Ann Arbor Environmental Commission Meeting 8-27-20

001to order um i'm going to read a statement first of all welcome to the august 27th 2020 electronic meeting of the environmental commission this meeting is in accordance with executive orders from the governor to affect social distancing and mitigate the spread of the covet 19 virus we intend to conduct this meeting similarly to an in-person meeting however please be patient if there are technical issues public comment will be very telephone only to speak during any of the public comment opportunities please call 1-888-788-0099 again that's 1-888-788-0099 and enter meeting id number 924-5796-9823 that's meeting id number nine two four five seven nine six nine eight two three this information is also available on the published agenda in the public notices section of the city website and on the broadcast of this meeting on ctn channel 16

002at t channel 99 and online at org www.a2gov.org watch ctn okay so um would you like to do the roll call yes sir okay uh just one second [Music] okay uh commissioner graham uh commissioner skinner commissioner needham here commissioner uh smith for council member smith president council uh commissioner slavic commissioner apple appeal commissioner gibb randall your commission uh council member banister here commissioner callie work here [Music] uh chair chairman uh brown commissioner brown commissioner overpay he's needed oh he's here okay uh commissioner commissioner mitchell commissioner singleton i'm sorry commissioner of puna dia here oh great okay that's roll call right um so we have a quorum yes we do all right thank you galen so the next item on the agenda is the approval of the agenda um i have two things um that i'd

003like to suggest um i move that we first of all the approval of the minutes is entered twice in the agenda i propose that we uh accept uh the approval of the minutes after the public commentary now this is uh within our in our bylaws this is what the um what the agenda order is um stipulated so um i moved to strike the first instance of the approval of the minutes from the agenda and i would also like to add one item that we were going to approve we were going to elect a vice chair at this meeting and so i would like to insert that after the approval of the minutes of the previous meeting that would be the first public commentary approval of the minutes and then add the vice chair um election

004um is there a um a motion a second second i'd like to also add um agenda items for the next meeting that was not so if we could consider all three of those yes john please go ahead so i second i second all three okay so uh what was your what was your um agenda item it was just i'm on the agenda there was nothing on there for agenda items for the next meeting oh that's on the printed agenda now oh it is okay it was not on the original one sent out okay great yeah it's right there okay all right so um so it's been seconded all uh approve all who approve of the amended agenda say i raise your hands hi hi any any vote anybody says no okay uh it was approved

005unanimously so um the next item on the agenda is the special presentation so uh first time first up here is missy staltz is going to present on goals and metrics and the sustainability dashboard matrix it was established you know how that's evolved so you have the floor missy amazing well it's good to see you all i'm gonna share my screen here i hope you're all enjoying a cool night uh it's pretty pretty stinky and gorgeous so uh commissioner brown asked me to talk about the sustainability framework and to give context i was an ann arborite when we did the sustainability framework so i don't have the legacy of being a staffer that was working day in and day out on it i have more the courtesy of being one of the people on the outside

006that was pushing for it so bear with me if you have a lot of questions about history some of you have more detail about the the nitty-gritty kind of process than i have that said the sustainability framework um is a framework that the city undertook and it was part of a movement that was happening around the nation at the time led largely by the star communities program where we were trying to think holistically about sustainability so there were 16 overarching sustainability topics that came out of the framework they were grouped into four thematic areas and they're shown on the bottom of the screen and those were climate and energy community land use and access and resource management and sustainability was intended to be sustainability in its purest sense a big broad umbrella of sustainability so

007this was done and created by getting lots of input reading lots of city plans i believe 30 or so city plans were analyzed to understand their priorities and objectives and there was some input into the process and eventually this was adopted and it actually became a policy guide for the master plan so the framework itself this is what it looks like right so you've got those plans that provided input and then it fell out into these various categories you can see here and i realize this is hard to see i'm assuming most of you are fairly familiar with the sustainability framework i'm going to highlight a few things in there the sustainability framework also provided input into the climate action plan but not everything and that probably makes sense because the climate and energy goals

008were the ones that were the most important and and pertinent to the 2012 climate action plan that the city produced and so here uh the subcategory so that that overarching was about climate energy and then the subcategories or thematic areas were around energy both sustainable production of it and conservation and then sustainable buildings so this kind of lived in the plan itself and was slowly moving forward the sustainability framework also helped inform things like the city's capital improvements plan and was often cited in resolutions that were brought forward by staff but i'm going to kind of say it sort of stopped there so i heard all of these great things about how the sustainability framework had been integrated into the cip and then i joined the city and saw what that looked like and it

009was really valuable at high level but lacked a lot of the detailed substance so here's what the sustainability framework also had with it it had these goal areas we talked about those 16 goal areas the four broad thematic areas and then it had these indicators that we were supposedly tracking to demonstrate progress well here are a few things so this was always meant uh to be overarching an overton guide for the city in terms of the policies and programs that we move forward a dashboard was created but i think you all know it was rarely maintained and rarely feels fairly generous most of these things were not tracked and i will argue i don't think these are even the right indicators in most situations so we have this really great process that came up with

010really good thematic areas really good goals and sometimes good indicators and sometimes not it led to a framework that really honestly has been disproportionately used some units use it some units use it to kind of elevate their work to say look we're in alignment with the framework some uh i'll be honest i have no idea when they talk about their alignment with the framework like i can't see it but it's used kind of in discourse disproportionately and it's not institutionalized candidly in the city so i have talked about this with many of you um it was something that i was concerned with too when i came to the city and then of course we made commitments around carbon neutrality and that sort of took a lot of it took all of our attention i'm not

011going to pretend that it didn't take all of our intention in that rapid time frame we had to move forward with carbon neutrality so i've been thinking and talking to the city administrator about what a revised approach could look like and where we are today so bear with me here this is also impossible to see but what it is is the city is doing priority based budgeting right now it's our first pilot into that process and we created this matrix now this matrix might look pretty familiar to you if you are able to read anything on the screen because we developed it based on four inputs we had done a resident survey to understand resident priorities the sustainability framework was one of the major inputs into this we had an organizational strategic plan and then

012we had our consultants who do priority based budgeting also give us some input when you look across this framework what's powerful about it is everything in the sustainability framework is here so i worked um with tom crawford when he was the cfo of the city and we led the process to integrate these things what i like about this approach now is we're actually making budget decisions based on this so eventually again we're in a pilot right now staff um actually gail and i were were some of the staff that went through and actually ranked it's pretty amazingly tedious everyone's budget in one of these areas so we delegated staff to a certain area there were criteria and then we had to go through and say how does this align with our goals around environmental stewardship

013and the individual units ranked themselves we ranked um and we compared and contrasted and we're that's where we are in the process we are all learning how that's gonna more fully inform the city budget but again i like that it's going to lead to some informing of the city budget which feels far more institutional than the framework that never really had that time this also is informing a new city strategic plan that we hope to launch when we determine who our new city administrator is uh that feels like the right time to really have this kind of collective community conversation about where we're headed we are working on dashboards we are a long way off and i think we need to own that and we need to name this this is not going to be

014done this year this probably won't even be done next year because we're talking about every unit of the city and automating as much of this data as possible so we have work to do but when it is informing our budget and informing our strategic plan then it's institutionalized and connected so it's a lot easier to be evaluating performance based on these metrics and so it becomes another thing that is kind of par for the course of how we operate as a government and it's integrated into work plans because we have to track on it right when it's part of the budget you have to track on your budget performance and the outcomes from your budget and so again this just kind of rounds out the conversation so let me just end by talking a little

015bit about 820 especially from the office's side when you look at this this is the sustainability framework we've got a20 i don't know if you noticed i think four things went away a20 touches on almost every single thing in the sustainability framework not all of them directly but almost all of them indirectly these are the areas where a20 is very clearly grounded and in alignment with the sustainability framework so even though we might be kind of uh evolving the framework itself it still lives and it lives because this is the plan that guides everything that our office is going to continue to do and what the city is doing because a20 is also in that uh that priority-based budgeting matrix so our guiding metric is going to continue to be greenhouse gas emissions that has

016to be our guiding metric with the audacious and beautiful goal that we have around carbon neutrality but that doesn't mean that we're not going to have other metrics so right now we are this is drafty i'll be honest we're working with lots of departments to figure out the various metrics that we're going to track and we are working with i.t to automate these metrics looking at things of course you're going to get a greenhouse gas inventory update at one of your future meetings it's hot off the press i know the numbers but i'm not going to share them just yet it looks it looks great but we have a lot of work to do so we're going to continue to use that but we also want to be able to identify how are we doing

017with local renewable generation what are our land use and transportation metrics look like in terms of ridership walkability modal shifts what does it look like in terms of the average commute in and out of the city what are our material use and diversion rates are we really making progress towards a circular economy and how do we know what really are the deep meaningful impacts and metrics that demonstrate the progress we want to have of course there'll be things like counts uh that we do we talked about this today counts do not make me feel warm and fuzzy but they are a metric so how many uh neighborhood ambassadors do we train how many emergency kits do we give out of course how many resilience hubs but once we get these hubs up and operational we

018can start talking about more meaningful metrics how many people are using them and how what's their experience like in that facility so that is a whirlwind take takeaway to say as we're well honestly in this moment we are evolving the sustainability framework we do not have the time um or the staff capacity to track all of those metrics and i i honestly can't i can't do that and make the deep meaningful progress we need to make on a20 and i also don't think they're the right metrics out the gate to be tracking so we'd have to go back and do an entire new process to figure out what they should be that was fun uh questions john thank you for using your hand icon sure uh thanks for putting this together missy i think this

019is something many of us have been asking about for a couple of years now so appreciate the time to dig into it and your honest assessment of where things are at and where you hope things might go with kind of the new plan that that you laid out i see how that aligns quite strongly with the goals and objectives we've set up for ann arbor but i'm wondering what your thoughts are on how we might be able to use that to benchmark against other communities that was one of the advantages of the previous plan and the link to the stars communities and i'm just wondering what you what your thoughts are about that with kind of a new approach going forward thanks yeah that's an excellent question and it at this point it depends on

020metric by metric so we certainly benchmark in terms of per capita greenhouse gas emissions performance on renewable energy generation or waste diversion so we're able to do it metric by metric but we don't have um we don't have that overarching framework and honestly i'm not sure that we would based on where we are right now we're looking if we go to the priority-based budgeting framework we wouldn't do lead for cities yet that's not saying we won't it's just saying in this moment where we are sprinting at beautifully audacious goals i don't feel the pressure or the necessity of pausing that work to do this benchmarking in this other space thanks okay any other questions well i i have one missy i'm i would just like to have a launch i don't expect an answer today

021that i would i would expect to get i have a discussion soon within the next three months about what you see the role of the commissions to to be in helping um generate these metrics and um helping to track them as well i know part of the original intent of the sustainability dashboard was not just to track progress that the city has you know uh to see if it's improving based on its budget expenditures but also how we are comparing to other communities as well so i don't know if that's so the only answer i wanted today was what do you think what's your first take on what that uh you know on is that still a goal or useful yeah it is it is useful it's very useful uh to understand how we're performing

022compared to our peers generally speaking though no one is doing a fabulous job right like we're all sort of figuring it out so it's useful but it's it's not the penultimate metric right like all of us performing poorly doesn't make me feel good so i think we're trying to figure out how we can benchmark and learn from peers and understand our performance and also push the entire field right so that we're all we're all moving together because that's what's necessary in most of these metrics and steve to your first point i actually will offer right now we are just about to form an internal work group to really unpack those metrics around a20 and more depth h20 has metrics right like it says what we want to do what we're trying like we've extracted all

023of those and now we're figuring out the automation right like how are we going to get this data because we don't want to have to have it be a manual enterprise every three or four months how do we automate it so if anyone from the commission is interested in joining us we would welcome that support i would say if you want to let galen know please please join us in that journey okay that's good all right i think i'll i think i'll volunteer for diversion yeah right now but um all right well thanks missy if there's no other questions for missy um it looks like bob's got one yeah oh sorry you covered a lot of ground really quickly and i i honestly got a bit lost um so when you were talking about um

024you know taking until the end of next year maybe um at that point do you envision that we would have a new dashboard to replace what's currently there with you know metrics that we can actually live with that we think are smart um for all the goals and including including the ones that don't directly relate to eight to zero or is that or is that what you were saying is too much to take no no you're asking a really good question and thank you for that additional clarification commissioner needham um actually what we're doing is rolling out metrics as we can get them so we won't have a full package of metrics for example uh the the police department is working on updating their metrics right now and reporting those more transparently we have work

025to do on those metrics but that's there's already a dashboard that's up for those metrics around safety and so we want to keep rolling them out we just won't necessarily have the comprehensive suite of those metrics for a bit longer so it's it's actually in the middle right like we're gonna we're taking full accountability for all the climate and energy metrics you'll have those soon the others may take a little bit more time yeah uh commissioner mitchell did you wanna you okay hello um hi missy um so i'm kind of into the nitty-gritty of questions and just to understand the um the slide on the carbon emissions could you just explain the actual emissions versus weatherized sure sure so we have both when we do our inventory we look at absolute emissions and then we

026weatherize those emissions excuse me so we can do a comparison you know for example this is going to be a warm summer and so we would expect that air conditioning rates are going to be slightly warmer for people and we're home more so we would normalize that but it doesn't matter because we need the absolute number as well so we run both of those different scenarios um yeah and you should i mean that's a really good question thea is going to come present to you guys at a future meeting and give you the inventory results and you can i'll prep her to give you both the weatherized uh information and the raw okay so it's more like a standardization yes that's right and that's just so we can compare like did we peak like is

027this your anomalous in some way or not and so that way we can say actually no it was just incredibly hot so yes we consumed a lot of energy but that is also because of this variable versus oh no like something broke somewhere in the system like we have a we have a leak in the system and we need to plug that leak totally different solutions to those problems thank you yeah okay any other questions i have to speak up i'm sorry this is the last time i'm going to talk about metrics and i mean it i'm not gonna talk about it again um i'm speaking as a resident um it is impossible as a resident to go to the city website or to go anywhere and to find out how the city is performing

028and i'm addressing this primarily to chip into ann as in effect board members representing the city residents and holding the city accountable for how the city performs and whether it achieves its committed goals and whether it provides positive outcomes for the residents of ann arbor and it is impossible to go to the city website and figure out how the city performs there are individual data points there are safety metrics for one year you cannot find trends in terms of safety metrics policing metrics fire metrics um there's it's it's really just a joke and i'm i just cannot believe we as residents and the city council as a board accepts the city's reporting we spent hours several i don't know if anybody here in this group spent hours in a metric subcommittee making recommendations in terms

029of how the dashboard could be improved in terms of metrics related to environment and energy those have not been adopted those have not been measured this is really i've had it i'm not going to talk about it again but the rest of you if you accept this from this city it is really pathetic um yeah i share your concerns john and i really appreciate you uh with being the one of the key leaders calling for this um in the previous years and i tried to amplify that voice and and and talk about it every chance i get and i'm frankly similarly mystified um that it hasn't come forward so um i have two months left on council i'm wrapping up loose ends and john or others could you give me a specific where to start

030to try to wrap wrap something up on this in my last two months because i'm not clear you it's thank you john for mentioning the work that the com you committee did or a report or something but if i had something point me in the direction and i will bring a resolution or do what i'm i'm just not sure i'm i'm frustrated like you it starts with leadership it starts with council it starts with the city administrator it starts with department heads in terms of holding themselves accountable and being transparent in terms of their performance and delivering outcomes to the residents of ann arbor period it does not come from the bottom up it does not come from anywhere else it you know the city needs to know is it meeting it goals if not

031why not how does it how does it perform compared to benchmark cities i put together a list of benchmark cities provided to the previous city administrator where we could then benchmark a performance against the average of those performance seeing the range nothing was done on that really it's it's just appalling i mean there's no business in the world that could survive the way the city performs there's it's just it it's yeah i've had i'm not bringing up the subject one more time in any organization it's the rest of you that have to drive this if you want the city to be a great place to live then you need to demand this there's no yeah i've had it all right um in the interest of time um brian stiglitz has to uh has to leave

032by the uh by 7 40. so um thank you uh first of i just like to say that i share john's concerns commissioner mursky's concerns and i think this will be an ongoing discussion um and with the new city administrator coming on board and the new council i think it's a good time for everybody to reflect on this and try to see what might be possible in the future going forward so um um thanks everybody so brian you have the floor um all right thank you for for inviting me i'm going to try to share my screen so i'm hoping or that you're able to see my screen now can you confirm that that's the case yeah okay um so i have a few slides um and also able to answer some questions um a

033little bit of change in gears here to talk about on the city's pfas management strategy i think you've probably seen a little of this before but probably the hottest topic right now is is that the state has just passed um and this slide says draft but they're actually now um enacted new maximum contaminant levels for seven different pfas contaminants or compounds and this slide illustrates um what those mcls are and where the city stands in terms of its most recent measurements associated with these in drinking water so um you can see where we're well very well positioned because of the work that we've been doing over the past several years to address these compounds in drinking water we're non-detect for five of the seven and even the other two um you know we're in one

034case uh five orders of magnitude lower than the mcl and the other case about two orders of magnitude so the work that the city has been doing um over the past several years has positioned us well um to address these new regulatory requirements and whatever may be coming down the road the initial focus um which is pretty consistent with what's been was happening at the federal level was the focus on just two of these these are um probably two of the compounds in pfoa um that are the probably the most common in products that we use many people use every day and they're the most prominent in terms of the data that exists on health impacts and initially these were the ones that the federal government was going to be taking a stance on potentially

035regulating so we developed their own metrics around these two compounds um we identified a goal of less than 10 parts per trillion combined and that remains more stringent than the new mcl's in michigan has put in place um so again we're striving for what we have saw by seeing looking around the country on that what's happening elsewhere um in the u.s canada and the world in terms of what are the most stringent standards um that any um have put in place and we wanted to achieve that um and that has been our goal um you may have seen this chart before um the blue line is the huron river so that's our source water and the source of pfas in the city source water it's not coming from our ground water but a surface water

036and you can see since 2019 um you know over the last year pretty much regularly non-detectable levels of these compounds based on the changes that we've made in modifying um how we both operate and the material we're using in our carbon filters there's one little blip that we had earlier this year we're talking about such low levels of these compounds that um the risk of contaminating a sample just by what a person um you know may be using in terms of soaps and conditioners and things like that um can potentially contaminate a sample so i much into that one little blip that happened earlier this year i think we've been doing an outstanding job of meeting our and exceeding our performance goal um this next slide looks at total pfast so we're not just sampling

037for these seven but we're stamping for 26 different compounds based on a state approved method and you'll see that again blue being the river and orange being the water they sort of trend together up and down um and you know we're moving maybe depending upon you know what the levels are about half of the pfas that that's coming down towards us in the river so you know this is probably where i would be wanting to focus and looking at in the future um you know we have um there there are a lot of these compounds the health data is being very you know being slowly developed so we're learning a lot more about more of the compounds that we're that are in our source waters um we don't have a lot of information on what

038those health impacts are um but i are in our source water or getting into our drinking water so i would like to see more of a focus on watershed protection and figuring out how we can get these things out of our um you know out of the environment because it's a lot easier to address dealing with it at the source than at the end of the pipe which is what obviously we're doing at drinking water treatment um all that being said we're involved in several projects um with several universities to look at what we can do what technologies exist to remove these from the water um you know carbon filtration has been around for a long time and um it's successful removing some of these but not all all of them um so we're piloting

039some other technology that's what the picture is is an ion exchange pilot system um which has resins which exchange the pfas um anions with um a different anion and it is more effective at removing some of the shorter chain on pfas which is the some of these that are more difficult to remove with granular active faded carbon um and ones that we really don't have a lot of information on in terms of what their health impacts are so um we're trying to position ourselves with understanding what technological um tools we could be potentially adding to our toolbox in the future um as we learn more information about health impacts associated with these compounds but um i feel like that we're again we're well positioned i think we're investing in the right things and and we're

040part a part of the leading edge of developing the knowledge based on how to deal with these chemicals um from a drinking water perspective so that's what i wanted to share um if are there any questions gabby you have a question um yeah thank you brian for the presentation um i was also wondering you know there's a large focus on the drinking water um but how is monitoring going in terms of like using the huron river recreationally are there different guidelines for um what is considered safe for like swimming and fishing and those types of things um there are different guidelines and um you know the the state has a lot of information out there on contact that's appropriate for recreation and there's currently still a do not eat fish advisory on the huron um

041based on the levels that are in the fish samples that the state has collected um huron river watershed is also another good source of information um they have a lot of good information on pfas so the real risk is um is is ingestion so recreating in the river um is not something that is is that we're telling people that they can't do we do have um we do have signage posted at deliveries for example so people can educate themselves about the source and really the risk in the river is the foam because it tends to concentrate in the foam so when the water is like cascading over a dam it can aerate itself and the phos can concentrate so um pfas foam looks a little bit different than river foam but our the recommendations that

042we're saying is is you know wash your hands that's like the same with kovid is hand washing is really important we actually have hand washing stations um at deliveries so wash your hands you know before you get out of the water and you're eating food or something those are the recommendations that currently exist in our best practice so um you know i don't know when the fish advisory will be lifted they're something that they're continuing to look at um i think that the that they're they're optimistic that maybe it won't be you know years away but these things are persistent and they're in so many things that it's not good that rapidly so it's pretty much background even once we address some of what we know is our prime sources you're you see this in

043everything you see it in you know the soils and in this compost and it's pretty much everywhere uh john you have a question and then rita yeah brian thanks for that update i'm wondering if you could speak to what looked like kind of the rebound after the carbon filters were installed in the spring of 2019 and if that's just kind of what you expected or kind of what's going on there because it dropped significantly but then it's like went back up again on the pfast totals slide um let me pull that back up yeah i'm i'm not sure that we can explain that we've been looking um and trying to talk to some of the folks who you know we know are the significant contributors to the pfos in the river wix and wastewater treatment

044plant is one of those um so you know at some point in this time frame um the one of the dischargers who was probably one of the primary sources to the huron is tribar put in some treatment at their facility um and we don't have a whole lot of information about how they're managing their carbon but it's possible um in terms of its capacity to remove total pfos and there they were pretty much focused on pfos which is probably means that it is one of the compounds that is much is the most easy to remove using carbon so what we're experiencing with our carbon is is that the carbon will probably take out pfos for several years without having to replace it but some of these other shorter chain carbon um compounds will break through

045the carbon in months so in terms of a total pfos you know they probably put it in it was probably removing a lot of different things and then over time these other compounds that they're not as concerned about began to break through they're managing it for pfs os solely because that's what their regulatory um um and pre-treatment requirements are completely built around the drinking water side of it is moving much faster than the waste water side so on the wastewater in the breaking water site now we have seven compounds they're still looking at one or two on the wastewater side so um we're trying to get alignment and working with the state to say hey you know we care about more than just pfos and pfoa you need to be looking at these other ones

046too and i think that's the advocacy part of it that um i think would be a good role for you know the maybe the environmental commission to weigh in on is to help advocate for getting these compounds out of our watershed even the ones that aren't currently regulated um that's what i am advocating for thank you um marita you had a question and then john thanks brian um so i have two questions so i'll just start with the one on the total pfize so it dropped in 2018 and i assume that's because of pinpointing the tribar company is that correct or was there something else related no that's i think that's the main reason for the drop in 2019 okay and um is there communication ongoing with that company or other companies upstream of ann

047arbor about what's going into the water how do we know what's what's going on on that upstream side um the state has a program where they're monitoring the source water um we're also continuing to sample so we know you know twice a month we're collecting samples from our source in our finished water so we know what was coming into the plant and what's leaving um the state is is monitoring some locations upstream in the huron as part of their own sampling program and there's continuing to look for sources um wix and wastewater treatment plant and tribar have their own monitoring requirements because you know one is a publicly operated wastewater utility and the other one has a pre-treatment permit so but again you know they're focused only on the ones that they're regulated for so

048it's just the pfos and pfoa i believe um not these others so they're not doing a total pfas analysis like we are so part of it is that's what we're trying to you know we would be advocating is that we need to be looking at more than just these two and we need to hold them accountable for trying to put in treatment that will address the broader scope of these chemicals part of what i'm asking is um are there other sources so there are some other sources and the state has um trying to think off the top of my head um i can share some more information with with you maybe after i can send it through um galen and you can share it but there is other sources upstream tribar is the most significant

049source but there are others there are other smaller contributors yes okay all right thanks my other question had to do with the educational information and um i just wondered um i've been at the barton dam recently and up on the the barton blind and i don't recall seeing signs there um are there where where are the postings primarily and could that be expanded just for general education um it could be expanded um there we've put signs at deliveries there is some signs um at the base of barton dam well i missed it so [Music] um but yes signs could be added so if there were some strategic locations that you thought were important we can work with our folks in the parks department to get those added right okay i'm thinking of near the docks

050okay okay thank you um john and then shannon john mursky ryan thank you very much for the excellent presentation thank you very much for the excellent performance thank you very much for presenting data in a trend chart where it's easily understood performance against the standard where we could clearly see how we're doing where we could generate the kinds of questions intelligent ones like the one that john asked i really appreciate it and you've done a great service and really providing great drinking water quality to the residents of ann arbor thank you very much thank you shannon i wanted to expand a little bit on the recreation piece and the signage um my office is is near argo and i still see lots of people fishing and i'm just wondering i would assume if it's an

051ingestible issue that um that fishing would not be a great thing but if you could talk more about that and i would just say that on any given day i probably see three people fishing in that area so somehow either they're choosing to ignore what's there or it's just not quite loud enough for them to see so if you could talk a little bit about that that would be helpful um you're getting out outside of my area of expertise um but i guess my the only comment i would have is you know there along the huron angling is a big issue so it's something that we've been talking about with the the state and catch and release is still okay so um i don't know um if there's additional communication that we need to get

052out on that topic or not um it sounds like from your perspective maybe we do so i can i can talk to some other folks in the city and find out what we can do to maybe better communicate that um i think again here on what river watershed is another you know group that's pretty active in communicating about what is safe and not safe to do run um so they might be a good partner to to help they have a lot of people use them as a resource for information and i i think just um you know in addition having some signs around in places where people tend to do it um i think would be helpful um so that they just understand that you know catch-and-release is probably the way to go i would

053imagine i don't know i'm again making a leap but i would imagine eating the fish if you're supposed to be not ingesting the foam that you know it probably gets concentrated by them and you know things like that so um i think it just needs to be a stronger message over there so people understand what their the risk they're taking what and and again i'm not paying so close attention to understanding if they're doing catch and release or if they're actually taking it home and eating it but um it does go on a lot on a regular basis so um i just put that out out there thank you um any other questions for brian yeah oh you know i i just want to uh reiterate what shannon just said i also want to say

054thank you brian for very nice uh presentation discussion um i complement her by being down in gallup all the time and there they are definitely fishing and they're not releasing some of them and i get the feeling uh of course it's uh folks who probably have a problem getting enough food on the table given the economic situation i've seen this a lot out west uh where the lakes and rivers are often contaminated mercury and other pollutants from coal-fired burning so i think we should definitely put up more signage i assume they know and they're not going to you know they don't have to wear the wherewithal to not get the fish but nonetheless maybe they don't know i haven't really noticed signs but i'm not looking hard thank you okay i have i i made

055a note i will i'll report back to you all with um what what additional work we can do to address the comments that you raised thank you very much okay one last question from mike apple uh not a question but uh just those sign signs that do exist were put in the parks by the watershed council initially so parks themselves i don't think it has done much signage for uh fish advisories but the watershed council has been very active and are the ones who've done it on behalf of parks or has at least let parks know that they were doing it in the past uh so if there's a tree to shake it might be the watershed council first yeah we we regularly meet the watershed council county health and the city so we we

056are all aligned and we're working together well i will communicate with all those folks um um if you're not aware we also i mean i heard the con conversation about the metrics before i started and from the drinking water side um we have a monthly newsletter that we put out called quality water matters you can see it at qualitywatermatters.org and we're trying to do that is communicate about what some of the issues are that our customers are concerned about um particularly to water quality so you will see some some metrics and some third monitors about how we're doing certain things so you weren't aware it could be a resource for you thank you okay um all right well thank you so much brian for all the good work and um job brian thank you you're

057welcome we'll move on to the other uh so let's move on to the next item on the agenda which i was going to talk about the federal and state regulation and uh what's going on in other places so i'm going to start sharing my screen let's see there we go okay so um just for a quick review um pfos stands for perfluorinated alkyl substances or polyfluorinated alkyl substances um what this wow what uh so what are for perfluoroapple substances well basically they're things with their molecules with multiple carbon fluorine bonds so this for example on the left are the chemical structures of pfoa which stands for perfluorooctal acid because there's eight carbons in here and p phos is a similar eight carbon chain it's perfluorooctyl sulfate so most of these compounds have either an acidic

058function here a carboxylate or a um or a sulfate so the response you know the the health effects of these have been known by dupont and 3m since the 1970s since the mid 70s and of course the patents have run out it's been illegal since 2015 to manufacture either of these compounds in the united states but it's still people are uh but you're still allowed to import them and put them into products um so the industry response has been to just make different kinds of molecules that uh uh you know instead stay a step ahead of the regulatory agencies so uh gen x is a compound that's uh a replacement for the ones on the left it's a smaller compound as you can see a little bit more complicated it has contaminated the cape fear

059river and caused a lot of problems with the city of um wilmington north carolina which gets its water you know from the cape fear river uh this was from a kimworst plant in north carolina which was um which was supposed to notify the state about its containment and production and containment of gen x but uh somehow one one office of the epa did not communicate back to the state office of epa so this was a a total case of neglect for um something like six or eight years um and then the second compound down here pfvs it's something um that's also even used as a replacement in firefighting phones and other other uh commercial products so again these are um pfas is just an umbrella term there are total of some almost 5 000 synthetic

060chemicals that have these multiple carbon fluorine bonds um the response of the epa only responded back in 2004 or 2005 or so where they set a a not a regulatory standard but just a public health advisory level about 70 parts per million for the combined pfos and pfo act and still at the net at the federal level these are the only pcos compounds that are regulated and they're not really regulated they're just health advisory levels um so however michigan as brian mentioned michigan just enacted uh mcl levels or regulatory levels for seven of these pfas compounds i just said earlier this month i think it was august 4th um so as of august 4th the state has regulatory authority for those southern pfas compounds um again the pfoa and pfos they've been manufactured and sold

061in the united states since 1943 uh and they can be measured in blood worldwide these compounds have been in the environment since the 1950s and they have been accumulating and they have they are persistent the their central property of all of these pfos compounds is that they are persistent both in the body and in the environment uh because it's unnatural there are no natural carbon fluorine chemical bonds known and so none of us have evolved the mechanisms to either detoxify them or eliminate them specifically from our bodies so they principally been used in consumer products such as scotchgard and firefighting foam by the military especially and a lot of contamination sites nationally are found in um airports and in training facilities that were for training firemen to extinguish aircraft fires it fires and fuel fires

062again their their main property their main threat is that they concentrate and persist in body tissues unlike a lot of chemical contaminants they do not partition into fats but they do partition into blood and liver where they're recirculated within the body um and there's another thing is that they are difficult to measure parts per trillion these are nanograms per kilogram so it's the equivalent of putting a drop of one of these p class compounds into 20 olympic swimming pools um so they're they're presenting analytical challenges brian alluded to you have to be careful how you sample things because they're on many gloves um they can be found in parts per trillion or more than parker trailing level part for trillium level and on gloves clothing such as waterproof clothing um you know hush about these

063shoes that have been waterproof um they're also very very difficult to destroy to actually actually to adequately destroy any pfas compound you need to incinerate it above 1100 degrees centigrade and you need to do it in the nitrogen atmosphere there are no incineration facilities in the united states that are licensed and that are regularly monitored for these conditions there are newer technologies there are grants grant proposals out there for requests for proposals for destroying fifa's compounds but as yet there's no really good technology to do that uh the next slide here i'm just showing a a quick graphic of how states have responded to pfas um over here at the top the us epa is still not regulating pfo and pfos but that some of these compounds are supposed to be our others the health

064advisory is that the sum of these compounds in drinking water should be less than 70 parts per trillion um california has acted many of these other states have acted wherever you see an x it means that the sum of all these compounds has to be less than 70 parts per trillion in drinking water and these are the michigan standards that you can see for comparison um so but again these are only a handful of the 4700 p fast compounds that are out there um now the circular economy of pfas is that you have point sources but um and they all come from industrial or these afff for firefighting foam point sources and they're they contaminate surface and ground waters uh there are hundreds of um fifa states recognize the igla uh egle now in the

065state of michigan state of michigan has been very aggressive more than many other states in testing for pfas and they tested first for drinking water and then their attention had once that was taken care of they focused on wastewater treatment plant effluents and groundwater and ground waters that are not near sites there are known contamination sites that where people are not withdrawing drinking water from those groundwaters and then also there's a concern with biosolids what i'm going to talk about next so in the state of michigan here industrial plants are are allowed to discharge their wastes into wastewater leaving generally municipal wastewater treatment plants um if you eagle has a pretty has been pretty transparent about this if you look at the impart website it contains a lot of information so um so the states

066looked at all wastewater treatment plant effluents for those for those that have industrial pre-treatment permits um ann arbor is one of those ann arbor has an industrial pre-treatment permit i think but mostly because of the university because there are no manufacturing plants here in michigan anymore i mean here in ann arbor um another source of contamination is through commercial distribution because for example scotchgard um you know nonstick cookware that all ends up in the landfill and landfill leachate generally contains high levels of pfos coming from the solid coming from these um solid waste and they end up in the wastewater as well um in ann arbor what's generally done is there uh our land old landfill uh the the leachate from the landfill is diverted to the sanitary sewer so it runs through the wastewater

067treatment plant and vents into the surface waters of the huron river um but uh a main concern right now are biosolids and compost and the their contamination mostly comes because fifa are already in the food chain but also because you have substantial contamination from p faucets and fast food wrappers and other food packaging materials um the only way that we're going to stop this from happening and uh and is by reforming the federal toxic substances control act to invoke what's called a precautionary principle which has been used in europe for some years and what this means is that you're not allowed to manufacture and distribute large quantities of a new chemical until you have actually tested them for human health and in many cases ecological health as well so the united states is the only

068advanced developed country that does not that accepts a manufacturer's statement that substance is recognized as generally safe before they're allowed to manufacture and release it and moreover that uh these are all proprietary compounds and proprietary mixtures that they're not required that are up in our trade sequence so they are not it would take a lawsuit to find out what actually pfos compounds are in a particular substance that's being sold on the market now there's quite a bit of fifa in cosmetics as well um but it's it's mainly entering the food chain through um you know through fast food wrappers and other food packaging but meanwhile all that stuff ends up in compost and biosolids as well and these biosolids are oftentimes spread on agricultural fields so where the plants will take up some of them

069to some degree and others will be bleached out of the biosolids and the agricultural fields onto surface waters so just briefly what are our local key flash sources in the huron river the major point sources brian stieglitz already said it's from the wixom the tri-bar cleaning plant number four in whitson and there's two other plants up there that have uh released pfas via norton creek and uh and that's what triggered the uh fifa's alerts in the huron river uh and some fish were tested in kent lake in the kensington metro park and that's what prompted the fish advisory because they had very high levels of pfas and i i should also say that these fish advisories will likely last for years because of the persistence of pfas in the environment and in living tissues so

070it's going to take i've been told it will take at least two more years um for the fish for the pea faucets that's in that was measured in these fish to come down to the level that's uh the fish advisory could become lifted another there are several groundwater sites upstream of us that could eventually leak pfas into the huron river one is the brighton thermophile site another is the chrysler scio intro site that says even here on river drive the state is monitoring they have ground water wells where they're monitoring the plumes of pfos that are coming from these sites they will not likely provide a significant source of pfas contamination in the future even if they do leak um and then there's the landfill leachates there's several landfills upstream with us that have uh

071have contaminated ground waters that are gradually migrating into the huron river so um but the thing that we all have to remember is that most exposure worldwide for pfos and pfoa which are the only pfas compounds that have any um real data in humans is that most most people worldwide that are exposed to pfloss and pfoa 70 percent of it comes through food ingestion and this has been going on for decades um it's mostly an aquatic fish and invertebrates oysters other seafood again it's mostly tends to concentrate in liver and meat so i've been telling people or whatever you do you might want to stop eating liver um especially fish livers for those of you that are fond of sushi and then um and then dairy products um generally 25 percent of exposures come through

072drinking water but this is something that can be more easily contained and more easily monitored and contained about roughly five percent of exposures occur through fabric dust where that's inhaled um you know dust from carpets and other fabrics that have been treated with fifa's um in terms of these newer pfos compounds it's um it's hard to tell as brian was saying they're monitoring a set a subset of all these pfos compounds but uh igloo just did a study of plating plants and they discovered that indeed the plating plants have replaced their fifos containing um products that they use in these chrome plating plants uh p-flats they're no longer using them and uh the monitoring data seems to indicate that however um some of them have no pfas and the substitute products have no pipots in

073them but some of them have another efos called 62 fts which is generally which is um not always monitored but um i believe that that's in the uh set of the compounds that brian is testing for so this is something we might expect to come out of these plating plants in the future with 6 2 fts so um just to highlight the problem is that there was a study uh some eight years ago by now in a voice water sludge in sweden and you can test for total pfas because there are 4 700 compounds in these individual compounds are very it's very difficult to measure them at the part per trillion levels there's a way of getting a measurement of how much fifos is in a sample by using an assay called extractable organic fluorine

074assay um which will tell you i'll give you a rough mass balance of how much phos is in within a particular sample without any without measuring the individual ones and so a large proportion of these extractable growing organic fluorines measured in these wastewater sludges in sweden were unidentified and that that means close to 87 to 98 percent in the wastewater and 87 and 91 percent of the sludge which has turned into bio uh biosolids so it's um so whenever we look at these total amount of pfos um that's a misnomer nobody is ever measuring in these massvec acids nobody is measuring the total amount of pfas what they're measuring is a subset that they think are likely to be there but again none of them except for very few of them um have any regulatory

075backing to them to any clean-out procedure so the priesthood and precursor compounds make a significant contribution precursor compounds are compounds that are degraded in nature and in the body to p phos or pfla so when you tend to get smaller uh perfluorocarboxylic acids during a wastewater treatment process and um and the amounts of unknown key fats have definitely increased in in swedish wastewater from 2012 to 2015 when that study was published so um i think the next little last slide here is as everybody many people are aware how the city tested the pfas content in its compost and the finished compounds at its compost facility there's other data coming out from linda lee's laboratory she's a professor at purdue university and she's published several papers where she's analyzed composts and uh packaged biosolids for pfas

076compounds and um what this is telling us is that um if you look at compost that just comes from leaves grass in the backyard yard waste in other words you have a far far very little contamination of the compost from fifos compounds however if you look at compost that includes food waste and compostable food service wear which the tragedy here is that it's good to have these um these um um you know these food wastes because they they're high in nitrogen content so the resulting biosolids are are much better fertilizer than just adding um the leaves and grass and backyard compost which tends to be low in nitrogen or high in carbon however what you can see here is that the uh and the compost our facility were sampled on october 25th and 2019 come

077in roughly in the in the middle of what's seen in other municipal compost um down at bottom you see uh and even higher levels of pfas that are in commercially available biosolids that you can find bagged in stores such as home depot blowers and other stores so you should be careful buying compost and biosolids that are bagged that are offered for sale in these um you know in these uh gardening store outlets um you'll see that there's one outlier here now these samples were all uh uh reported under conditioned condition of anonymity because nobody would willingly give a sample to the professor for testing if it was going to be published if if what their levels of pfas in their product were published so these are all it's unknown what these um what these biosolids

078are except for one they're really large outlier here um this is milorganite which comes from the city of milwaukee's um municipal wastewater treatment plant so milorganite um is definitely higher than um than many other compo uh biosolids that are offered commercially on the market so the last slide here is just that i provided for you or just key information sources if you want to know more about key thoughts but there is but just to cap this um there is there is still no regulation of pfas by the epa there is uh the state is regulating them for drinking water uh but there are no standards or regulatory authority for pfas in either biosolids or wastewater treatment plant effluent so that's the next thing the state is working impressively on and i'll just want to say

079finish by saying that the state impart program has done a very good job uh they have very dedicated staff there that have um that have uh pursued this contamination as um as very properly um with the budget that they have um and that their michigan is actually head of most many other states in the regulation of fifa so that's um that's all i have to say so i'm going to stop my sharing and i'll answer any questions um um okay um shannon um if you could actually go back to sharing your screen closed out we're trying to figure this out and go back to the slide that shows the composting graph yeah could you just point out where i'm i'm a little confused about sort of where ann arbor is in this graph oh okay

080well the total okay the total pfos of them they measured the entire thing is the ann arbor results basically is that what you're saying um if you sum up all the 26 compounds that were measured in the compost of the sum of the pfos compounds come out at 31 parts per trillion and so the arrow is pointing like i guess i'm a little confused by the so our our facility is this top chunk and then the lower oh no no no i have not plotted any of the ann arbor data here like can you see that cursor can you see my cursor yeah yeah yeah yeah so for example for this municipal compost uh this right here is the total of the pfos because at the bottom it says ann arbor compost facility sample and

081so this is this is not like a summary of what this graph is okay i was confused all right that's yeah that's misleading i'm sorry um this is where that total for ann arbor comes in i see that's the gray line is where we're all within that okay so up here so you see where we're we're basically showing up in the middle of where other at least these um compost were measured okay and so um you had you had made a distinction between fast food packaging which you had said was you know pretty intense in terms of um some of these chemicals in it but then you would also also talked about compostable containers and so i'm just what i'm wondering is are essentially like are they made of pretty similar things should we be

082thinking about um what we allow to go into our compost in terms of food containers that's that's my question it's like i i don't think that anybody like that i don't think of going to mcdonald's and think i can put their stuff in in our compost bin but i do look at things that i get from you know a local store that has a compostable cup or or something that has you know zucchini in it or something like that that says it's compostable should we be thinking twice about putting those kinds of compostable containers in our own compost facility and i say this as somebody who um you know as a landscape architect i spec that compost every day in in the work that i do um for soil building capacity and so i would

083just be very curious about what our facility is and should we be thinking about um shifting or or you know how we um [Music] how we say who gets you know what what gets in and what doesn't get in yeah no that's an excellent question um i have been trying to follow up on that with some of the um some of the you know um supermarkets here that offer you know containers and so i've been doing some my own investigation about that first of all nobody's really testing for those except um if you go to the environmental working group as in the ngo the environmental ngo the environmental working group and they've had they've acquired quite a lot of funding through hollywood celebrities and so they have done a very good job as well as

084the ecology center here in ann arbor these are the leading um and and i should say the silent spring institute and um you have web and in that last slide i have um links to their websites so you can there's a limited amount of data because of uh that was obtained by these ngos there is no government organization that's been because there's no regulatory authority nobody's coming tax dollars to measure these things okay okay and then my other question is like do we have i'm sorry sounds like you wanted to continue so you can go to those websites and see how they've ranked different people um different stores um through sampling uh you know of things taken on various packaging taken from various stores nationally what i have noticed is that most of the high-end

085stores here in ann arbor their takeout containers do not have pfos in them but um some of them do have a plastic that does not break down um you know there's they're made out of paper board but they're always aligned if you see the insides have like a very polished looking surface and those can be um in one case they are like um one supermarket here offers their takeout containers have a polymer which is a copolymer of ethylene and acrylic acid and that's not readily broken down so when those things are composted those plastics are still there as polymers um but they're a smaller amount and they're not it's hard to tell what's going to happen with them over time yeah um and then my other question then i don't know if you know the

086answer to this or not is i was under the impression that our um you know a wastewater treatment facility produces biosolids for fertilizer and things like that i don't know if you know that and if you feel like again it's it's just it's just concerning to kind of hear that we're trying to do they're the right thing with some of these ways of handling compost and stuff like that and do you feel like any information you have will um allow us to self-reflect on some of our own procedures within the city and and affect some of the you know ways that we get to our goals um with with these items because you know it i know it's there's a lot of pros and cons all these things i'm just wondering if you have any

087information on um how we handle our own i feel like i had heard that there are biosolids that come out of that process but i'm not sure if you're aware of that i know that you're you're way more aware of all those issues than i am in terms of how waste is handled in the city in that way yeah i mean i think this deserves a bigger discussion in the commission um i'm we don't have time for it all today but what i can say is that um you know the law uh biosolids have been spread on agricultural land for for decades um the only thing they're required to test for heavy metals and sometimes in several a handful of pesticides i believe um but they're generally uh they're only required to test for heavy

088metals so uh i think it would be um i'm working with some engineers to try to see if we can sample some things upstream with us especially and maybe do what the environmental working group has done and what silent spring institute has done um you know to try to do some fun and testing by an ngo to try to see where um you know where um i would i would my my intuition tells me though that ann arbor is not a particular problem a bigger problem is going to be the wastewater treatment plants that have industrial pre-treatment permits which are definitely contaminating nearby solids with ann arbor has not been flagged as being contaminated because we don't generate we don't have a point source here you know and within our within another there's no point

089sources that have been identical we may have some upstream potentially coming down to the huron river which then we're drinking and you know goes into our food growing and all those sorts of things yeah so okay all right thank you for for that okay let's see i can't see everybody here you can you can leave the presentation if you want i just wanted to understand that graph better thanks this is chris graham what is the the particular pfps fertilizer that's so completely out of line with everything else oh well you see the um the orange color here is p foss mostly and this blue color is p f h x i think so that is mill organized oh really we'll organize that comes from the city of milwaukee's wastewater treatment plant which i do really

090like to use and a lot of uh there's it's particularly high in pfas but again i can't say what these other ones were and and where the fuss is coming into their wastewater treatment plant to their wastewater stream somehow well yeah because they have industries that are um you know they're dumping their wastewaters into the municipal wastewater treatment plant all right so so you know that's being tracked here in michigan um so you know uh so i'm working with the sierra club and other ngos to try to figure out on what we can do to help finance on some of this some you know testing that will actually tell us because eagle is not going to have the funds and it doesn't have the regulatory authority either so you know it's just um that's the

091central problem here is um you know like our wastewater treatment plant um they if they have the funds and they have the um the courage to test their own drinking water it will happen but there is no regulatory authority in order to test your drinking water um until like earlier this month where we're municipal drinking where people are required to test the water for beef off and of these ones that are very low in pfas or p p f h x a content do you know what they are no i do not i'm still investigating that as i mentioned i mentioned earlier that uh um that this study was only possible because of the um you know the the samples the samples that were provided um were done um under condition of anonymity that after

092if they were if any of this data was published that um they were not to be identified so these this paper does not identify the sources but i've heard um anecdotally that this large one is from the lord from several people very interesting um all right i can't see anybody's hand or anything hd this is john mursky i really appreciate the presentation i appreciate your public service and the work you're doing for the sierra club and your presentation today um so thanks a lot um i have um one question in terms of our exposure as human beings to pfas it seems to me one conclusion that one can draw is that a vegetarian diet is would is is better better than one that's heavy in dairy and meat and aquatic life it seems um if

093that's 70 of our exposure um and we know that there's also other benefits in terms of health and also in terms of impact on greenhouse gas emissions is that is that a valid conclusion oh definitely you know um you know the only um there are several studies have been published over the last 10 years about plant uptake from people you know from biosolids that were split on sprouter and agricultural land um these heavier these um a larger fifa p phos compounds like pfos and pfoa they generally bind to the soil pretty tightly and the plants do not take those up but they preferentially they will take up some of these smaller chain compounds like pfds the fbi pfhxaa these smaller these smaller um compounds will be taken up by plants some some of them um

094they do not concentrate them particularly one of the one of the reasons why the industry switched to the smaller compounds is because they do not buy to accumulate as much as the longer chain ones but they are still as persistent so um what i've been telling people is yeah plant-based diet is is better um you have you should be more careful about eating fish which is unfortunate um freshwater fish but mostly seafood um you know you can measure there's quite a lot of pfos in the blood of um of inuit the anyway you know and other populations that eat a lot of seafood in japanese so um so you need to minimize your um intake of these foods and try to eat as much of a plant-based diet as you can and one thing i

095should say that i neglected to mention is that just this week jeff irwin introduced a bill um in the state legislature that's called center bill 1072 which is a bill to ban people food packaging in michigan and yusuf ravi is submitting a similar bill on the house this week so um um there are there are a handful of states i think it's somewhere around six or ten that have already done this they've already banned the use of pfos and food packaging uh washington the state of washington was the first i think their ban doesn't come into effect until next year because you know they they've needed to delay to allow to allow people to adapt to that regulation and change their supply chain hey steve i have one other um conclusion i'd like to offer

096and get your reaction to it you talked about the difference between us regulation under tosca that's the acronym for the toxic um compared to um the equivalent program of um called reach in in europe and um my my conclusion or proposed conclusion is um you know we hear all the time how um all these regulations um are onerous um but none of them um well when when people make that that conclusion they're not thinking about the externalities and in the sense the the tragedy of the commons where these things can just be dumped in water or dumped in in compost or wherever the case may be and if you look at at reach in europe it's not like reach and all of their uh regulations have sent their economies into total um you know disasters

097where they you know they're they're they're just absolutely not able to compete on the world stage anymore because they have um regulatory systems like reach is that is that is i is that reasonable um i don't know you don't know no um if i if i understand you right um you're asking if this will american industry manufacturing yeah those are these rules well yeah yeah my mother-in-law worked in the chemical industry for years and worked overseas in switzerland for what's now part of basf and um one of the areas that he worked in was in related to reach regulations and my understanding is is that you know that's been in place for um a decade or more if not longer and um they seem to their economy seems to be able to operate at a

098high level um and they're um able to do so while protecting um their residents from contaminations like these that are bioaccumulative and that are um that are very very long lasting and it just seems to me that you know when we hear all the time that regulations um will kill the us economy i just i just don't understand it when i see economies like europe that are highly competitive and they're able to control substances like like these yeah oh yeah well i can't speak to that with any authority but my uh but my um i can give many examples about why that is not generally true you know it's uh people resist raising the bar for the for their industry but uh all that does is allow the more um the more irresponsible players in

099the market to compete you know to compete to to to compete and get a higher profit so i don't understand i don't understand why people won't impose a floor you know just to be responsible and make sure that there's an even playing field um but you know you know there was a problem disposing of gen x to pfas compound gen x in holland now the netherlands had a problem they they couldn't dispose of it so they sent it to north carolina and north carolina was supposed to send it to a landfill in new mexico and so some environmental groups found out about that and tried to halt that whole process but it's not clear what happened ultimately steve i have a question yeah this is rita um since the we currently encourage people to put

100food waste and other compostables in our compost we're now accepting things that here in ann arbor that are not really so great it seems like do we have a plan for how to move forward with that or we're going to kind of hope that that the legislation passes and do our best to support it or what do you see as like next steps to deal with our part of that food waste and compostable food service where well supporting that bill to have defaustpan and food packaging you know you'll never get the pea pots out of the food waste we're eating it and we're throwing it away so there's food waste but you said that it didn't accumulate as much in at least in in vegetable type food what food if i heard that correctly and

101then there's the packaging which i assumed was really the greater source is that right yeah so i'm just wondering if maybe we should say temporarily hey everybody don't put your packaging in the compost yeah we can say that um there's no uh we can we can educate we can communicate that to people in the community it looks like at least the high-end um supermarkets around here have already done so you know they've already pretty much reduced the pfas from their food packaging but it's the fast food um it's the fast food operations that are the main problem so i think what we can do is we can take the data that's been generated by an environmental working group and other ngos and try to publicize that but i'm not sure how to publicize that yeah

102it just feels sort of ironic that we've all you know that we've moved to this greater composting and in a way we've got a problem that we'd rather not have yep it's going to keep going on until we can get some kind of federal reform so um any other questions um we should move on shortly all right so i'm going to stop sharing my screen here and i can see everybody and so the next item on the agenda is public commentary so i'm going to read my uh i'm going to make a statement here uh this is an opportunity for persons to speak for up to three minutes please call 1-888-7888 and enter meeting id number 924-5796-9823 this information is also displayed on the meeting agenda and video feed city staff will select callers that

103have raised their hand one by one using the last three digits of your phone number in order to electronically raise your hand to indicate your desire to speak please press star 9 on your phone you will hear an automated announcement that the host is allowing you to speak when speaking please move to a quiet area and mute any television or background sounds so that we may hear you clearly please state your name and address at the beginning of your comments and be patient there is a delay of up to 30 seconds before a connection is established so um so galen will get the uh any request for public comment steve i'm gonna wait 30 seconds and then um i'll let you guys know um but i don't see anybody right now okay if there's nobody

104in the queue nope no one's in the kill okay well let's wait another 10 seconds then okay the next item on the agenda is uh um the approval of the minutes of the july meeting um has everybody had a chance to look at the copy are there any suggested changes or revisions of the minutes from the july meeting i don't see any hands raised so do i have a motion to accept the minutes i do i have a second okay john callaward first and seconded by john mursky all who approve of the minutes say raise your hands anybody who does not approve raise your hands okay it passes unanimously uh we'll move on to the next item on the agenda is uh is a vice chair um as you all know susan hutton was our

105vice chair last year and she left the board in may she cycled off the board in may uh during our hiatus from the code with 19. pandemic so we we should have a vice chair so i've heard uh let's um i sent out an email earlier so let's uh i'm the floor is open to nominations raise your hand if you want to nominate someone by john mursky i'd like to re nominate rita mitchell um rita indicated her interest in serving and i think she'd do a great job i've been working with her on the natural features committee and she's done an outstanding job okay any um are there uh let's see are there any other nominations okay do i have a second i think i need a second that's chris graham seconds that nomination um

106so let's vote on um on electing rita mitchell as a vice chair of the environmental commission um all who approve raise your hands okay all who are opposed raise your hands okay it's passed unanimously uh congratulations rita thank you thanks everybody thanks john and john and chris bravo bravo yes i'll share some of the information i have that you might need i have to take over this role thank you all right so uh moving on uh regular business um every did everybody have a chance to review review the proposed bylaw changes i'm not sure where they came from and who made them i was hoping to get an answer from city staff about that galen hello i'm gonna have to check with chris frost on that oh okay but you know to me they all

107looked uh uh they all looked proper proper and good and they they were clarifying i thought and so um i know did anybody have any other comment or objections to the bylaw changes uh rita i had just noticed as i was reading through them that there was one that that looked to me like there was a word missing and it wasn't i am the edited section um and i'm sorry i can't even find my own copy right now but it was section 3.27 and it looked like it needed a word um like clean energy or produce it said produce clean and it didn't say clean what um um and so it just looks like it needs a check okay big deal yeah would you just communicate that to galen sure okay okay thank you i

108have a procedural question um well first i should uh acknowledge that i did not read the bylaws so um shame on me but i do have a question in terms of um what were you um how we handle this is there supposed to be a first and a second reading of this um typically like with resolutions and things like that there's um a first reading in one meeting and then there's a second reading um where we then finally vote is that um what we need to do in the case of these bylaws does anybody know i think you're correct but i was hoping i didn't have to read the bylaws out no i don't think you have to read them i just present them in the meeting and then we can then finally approve them

109um in the next meeting and i think it would be helpful um with maybe this is already in the document read if you've read it is there a side-by-side comparison that shows um what was what was crossed out and what was added yeah yeah okay it's not side by side it's integrated integrated okay go ahead bob yeah it's really clear and these changes are not substantive at all it's it's really just cleaning up language and personally i don't see any reason to wait to vote on them if others aren't comfortable moving forward um i'm happy to defer but um i i i feel ready to make a motion to approve them as submitted john callaway weren't there some questions though about the commission composition and not being reflective of what we're currently at i don't

110know steve didn't you raise that in terms of the youth membership yeah it needs to have there's no mention of youth members in there so that's a deficiency right there so um does everybody feel like we need to have more explicit you know definition of the responsibilities and the roles of a i don't know why we would approve by laws that don't mention youth commissioners when we have a youth commissioner that's participating in this meeting i know i know so um i've already yeah i had down i was gonna wait until everybody else had said something before i brought that up but um i think i think uh it will definitely be it was worth having a discussion here and so this counts as the first reading and so let's have uh let's um i'll

111communicate this to the um for reader and i can communicate this to galen and let's get something uh a copy that has these commissioners in it as well and then we'll uh we'll read that at the next meeting in september okay these were being handled by chris frost i think right in the attorney's office yeah yeah yeah so i i would um if you all have any comments send them to me and um and including you read i just send them to me and i'll compile them and i'll send them to galen and uh and uh and uh and he can decide who to send it to probably chris frost okay steve it's chris graham here i saw you do some discussion about standing versus working groups and when the natural features committee came to

112the environmental commission it was prior to that a council committee called the natural features ordinance committee oh and it came originally as a standing committee so we did have one it i don't think it matters when iota and not having to do public the public process maybe is easier if we aren't but um we did have at least one standing committee i think there was another on toxics um back 10 years ago or eight year 10 years ago anyway um so morphing to our committees being predominantly or completely working maybe make sense but it is a change from past history okay um yeah this is the first i've heard of this so um let's um [Music] so um thanks for bringing that up chris so why don't we table that to a future meeting and

113but um you should just continue doing uh what you've been doing have you been doing public sessions anyway yeah i know we have announced they're announced and i'm not sure we have outside participation very much in the zoom era but right right okay well i'm sorry i did i wasn't aware of that okay so um the natural features ordinance is a standing committee as uh defined by our bylaws by our current and future bylaws well i think you've changed it i you know the whole process now is natural features working group and that's fine i don't i don't raise this as a request to change it okay i i'm simply saying that uh you did have two standing committees i think and uh probably not having them works more smoothly okay though without an annaber

114news i'm not sure i you know stuff happens when we don't know about it i don't i'm not happy about that circumstance yeah yeah okay well this is uh i think this is worth keeping in the back of all of our minds i mean i think yeah yeah we want to we want to be as open and transparent to the public as we can be well that's why i'm raising if i'm raising a question at all it's the difference between the two committees standing committees have to be public meetings working groups don't have to be yeah but uh the working groups do not make any decisions there's no voting in a working group it's just designed for uh compiling information and digesting it and making it putting it into a presentable form for the full

115commission i don't remember standing committees ever making independent decisions yeah everything came to the commission okay just just briefly from the energy commission and i can shorten my report later but we have six working groups um no standing committees um in the past sometimes josh um put them on legistar so they they were announced in the public domain so people could participate we had residents um serving on on the committees and all of the work that we've done um heretofore at least has gone through um other commissions for example like planning commission and then through city council so there's been ample opportunity for public comment and for public input and in at least one case uh in the ev charging group you know we reached out and had meetings with dte we had meetings with

116developers so i think chris's point is correct that working groups are a lot easier to work with and we still can ensure that we're engaging with the public and ensuring that we're inserting public comment into the overall process okay yeah um all right uh any other comments about the uh about the uh structure of the working groups and the rules or committees okay so let's move on to the capstone project for the c students um just a quick update um because my uh my recollection is that uh we're supposed to just give a ten thousand foot summary to uh pack by september 1st and then he'll do some um circulating around the seas department and see um see what needs to be flushed out i already did send around i think everybody right uh contact

117information on who to get in touch with make easler yeah i think i everyone got that right yeah yeah yes i think i did my job really a lot earlier than i thought simply because uh nate was eager to get going but he's the man your time on the master's projects yeah yeah we did get it and the natural features committee has one uh assembled and ready to come to you okay but it goes to nate not me right right got it yeah that's the perfect time to do it and uh you know if it has to it might have to be done remotely whatever ones we have this year we'll see how it goes so keep that in mind too right now with the governor's guidelines our students can get out and do do

118field work uh they can also do uh human subjects work uh so there's quite a bit we can do our research enterprises is going pretty well for grad students so but i can't guarantee anything and it all depends on this this virus thing i've heard about yeah yeah and we're about to really uh have quite the experiment going on now yeah indeed okay so it sounds like so we're on progress with the capstone project proposals and um so chris you'll just you thanks for sharing um the one that you drafted and you'll send it to me geisler and um if there are any others uh they'll send them to matt geisler within the working groups after some review with the working groups okay so the one we have goes through the natchez natural features committee

119tomorrow and if it comes through there intact then we'll forward it on okay great um any other um any other comments on capstone projects at this time okay um stop need him sorry uh yeah just real quick just a heads up that there is another potential one in the works i did write to nate kiesler and ask about um just uh exploratory email of whether the subject of microplastics in the huron might uh be well suited to a project and he said that um dr stultz had mentioned that possibility and he thought the huron river watershed council may have as well so some combination of entities may come up with one on that topic too okay it might be worth reaching out to susan hutton i recall her mentioning in the previous meeting that there

120had been some measurements of microplastics in in the iran river and that the levels were okay yeah um so let's see so chris you want to the next item on the agenda is the natural features tree protection ordinance get us through the drafting and now let her comment for you okay all right so this will be really quick we are um working to review the udc for protections of that applied to site plans that would protect heritage trees landmark trees and any trees that we we determine are registered trees for various reasons we are literally crawling through phrase by phrase of the documentation and making the changes that that our group feels are appropriate um so we are i would say a little more than halfway through what we need to go through um and

121i'm we've been um having some great success i think with the group but but it has taken some dedication to having a basically a weekly meeting so that we can do what we we need to do um john and chris spent a lot of time reviewing the document prior to this um and got us set up with some original kinds of edits and now we're just going through and with everyone who's who's wanted to be actively involved um to put it together so um i don't have an estimate yet of when we'll have a final product um i think we're going to have a little bump with the labor day weekend coming up um but but i expect to move ahead and uh you know another month maybe um coming close that's what i would

122like sorry commissioner mitchell what group was that again that's the that's the national features working group it's the one that you've been helping us um galen with setting up those weekly meetings and we're working on the heritage tree ordinance okay thank you um shannon rita in the in the last i i struggled to kind of find the last draft and i i found something from chris but it doesn't have the list of trees that's in that um and i'm just wondering if there's any way that you could send that around i'm sure well wear those things against each other because i'd like to be able to take a closer look but obviously that's a big piece of it is sort of understanding what you're what you're right you know what your thresholds are for things

123yeah so right now you know it's really it is really literally a drafty document that's full of notes and markings of where we've ended and things like that so um just to be sure i get you what you want you do you want the draft document as well as the list of trees i think it would be helpful just even if it's full of you know replacement stuff and things like that that's what it is that's totally fine i okay i understand it's a messy process to go through this i'm not expecting anything finished but i'd love to just take another look i know kristen went out a while ago a while ago that i looked at but just curious to see where you all are with things and then again the list is the

124big thing right um to understand because obviously that's the thresholds that you guys are are regulating too you know so if you could send both that would be awesome i will do that so but just to let you know we have really not addressed the list yet it's been prepared but we haven't addressed it as a group at all yep yep but um just even if i just you know know where you all are headed or whatever then that would be that would be helpful so to be clear shannon we have not especially answered your question about whether we deal with just native trees or we deal with all big trees okay well even even just that just knowing where you guys are with it i i want to just give a more um kind

125of more thoughtful response that goes through it a little bit more carefully and so uh just having the whole thing there at in the state that it is knowing that it's just you know midpoint i totally get it i just still would like to be able to um to be able to look at it a little bit more carefully so again i totally understand that it's still evolving and and things like that but i would just like to be able to um know where you all are at this at this moment in time so a key piece of where we are is that there's a second set of amendments to the udc that would protect all trees all large all landmark heritage and register trees in the city not just those in a site plan

126process that is to say to disturb a tree a heritage landmark or registered tree you would have to go to city hall and get a permit and just how to trigger that process um my our original idea was to work through the grating permit and tighten that because the key issue about losing big trees is compaction of soils under them which happens all the time around house expansion projects for example or parking lot parking area expansions and to that end if we only address native trees in that there are a whole lot of planted trees native or otherwise that people would miss on their neighbor's property if they were cut down or killed by a construction activity that's goes on unpermitted so so are you saying that you can't like that you can't remove a

127tree on your own property if it's a certain size if it's just because up to this point obviously anybody can you know it can be a huge tree or can be a small tree you don't have to permit with anybody in order to remove a tree on your property and so you all are saying if it's a landmark tree or a heritage tree that you would have to go get a permit to be able to um take that down and then do we haven't gotten to the second ordinance that grew out of the packard road deal the first ordinance is to amend the provisions that govern site plans right when they're required but we're losing a lot of trees across the city and wonderful big old trees whether native or not on single-family house expansion

128projects um ignorance among contractors who say oh god no we're not going to hurt that tree but of course then they drive all over the roots and the tree gets hurt there's a great deal of education so they're there are two parts of what we're trying to do to protect the bigger trees in the city the first part is site planning process and that's easier but we're trying to load the load the weapons uh in definitions and so on and and amending the what meaning our tree list that's that existed for 30 years um in order to get to the second step which is a separate ordinance for individuals on single-family lots that aren't going through the city permit process in any other way that they would be that's a second step and it takes

129one a lot of pre-preparation with contractors and excavators and three guys and to know they they have to be able to distinguish what a landmark charities and registry is and then they have to know they need to go get a permit when they enter somebody's property and i'd like to just say that for me it's sort of like triggering that culture of appreciation of trees that we'd like to see across all properties regardless so that's kind of the direction i'd like to go and i think that our first one can start the conversation um and i was talking with um councilwoman banister today about potentially even going in an educational route in the direction of of educating the community about the value of our our big trees and to do kind of like i like

130the way we've approached the the pesticides and the turf grass like let's let's learn about what the values are and let's let's start getting education now to turn the tide so that maybe we won't have to use some such a big stick or anything to get people to keep their trees it'll work i think more or less like retention requirements work and that permit works in terms of the individual the residential stormwater permit is that what you're referring to exactly and instead of trigger being triggered by a 200 square foot or larger condition to impervious surface it would be triggered by any vehicles or work being done that requires them going off impervious services in other words a grading a grading permit of that soil erosion control permit basically well it aims at preventing compaction

131of soils right but that gets triggered by the the control permit by any permit by any action that that causes is likely to cause compaction of soils then you have to bring a drawing you sketch in that says here are there trees on the property and here's where the drainage system is going to go and here's where we're going to dig trenches and here's where we're going to drive around behind a house and how we're going to do it and how we're going to protect trees all right so i'm curious to see i think it's i think you're going to experience pushback oh gosh we got it the last time we tried 30 years ago yeah i think that yeah we the whole game plan is to design the ordinance but then go out and

132work with the excavators and the tree guys and the landscape contractors and get them really on board about but i think that residents too would be you know if you're there's going to be i think there's going to be push back with this too well that is a permit no again i know i get it but if i have a big oak tree overhanging my house and i cut it down because it's over my roof and it's a 30 incher then i'm going to have to plant 20 trees on my property i don't know how the mitigation will work but you see what i'm saying though it's like that that's you you may i'm i'm predicting some serious pushback on this i guess is what i would say just somebody who's in the industry i

133think your prediction is correct but we'll see how the political tide pushes i think it would be great to have the conversation though you know and also to promote the culture of trees so and i think you have the background to help us support that as well yeah no i i get it it's i don't next year we'll get into this okay thanks for the update well yeah many times it usually requires a controversy to get a substantial public discussion about anything doesn't it so um okay did you wanna uh do you think that uh when do you think you might be ready to bring this to the commission for a vote maybe early next year or the amendments of the site plan portions of the udc for this purpose sometimes fall oh okay so

134uh what about october uh i don't know i'll say maybe on that one that's my my guess that would be the first yeah so we're talking about december 3rd i think it was probably yeah instead of thanksgiving okay well maybe a draft by then maybe maybe uh you know i think it's worth sending it up to the whole commission and let comments happen before we say okay we're we're ready to send this on to planning commission yeah okay so let's put it on the december 3rd agenda all right okay let's see any other discussion about the natural features tree ordinance i don't see anything so bear in mind as i've always said to people to say yes we have a natural features ordinance no we have a whole set of amendments to the various development

135ordinances and all all of which now are packed into what's called the universal development order so we're amending pages in this 240 page thing which is an ongoing process that shannon knows very well about every single planning commission meeting there's another set of amendments okay nothing stands alone anymore right so um so we'll move on to the reports from the committees other commissions council and chair um versus administrator and council um the administrator is not here about council commissioner banister yes um councilmember kathy griswold was gonna join us and i um but i will paraphrase what she was gonna say um she is working on amending the udc chapter 40 about height of vegetation uh and obstructing the sight distance for pedestrians and bicyclists and cars and so that it has been sent back to

136the transportation commission for more review um but we she and i wanted to check with some of you all to see if anyone has a special interest or expertise in helping us set the optimal height level for vegetation in the right of way at the side of the road um because for the optimal level for sustainability so like right now it's 12 inches and it's the resolution on the table is going to 18 inches for grasses and so far the the chapter 40 udc is mainly on grasses so we would like to expand it to other vegetation at the side of the road and so we're looking for input on what the other vegetation would be and we're looking for input on what the optimal optimal height level like maybe 36 inches is fine as

137long as it's away from the sight distance of drivers so i'm paraphrasing this is really count kathy griswald's main area but we were hoping um that maybe uh chris graham or others of you that know about uh the height of vegetation blocking visibility you know we're trying to set the optimal level levels for both sustainability sustainability and visibility for public safety i understand mike uh yeah i'd say that there wouldn't necessarily need to be a limit unless it were causing a visual obstruction and uh that's always been i think a common sense approach that's never been codified in terms of law and it would be nice to have that actually written down there are plenty of places where there might be a hill on the shoulder uh where for cars that were that are parked

138where the uh the vegetation is already or the sight lines are already blocked regardless of what vegetation is is on the curb so i'd say that anything that looks at short limits uh opens up the potential for uh you click fix battles between neighbors that may or may not appreciate somebody else's choice of landscaping so anything that can be done that can open up uh height limits or reduce height limits uh and take a more common sense approach where uh you know visual sight lines are actually the problem as opposed to a measure of of height of vegetation off the ground i would i would strongly recommend just because when these little uh battles start between neighbors about vegetation that's a lot of city staff time that ends up getting involved in potential for enforcement

139about tit for tat type things so uh yeah uh if if a if a height limit can be reduced altogether then i would i would recommend that i think i have a question for mike and maybe shannon and that is should this be directed um the changes propose changes at the udc or should it be directed at the orange book which governs the public right away the udc is basically private property which is already set back from the road or crossings or whatever the case may be and it's really obstructions that are in the public of right-of-way that are probably of the greatest concern i mean both might be but it seems that there needs to be at least um a an equal focus on the orange the so-called orange book as well as the

140udc um and since the udc covers private property that's set farther back maybe any restrictions there would be less restrictive along the ones lines that mike talked about than ones that are in the public right away could either of you comment on that shannon so it all comes down to sight distance from cars pulling out of driveways and there's calculations out there but very few people are ever going to do that all based on the speed of the road and the distance from you know the the back of the curb line and i would just say that um it it is a concern um i've you know i this this spring we went out and did some measurements for a project that we were doing along carpenter road a bunch of bioswales in the right-of-way

141and um we followed the the you know the guidelines but it's like wow when we went out and measured exactly and and really looked at it we were blocking views and this is on carpenter road in front of home depot i mean it's like you don't want to mess around with blocking people's you know safety that that's a big deal and so we ended up lowering things um and so um i think there are very few places in ann arbor it's like there's so many driveways that are really close together that like safe distance is just always an issue and again it's it's this whole formula and this big triangulation thing and i doubt that anyone's going to do that and so mike i kind of respectfully disagree i think it'd be a lot easier

142to just say it's a height and then it's just way more clear for people because different cars have different heights and it all has to do with like where you are in your seat how tall you are and looking out of the car and it's just you know that's that's pretty difficult to determine and i i get it that it's like it really should be around that i just think it's really difficult to be able to um to govern with that as something that feels pretty relative based on individual cases we've always used 18 inches you know maybe two feet you could get away with um as kind of general guidelines when people are putting like rain gardens in the right of way or things like that but it needs to be measured from the

143top of curb up so sometimes with rain gardens they're lower and so people can get away with you know that but i think being clear about where the measuring point starts is really important and that there should be some sort of overall statement about what mike is getting at that like i would advocate for a certain height but that but that any sort of obstruction in terms of safety is really you know that that's a that's an issue so um it it is i think it does belong in the in the orange book though um you know the orange book is a little weird because not every citizen has the orange book yet we many of us mow in that area and and manage that area as if it's our own yards and so it's

144a gray area i think in terms of that so i think it does belong in there but it probably belongs in some other much more easily findable um you know place for people to be able to refer to different codes um and i i do i get where mike is coming from because people have used this kind of thing to be able to say i basically don't want native plants in my neighbor's yard and and i don't agree with that i think i mean we do those designs a lot and um but we do need to be super careful about safety as it gets close and so i think like what john was saying you know back behind the sidewalk there's a lot more freedom that you can have um but that once you're reaching

145that sidewalk point and you're in you're in the right of way that there probably should be some you know very clear safety regulations around that you could probably get a go up to i think 18 inches is sort of a broad thing out there but i think it'd be worth sort of measuring frankly to see if you could get away with 24 because maybe you could you know or maybe you can get away with 30 you know so but part of it depends on is the road going up or down and you know things like that too so you want to stay pretty safe because if you're on a hill and something's going up and you know that could affect things as well um so i guess that that that's my that's my take on

146it personally and uh the only other thing i'd add here is that uh it was probably in 2004 or 5 that the city changed some ordinance to be able to allow tall vegetation in the right of way in the first place and that's going back and i have no idea whether that was based on the udc code or whether that was based on the orange book code but i do remember that it was back uh when gene kurlberg was still on city council because she participated in the committee that was doing it and they decided on a height that was appropriate for right-of-way vegetation and i think it was 30 inches or 32 inches and it also had some sort of strange uh wording in it like 32 inches over the course of the year

147or something like that which gave some people some flexibility for being able to cut things down seasonally which was also nice if you have a grass landscape that sometimes gets a little taller than that okay um chris uh difficult this is really difficult um i've had multiple clients get in trouble with their neighbors about wildflowers and not three feet tall they just don't like them and they use any pretense they can to try to get it mowed and it's not very cool result well i mean in my neighborhood the main the main thing is that uh you know the city's planted large trees heritage trees and landmark trees are going to go right away so there's probably a minimum branch height somewhere in the code as well yeah yeah but it's a tree trunk that

148really blocks your your view coming into an intersection so how does the city handle that they they don't but it doesn't take up the entire thing and so if you think about a car you know behind something like that it had to be a pretty skinny car to be able to block the whole thing a row of dense trees all the way along that's different than one trunk i think is the way that it is seen and then the code says that for a tree in the right of way you need branching above eight feet that's the way okay so in other words you could have like a tall pompa you could have a patch of pompous grass that's like 10 feet tall as long as it's not more than like three feet wide well

149no i think that's what is you know um council member bannister it's getting at and in fact i can think of a spot in water hill where somebody does have that and is actually kind of unsafe um so it's it it's at the right point in a curve and it's like you can't see who's coming around it you know so i think eight foot tall things that are really wide do get in the way you know so okay great thank you very much and i'm this will be recorded so i'm sure kathy and i will review it again tomorrow so thank you so much well thanks sam um it looks like uh chip isn't with us anymore so what about um the staff it's time for the staff report yes okay um hang on one

150second let's say this okay on this tuesday we hosted our first uh you know i want to get the right verbiage we hosted our first uh virtual neighborhood associations and community leaders uh sustainability meeting we had about 16 folks in attendance it was a good uh meeting we uh covered um h20 we cover um solarize uh also we talked about grants you know uh for neighborhood associations and also uh the ev bulk buy so um ev bike bought by so um that was a pretty good meeting and hopefully we can do it quarterly okay and that's it that's it okay thanks thanks galen uh so the next item is representatives of other commissions park advisory mike let's see and parks news uh the cascades are being closed to tubing starting tomorrow uh to increase social

151distancing and keep people from spending a lot of time close together down there uh in other parks news uh the stream rehabilitation project in huron hills is going to get started this fall so what was once a ditch that ran through both sections of the huron hills golf course will be turned into a meandering stream with wetlands a lot of habitat improvement uh improvement and flood control improvement um and that's that's the good and exciting news um we've had a lot of challenges with uh with covid and pools and things like that but uh hasn't everybody where's the stream in here in hills uh it's on both sides it's on the uh the hilly eight and it's on the flat ten as well and then it also runs through the uh the uh the neighborhood

152to the to the east side of huron parkway as well just a little clarification on that one uh that's um because that's a project that we're working on in our office and there's base flow at on the side that is flowing between um here and uh here on parkway or is it no here in river drive and the river but there is not base flow between neighborhood and the hilly section up above um it's basically you know when it rains um and so uh that will be more a series of kind of wetland rain gardens in that section that will be more actively flowing when it's taking storm water from the neighborhood so there won't be it won't be constantly flowing all the time all the way through just at that bottom flatter section and

153then it will be flowing um in the hillier part um during storm events basically okay are there's greens that are charging the upper part as from over ridge and correct yep so we'll be taking the the storm drains that are coming through there um and then it also was a natural valley that probably had sort of um intermittent streams my guess are you know i mean during you know back when it was all intact um i don't know that we know that for sure um but it's not it's it's much more constant flow coming in the lower part than it is in it'll dry out in the upper part lower parts groundwater yes and and wetlands from across the road and that little neighborhood over there okay um energy energy commission um so a couple

154of updates um first of all we welcomed um our two new youth commissioners and we also have a new normal commissioner so we have three new commissioners on on the energy commission secondly both the lighting ordinance and the ev charging ordinance that uh the energy commission and its working groups have been working on both received unanimous votes of support from the planning commission and are now moving on to city council thank you for all the work the planning commission did on that i mean they they were really really thorough in their questioning and review um and i think hopefully they have a good chance of passing city council our last meeting was a working session and as i mentioned we have six working groups um but to be frank not all of them have been

155all that active recently um we want to start those back up and also recruit members of the local community to serve on those as both of those other two working groups that worked on lighting ordinance and the charging both had substantial residential support and what we're doing right now with the working session is um we've had an action item tracker and we've expanded that action item tracker and aligned it with the a20 plan so now we have all different kinds of light items of potential projects what element of the 820 plan they correspond to i should say strategy and actions and then we're asking commissioners to indicate whether or not they're interested in serving on those project teams whether they're willing to lead the project team and to suggest people in the community that can

156serve on them um we also have uh from the 820 prioritization matrix an indication of what priority level those projects are in terms of aligning with the a20 priorities and we're going to be reviewing all of that in our next meeting and deciding which of those then we really focus on there's a lot more possibilities than what we want to take on um and to pace depending on interests and the number of people willing to work on those we'll boil those down to i don't know maybe five or ten ten projects or something like that and then the last thing i was elected chair in the last meeting so i'm now chair of the energy commission and but will continue to serve as liaison to the environmental commission that's it hey thanks john uh planning

157commission yeah um so uh thanks for mentioning john the lighting um and the eb ordinance and i would just like to give a shout out to sally owen for first coming before the environmental commission probably over two years ago and this is a citizen that just had a bonnet about this and really cared about it and just poured tons of hours into it and i really admire what she did and i just would also like to encourage anybody who's watching in our vast television audience right now that you too if you care about something and you know it's it's going i mean i'm i'm i'm hopeful that it'll get through city council and i just um i think it's amazing that she did that and um that you know one person has the power to

158change uh something in a really powerful way like that so i just would like to acknowledge her um the next piece is that we passed the viridian project which is over on platte road uh next to county farm park which is uh very environmentally i shouldn't say the planning commission passed it i had to recuse myself um because i've been working on the project so the planning commission passed it um and it's a it's a highly sustainable project that is all net zero all electric buildings many many innovations in really interesting challenging ways i think they've challenged a lot of city codes too which has been i think a healthy process to go through you know for the city as well um and uh and it's going to be exciting to see it um it

159kind of moves through the system and and see how how things um how things end up with city council so it's encouraging to see developers uh wanting to be able to take on these kinds of challenges and um and be able to muscle through the system out that way so um we'll see where that goes but it was exciting to be able to see that move through the next step okay yeah thanks um thanks sharon so the working groups um let's say the solar waste working group didn't meet last week um we will meet uh next week and i'll send out some emails before then um see the uh natural features working group we've already heard from them we've been working on the ordinance um is there anything else chris uh no steve it's those

160two things are um taking up our time okay i'm sure yeah and you've um and we've integrated the uh pollinators working group with the natural features working group while we're starting uh and water committee also maybe all right the first discussion happened about integration and we'll see how that all works okay and um and uh water bob yeah i mean we we did as chris says start the integration discussions um don't really have a membership of the water working group now so it's a good time to integrate from that perspective i mean we do have uh things happening uh for our next agenda which is coming right up here um on the agenda anyway so but um next next uh next environmental commission meeting we will hear from jerry hancock about the floodplain overlay district

161ordinance as well as from the huron river watershed council um updating their watershed management plan okay all right thanks so um the next scheduled meeting is september 24th and we reach our second public commentary so let's see public comment this is an opportunity a second opportunity for persons to speak for up to three minutes please call 1-888-788-0099 and enter meeting id number 924 this information is also displayed on the meeting agenda and video feed city staff will select callers that have raised their hand one by one using the last three digits of your phone number in order to electronically raise your hand to indicate your desire to speak please press star 9 on your phone you will hear an automated announcement that the host is allowing you to speak when speaking please move to a

162quiet 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 be patient there is a delay of up to 30 seconds before connection is established there's no one for public commentary okay so um the last item on the agenda is items for the next agenda i think bob has already mentioned um two of them um are there any other suggestions for agenda items um and lannister yes um i am hoping it sounds a little unrealistic but i am hoping to bring a tree ordinance in in anticipation of the tree ordinance and um so it would just be something along the lines of of kind of like rita mentioned with the integrated press management where it's trying to tell

163people education and outreach and the culture of appreciation of the trees and the compaction of the soils around town and um and trying to bring it not that it's a bunch of tree huggers but from the 20th century but bring it into the 21st century that these trees are multitaskers in our um in our sustainability and there was also uh you know the new york times article last weekend about how redlined neighborhoods um have less trees and a lot bigger heat islands and a lot more unpleasant summers and so it's a as we know it's an equity issue and all that stuff so i was just i'm pulling together all my loose ends and one of my loose ends is um a resolution for council in advance of our finishing our work on the uh

164natural features working group so pencil me in for september 24 on that and uh i'll see what i can do okay how much time would you like for that well i don't know yet is the natural features group meeting tomorrow at noon yeah i'm working yes so at this point it could be from three minutes to 20 minutes okay great okay julie noted um any other suggestions all right well um i declare this meeting adjourned thanks everybody thanks for your time good job steve thanks everybody see you on september 24th bye bye