Environmental Commission 4-25-19

001the environmental Commission meeting of Thursday April 25th to order will you call room yeah of course Commissioner Graham Commissioner Hutton Commissioner Skinner here chair needham councilmember Smith Commissioner Slavik yeah commissioner Appel commissioner gibbeh Randall here councilmember Bannister here commissioner kala Ward here Commissioner Brown here and then Commissioner mirskiy we have core all right any changes to the agenda we have in front of us for tonight additions [Music] next we have the approval of the minutes from our March meeting that I believe were sent via email oh wait no no I had a comment just a possible correction in the minutes it just talks about DTS contributions but I wanted to just insert before contributions this is the Energy Commission report just say political or campaign contributions you know to distinguish it from charitable contributions or

002others just to make it clear given the little context that's there all in favor opposed all right last meeting I approved do we have anyone here tonight for a public commentary no one all right there will be another opportunity at the end of the meeting if you would wish to stay is there any unfinished business new business all right we'll get right in it then first up we have a funding presentation from city administrator Lazarus good evening thank you for the opportunity to talk about the FY 2008 and also thank you for your continued service to our community there is an accompanying resolution to this asking for you to provide a recommendation to the City Council as they take on the very serious business of approving next year's budget a couple of disclaimers as I

003was saying for the meeting the slides did initially translate stylistically from a PowerPoint to a PDF so I blame Josh entirely for that I take no ownership and like unlike many presentations that are triumphs of style over substance this is a triumph of substance over style I'm also a little bit nervous because my mentor and coach during my community engagement training is sitting right behind me and I will probably violate every rule that he taught me so tonight what I'd like to do is talk give you an overview of the budget starting with the numbers and some things didn't translate well here but essentially total expenditures for next year are four hundred and thirty million dollars it's somewhere around an 8% increase over over the previous year and 111 point 3 million of that goes

004to the general fund and you can see the other distribution at the end of the two year financial plan our balances remain at the midpoint of the city's policy goals that about seventeen and a half percent city policies are 15 to 20 percent the general obligation bond rating is double a-plus some people would ask why don't you have a triple-a bond rating and the answer really is the requirements you need to achieve a triple-a bond rating aren't really worth the reservation of funds and the interest rates we get are as competitive as triple-a ratings so that's why it's doubling plus the impacts to the residential taxpayer which we're always mindful of and sensitive to are about eleven dollars a month between property taxes and the increases in utility costs when we look at the funding

005by priority and these are in thousands of dollars we tried to show on this slide the increase from the current FY 19 to FY 20 the increases by dollar amount and percentage for areas of both council and community and Commission interest starting with climate action and sustainability and you can see there's a million dollar increase or so 358 percent in our climate action and sustainability funding also of interest is the large amount percentage increase dedicated to community mental health as well as affordable housing those are areas that are of great interest to council reflective or our community values and those went up percentage-wise in dollar-wise more than any other one some of you may say why did the road funding essentially stay kind of flat and the answer that is most of the increase is

006in active transportation pet and bicycle which also addresses carbon reduction the actual road construction was just a little bit of an increase most of the increase in our transportation budget is for alternative means of transportation when you look at new funding in the budget we're talking about almost four point three million dollars in new funds the numbers there are additional funding beyond what's already in the budget and they reflect a couple of council priorities one is to be reflective of the community surveys that we've done the other is to remain true to the allocation of County military bait funds so you can see that of the new funding 2.2 million comes from the county millage rebate about a million nine comes from other general fund sources including additional income due to development projects there's a

007rebate in there from the city's risk fund because of the efforts we've taken through our wellness program and our safety program our risk fund was over funded four million dollars was sent back to the contributing funds half of which is the general fund about two million dollars it's a little and some of the things that happened we haven't had a increase in medical care for a while to the employee and a lot of that has to do to reduce exposures reduced long-term illnesses partially due to our wellness program we also over the last couple years have had a 50% reduction in accidents in our public works area due to our safety program so those are all I think very good news stories what you see in there safe drinking water water and wastewater most of

008that goes to funding upcoming requirements to the bharden and superior dams that are required under FERC and in fact somewhere between 35 and 40 percent of that new funding actually goes into dedicated reserve accounts so we're really not spending it we're building up monies for future obligations for the Barton and superior dams we know we have about a 2.2 million dollar general fund obligation starting in FY 22 so we want to put the money aside now commune you mental health the three hundred forty nine eight hundred three hundred thousand of that goes to the Housing Commission to provide supportive services fifty half of the remainder goes to the police department for social services and for items that were brought up during the police task force that deal with interactions and community outreach the other half

009goes to a employment jobs program that we have a with it we were proposing with the neutral zone to engage youth in jobs I was watching one of the presidential candidates who mentioned that when young people get employment but the ages of 17 and 19 their chances for long-term success are much greater so we're gonna work with the neutral zone on that going down the list you can see the application to affordable housing 220,000 of that goes towards supportive services to complement the 300,000 and mental health the rest goes into the affordable housing trust fund police funding among other things includes two Police Cadets there's two main purpose in creating police cadet positions one is to provide the opportunity to put police cadets in administrative jobs there by letting warranted uniformed police officers to be

010out on the streets so it's the cheapest way to add police but the main reason in the cadet program both police and fire is to find a way to expand our recruiting efforts to reach out to young men young women who might not consider public safety careers but for this exposure and it gives us a meaningful way to expand the diversity of our recruiting efforts as well I will talk about climate action in a little bit more detail the pedestrian safety projects include one hundred and forty thousand dollars from the street millage specifically for the fuller Road crosswalk over by your own high school so that's kind of a little bit of detail of where the 4.3 million goes there's been a lot of talk about performance measures and while the budget has budget book

011has had performance measures for many years they've changed over the last three years to be more quantitative and we focus on where does the data come from what's the math because those performance measures should be both reliable and reproducible you know we are going to start posting those on the city's website starting with the fourth quarter FY 19 end of year and they will be updated every quarter to provide greater insight into the internal measures we use to measure how well we're doing we're also developing a set of key performance measures should be KPI key performance indicators that'll be presented in a storyboard format the police and fire are already on our website as are the community we're working on the community services the financial are posted the last that you'll see roll out are

012the the public services they're updated as the data comes in kind of Auto magically just like to say and they'll be grouped together so that the public can answer the question how do we know you're doing a good job and they'll be presented in a way that they're current and they're easy to understand and the representative example you see that the right is the police department so we're excited about being able to share the story and be much more responsive to the people who pay the bills the next series of slides breaks every rule that Charlie told me about slides but I'm gonna do it anyway and it kind of provides a path of where the new funding goes and what we're using it for on the drinking water and sewer instruction infrastructure we combine

013those two that were in the citizen survey the total is about five hundred seventy four thousand dollars and that's the money we're putting aside for outstanding obligations we know we have on the Barton and superior dams the reason that's a general fund obligation is several years ago in 2008-2009 the responsibility for the hydro plants along with the reserve accounts went from the water utility to the general fund and some of that money was used for other purposes so the general fund now has the obligation but no funding so we need to build a funding backup and that really does address the hydropower portion of the dams each one of those flowcharts also comes with a background and this breaks every rule for power point that they're waiting way too many words but it's provided really

014for your reference instead of really for discussion what I will focus on as we go through these really are what are the outcomes we hope to achieve and I mentioned before these are required to me water supply hydropower and FERC requirements the next one our climate action and at mr. Murphy's suggestion we added the green boxes to these because many of these funds while they are put in the office of sustainability and innovation so we can track them and provide transparency they do go to support work from other agencies and you can see how they're split there among the different agencies and I'll touch on each one of those lightly as I go through the next set of slides so the Net Zero affordable housing we are going to put $200,000 aside to help fund

015Net Zero affordable housing council this past year approved the similar allocation for the Broadway apartments that the Housing Commission has and the goal is to bring down not only reduce our carbon emissions but bring down the monthly cost of living for the residents in our affordable housing units the outcomes you can see are at all affordable housing complex and units will be energy positive or neutral by 2035 next one is the sustaining and Arbor together community micro grant program the requirement for a micro grant program is very deep within the pages of the Climate Action Program the goal here is also multi fold one is to do things in and around the community to promote awareness but it's also really about building relationships and the neighborhood network so that people working together on a project

016get to know each other and it builds strength in our neighborhoods this past year we awarded our first first projects one was a project in the 5th Ward to promote compost collection there was an award to the Northside steam school for their solar energy program miss Bannister was there for the award of that she was also there for the award about two weeks ago for a sustainability themed playground up at the Leslie Science Center that one of the goals also is to leverage other money partners from Toyota were there and they're also contributing a significant amount of money to that project a couple things in the pipeline are another sustainability theme playground at burns Park and there's also another solar curriculum ad burns middle school elementary middle elementary and then there's some others that are

017coming so we're excited about about all of those and the program these program is my experience with these neighborhood parking programs is that they do take a while to take but once they become wildly popular the neighborhoods get engaged and council generally supports them because it does build that trust between citizens and their government 100% clean renewable energy for municipal operations our goal for the councils approved policy is to be totally on clean and renewable by 2035 and the goals for the coming year are to complete energy audits for our 10 largest facilities now the wheeler Center the water treatment plant wastewater and then an FY 21 to install energy improvements at five of them and then the conversion again is to go to convert our energy use to renewable sources and we will track

018that annually the revolving energy fund the purpose is an internal account to pay for the upfront cost of energy efficiency and renewable energy improvements and then he gets paid back through energy savings so it's a way to overcome the fact that different city agencies don't always have funding in their budget to get over the hump this is sort of the catalyst that helps us all get to a renewable source of energy so again the goal is by to have a minimum of 15 percent by 2025 I have reason to suspect that dr. installs and her crew of outlaws will get us to 100% renewable much faster than the city's goal so and Josh will be put on the spot to make some other programs you can see there are there are a host of them

019it's green housing rental resiliency hubs time of marketing green buildings Aging in place I'll go through each one of those briefly as well green rental housing our goal is to have a rental efficiency standard established by the end of next year the ordinance in place by the end of FY 22 and then get to the point where there's no net increase in rents as the rental units become energy efficient resiliency hubs or resilience hubs is something that dr. salts is a champion for the goal is to have the first hub designed in the coming year and then start the implementation in the second year of the finding I'll plant so there's also an a goal to have residents have emergency preparedness kits by the end of FY 21 time of marketing addresses the fact that

020when you sell your home or you buy a home you should disclose the home energy score when the home is up for sale so you'll know what the financial costs are for living in a given home and therefore buyers can make more informed decisions about whether or not a home is a good fit for them the creation the goals are to create that time of marketing awareness ordinance in the coming year and then implemented in 2021 and beyond green business challenge I think revives a program that used to exist in town the idea is to encourage and recognize business for engaging and more sustainable behaviors and we hope by the end of FY 21 that the program has been designed in partnership with our business community and that we get 50 businesses to participate by

0212025 Aging in Place efficiently when you look at the demographics of our city we have a lot of young people we have a lot of people who are a little bit older our goal is to be able to help senior stay in their homes part of that is a reduction in their energy cost so the program has a goal of 15 percent reduction in energy usage in 21 low-income senior homes by 2021 weatherization expansion we want to expand the initiative for Ann Arbor residents and have 12 homes weatherized through this expansion by the end of 2020 efficiency and solar in the community we could spend a lot of time talking about this again dr. Stoltz Josh Emily are working on some initiatives that I think dr. Stoltz a lay out next month once he has

022the work session with council and presents our work plan so I don't want to steal any of the thunder but there are some very very aggressive elements of that program to move our whole community to energy efficiency within the near-term so I will just whet your appetites on that and have you tuned in on May 13th some other items of interest before I close I know you can talk about solid waste this evening we are near completion of the solid waste resource management plan we are finalizing the Job Description for the resource recovery manager and we'll go out to recruit that that position was fully funded in the FY 2008 and one thing that ad councils asked us to kind of look at after the resource management plan done is our participation in a regional

023solid white waste management authority which is being formed now so it's something that we'll look at really towards the end of the first quarter of the fiscal year after everyone in the community has had a chance to digest the resource management plan some water quality issues find Stieglitz has done an exceptional job in dealing with PFS and in 1 4 dioxane we are publishing our results now 4p fast bimonthly and we're doing it on our website we've launched a new community information program so that people feel comfortable you know everything in Michigan now as it relates to water quality's viewed through the lens of what happened in Flint we want to make sure that customer and consumer confidence and our safe and clean and reliable source of drinking water remains high Council will continue to

024discuss water rates they'll have a discussion next week as part of the budget adoption we'll probably continue to look at the structure of the rates into next year what and copper rule impacts require us to do an inventory of all the galvanized fittings in the city and we'll do that although we're not required to make changes and there are still some legal challenges to the lead and copper rule as we go and do our street improvement programs if we know there's a galvanized connection we'll replace it and the next year's budget there's also the completion of the sanitary sewer evaluation and putting in periodic cleaning as a result of that so the occasional sewage spills that you hear about should kinda thing of the past on the transportation side DDA and partnership with the city

025we'll put in the city and I hear the state's first two-way cycle track on a two-lane roadway this summer going from Ashley along William up to the diag and it'll be a protected and buffered lane so we're excited about that there's some discussion about lane reductions you know they're they're very much context sensitive and they require a tremendous amount of outreach and good discussions with council so that they are comfortable with the balance between reducing lanes widths and not lane widths but number of lanes to make the crossing distance shorter but also making sure that we don't introduce additional idling time by increasing congestion so that continues to go on we have all the easements we need for the Allen Creek berm opening project we have the contracts in place construction should start midsummer so

026hopefully we'll get our council members out there with the gold shovels and have the groundbreaking on a much awaited project it will provide a safe way to get underneath the railroad tracks and will be part of the treeline trail which is the last item where we are very close to having the easements the right-of-way and the things we need to lead from the border-to-border trail to your on River all the way up to actually all the way through the on-road segments that lead us down to state and Stimson so the commitment that staff made was that the tree line trail master plan was not going to be a document that sat on the bookshelf and gathered dust we're actually going to do it and you'll see the first part of it this summer when we

027started opening up pedestrian access bike access through Allen Creek the on Creek mark so there's a lot of exciting stuff in case you can tell this is an engineer being excited and with that I hope that you'll you know offer your support to the budget and I'm here to answer any questions you may have yes I'm curious about the dams being on Planning Commission we just heard about the whole DEQ site not DEQ sorry dte site on Broadway sure and obviously that is contingent upon our go remaining extremely stable otherwise it's all underwater and so I'm just wondering has our globe and recently redone enough that it's not in your immediate plans or the question came up in terms of the the I don't think anyone is saying oh my god we can't do this

028because because the dam but it came up as an issue so I'm just curious in the scheme of things where Argo rates compared to the other dams in terms of maintenance the financing of the that site development is complicated and involves a lot of give-and-take part of the community benefit that is in place for the Planned Unit development that PUD application includes repair and renovation of the REO down okay including actually another crossing across the river there one of the goals of that is to provide a way to get across so that we can provide parking on the Mishkan old Myshkin site and I'm sure miss Bannister would glad to know that well my intent will relieve some of the parking concerns in the Argo neighborhood so it's on their dime in other words it's

029part of the agreement that we have with the whole the brownfield - and the PUD but it's it is their contribution in the short term Thanks thank you for the detailed information that you provided I'm wondering if you could help me understand the difference in the total budget expenditures on page 2 which you've expressed as 430 million and the total funding by priority which is slightly less than 200 million on slide 3 the this what's on slide 3 is not all-inclusive this is a snapshot of those prior it doesn't address ongoing operations and means it doesn't cost all of our pension costs it doesn't include some of the personnel cost it doesn't include all the ongoing public safety issues what I have done there is selectively pulled out things that I thought would be of

030interest well thank you all again for your forgive me the opportunity to come speak to you and I hope you view this favorably so thank you we have a resolution to support the proposed fiscal year 2020 city of Ann Arbor municipal budget process audience that doesn't have a copy in front of them it's attached in legend a-- it's a resolution to support the proposed fiscal year 2020 city of Ann Arbor municipal budget process whereas the environmental Commission received a presentation about climate and sustainability related elements of the proposed fiscal year 2020 budget on April 25th 2019 whereas the budget includes funding to support projects and programs that will benefit city and community facing climate and sustainability programs throughout the city and whereas city of Ann Arbor has established a goal of reducing community-wide greenhouse gas

031emissions by 25% by 2025 and 90% by 2050 based on emissions baseline near 2000 and whereas the city of Ann Arbor has established a goal of powering municipal operations with 100% clean and renewable energy by 2035 again based on emissions of the year 2000 resolved the environmental commission endorses the climate and sustainability related elements the proposed fiscal year 2020 budget moving forward through the budget process somebody's got a second any discussion on the resolution that councilmember Smith has read okay Millan favor I opposed all right resolution is approved okay now the next item on the agenda is real as you were just excited I know I'm so excited I can't wait for this presentation the solid waste regional management plan update from mr. Slaton and we'll push the button Thank You environmental Commission and crescents

032Latin with the public services area one of my roles these days is the manager for our solid waste resources management plan and so here with other team members just a quick introduction Christina Siebert is our lead consultant project manager captain and Charlie fleadome who sort of heard about their key facilitator and Community Engagement sub consultant and also mildly ma TF ski last name and almost can spell it by memory is our Public Works manager and another key member of our team and so we're going to give an update and status and provide details on some of the key aspects of the project that have been completed or are underway and I'm gonna be turning over to Christina here shortly to go through most of those details and also be looking for some feedback from the

033Commission on actually a particular aspect of that which Christine is going to get the details but basically the initial options and things that we're looking at as part of the project to look at program enhancements or additions potentially so but before I even start on the presentation itself on the project I just wanted to pause because I had an email request from Commissioner mirskiy who couldn't be here tonight but wanted me to pass along an update or actually answer to a question that was asked Tuesday at our third Advisory Committee meeting which you'll hear a bit more about later but besides the additional agenda one of the committee members asked if a question could be answered about a heard about a proposal former cyclin Arbor related to our MuRF and so asked for an update

034or a response to that so I provided that at the meeting and Commissioner muskie just wanted me to pass that on to the Commission as well and so that update was that city has been approached by recycle Ann Arbor about the potential for they've turned it a mini MuRF you know with description narrative description of what that might be but doesn't have a full detail of a proposal so some key differences in terms of a discussion topic or a initiation but not a detailed proposal yet so we've provided feedback to recycling arborist one of the key pieces and the details that would be needed to really develop an actual proposal for the city to react to and so that's been provided to them and really is waiting to see when and if that comes back

035and so if that comes back then staff would review and evaluate that and react and respond to that question will be if that's something that we can move forward with based on them coming in to us or would that be something through our policies and procurement requirements really need to be through a broader request for a proposal so so you've been approached it's not complete and detailed yet but if that happens we'll see where the next step is and so that was provided to that to the Committee on Tuesday okay so with that I will begin just initially because I'm sorry I have a question about that my understanding is that this proposal which I've only heard rumors about needs some timely communication from the city staff so I'm hoping that I think many of

036us that are aware of this are hoping that the city staff can respond to the proposal quickly enough to get the benefits some of the benefits that are part of the package and it's my understanding that recycling over has just delivered the fourth revision of their proposal right before this meeting today I received an email from Brian about 5:19 this evening so haven't had a chance to open it yet to be really open and honest where we are as we're going from agreeing on good intentions to getting into the Nitty Gritty of what an agreement would look like we need to make sure that when we present something what that amounts to a an unsolicited sole source procurement to counsel that we're comfortable with the value that it provides and with the certainty and assurances

037that it provides and that includes you know the goodwill that recycle in Ann Arbor has as a valuable community member but ultimately councils gonna be looking at a pretty high dollar value contract that would could be awarded without competition and we need to be comfortable with it so that they can debate it earnestly on behalf of the public no of course we all appreciate that and we will we will move with with a new speed and to get it before council as we can I'm I'm aware of the sensitivities and the needs they have from a contracting standpoint so we'll look at it as quickly as we tell us and we can okay cuz I'm not just a final just a final comment that it has been in almost three years since the more closed

038yes and so I think we've all been hoping that the Morpher get restarted for you soon and I appreciate that and sensitive to it from a time perspective the very first thing I did when I started a city administrator even what the day I walked in almost was to take the difficult challenge of shutting down the MuRF and while the path has been a little bit rocky to get to where we are I'm hopeful that the proposal will set us in good stead for many many years to come recognizing the changes that have occurred in the recycling industry and you could share your pain thank you okay okay in terms of the solid waste resources management plan I actually bring brought back a infographic that shared with the Commission and and with various stakeholders to

039really show our process and been updated with the progress of what's been done and won't go to it necessarily step-by-step but some of the key items that have been accomplished and completed noted there on the slide as far as looking more detailed at our tonnage --is and in diversion quantities the recent past benchmarking with other communities Christine is definitely going to get into some information with the cost of service analysis which reminds me and I'm sure Christina mentioned - along with this PowerPoint a lot of other added items in the packet we're not going to pull them up and go through them but there are slides related to some of those things so that's a conclusion and after the the feedback discussion and the options if there's still time and the desire we can pull

040up some of those because we have those on the flash drive as well some of those supporting documents and a key part with any project in the city of a number but particularly this one Public Engagement I've mentioned we had an advisory committee meeting this past Tuesday that was the third meeting of that committee my small committee of 50 as I like to say and we have one more meeting here about it at the end as we talk about next steps and another key piece of the engagement - that has been completed and again you'll hear about in a little bit our resident survey which was a key task of the project and so with that I'm going to turn it over to Christina super to walk us through some of those key aspects of

041the project good evening everyone it's good to be back in front of you we've covered a lot of ground since we were here last for the visioning session work session that we had in August so tonight really we're gonna go over three of the big areas that we've either completed or have nearly completed the first being the preliminary options we want to start there because I think it'll help you to frame your thinking as we go through some of the other pieces though being the cost of service what do things cost now and where do the dollars reside and as the final piece being the residents survey and what we've heard from the residents as far as the interests they have and the satisfaction they have with current services as well so when I start

042with the preliminary options we have about fourteen options I think that we're going to talk through and so given the amount of options there are and the time that I want to allow for you to ask the questions that are important to you I'm not going to cover them all in detail but there is in your packet document that has one-page summaries of each of those different options I so encourage you to look at those and if you have questions or you have feedback on that after the meeting tonight even we're available to take written comment from you or written feedback so that we can be sure that that is taken into account as we start to formulate draft recommendations that the Advisory Committee will be commenting on and that will be asking for your

043support for as we draft that plan how we identified our options at this point we've taken the feedback from our stakeholder interviews which we did more than thirty of at the beginning of the process the downtown business focused group other discussions that we've had with city staff and other parties around the city and supplemented all of that with the best practices that we see implemented in other communities that are either achieving high diversion or are making strides towards a high diversion rate to see what those best in practice type options are we've grouped those options into three different areas we've got residentially focused options we have commercially focused options and then we have a set of options that are focused entirely on the downtown and alley service areas for improvements to that service and when

044we looked at each of these options we laid out what the current conditions in the potential future condition would be we identified the benefits and the objectives that would be achieved by implementing those options we have the diversion and cost impacts identified and when we talk about those cost impacts those are direct cost impacts to the city's solid waste fund so it's the staff and the equipment and operations related expense that would go along with that what we haven't included at this point for those cost impacts are indirect costs that are the administrative charges that come back from other city departments but that supports the work of the solid waste group as well as any financial adjustments that are applied against the fund annually for retirement benefits and Pensions things like that so those will

045all be coming as we start to get into fund projections for these different options but right now all the costs you see those are direct cost impacts we've also looked at the resource needs in order to identify those cost impacts so how many people would we need to be able to staff some of these options and what is the equipment that we would need or where we need to possibly be for carrying contracts for outside vendors to provide services and then for each of these we came up with a rating scale on different criteria that we thought would be important for being able to evaluate them against each other and those rating criteria we rated things on a low to high scale looking at the level of effort to implement the cost impact the alignment

046with the city zero waste vision the greenhouse gas reduction potential of the option and then the responsiveness to the input that we've heard from the public because in some cases they're not entirely responsive to what we've heard from the public but there's still best practice type options that we think would be of a benefit to the city what you're not going to see in the options is funding options or ways to pay for the program so we're talking about the options that we're looking at that's another next step to this process is to identify how we cover those costs if there isn't enough money through the existing funding mechanisms so do we need to look at adding a user fee is there any ability to increase the millage revenue that's coming in or to reallocate

047the millage revenue to be able to pay certain portions of the costs and then introduce a blended type of funding with some user fees for certain types of services all of that is still under evaluation and not something that we're ready to talk about at this point the other things you won't see in these options are the MuRF and for part of the reason that we just heard about from Preston and from Howard is we have been aware that there was an idea from our a a to do something to restart that facility we've been involved in looking at what has been proposed or has been discussed at this point so we've been waiting to have more information to flush that out and take that into consideration as part of this process so hopefully now

048that sounds like maybe there's more information available over the next couple weeks we may have something more to think about them yet the other thing we don't have in here is education and outreach on a broad scale so the the citywide type education and outreach that we would be recommending or suggesting could be implemented to provide more information to residents and more outreach to the residents and businesses to drive more of their diversion habits drive more of their attitudes and behaviors and how they select what they purchase whether they can be influenced to do more in terms of reduction and reuse all of those different types of efforts are something that we're going to be bringing back to you but taking into account what the options are for potential future implementation as well so that

049we can kind of build all of the needs together but within each of the different options that we have identified we have added in costs and staff effort for some outreach to support that in an implementation sense and focused particularly to those programs so it's somewhat there but we also learned visioning a larger outreach program as a recommendation ultimately in this plan so I'm just going to list through the different options in the residential sector and share with you what the feedback is that we heard from the Advisory Committee we'll do the same thing with the commercial and the downtown options without really going into much in the explanation of this so I apologize if I know that you haven't had the materials for very long if you haven't had a chance to read the

050detail on them I will be happy at the conclusion of the presentation to go back to any of them that you want to talk about but on the residential side we looked at right year-round residential compost collection and have two different costs in there one based on a bi-weekly collection and one based on a monthly collection that's an expansion on work that was done for the organics management plan a couple of years ago we have an option for curbside textile collection which is actually a virtually free program to the city it's a no-cost contract that we would be looking at and it has revenue generating potential as well for the textiles that would be collected we looked at a bulky waste collection option to provide collection of bulky items on a periodic basis through the

051city for the residential sector and then electronic waste and household hazardous waste collection also is an item that we looked at to supplement the existing drop-off options that are available for those materials so what did we hear from the Advisory Committee on these different items there was definitely strong support for the year-round residential compost collection really the only concern that we heard raised on that was the concern that material may freeze in the bottom of carts and be difficult to collect so there would be an outreach element that goes along with this and an education element to help residents understand how best to get around that challenge and knowing that that will perpetually be an issue regardless of how we would implement a year-round collection because of our winter climate here curbside textile collection had

052very broad support as well there were some questions from the committee about what the contractor does with the material that's collected how much of it gets reused how much of its recycled where is it going to the bulk e-waste collection had mixed support in fact there was probably the most concern on this type on this particular topic just from an ability to manage the residents and how they set material out what type of material set out how specific the program would have to be to make sure that there is an abuse of the service and therefore leading so a very high cost to the service that the city wouldn't have been prepared for also the observation that people have done a very good job of figuring out ways to get rid of their bulky items

053since the city discontinued its bulky item collection several years ago and then that was a conscious decision by the city to discontinue that at that point on the e-waste at hhw collection again there was mixed support some people felt that it wouldn't necessarily be needed because there are drop-off options you can go to the county's toxics facility you can take some materials to the drop-off station and that the survey that we did showed that residents actually are using those facilities for a lot of materials but there is still a portion of the population that won't use those or don't doesn't use those or may not have the access to get to the facilities or has a larger TV that doesn't fit in their vehicle there's a lot of different reasons that an at-home collection could

054make sense but again there were concerns and questions raised about the risks and the liability associated with that setting household taxes out in front of your house for pickup and leaving them until your pickup occurs that day of collection was viewed as a risk and then the cost associated with the quantity of material that may be collected was also a concern nasca question could you go back and explain the rating scale in terms of high medium low what that's actually yeah so so the high medium and low in some cases high is going to be favored favorable in some cases high will be not favorable so when you look at things like direct cost a high rating means a high cost if you're looking at greenhouse gas reduction the high rating means we're going to

055be achieving greater reduction of greenhouse gases for those options relative to some of the medium or low options so this was really we used it as a way of just providing across-the-board comparison of the different options I think ultimately we will look at doing something on it like a 1 2 3 scale or a favored 2 non favored scale but for simplicity at the time it was coming together we went with the high medium and low so especially when we start putting colors to it and looks leo that's got the stoplight reading actually means downward right right so their hands yeah you have to put a little more thought into that as you see them together that we're not necessarily looking for the option that has the highs all across the board or the lows

056all across the board Thanks so thank you yeah well it will be getting updated as we get it further into the the rating and the ranking type process okay I have one more question our textiles accepted at the drop-off station yes yes and they do take up their amount so and the textile program that we're looking at this company called simple recycling that operates in this market they also operate in ha leave I think there are around 300 communities nationwide but they have 26 communities in the Detroit Metro market including city of Celia and city of Ypsilanti here in Washtenaw County that they serve it's a no-cost program they provide bags that get the material gets picked up on your regular day of collection and they actually encourage people to still use donation outlets and

057other charitable organizations for material if that's how they've historically handled getting rid of that material they're trying to provide the service to that portion of the population that is looking for the easiest option to get rid of material something else that I personally like about it I don't donate items that are like ripped jeans or things clothing that's sustained that I believe is just going to be a waste for someone else to deal with they will actually take those materials because they have recycling options for those portions of the textiles without being a burden on the charitable organization or donation organization that you might otherwise send it to and they also are not a charity so you cannot do it as a tax deduction but their website has all kinds of great information about what

058they do with the material they collect how they encourage you to still use your other local outlets and one more time the name of the company is some simple recycling simple recycling thank you so we've got a graph here that just provides a comparison of costs so we have two different types of costs that we're showing the bars are showing the annual direct cost so we have a range of costs for many of these different options being a high and a low and then the green bars we use to show kind of a cost per ton on a low and a high basis you'll see with bulky waste that there isn't a range shown that's because the way that that calculation worked out it actually netted out to the same cost per ton even in

059a high and a low scenario because the costs double but the tonnage also doubled so it it just washed and it was well it's basically coincidental that those two cases things both were multipliers of each other so this is just a relative a of again relatively comparing those costs so the commercial side we had five different options one is for fats oils and grease management and this would be focused primarily to the yellow grease component of restaurant grease this is the grease that goes into the collection bins that are out in the alleys or behind restaurants a lot of times it comes out of the fryers it's not the brown grease that would come out of the grease trap that you also have to manage as a restaurant but the city doesn't have a lot

060of mechanisms to really track the behavior of restaurants around the grease now and it creates issues and especially in the alleys so we're looking at an ordinance option for that to improve those conditions commercial organics collection is something that we have visited before as part of the organics management plan so we've updated that option and there's a lot of interest in it particularly focused to the food generating businesses while there might be some non-food generators that would be interested the the impact is going to be greatest with the restaurants with the grocery stores student move-in and move-out collection as kind of an adjunct to a bulky item collection program would provide a higher level of service during that move and move out period on construction and demolition waste again it's a an ordinance and a

061permit type of a option looked at looking at how we can drive the diversion of building really they can start and demolition materials so not all of the CND stream a significant portion of the CND stream is from road construction projects we wouldn't be looking at touching that that material is almost universally recycled already never enters our usual handling system but the building related C and D is something that the city never has really interacted with it's not part of its commercial franchise so as a way of being able to drive diversion of that material which with the building and redevelopment happening in lots of parts of the city it's probably pretty sizeable we'd be looking at a permit requirement to develop a diversion plan and provide disposition information for those materials and phase it

062in over time in our last option there is the commercial services participation enforcement which is just really long way of saying making people follow the ordinance that exists now commercial businesses are required to have trash collection and subscribe to that service either through the city or through waste management than the franchisee and they are also required to recycle there the way those ordinances are structured and with the staffing that's available it hasn't been enforced very well or very much at all and there are 350 to 500 businesses that are known to be not complying with that ordinance so this effort would include a lot of face-to-face work with those businesses making sure that they're aware of the requirements and then also helping them to implement the programs on-site that would allow them to participate in

063the recycling program and actually divert material so the advisory committee liked the fats oils and grease option didn't really see too many concerns with it on the commercial organics collection also there was a strong support for that particularly focused towards those larger food oriented businesses provided that there was space for the containers and there was the right amount of Education that went along with setting those programs up the student move-in and move-out collection had limited support several of the members of the committee questioned whether it was even needed because of the current services that are provided through contract with recycling Arbor for the temporary drop-off location that's set up during the peak move-out period the city also provides apartments with the option to call in and schedule a free pickup and two of the busy

064Monday's following the the peak Bluebell period so there are options already in place that are being provided to the apartment owners and to those residents so there was concern about whether it was really something that needed to be done or not and then also through those avenues there's more potential that that material is getting diverted the concern would be that if it was kind of a full-time will pick up everything that's out there there's not a real incentive to the residents or to those property owners to try to divert any of the reusable items like the furniture or house where type items which is actually being collected through that temporary drop-off that's being done on C and D ways that again was generally supported definitely was viewed that there is a need for more data

065to be available which just isn't collected now before setting any kind of an expectation for a diversion target that would be reasonable or appropriate to put onto the contractors or the property owners that are doing that development but that we can start that through getting a permit requirement in there to actually collect the information start building a database of understanding of what's there and also starting to put the word out to the contractors or to the haulers that there's a need for some construction demolition recycling processing infrastructure in the market because there isn't a lot of that available right now so before we can go in and say we must divert 50% of this we really need the facilities that are available to process the material that we would be asking to to divert and

066having that policy of diverting coming and knowing that it's going to be coming will help to drive it infrastructure and then I'm the commercial services enforcement there was definitely strong support for that there was some several questions were raised about why the cost for that was was higher than maybe had been expected so if you look at the cost here you know of the options aside from the commercial organics collection where we would roll that out to all businesses the cost for that enforcement is fairly high at about a million one a million to a year part of that is that it's a very intensive effort to have to get in front of those businesses and work with them face-to-face hand-in-hand with repeated touches back to them to make sure that they're understanding the information

067that you're getting the right person that they're embracing the work and actually doing what they're supposed to the other portion of that is that we assumed that that would result in higher diversion and we'd be shifting tons that currently are collected as trash over to collection as recycling and when we get into the cost of service analysis you'll see this better but in broad terms the cost to process recyclables is about four times as high as the cost to landfill a ton of trash so moving that to a different bucket is just necessarily going to increase the cost for downtown and alley operations we looked at four different options or alternatives here all of these are designed to give a higher level of service to the downtown all of them are based on a seven-day

068collection operation which we've heard from many of the stakeholders is needed and what our research into what other communities do to serve their dense business districts is they all have seven-day collection or the very least maybe they don't have one day of collection during the week but they have Saturday and Sunday collection that's that peak period for a lot of your restaurants your bars your shops and we need to make sure we can serve that so the first option would be a seven-day collection with services basically as is right now the businesses would still be able to select their container size everybody would have their own individual containers but we would make it mandatory that restaurants and bars have Saturday and Sunday collection in the downtown would also have two additional days of collection so

069they would have afford a minimum collection with those two other days falling during the week and by putting them as a mandatory service we can shift work schedules with with the collection crews to not make that an overtime collection during the weekends and try to keep those costs under control the second option is to again do that seven-day collection but instead letting everyone pick their own container will do an inventory of the entire downtown what are the containers that are out there now where the collection frequencies so what is the minimum level of capacity that's needed knowing that we're going to be there every day picking it up and where can we consolidate and place larger dumpsters and assign businesses that your dumpster now is located in this location it will not be directly behind

070their business necessarily or right outside their door but it will be available to them and then the costs would be a portion through a special assessment similar to how costs are assigned through the biz for the Main Street is for the services that they provide in an effort to take away from the economic decision that businesses will make that they want to pay for the cheapest option available to them even if it's not the appropriate option for what they need and provide also the incentive to have fewer containers and provide them in areas that the city selects as being more effective for all of the different downtown operations alternatives C is that same type of option as B except that we would be installing underground refuse containers so there would be a receptacle located at

071the top of the ground surface that looks like the picture and the left of that box for alternatives C and it looks like a mailbox and then there's a vault that's below ground that collects that waste so we're providing the dumpster capacity without the same dumpster footprint or appearance that does require a special piece of collection equipment it's and it's it's own unique truck because it has a crane on it to lift it and drop into a top-loading truck so there is a significant capital cost associated with that the city of Kissimmee Florida is using these they have about 45 of them in place right now they started initially with 18 and they've gone and expanded it and there's several other communities in Florida they're looking to add to that so we know it works

072in a warm climate what we haven't tested is whether it works in a cold climate and what issues would we have during the winter are they going to get frozen into the ground well the material freeze in the container so this would definitely be something to pilot and possibly do you know in a couple of areas but it may not be a one-size-fits-all for the entire city for the entire downtown alternate D is a bag based collection program so businesses would be purchasing bags for their trash and bags for their recycling and they would set them out as they get filled and we can provide a twice daily pickup through the alleys to remove the bags that are there this is bottled off of program in the City of Seattle called the clear alleys program

073where they've implemented it in select areas and in those areas then they pull the trash and recycling containers out entirely everything's in the bags they do make exceptions to still allow carts for organics because they don't want to bag the organics for the mess for the potential for terror you know the bags things like that so this again just shows the comparison of those quick quick questions on that and back aside so in your comparison with Florida another thing to take into consideration is just how those different communities handle their utilities in terms of where they run them because you could have serious that could be just a game stopper right there in terms of how those things are handled so like in Detroit where we do a lot of work all these illa tees

074run to the alleyways would be a nightmare to put bolts in there and I'm you know I'm not quite sure how it all works in the downtown but that's just gonna be a massive there is a step we've built in in the cost estimating for this we've built in a cost for the engineering design for that and whether you can find suitable space and that you can confirm that utilities aren't present so that would limit potentially the areas that you could situate these they actually if you look at the way that this situated in the picture they're not even in an alley they're on a street side so it could actually be something that you could put on your right on your sidewalks it in certain areas and move it entirely out of the alleys

075obviously you're there's still plenty of considerations to have with any obstructions both below ground and above ground in that collection and in that service and then also making sure that everybody keeps things clean around the container you know lots of questions the answer there in looking at these four alley options the one thing that I don't see is a discussion of why don't we just punt this over to the biz to handle you know because I know that the three associations have all gotten together and said we want to tackle this and you know honestly council member Bannister and I get an awful lot of emails about the alleys and you know particularly as it heats up we'll get more and more about how neighbors aren't getting along and all that frankly this shouldn't be

076that and you and I have had this discussion shouldn't be that complicated and issue but we haven't been able to do anything about it let's hand this off to the people that are directly impacted it and let them manage it I mean this is a pass-through cost for us I would appreciate that consideration to the the proposal that is sitting out there from the three different associations and the DDA so on precedent I did have a conversation with Ed Schafer and where he laid some of those options out for us we intentionally did not go and call it something that we would dedicate to the biz at this point because one of the other elements of our scope for this plan is to look at service delivery so it does fit into that service delivery

077type of an option so there are a lot of considerations that go into that kind of biz scenario and legal considerations that we have to still work right through so we are doing that I mean I'd much be much more interested in pursuing something like that than thinking about putting vaulted dumpsters in our alleys that's it's not gonna solve our problem anytime soon and this is one of these things that I would like to be solved sooner rather than later I understood and our advisory committee agreed with you because they said alternate a and alternate B all day long and alternate C an alternate D no thank you so definitely an interest in getting that seven-day collection into the downtown higher level of service being required for certain types of business being you know the

078restaurants in particular because they are more likely to generate that material it needs to get picked up on the weekends and looking at that you know possibilities for the consolidated collection and how that might occur so guys are in alignment and just more on that I met with those guys too and the state suit area in the Main Street Association I think when we say handoff to them my understanding was that they wanted to pay extra they were willing to have an additional special assessment to get the seven-day pick up yeah yep and it's what we've heard too and that's where you know that question of how that special assessment gets applied and who's doing that application of that special assessment also bearing in mind any potential changes and who delivers services to be consistent

079with council resolution about current provision of city services with city staff so there are a lot of different moving pieces that you certainly you guys could speak to better than I can and how that is allowable or would be understood within the context of those parameters so you can't read this very well up on this screen but hopefully on a printed copy or if you look at it on your computer screen you might be able to see it better we did go through and do a preliminary run through the sustainability framework goals and how each of these options aligned with those goals just because of the fact that that's a guiding document that you use as you make your decisions moving forward so why don't you two have the chance to see where each of

080these options fit in those goals and which ones they achieve I did that was sort of one of my questions eventually would we get some net metrics on how much the impact of these were on the greenhouse gas emissions particularly like the organic and the commercial services participation enforcement yes yeah we will be able to get those numbers and we didn't it would be a little premature before we get the feedback on the different options and we've been just duplicating the work if we keep going back and you know there's change because of the feedback that we hear from the Advisory Committee and from you all here tonight yeah we didn't run those firm numbers but in relative sense we did look at it so yes your long answer to a short question all right

081so we're gonna shift gears and talk about our cost of service analysis and financial productions there's a copy of a cost of service technical memorandum that was provided as part of your packet for tonight I believe that you may have already had it as well because I think it was attached as a response to some questions that were answered by staff back and maybe January or February but you may not have looked at it at that point so I want to just give the quick findings from that analysis and then we're going to go into a couple of the items in more detail high-level residential services are about nine and a half million dollars per year commercial services cost city about six point three million dollars per year and then there's some other services like

082the costs associated with the city's former landfill that are a small you know less than half a million dollar cost per year in fiscal year eighteen overall residential services average about twenty nine dollars per household per month that's a standard metric that we use in the industry as we're comparing across different communities it's a lot of the way that a private hauler would look at pricing a community is how many homes am i driving past and what is my cost to serve each home and then that ties back to potential funding methods for collecting those feeds as how much is the household costing the system looking to the big picture of funding sustainability in fiscal year eighteen revenues and operations expenses generally balance there was actually a slight revenue surplus but there are annual equity

083adjustments that hit the cell-based fund for pensions and other employee costs that's resulted in actually in a fund balance decrease during fiscal year eighteen I mean it was based on one year and we know from looking at fiscal year 18 and changes that are happening this year the operations expenses side of the equation is going up that's in part due to the collections operations being more fully staff and in fact I think they're now currently fully staffed or will be with hiring maybe one more person to replace those temporary employees that had been holding the vacated positions so those costs for those employees are going to be higher for fiscal year 19 than they were in 18 the recycling markets continue to be depressed so revenue that had been offsetting portions of the recycling processing

084cost continue to be down as well so that means you know less revenue to offset the expense the expense ends up being higher so based on those insights and knowing that those costs are are still very dynamic and very fluctuating with recycling costs we don't expect the current revenues are going to be sufficient in the long term to sustain current services and if we were to add additional services to that each of these different options we're looking at our incremental cost adds not any kind of savings that we would get so in order to be able to sustain the current services and add new programs either some other expense needs to be decreased or revenue needs to be increased so recyclables to Ohio so if that problem is solved that will be a significant savings

085and that money can go toward expanding some of these programs it could and their work so that kind of goes right into our financial model so our the next piece that we are working on which will be coming at isn't here yet is a near-term projection of fund balances both under current conditions and then under different option scenarios and based on the timing of implementation of different options and being able to weigh the revenues the expenses the fund balance impacts of each of those engage that impact that the options would have on the long-term picture what that model won't be is a it won't be a simulation type model so it's not going to be a matter of got a dashboard and we can plug in a number here and a number here and it

086does its magic and it spits out a new fund balance at the back end there's a lot of analytical thought that eats to go into each of the different scenarios and how they roll through those different cost centers and what the fund balance impacts are so the tool that will have will be usable by staff to be able to do that as time passes and costs change and we see you know changes in staffing or implementation of new programs and we can engage what shift in the amount diverted would be we can gauge what the impact would be if we were to have a lower processing cost for recyclables versus current costs and whether it's enough of an impact to offset those differentials and return us back to a positive fund trend and I think

087Carson's going to talk briefly now about this one because this has already proven to be so available from my perspective from staffs perspective I in and Kristina touched on it already quickly with a dollar amount of that cost per household hour as I think you have learned along with me and staff our system is very complex and how all of our materials are managed and the different players and the different pieces and components and so on we now are able to and Kristina's going to walk you through here very shortly the output as to what are those true costs by stream what is it for our trash for our recycling for our compost at a residential unit level so that we can understand what are those differences and then again as we go forward using

088the model as it's developed both to generate the recommendations and to see what those impacts are but then also down toward the bottom here on this slide going forward this is again tool we're looking for that included in the contract that as we monitor and implement the programs then even look for further it's still going to be of that key tool used as Christina described for us to evaluate and understand as they get implemented and as our system changes as the diversion changes there's actual financial impacts of that and we'll be able to adjust and understand how to put that plug in and I'm gonna turn it right back to okay Christina I have a question about that because um I mean I remember a long time ago looking at the final estimates for the

089solid fund balance in the year the annual cost year-to-year there were significant multi-million hits to the budget every year so there were very wild fluctuations and they seemed to be coming from outside of any the standard normal operations so and they were hard to understand from the brief you know three four word description that were described to them so what's the assurance that in the future that there will these sort of hits will become more predictable and more manageable well they there's always the potential for the unknown hits the types of adjustments that Christina mentioned biggest one mentioned Gatsby or new accounting procedures that come out but some of those as we understand they get more consistent some of the other offsets that are in there our depreciation of our equipment that's back to an

090item with the MuRF that because we're the owner of the MuRF and that's our equipment we're actually still depreciating that equipment that building and those are hits to the fund those aren't operating expenses but those are the adjustments that are made outside and those are predicted and understood but that's some of these other things as accounting procedures and some of the financial adjustments we make our best estimates and so I can't guarantee that we're always going to have it absolutely predictable but we're going to better understand as we move forward where they are but also and as you'll see coming slides where those hits are and how they're distributed as to where the material streams are so if it's hitting in say trash we can find what areas we could perhaps make some adjustments in

091some look for cost savings and adjusting things what's the last number we have for the balance of the solid waste fund we can yeah we can certainly go back in and check because it has been some time Commissioner Skinner but I'm sure we could get that and Josh Oh homie to making sure that gets out I'll turn it back over to Chris you sorry commissioner at which a one more slide that one I'm sorry which item it's under contracted collections cart recycling it's 1001 million seven hundred thirty six six hundred eighty nine oh it's a little bit footnote there it's so it when you go to the cost of service technical memorandum that table is actually right out of that okay so yeah I was also gonna pull it out the footnote is in the

092table in a document so it's the table was here for representative purposes and we're going from this level of information to a protection yeah and I could pull it out right now if you want me to answer it or we can look it up later I think up later is fine and I think this the screen that you were showing us page eighteen I don't have in my presentation the so there was you were correct and in fact some of the earlier slides where we showed the Advisory Committee feedback also weren't in your copy right so this was added because of comments and questions that came from the Advisory Committee meeting that we had on Tuesday also that meeting was held after everything was already posted to lunch a start for this meeting so a

093new version is going to be uploaded with all of the new slides on okay great thanks all right so real quick on the methodology we use the FY 18 costs and operations data to be able to walk through the cost of service and relined the different cost functions that the city tracks for its purposes and its budget two functional areas by the different cost elements so that we could come up with that really small version of that table three that you saw there where we actually show the cost for each of the different sectors so residential waste recycling composting commercial weeds commercial recycling and what goes into each of those different functional areas in terms of the labor the equipment the fleet maintenance and then the indirect costs that get allocated to those services as

094well and the cost of service analysis does go through and provide what the allocation method was for those indirect costs because it varies depending on what type of indirect cost it is sometimes it's based on the amount of staff that are in that particular function sometimes it's based on the tonnage that's managed in it function and it's a standard accounting practice to go through and do all of that and then we have those financial adjustments that we were talking about that occur annually that come in as a hit to the fund at the end of all the other pieces and while they were very sizeable in the last few years for OPA but for Gatsby my understanding is that was an initial funding of those requirements and that going forward there will be adjustments from

095year to year but those adjustments should be more modest relative to the initial funding burden that had to be met that initial funding is exactly why you wanna make sure you maintain a good healthy fund balance because those accounting changes do you happen they hit you and you have to comply so you want to make sure that you've got funds there for that so then we develop unit costs for each of these functional areas dollars per household per month for residential services and then dollars per lift for commercial services and the reason it's different for commercial is that commercial service is much more variable businesses have you know a range of different days of collection or number of days that they're collected during the week and they have different container sizes so in order to

096standardize that how much does it cost each time that that container gets lifted and then we can apply a factor to look at the differences in the size the container as well and be able to make comparisons of cost that way so a high level this pie chart shows how costs break out by direct expenses indirect expenses and then those financial adjustments so about 75% of current costs are in direct costs that's about it was about thirteen point seven million dollars in fiscal eighteen are then indirect expenses and financial adjustments make up the other twenty five percent or so and they were about equally split between the two of them around two and a half million dollars a piece so if we zero in just on the residential pieces here so the first one two

097three pies that are orange up there on the chart if we're going for twelve O'Clock down to about three o'clock residential services work out to be about twenty nine dollars per household per month so if you break that up and you look at the different components of the residential collection separately you see that there's a big difference between each of those different collection areas in terms of what it costs to pick it up from each household and when we look at the bar chart that shows you what goes into those costs so where are those differences labor is one area where there's a difference between waste and compost that is City staff that's collecting both of those waste streams those are city employees but compost collection is a lower cost per household per month because

098of the use of temporary labor for a lot of that service during in fiscal eighteen so they're paid at a lower wage they have a lower fringe rate in addition to the fact that compost collection is only done over a nine month period and we have 12 months in a year so go back one slide why the big disparity between collections and expenses between recycling and residential waste so that's going to be will explain that through looking at the graph here okay so that disparity comes on the labor so as I saying with the waste and compost there's a difference and those are city staff and the recycling collection that labor cost is actually the recycling Ann Arbor contract cost which predominantly is for labor it does include a small amount of additional maintenance costs

099that they chip in but it predominantly is reflective of Labor cost for that recycling collection that as a contracted cost that is also a contract that is old and has an escalation factor that was built into it so me just through escalation may have had priced itself out of the norms of what labor costs are but that's a that's a standard element of long term contracts that we have that risk no those labor those labor costs are purely for the collection element of the recycling collection the processing cost which is the red bar which is the taller of the it's the tallest bar on that graph that is inclusive of your transportation to Cincinnati and so you see there there is a much higher cost to process every time that you collect for recycling compared

100to waste and composting that cost so there is an element of it that it's the transportation a lot of it is actual processing cost so we can get you the numbers and because they were not don't believe they were in the cost of service but I've worked them up I just haven't documented them for everybody yet of what the transportation element of that works out to be and that calculates to be it's a smaller fraction than you would think in reality and it's going to a large regional murph that has efficiencies through the fact that they draw from a very large regional area so their actual on-site processing cost is probably lower than what you would have for a MuRF in this market just as a you know just based on what we see for

101different sizes of Murph's that are out there in the tonnage that you would have supporting more of here versus going to a larger MuRF that has a very large tonnage pool that it draws from so I know everybody is really interested in trying save those costs that you're spending on recycling processing and trying to bring it back here I would certainly get a lot of greenhouse gas reductions as a part of that which would be very important but I at this point the markets are so volatile that to be able to say how much you would save on the recycling processing by doing it locally versus contracting it to a more distant facility you may not get as much savings as you think you would about that the income that you would get from recycling

102other cities materials if we were anywhere here with we haven't we haven't done that analysis yet so we don't know but there we there is revenue that comes from the materials for sure there but the costs to process the material now even just to get it clean enough that you can even sell it to a market is growing because you have to slow the processing system down unit so you're incurring more labor cost it takes more time to sort the same ton of trash food than it used to because there's a courtliness standard and then the markets themselves are so depressed that the costs per ton that's being paid when it does get sold to market if you can sell it to market because we are hearing facilities are having a hard time selling certain

103streams is much much lower and there's a revenue share usually that goes along with that so you do it you do get a revenue sharing your current contract and in fact this shows us what it was in fiscal 18 relative to other years that revenue share if we were to look at it today is going to be even smaller because the the basket of commodities is less valuable than it was on average over fiscal year 18 so yes there's a lot of pieces that go into that and a lot of balancing in those numbers but recycling just frankly is is bleak right now it's a costly activity I don't think that anybody right now is recycling because of the value in an economic sense well we all think that this is where we all hear

104from different sources that this is a temporary situation and we're perhaps midway through it and in fact like proud industries and other companies were building new we are recycling processing capacity in the Midwest all right and I think that's a there's a lot of optimism around that the reality is yet to be seen because we haven't seen any numbers come in where anyone's committing through a contractual number that they will in fact pay a better price or will have a lower processing cost so I think there is hope around that that those that the processing options are going to be stronger but right now that even the demand for the recovered material is low so the ability to get a higher price for the commodities is based on that demand from the outside markets which

105we may or may not see recovery and this isn't the first time we've had down commodity markets either so one of the follow-up items that we're going to be sending to the Advisory Committee and we can make sure that you all get as well is what those national commodity pricing trends have been both from index factors which is what a lot of the pricing is based off of when you get your revenue share as well as what you've seen in your own contract to see you know this isn't the first time that they've been low they do recover they did recover before we're hopeful they'll recover this time but from a planning standpoint and a funding standpoint much better to be surprised and have extra money sitting there because markets recovered than to not have

106any ability to pay for the program in the first place because we don't want to cut that program off nobody wants to do that so in recycling processing over the last three years you've had three different contracts so a lot of different price points out there the common denominator to all of this is that the net cost of recycling has continued to go up on a per ton basis and in fact has gone up by double so in 16 you're at about $45 per ton and in 18 it was over 90 that's likely even higher now again because of those depressed commodity prices and what isn't shown on here is the impact of the sunk costs and the city's Murph those depreciation costs and the maintenance that goes along with keeping that facility up which

107adds about another hundred dollars so it would push costs up to $199 per ton net on the recycling so those costs are going to continue to be until either that appreciation is completed or if there's a one time right off of that which would be a big hit to the fun if I remember correctly and maybe I am completely wrong on this but was waste management recycling all of our residential materials because for some reason I thought that I remembered that it was just cardboard and paper just real quick yes for that graph yes the first we always year in the end when we stopped with our s and snap the contract waste management ended up doing it for just short of a calendar year and it was all of the community recycling so they

108they did take cardboard to a I think it was saying it on was their facility similar to what RA does with the merchant or the commercial card order OCC it's called they take to a local MuRF as well so same approach okay so before we get too far away from it I had a question on slide 21 about streetside cans okay so yes I can skip right over that so streets I can zoom your letter cans that are downtown for pedestrian cans and then city special events we built that into the residential cost per household because typically in a community where those services are contracted out to a private company for collection that private contractor also provides collection of those streetside containers they'll provide collection of municipal buildings so in order to be able to

109compare the city's costs against other cities costs we went ahead and added it in so it's about another dollar per household per month and now typically if you were out of user fee system that would be where you would end up getting a payment for those services rather than the city paying itself for those services and so then like the tray over going back into the warm months we've had last year trouble with overflowing trash cans down at the parks by the cannula Riis and such and is that gonna be under commercial or would these streetside cans be oh so the park cans I'd have to go back and confirm how where those costs are recognized in the city services budget and answer that question because I'm not exactly sure there's a portion of the

110parks that are served by city crews there's a portion that gets assigned to parks which was rolled into the city events and streets I cans so in one way or another in the really big piece of pies it's all in there but exactly where those particularly would fit I can't answer right now yes well and then just take away that like the alleys those parked cans are overflowing a lot in the summer months and blowing around and heaped up around the can okay that's good to know um yes again speaks to a higher level service that maybe is needed or change in those containers so our the last thing revenues expenses how did they compare just kind of closing the loop on everything on the Left we have our revenues so this is what comes

111in through the residential and commercial properties contributing to the millage those are the levy portions of that bar the fees for services are primarily the fees that are paid by commercial properties for their collection and then you've got royalties revenue shares and other miscellaneous revenue that comes in through interest and then off of the third-party material that's handled at the compost facility and a sale of compost off of that facility and that compares against the expenses and you can see that residential services expenses are higher than what the residential lobby brings in so somehow those costs are being subsidized and it looks as though commercial services may have a small subsidy that's going towards the residential portion of the service so those commercial service costs are slightly less than what's generated between the commercial Lobby

112and the fees for service so there's a small imbalance not nearly as large as I would have expected to see just as at a gut level before really digging into the numbers because of that millage based funding for the programs but this shows you that with when you add those financial adjustments on top that we did in fact have a higher expense than revenue for fiscal 18 so this just goes through with that same kind of summary and that we had that punchline of the fund balance declined last year so the last piece here I want to go through quickly is the resident survey we did conduct our resident survey the last week of March it was a phone based survey of four hundred members of the community randomly selected and it was a 15-minute

113questionnaire that they went through we asked them about thirty content questions and then there were a handful of other questions on top of that four that were screening questions upfront to make sure they were a resident of the city and demographic questions on the backend to make sure they were demographically representative sample wide of the city we have a margin of error of plus or minus four point nine percent at the 95% confidence level so that means that if based on an answer that says the 50% of the population feels this way we can be 95% sure but it's going to be between 45 and 55 percent of the population that is in agreement on that so it's a high level of of confidence with with a reasonably good margin of error when you look

114at the results there we provided the what we call the top line results which is just the all the numerical result responses for that survey in addition to the draft report from our survey firm within your packet when you look at the top line results you'll see questions that have a labeling of SS a or SS B sometimes those are split sample questions so half of the respondents were asked a questions half of them were asked B questions and that enabled us to ask more questions and get feedback from people on a bigger spread of questions and also to vary those questions slightly without having the the risk of survey fatigue or confusion by the survey respondent because there's similar enough similarity and two questions that they go with their last answer because it sounds

115like the same question again so what we learned from the survey the general satisfaction was city services hi garbage collection satisfaction about 96% of people are either very satisfied or somewhat satisfied and it's pretty similar on the recycling collection would you see a lower level of satisfaction with compost collection with 66% saying that they're either very or somewhat satisfied but here we also have 23% who said they don't know in May it's likely because we have rental tenants who have no yard that they maintain they don't have any use of the compost collection system in that case or homeowner that has a landscaper that takes care of all of their materials and they don't interact with it that way but we do see that there is a somewhat higher level of dissatisfaction that was reported

116for compost collection as well at 11% we wanted to find out if people feel that they have enough information or whether they need more information from the city this kind of speaks to that education and outreach need that we'll be looking at and what we found is that people are most strongly are interested in education or information about how to handle less frequent materials that the city doesn't collect every week curbside that's your e-waste your hhw bulky items but there's still a reasonable interest and need for information on all city services in general and on recycling and compost services and a lesser feel of a need for garbage service information that's something that they feel that they have a pretty good handle on and then we were asking indirectly through awareness type questions or through

117usage type questions about specific programs we asked if people were aware that they could place food scraps in their compost cart and this was asked of everyone regardless of whether they have a cart or not and 43% of people said no I didn't know that so almost half the population doesn't know that that's an option that's available when we ask people who do we have a card and you know why they don't put more food waste in their cart they said they didn't put very much food waste in their car didn't put any 25% of those people said that they didn't know that it can go in the cart so even when they have a cart people don't know that it's available and that's the same finding that we had when we did this survey

118two or three years ago for the organics plan so again still an opportunity to do that awareness and outreach then we ask people what's the biggest factor that limits how much you recycle and some people said I recycle everything I can so when people said like you know do you have this limiter 33% of them said I don't know what's recyclable so again there's an opportunity there to provide information we asked residents about what additional services they might want and if it was if it came with a cost increase how willing they would be to pay for that and 27% said they want bulky waste collection another 27% said that they want year-round compost collection and then 13% each said expanded hhw options and a waste options 7% of people said don't do anything I

119don't want any increase in my cost and I met willingness to pay not surprisingly people were far more willing to pay if it was a modest cost increase of one to three dollars per month and that willingness to pay went down as you went up in those costs but half of people still were somewhat willing to pay 8 to 10 dollars per month just for one additional service within the community we also wanted to know how people feel about how they actually pay for services we asked them based on how you pay for service now which is a fee that's based on the value of your home do you support that or do you oppose that and there was strong support for that 68% of people said I'm good with that 27 percent of people

120said they opposed it by comparison we asked them well if we instead took it off of your property taxes gave you a monthly bill and we charged everybody the same we charged everybody the twenty nine dollars a month that the cost of service says now we see a reversal in that and we've got fifty five percent of people that oppose that approach and only 36 percent that support it and then we ask them about whether they would support a structure where they pay for the pay for their service based on a different size of their garbage can so there were this was a split sample question so half the people were asked if it was $27 for a 32 gallon cart 29 for a 64 gallon cart and 31 for a 96 gallon cart do

121you support or oppose that 65% of support of it we asked the other half twenty-seven dollars fifty four dollars or eighty one dollars which is obviously much bigger price swing between those different cans sizes but consistent with the pricing that we see in a lot of West Coast communities and other communities that have those graduated can prices we still see about the same level of support with sixty four percent the level of opposition did go up in that to about thirty one percent why why would you ask for a two dollar difference so the two dollar difference is based on the actual difference in cost of service for those so there's two different ways you can look at funding your system you can look at passing the actual costs along or you can artificially price

122things based on the desire to create an economic incentive to change the behavior so we wanted to test both of those and see what whether there was a difference first of all whether there's enough incentive in the twenty seven fifty four eighty one that they're still willing to consider it there would definitely be further thought that needs to go into how those prices would actually be set what we wanted to make sure was that we did not set the lowest two your price at a point that wouldn't recover the city's costs so the city's actual cost if you were collecting a 32 gallon part from a home is going to be twenty seven dollars per household and if everybody decided to select that level of service you have to make sure you're covering your base

123level of cost so that's why you know we went with here's our actual here's something that's that's artificially inflated in order to intend to drive a behavior explain where are these numbers in the bar graph the 68 in the 49 or the 27 18 what are those so the dark bar at the bottom is the portion that's strongly support or that are very willing on some of these others where the different ratings were used and then the lighter portion is the some white support or somewhat willing did you consider any anything with like people who didn't put it out every week so II more of a paper use type of those that often is we talked about whether we could answer that question we had a constraint on the amount of time people are only

124willing to stay on the phone for so long we had a lot of topics we wanted to cover there's a lot of explanation that needs to go into getting a response on that type of a question and so it was decided that at this stage that was not something we were going to test through the survey whether they would you know set out on a less frequent basis so the last thing we added a question to the survey based on some input that the city's been working with one of the community resource groups at community high on a solid waste education outreach project and they came up with the idea that aligns with the city's can sustainable business challenge of if people if we could recognize businesses with a badge or a sticker that says

125we're a sustainable business would people be more likely to shop or eat at those locations and people in fact said yeah we would set to the tune of 70% of people saying that's important to me and I would favor those businesses so I'm gonna let cross them come up say a couple of words in closing about where we're headed thank you everybody thank you Thank You Christine and yeah just to wrap up and preview for our next steps and where we're headed is completed a financial model and the fund bounds projections as we talked about and developing the draft recommendations taking the options that Christine touched on hopefully has some time here to get some reaction from you folks or at least try to answer some questions so we can get some follow-up written comments

126but taking that and the input from the Advisory Committee and further staff and consultant team evaluation develop those into draft recommendations and the putting together the final report and then coming back to the advisory committee as well as the Commission and really take those shoulde recommendations and work them towards fighting a set of final recommendations and plan and then coming back to you folks to to wrap things up before we finish and so with that that was our last slide and I think we'll turn it over I guess I'll turn it over to Vice didn't even catch this vice chair Skinner vice chair if we want to either generally or to the back to the options but we'll leave that at the leisure of the Commission and then whoever's most appropriate will come up to

127answer whatever questions we have okay thank you does anyone have any questions well I was just remembering our presentation on storm drains from Jennifer Lawson back in March and she talked about how leaf pickup done right not when it's left laying in the street for many weeks and freezing and slippery for bicyclists and whatnot not like that but when it's picked up on a timely basis that that helps reduce greenhouse gas emissions from a composting leaf and so I've been talking with residents about this different residents say no you should grind them up and put them in your flowerbed and others say no we shouldn't carry him away and so I was wondering you know leaf pickup why how come that didn't rate in this study or why was it was probably eliminated early on

128maybe I can go back to you when we work on the organics plan it was something that we talked about and there was a decision made by the city to require containerization of leaves for pick up that containerization increases the safety aspects it makes sure that it's not just sitting out and in the the public way it's not in the way Forbe I suppose it's not being started on fire with a tailpipe that is making contact with cars warming up and requiring it to be bagged so having it bag taken to the compost facility that gets put into the compost pile right away it does shorten an amount of time that those leaves are held this was back to to some of the outreach components of encouraging people to manage material in a different way

129other than entering the solid waste system so don't create it in the first place or compost it at home mulch it on your lawn you know you have a lot of properties here that have a lot of tree covers so that's not going to be an option for everybody but that is another element of that education that you can provide we haven't looked at adding or changing that leaf collection process it would probably be a cost savings for the city to go back to doing more like I was vacuum pickup or a loose leaf pickup only from the sense that there's a full additional crews and trucks that have to be rented to support leaf collection season because it's all bagged and a lot of manual handling of that material but you have to weigh

130that against those public safety aesthetic community means - I would just add that I think the you make it sound like everybody collects them and put them in bags they all go away it's just not the case and so what happens is a portion of people do that but I would say the majority of it sits in the street from the city trees and the impact is on our waterways for water quality as well as greenhouse gas emissions so I think in terms of the calculus of how you kind of think about that question I think that it isn't just everybody bags up their stuff and puts it in a nice little neat thing and it heads off to the composting facility I think the reality is that some people who really care about getting

131a relief off do that and I just multiply an in but I don't take care of this stuff in the street so you know so in other words yes because it's adrene's this tree tree and I mow all of my I mulch all of my stuff into my lawn but I don't go into the street gather it all up put it on my lawn and then mulch it in it's something that we could talk about to understand the operational aspects and we know who's responsible it is upon is that a street maintenance issue with the street sweeping or is there some other collection aspect to it and does it fit into this process yeah so I think that I would be interested in having that be part of like a fair part of the discussion

132in terms of how these things get figure it out because I think it's just I don't think it's happening in the way that you're discussing I think it's at the actual pattern is different than that and that as a water quality person it doesn't matter a lot actually in terms of water quality and greenhouse gas emissions and things like that so just some feedback on that piece yeah and and that that but they used to have it come and they'd forklift it up and put it into the trucks and take it away and that's just a totally different scene now than the street sweeping in terms of the amount that really gets dealt with I would say I feel though that the issue you're talking about is because they fall and they land in the

133street which through that leaf collection process where they would come and pick them up probably wasn't getting picked up then either it was getting people which would rake it into the street yeah that's right but there's still a lot right but there's still a lot of leads in the street no matter how you slice it you know Jen's point and March was that you know having a better strategy for dealing with sweeping the streets for leaves specifically in the fall will improve water quality I think that was the point she was making right absolutely yeah and so we've committed to do at least to fourth sweepings now and the problem is is that the leaves are falling later we're scrambling to get out and complete those two cycles before winter comes and then we have

134to stop or or be interrupted and then they just sit there so looking at what we can do last year we rented for extra sweepers and I think that that helps some but it's still the problem persists yeah and so we continue to look at it yeah so I have one final question and I know you talked about outreach and engagement not being part of this discussion but one of the things I would be interested in seeing in this final report is you know how do peer cities that are high-performing do these services are they in-house do they contract do they have a community partner I think we need a lot of help on how to do that effectively absolutely and that's part of the reason we don't have it yet is we're making it

135outreach to those communities and I'm working with a contacted Recology who is the provider for services both in San Francisco and in Seattle and they do a lot of that outreach so we're working back and forth to get that type of information pulled together to understand what the contracted side of that service is in partnership side of that services as well as getting into contact with the people within the communities they have at the municipal staff level that are involved in that to figure out what that level of effort is now those are much larger cities than Ann Arbor so the you know the effort may not be proportional directly we want to make sure we understand it well enough to understand how it would scale to the size of community any other questions like

136here send it his question alright thank you so much thank you I look forward to being with you guys another couple months here alright so next on the agenda we have a resolution to approve Ann Arbor's membership in the Washtenaw Regional what does this acronym stand for the regional waste management authority Resource Management Authority Susan would you like to introduce I'll just read it directly off the ledge estar page thank you so the title is the environmental Commission resolution to recommend city council approved the city's constituent membership in the Washington our regional Resource Management Authority we call it warm-up for short before June 1st 2019 so the body the text is where as Regional recycling authorities permit members to manage multiple materials in order to increase community diversion rates decrease landfill amounts to save costs

137through economics and efficiencies of scale that cities and counties cannot attain on their own to share risk and investment among community partners and to consolidate educational efforts and provide consistent messages to all residents within the authority and whereas there are more than a dozen authorities in Michigan such as mm WI the mid Michigan Waste Authority and within Southeast Michigan such as W WRA the Western Washington are recycling authority and Sacre the South Oakland County resource recovery authority and our our a our our our a SOC resource recovery and recycling authority of Southwest Oakland County these have all successfully reduced costs increased diversion rates and approved levels of service whereas the benefits that would accrue to Ann Arbor and its community partners by achieving an economy of scale through a Regional Authority would benefit Ann Arbor

138and its community partners rather than private or contract haulers and whereas in 2017 Washington County amended its solid waste plan to operate collaboratively within the county and regionally outside of the county for a comprehensive sustainable materials management strategy and whereas representatives from Ann Arbor township the city of Ann Arbor of the city of Dexter Pittsfield Township Pittsfield Charter Township the city of Saline the township of scio the city of Ypsilanti and the Charter Township of Ypsilanti met monthly over 12 month period to draft Articles of Incorporation and whereas institutions such as University of Michigan and Eastern Michigan University were also part of this process and whereas the city of Ann Arbor participated in the authority formation committee that developed Articles of Incorporation of the Washington our regional Resource Management Authority and whereas Ann Arbor is

139the only municipality that participated in drafting wormans Articles of Incorporation that has not joined the authority as yet and whereas the first year dues for joining the authority is a relatively modest $5,000 and defines a period in which the authority would constitute people would coordinate communications improve outreach to increase the quality and quantity of the recycling streams gather and analyze members community community's concerns define priorities elect officers and develop relative relevant metrics and whereas prospective Authority representatives have expressed a strong desire to increase the quantity and quality of the recycling stream first with the desire to move closer to zero waste over the long term and whereas the environmental Commission adopted a zero waste goal in 2007 and whereas the city of Ann Arbor did not make any progress on its diversion rate zero waste

140or commercial recycling goals as specified in its 23 2013 to 2017 solid waste resource update plan whereas if an arbor does not join were mabye June 1st 2019 the city must be either submit a petition to each member to be added to the authority or join as a non-voting member a status that will eventually be offered area institution such as the University of Michigan and whereas On January 24th 2019 Washington County Public Works presented the environmental Commission with background and information on WR Mme and whereas On January 24th also the environmental Commission unanimously approved a resolution to recommend the City Council approved the city become a constituent member of the Washington or regional Resource Management Authority and whereas each member of the authority initially receives one vote as the authority evolves and makes multi-year commitments

141capital financing or long-term risk programming can be governed by weighted votes they protect the city's interests and offer the city commensurately greater influences and whereas the authority is not empowered to impose unilateral directions or change contracts that affect members without gaining approval and whereas WR RMA intends to integrate each charter community's current and future solid waste plans and assessments into WR ma discussions on an ongoing basis which means there is no benefit to waiting until the city's solid waste resource management plan update is completed in July 2019 and whereas the city's ability to determine specific contracts that meet Ann Arbor's living wage ordinance require unionized employees and other existing requirements would remain within the city's purview and would not be decisions over which the authority would have any governing power therefore be it resolved that

142the environmental commission recommends the city join Washington our regional resource management authority to develop a regional approach to materials management strategies and becomes a constituent member of WR RMA do we have a second is there any discussion I'm just curious how what you presented dovetails with what was just presented in terms of like was this all in the context of the city have its own gig or is this in the context of a regional facility no no this is well okay yeah who's first Molly told me to turn it up so quickly it was included into the scope of work when we went out for the RFP because we knew it was coming we were involved initially anticipated it so it's built into the awareness and what I was just gonna mention that with our

143first two advisory committee meetings there was an actual sections in the presentation of the discussion that I gave updates on where we were at with that so that everyone stayed involved the awareness was there knowing that things like you know consistent approach within the region broader education outreach and working jointly and back to that common thing the MuRF and quite frankly to think back you know and there's Howard mentioned when they started that was quite frankly one of the things they kicked off from us to try to nudge the county to look at this because we felt as staff at the time it needs that regional it's got the capacity for that and that's gonna help get it restarted okay so what you presented today is really within the context of a countywide regional system

144not a sir we so that comes back to the some of the service delivery side of the equation with the options that we've priced at this point we've looked at everything as if it's a city only service because there has been no commitment yet to a regionalization and when we draft the plan we'll be identifying the areas where a regional approach would make a more effective or efficient implementation for those types of options so on those you know smaller waste streams the e-waste and hhw you know those kind of historically have been handled partially as a County collaboration or even entirely as County service with the toxics collection at their facility the drop-off station formerly was jointly funded through regional fund so we can certainly identify where it makes sense for those things to be

145done regionally and you know without having it the decision made it makes things in the plan a little less clear because the decision hasn't been made i'm whether to be in or out of it authority but okay so i would i would simply add is that when this was before council to consider there were a couple of primary considerations that council was concerned about just number one you know it's only one vote on this board and we are far and away the largest community the biggest funder and you know we would want to be a little bit assured of the fact that we would be the 800-pound gorilla in this equation and you know i think that's a legitimate thing as the solid waste subcommittee worked you know it is a it was very when

146we reached out to a couple different folks that had experience working with regional authorities it's very common for the weighted voting to be used in these and I think joining now gives us the ability to influence that and to make a big deal the other major concern that was brought up in council is you know what does this do to our solid waste labor contract you know the council has passed a resolution saying we commit to using our ask a labor to collect traction in the city this is not the the purpose of this really is not to regionalize trash collection this will that will remain a city service done by city staff / council direction this is really about really about recycling and I think as we were able to suss out some of

147those details that were covered in this resolution I believe that addresses the primary concerns that the council has you know I'm worried about missing the deadline to get in there and you know if we're not a part of it then there it really isn't much but I think it's very important for us to join and say you know we're gonna drive this bus and we're gonna you know we're taking the lion's share of the risk so we're going to exert our influence appropriately and I think to be able to get in there and to say you know this is what we would like to do and if our contribution is X we need these things and I think that that's clear expectation of what this resolution tries to get at yep yeah that's why it

148was drafted it was to address a principally concerns expressed by council during a meeting back in March when this first came up and it's certain it's certainly there's little risk that we cannot capture economies of scale and that our labor contracts are not at risk and there is experience locally and nationally that this kind of operation can work very well as it's currently structured any other discussion just wasn't Lea surprised that all of the concerns have been resolved you know in the where is clauses and at this discussion so you know I think some of it is is we're not as council always particularly clear about the key things and you know this bubbled up to us without you know these things being addressed in a way that the body was comfortable with and I

149think you know I'd like to reintroduce this and and have this explanation you know to say that we believe that that this does address the concerns expressed by council you know let's let's move on with it yeah and and those of us who have looked into the issue or happy to talk to any council member about any questions they might have about it since there is this June first deadline during the council any other discussion all in favor opposed moving on do we have reports from committees other Commission's council and chair anyone want to go first well John Mercy's knocking everybody provided a summary of the Energy Commission that I can read if people are interested I read his email so we could just put it in the minutes or we could yeah yeah okay

150anything from Planning Commission I would just say that to the committee that's working on natural features that I would like to up the ante a little bit on a heritage tree kind of designation because there's been some things that have come through where it really would have been nice to lean on that and we don't currently have anything for the trees that were here long before any white settlers got here that are kind of iconic and part of part of our account so I would just say that a little bit of pressure in that direction would be really helpful because there's no code that we can lean on for that and then the other thing is that the DTE side on Broadway went through another step in the process in terms of getting their area

151plan approved and that you know with that comes a lot of brownfield redevelopment and cleanup that comes with it as well as a good chunk of City Park that gets added and those both you know have access to the river or things like that have impact on on the kinds of things we discussed here so those two items I would say thank you is there an update from council and I had a follow-up question on it so on that last one where you're saying the brownfield was there an action step in there no I mean it's it's it's contingent upon you know anything like that's part of the process but I'm just saying that like right right now you know it is what it is and there's contamination there and some of its been dealt

152with and some of it hasn't been but as part of this development that would be taken to the next level of improvement no yeah it's still early in the process it's only an area plan so yes okay well Mike oh thank you my briefly updates um we down at the Center City last weekend we had celebrated to earth days on both Sunday and Monday and we read the mayoral proclamation on both days and that was well received and I want to thank Commissioner Brown for staffing the Sierra Club booth at the Earth Day thank you very much and our friends from the ki potassium Fermi to emergency nuclear preparedness group also had an exhibit table at Earth Day so we were Paul Gunther's brother Keith Gunther is also involved and so they were happy to

153be there and they're moving to use Ann Arbor our resolution damn ki potassium pills to Detroit City Council so they're gonna reference us as a positive influence on that and then just briefly councilmember Smith and I are getting any budget amendments together so that was very timely that Commissioner Kia Brandel would mention a heritage trees the natural features group is meeting on Friday at noon and I remember Commissioner Hutton you had said about a you picket possibly and so at this point Commissioner Smith and I would recommend or I'm speaking for him however but if you all have any one or two-sentence wish list for budget amendments along the lines of heritage tree protections or chimney Swifts or leaf pickup or you pick it or recycling guides linking properly to our all of our recycling

154guides or I went to a food gatherers meeting this week and they had suggested that they might you have a need for a stepped-up pickup of their waste extra waste they give away most all of the vegetables and that they can and the food that they can but there's a certain amount of extra that is not handled in the most optimum way maybe even someone's going just playing in the trash so these were some of the ideas and so that sparks and any idea that you wanted please sudden email them over councilmember Smith and I will need to submit any amendments no later than May 15 so you had something on your wish list please let us know Thank You councilmember Smith do you have an update just very briefly reminding everybody to come out

155to Leslie Science Center this weekend for birthday celebration on Sunday it's quite quite an experience up there regrettably I'll be watching third-grade soccer in Kalamazoo so this will be the first one I've missed since I've lived here and we've been doing it but it's anybody watching on TV this is a really fantastic family opportunity to get out and to learn more about the environments and things that you can do particularly regarding environmental protection and climate change medication any other Commission's or committees I've missed have updates met we are still working but we are talking about doing a green infrastructure vision plan and we need to do some more work with staff to figure out the best way to do that to figure out what what kind of data that we have and it feels like

156that might be a preliminary step to revising the Green Streets policy and the only update for the solid waste working group other than this resolution would be we've contact a city staff to talk to them about discussing metrics for solid waste diversion numbers and and relevant numbers to track and basically meaningful hard metrics that will be useful for a number of years and there will also be and will also specify our data collection methods going forward thank you do we oh I just thought of one more I was just wondering if Josh wanted to update us on that exciting news that we've got a data download from DTE young yeah fire station number six we actually have volunteers to come up and put solar on fire station number six anyone in the community the audience

157if you guys are interested in volunteering you can get in touch with me directly J McDonald at a to go org we also have a patron isset e site up to be able to raise some money for for those solar panels so a lot of exciting things going on the time frame right now is looking about middle to late part of May so it's all coming up really quickly there's also a solar power hour so we're doing these kind of community solar power hours information for the community on both renewables as well as energy efficiency that can be done in people's homes we have the last of a series of three coming up April 29th at cobblestone far at 6:00 p.m. so again anyone listening from home anyone of the audience who'd like to learn

158more about things that they could do in their home as far as renewables energy efficiency please come this would be a good time you already kind of covered the Earth Day celebration sorry to steal you but everyone should definitely come out it's a wonderful time there's a lot of activities for kids live music so that's a great time and then finally the kind of greenhouse gas inventory update which we're currently working on internally we do have the data from DTE it took a little while but we're currently crunching those numbers some of those numbers are actually waist related so we do transportation waist we do residential commercial industrial sectors as far as natural gas and electricity so pretty much we try to cover as much as the gamut as we can for community emissions and

159so we're thinking we'll probably have it done in the next couple of weeks here be presenting to the Energy Commission and then coming and presenting as well to the environmental commission that says stay tuned for that and that is all I have all right any items for our next agenda our next scheduled meeting is Thursday May 23rd at 7 p.m. right here is there anyone here for public comment last chance step up and if you'll just state your name ok I guess the first thing I would like to address is the solar power and the roads being fixed there is self-healing concrete that has a bacteria in it that helps the concrete fix itself and so I'd like to mention that and then drainage systems I heard mr. Lazarus talking about drainage and a dam

160I'm interested in that because the hydro dams the water systems has heard last of the City Council meeting they were talking about seven miles of piping systems being put in is that correct seven miles I know the I was saying seven miles of drink new drainage systems being put in that could be utilized that was one of the things that we might a wet page on the on the dam right there's seven miles of drainage systems being put in when they're fixing the roads and that could be utilized for water power and then when they do the 22 million dollar parking structure that's proposed wind and water and solar can all be utilized because the parking structure if it's slanted as parking structures are water will run down it and they can capture the water

161and then use that as a part of renewable energy as well and then as far as the the waste systems and recycling I don't know if you've seen these recycling one of the things they have in Europe is where you take and you go on the bus and and you go to like a convenience machine and you put a can in and you get a pop out okay that's one thing they have and then they have where you go along the highway and you go to like a station where you go through the toll GUP toll booth and you put in an aluminum can and it goes through a thing where it goes to right where it makes it forms into a mold where they're doing construction on the highway you know what I'm saying

162it goes right to where the construction workers it like actually molds into the shapes that they're using on the highway so rather than having all this fuss and muss and putting stuff off to Saginaw and everything else we could be utilizing aluminum cans by taking them right right onto our toll booth you know and also there are big machines that we could put right here in Ann Arbor and have a recycling station of our own which would reduce costs rather than shipping it out to Ohio like you were saying those are just some ideas that I had so when solar water and then height hydro electric dams thank you thank you all right if there is nothing else Oh yep please thanks Ken Garber and thanks for everyone for all the great work you're doing

163on behalf of the city on these incredibly important issues I was listening to the survey results and some things really caught my attention almost half of City residents don't know that you can put food waste into the compost bins one third of residents who don't recycle don't do it because they don't know what's recyclable in 39 to 57 percent of residents want more information on recycling so all this reminded me of a guy named Ray air I doubt anyone in the room remembers Ray he was a long time city employee who well then yes when Ray oversaw the recycling services of the city he retired around 2006 but and I knew him only slightly but Ray was the person who invented wastewater and his feeling was recycling would never work without people knowing how to

164recycle and what to recycle so he recruited a graphic artist and correct me if I'm wrong in any of this history but and they put together the first edition and mailed it out to every city residents and I think it was a big success I think it worked in the city recycling really functioned well in those days and that was probably only one reason today not so much is the impression I'm getting and the survey points out a real gap in public education several years ago someone in the city and I don't know this history I'm sure you do decided that this shouldn't be mailed out anymore and that instead the city would send a link via email to certain residents they had email addresses for others could request this if they wanted a paper

165copy I suspect the demand just low and perhaps maybe this is part of the shortfall in public education that's going on right now maybe I know going paperless is a fantastic goal but maybe we should think again about mailing this out a paper copy to residents especially given the fact that I heard for the first time tonight maybe there's a glimmer of hope that the merger could be up and running again some time soon you know we don't want to wreck it again anecdotally well I'm kind of a snoop and my neighbors will tell you this is true and occasionally I look into the recycling bin so people around my neighborhood and some things I've seen include garden hoses styrofoam packing blocks toner cartridges shower curtains plumbing fixtures entire office chairs in a recycling bin

166you know Ann Arbor has joined the ranks the ranks I think of the the wishful recyclers you know just toss it in and hope someone deals with it if oh and plastic bags I think pretty much everyone throws plastic bags in the recycling bin just again this is anecdotal and with all even with all this contamination Ann Arbor's diversion rates still I understand trails the national average so maybe it's a dumb idea but I'm just throwing this out there maybe bring back Ray's original vision and send out something in paper to people I don't think people check this online I think if this is sitting next to the recycling been recycling been in their home they might actually do it I do so that's it thank you thank you we definitely share your concerns all

167right if there's nothing else any more public comment all right we will adjourn the meeting at 9:27 thanks everyone you