have a selected solar installer here shortly on top of that we also have two rounds so we did one round already of
155energy audits on existing uh city buildings most of those being parks and rec so kind of smaller buildings uh with the eye not only towards uh kind of energy efficiency improvements we could do across those buildings but also electrification um so looking at uh you know one of the one of the sites that kind of stands out in my mind is uh the senior center it has um you know electric baseboard heating along with kind of a traditional uh natural gas furnace and so a few kind of competing systems all in one building and i think it's a prime location for uh for a heat pump air-to-air exchange heat pump and a place that we're hoping uh you know if we go ahead and put a heat pump in we can also make it a
156kind of a you know almost like a um a pilot case for the community members to come and see what a heat pump's all about so i think there's always that opportunity to get the community engaged especially with equipment that they might not be as familiar with um so we're hoping to do all that so i guess uh yeah just to keep it brief those are some of the high level things we're working on on the city josh may i ask something real quick sure there's going to be a workshop i think is what is being called regarding heat pumps on may 12th at 7 pm is that right yes and missy told me yesterday that 150 people have signed up for that that is correct yeah uh so if you're interested or you know
157someone who's interested in learning more about heat pumps and how you might be able to consider that in your near term or mid to long term plans i encourage you to sign up for that yeah we have we've gotten local contractors so it was very hard early on to find contractors who specifically could install heat pumps but i think as time has gone on and i think you know the demand is really especially with these kind of events these community events i think the demand is is really building in the city and so i think it's really helping to bring people out you know contractors would normally not look necessarily at heat pumps that might be a little bit more complicated out of the realm of their expertise uh have really come out uh in
158in force and so we're happy with uh yeah that kind of uh those contractors meeting with with the with our community members great well thank you josh the next item on the agenda are action items and i have two uh one is that uh um on the uh rain gardener information uh well we were talking about putting information on the city's rain garden website we're updating that information and uh the second one was um is that kathy and rita are going to lead this group and further develop and lead a group and further develop the chapter 40 discussion and come up with a proposal hopefully very soon they'll return to the full commission with this with a concrete proposal that we can discuss um are there any other action items i might have missed no
159i don't hear anything so uh items for the next agenda i think the natural features working group is going to manage the uh presentation i want to thank rita and her associates for the pollinators work group manage the presentations and the agenda for this meeting and i'm looking forward to the natural features work group doing a similar job for our may may 25th meeting so um let's see the next uh i don't are there any other items that people would like to propose for our next meeting no i don't hear anything so uh the next item on the agenda is uh the next scheduled meeting which i believe is may 25th i better see no it is may 27th may 27th thursday the fourth thursday is may 27th so that's our next scheduled meeting um
160we'll see you all there this uh so we'll move on to the next public commentary um public comment this is an opportunity for persons to speak for up to three minutes please call 1-877-853-5247 and enter meeting id 997-3412-6347 city staff will uh this information is also displayed on the meeting agenda and video feed city staff will select callers that will raise their hand one by one using the last three digits of your phone number in order to electronically raise your hand to indicate your desire to speak please press star 9 on your phone you will hear an automated announcement that the host is allowing you to speak when speaking please move to a quiet area and mute any television or background sound so that we may hear you clearly please state your name and address
161at the beginning of your comments and be patient there is a delay of up to 30 seconds before a connection is established josh do we have anybody on the line yet i don't see anyone yet okay well i don't um is there anybody on the line now i think yep no one no one yet so i think we're good okay then i think uh we've passed our 30 seconds here so let's i call this meeting adjourned at 9 48. thanks everybody you