Environmental Commission 3-28-19

001it's Drennen could you please call the roll sure Commissioner Graham Commissioner Skinner chair needham here councilmember Smith Commissioner Slavic Commissioner Appel commissioner gay Brandel councilmember banister Commissioner callewaert Commissioner Brown here in Commissioner Mirsky here you have a corn terrific first item on the agenda is approval of the agenda does anyone have any additions or changes to the agenda Sara motion to approve second all in favor aye great next we have the minutes from our February meeting any changes to those is there a motion to approve yeah second thank you all in favor aye great and next we have public commentary is anyone from the public here who would like to make a statement to the Commission nobody all right you will have another opportunity toward the end of the meeting if you so choose we

002don't have any unfinished business tonight and our first item of new business is a presentation on stormwater from the city's Jena awesome hello thank you for the hello I was asked to come speak with you all about stormwater in the city of Ann Arbor and after a little bit of soul-searching it's a big big ask so I decided to focus a little bit on telling the story of how we manage stormwater some of the tools that we use and some of the projects that we've done over the past ten years for both quality and quantity management and then open it up to some questions and pardon my technological prowess here we're having some issues okay I'm gonna talk a little bit about the background what is stormwater in Ann Arbor where is it how do

003you see it what how do we kind of manage it I'm gonna take a few slides to talk about the stormwater utility that we have here in Ann Arbor which is a very unique item that I want to make sure I touch on that's how we finance more most of our projects I'm gonna hone in on a few of the creeks shed projects some of the citywide programs that aren't necessarily specific to any geographic area how we use data and science to manage stormwater and then I can open up for questions so this is the city of Ann Arbor north is up this is how most people see the city but this is how I see the city all of the water this is all of the open water in the city of Ann Arbor

004the Huron River goes right through the center from north west to southeast and this is breaking it down even further into creeks sheds so we have several creeks in the city of Ann Arbor that all flow into the Huron River we have Allen Creek Mallett's Creek swift Run Creek we have drainage that goes directly into the Huron that doesn't touch any additional creeks a little bit of Honey Creek is in the city Traver Creek to the north Miller's Creek and a little bit of Fleming Creek on the far east so of all of that drainage in the city we don't actually own and operate all of it there's a big swath through the middle in blue the University of Michigan owns and operates that portion of the stormwater system everything in the bright green is

005owned and operated by the city the red lines are owned and operated by the county of important note though the city pays for the maintenance of county drains they just send us a bill once a year the purple lines are privately owned and then there's a few yellow lines in there that are what are considered waters of the state under jurisdiction directly of the state of Michigan so just thinking about the stormwater pipes in the city of Ann Arbor we have 231 miles of pipe if you got in your kayak in Ann Arbor you could almost get to Chicago you'd have to stop and take it up the L thinking not just though of the pipes but if we add all of the open creeks and ditches it's five hundred and forty miles of conveyance

006of stormwater that gets you to from Ann Arbor to just about st. Louis ultimately we have a lot of stormwater system that we have to operate and maintain Public Works has six staff there are six wonderful gentlemen that drive around the city and fix the drainage do improvements for us and maintain our system so thinking back to the pipes again the 231 miles of pipe almost twenty percent of our system was installed prior to 1940 we do have some that are nineteen hundreds decade ish we a large portion of the city was developed in the 50 60 70 s over half of our storm water pipe was installed then and the last quarter was installed in the city basically since the 1980s one thing to keep note though just because a pipe is old doesn't

007mean that it's bad pipes were built much longer and thicker pre-war and so you do have a lot of older pipe in the system that still has a lot of life left in it so talk a little bit about managing the stormwater system what we do to manage it so when I say stormwater management I think a lot of you probably have a preconceived notion I know I did when I started doing stormwater management 20 years ago but it really encompasses a lot of different things here at the city we have an asset management program that covers operations maintenance work orders work scheduling as well as inventory and figuring out how we maintain our system it covers capital improvement projects it covers a lot of our regulatory programming as well as enforcement of those regulations

008both state regulations federal regulations as well as local regulations it includes flood plain programming and implementation of floodplain projects here in the city somewhat unique to the city of Ann Arbor our stormwater management system also includes the street trees so our urban street trees forestry is out of their stormwater program we also have a wonderful Green Streets policy that many of you may remember because it actually came out of the environmental Commission and that looks at city-owned projects including road projects making sure that the city walks the walk just like we hold our developers and we have to make sure that any road project that is done a reconstruction of a road also addresses stormwater for infiltration and water quality improvements so I mentioned a stormwater utility there are nine stormwater utilities in the state

009of Michigan and this is a funding source that essentially creates the revenue for this management of our stormwater system based on a fee assessed to every parcel in town including the university including churches everybody pays because everybody creates runoff so we look at the square footage of every single parcel of impervious area so that's area that doesn't infiltrate water and everyone gets a quarterly bill so one of my favorite examples this is a neighborhood in Ann Arbor that does illustrate that everybody pays but not everybody pays the same because not everyone's house is the same size and not everybody has the same size driveway or the same size garage and so you can see there's three houses here right at the corner that are different colors each of these different colors represent a different tier

010for our stormwater utility and so those three neighbors the house on the far left that's 23:55 it's the largest bill I would think they're probably in Tier three 25:11 is tier 2 and 25 17 is Tier one my favorite picture anyone know where this is yeah they pay to you can see how much impervious area there is this is the diag at the University of Michigan they are our largest rate payer for stormwater but we do work hand in hand with them making sure that projects that they do implement are reducing impervious area they have some of the same regulations that we do it is so gravel driveways are a perfect example it's gravel so you'd think that water wouldn't would percolate through it we actually have a wonderful tool that we will come out

011and test your driveway dry that gravel gets so compacted with cars driving over it for the past however many years will come out and test to see if it is actually pervious I think nine times out of ten we found that it's it's still impervious but if anyone has a question about a gravel driveway we're more than welcome willing to come out and check so thinking about all three of our water utilities here at the city stormwater still is kind of the little brother we have roughly nine point 1 million dollars of revenue it's about 16% of the revenue coming into our system as compared to Water and Sewer bigger systems different types of operations and maintenance what does the stormwater system look like it looks like pipes it looks like out false this is

012an outfall of stormwater dumping into the Huron River some of the things that we do internally our inspection of the system so how many of you remember how many miles of pipes there are 231 Thank You Shannon we inspect those miles of pipe not all 231 in one year we don't have enough staff to do that but what we do have is a wonderful technology it's a it's a robot camera that our staff drive up the system and televise and rate the condition of the pipes things that we see in the pipes it's a fairly decent pipe nothing special tree roots blockages broken pipes critters more critters one thing to note the city's stormwater system is entirely separate from our wastewater system we have what's called a municipal separate storm sewer system city of Detroit

013has a combined system a lot of your first ring communities in the Detroit area have a combined system that means that both rainwater and sewage are in the same pipe ours are separate and that's very fortunate for us but it also does mean that those 231 miles of pipe most of them go directly to the river without treatment because we don't treat our stormwater so one of the things that we're doing internally now is looking for opportunities to treat that stormwater before it gets to the river both improving the quality of the stormwater as well as reducing the quantity and that quantity reduction is really important because if you think about all of the rain that falls in the city if we just push all of that water out to the river it's going to

014cause floods it's going to cause erosion as opposed to pre-settlement mother nature had all of that rain water soaking into the ground so we look at how we can mimic nature for both the quantity management as well as the quality management so we use what's been termed green infrastructure and green really means that it doesn't have to be the color green but it is something that was mother nature intended or mimicking nature so if we do some back of the envelope calculations here in the city we are and I'm not saying this being self boastful but we are the leader in the state for green infrastructure we have more green infrastructure than any other community in the entire state we have 124 city-owned rain gardens bioswales large detention facilities and we have 277 residential reading

015gardens which in itself those numbers are amazing but the better numbers are what we actually do with that pieces of green infrastructure so annually that's per year we infiltrate or treat 403 million gallons of stormwater just in the city owned that's a great number that number will increase as we continue to increase through our Green Streets policy through an implementation of green infrastructure this isn't even including stuff on private property though this isn't including what we require developers to do there is another number on there that I want to say a personal thank you to all of our residents who have rain gardens that they have let us know about and they're infiltrating and treating 3 million gallons of stormwater which is nothing to sniff you know that that's still a quite a wonderful number

016to see question not online but we do have this information on an internal dashboard we can certainly share it when we look at external dashboarding sure so I do want to take a minute to talk kind of honing in on a few creek shed projects a couple months ago I think there was a handout that you received regarding Allen Creek it was just kind of a little bit of a teaser to say hey we do some really cool things in fact we've spent over 10 million dollars in Allen Creek in the past ten years so after I presented that to you guys a couple months ago I did some more homework and I crunched a whole lot more numbers and I I have to admit part of me has an engineering brain so I'm always

017looking for that data numbers to justify some of the science behind everything so by the numbers and I know this is a really number heavy table but what this is telling you is that we have a lot of creek sheds in the city that we're doing a lot in so at the bottom you see we've spent three points - I'm sorry 31 point six million dollars just in stormwater improvements that's both capital as well as reports on the studies over the past 10 years what's not included in this number is the operations and maintenance that's an even different number and I could give an hour talk about what we've done there but I'm focusing mostly tonight on in the ground boots on the ground improvements to water quality and water quantity management something to note

018those all kind of read through this table in Allen Creek for example but we've actually spent 11.5 million dollars over the past ten years and that's 36 percent of what we spent but adilyn Creek actually only covers 17 percent of the city so we're spending a lot of money in Allen Creek Allen Creek is 49 percent impervious so almost half impervious and that watershed health indicator index score is on a scale from one to a hundred with a hundred being the best Allen Creek as you all know it's entirely underground it's scored a five and anecdotally I was told it scored a five because its underground and it's cold citywide that's where you see our urban forestry program so we've been planting a thousand trees a year for the past ten years we have been

019doing model calibration rate study so a lot of our larger studies that's where that 7.7 million number comes from Traver Creek that 3% is mostly attributed to the Traver Creek Golf Course project that was completed direct drainage is everything again immediately adjacent to the Huron River that would be projects within the ARB area projects that are kind of old Northside area there is a zero percent on here that I do want to explain in Swift run we've spent about 125 thousand dollars we had one project that we did in Swift run last year and it does see zero percent because of decimals so I just want to make sure that my man I me that's correct just wanted to point that out but looking at each individual area so citywide projects we've done some sewer

020lining we've done tree plant tree inventories are hydraulic model and calibration street resurfacing a lot of our capital road projects do take budget from stormwater because as they're fixing a road there are storm water inlets and storm water pipe connections that you also need to be included and so many of our road projects do pull capital from stormwater in Miller's Creek we've done three projects some of these projects may look familiar to some of you in mallets we've done a lot of really good stuff a lot of above-ground projects a lot of streaming stabilization projects some rain garden projects in there mallets also is fortunate to have some of our poorest road surface projects Traver we have some not so exciting projects storm sewer crossings underneath the railroad a road project on Pontiac trail culvert

021replacement I do varn and the Leslie Park Golf Course project that I mentioned we haven't done any projects on Fleming Fleming's only 4-percent and it's actually really on the far east side of harbor but we haven't done any stormwater based projects in the Fleming Creek Swift run I mentioned we had one project and those are rain gardens the residential rain gardens in the public right-of-way that we worked with some residents on directly to the Huron River we have a lot of road projects a lot of really not exciting projects but again it's a lot of that quantity management that we've had to work on in Honey Creek we just finished the sister lakes stormwater retrofit project where we captured all of the stormwater from one neighborhood before it got into first sister Lake and infiltrated

022it treated it and we're actually still kind of under warranty for those plantings for this year and in Allen I apologize the the list got really small I had to fit everything on the screen but we've done a lot of wonderful projects you will also see projects regarding the Allen Creek berm is on here some demolitions that we've done in floodplain so we have a lot of wonderful things in Allen Creek we've done just for reference I'm not sure how many of you have seen this picture this is what Allen Creek used to look like this picture was taken in 1918 I think is what was written on the back and this is actually over off of Washington in the Old West Side neighborhood I'm not sure if they're deciding what they're gonna do or

023if they're just hanging out but um that is what Allen Creek used to look like this is what Allen Creek does now because we've decided to put it all in a pipe we've put it all in a pipe and continued to build continue to create impervious area and there's so much water that comes we're getting manholes that pop off what we have done recently instead of this because I wonderful as our residents are we've had a few good Samaritans that have seen manhole lids that have popped off like this and tried to put them back on and from a liability standpoint I don't want anyone's toes missing so we have now graded bolted down manhole lids but this was a common occurrence that we would see in large events probably about eight or nine years

024ago so a few of the citywide projects and programs that I want to delve into this picture is actually a great picture what's underneath 4th Ave right now between Huron and Liberty this is a project on about six or seven years ago the storm drains on this road go into a large stone vault that's all that stone you see there that infiltrates the 100-year event which is unheard of for projects what's that it is a wonderful downtown was built on sand which is great sort of because the more we infiltrate the more concern we have but yeah downtown has a great great sand ribbon right through it so I mentioned we have a lot of those projects and programs that we do floodplain programming regulatory permitting asset management this picture is from 2013 I believe

0252012 2013 over in the campus area hill some of the individual projects that we've done across the city that calibrated hydraulic model I'm going to talk about in a few slides but that is one of the most important tools we have to manage our stormwater system our engineers adore this program as a matter of fact it's a great decision maker and scenario builder for us as we look at improving our stormwater system we also have projects proposed for detention pond upgrades detention ponds that were built 30-some odd years ago were built for a different kind of storm and a different kind of development and they really weren't built for water quality improvements they were just built to hold all the storm water and let it go later we've actually started inventory and assessing our city-owned

026detention ponds and looking at opportunities that we can improve them now so not just for quality I'm sorry quantity management but for quantity management as well we also have a wonderful and I will say unique relationship with the Washtenaw County Water Resources Commissioner's Office we pay for a staff person essentially to assist us with financing projects assist us with project implementation so sometimes you see the county at the city offices and in fact sometimes it's great we're not really sure who works for who sometimes but we do work hand-in-hand with the water resource Commissioner's Office to implement large-scale projects we also work with them I'm going to put on my maintenance hat really quick we actually contract with the county to do maintenance on all of the green infrastructure that we have in the city

027because we don't have the staff and we don't have the staff expertise to implement all of that maintenance and it's about two hundred thousand dollars a year that we're spending on maintenance of that green infrastructure okay so I mentioned a little bit that we use data and science we measure everything that we do and we don't make decisions without running the models without having the science and data to back up those decisions we have available also online for the public stream gauges that are we actually pay the USGS for we have several stream gauges around town we also have rain gauges there are five rain gauges in the city that our tipping buckets every 15 minutes and so we know exactly how much rain falls we have flow meters for specific projects that we put

028in the systems we have radar rainfall I can show you one of those maps and we also have an extremely complete GIS program or system and that GIS stands for geographic information systems it's a geospatial tool to connect geologic space spatial data with non spatial data no it does not we have a one stream gauge that we've worked with the USGS at wall street that does some of the water quality monitoring but we found that it's more efficient for us to do our own water quality monitoring because there's so many different parameters and then we also contract with hearing over watershed Council and they do a lot of the stream modeling or stream monitoring for us so this is our stormwater management model again it's a lot of Engineer speak but in a simple form

029it is a network of our pipes and channels and structures that we can run simulations through with different storm events different durations different frequency different volumes of water and we can see how our system would react where we may have surcharges where we if we put a blockage in the system what might happen if we have future development what might happen and what some of those needs are a little plug we also have models for our drinking water system and our sanitary system so this is what the printout of a stormwater model would look like you can kind of see the stadium in the bottom Center in a I think we did this as a larger 10 year event the red pipes would be running full the black pipes would be to the top of

030the structure but none of these would be coming out of the structure in this scenario this is a screenshot of what the stream gauge data looks like at the USGS website you go on the city's website we actually have links to all of this but we can see exactly the flow and depth of several point locations both in here on River as well as some of our creeks sheds we don't have the water quality but we do have how much water is passing at that moment and we can start seeing how the creeks are reacting to different rain events this information is I'll call it relatively real-time usually it's about an hour lag and then these are this is a screenshot of what our rain gauges look like the blue dots are the five locations

031out at first sister Lake we have one at Barton Dam we have one up on North Campus but I'm sorry down at 2000 South industrial and then here on the top of City Hall you can look at these as either daily points or 15-minute points of rainfall for each of those locations and this usually is updated takes a couple hours it's not instant this is an example of some of our project specific flow monitoring this is hydrographs looking at how we actually did a project in mallets Creek what happened during specific rain events and where our peak flows were this is an example of the rainfall data I love this slide because it tells a really wonderful graphic story in June of 2010 there was a really really big rain event and we had a

032lot of people complaining about the amount of rain that they received but then as you can kind of look red is the most rain red I think is three 3.17 inches at the most and yellow is not a lot of rain and what this tells us is that when you listen to Channel seven and they say up you got three inches of rain not everybody receives that same amount of rain because rain falls different we're in a valley here in Ann Arbor and depending on the weather pattern sometimes those storms move and they split so we do look for some of our larger rain events to pull this data to actually look at how the rain fell in the city and I talked about data I talked about projects I talked about how much we

033spent on things and I'd like to open it up with one quick question for you guys and then you can ask me questions this is a storm drain here in the city of Ann Arbor how many storm drains do you think we have in the city of Ann Arbor 231 miles of pipe it's more than how many way more way more we have over 15,000 inlets in the city if we count inlets and structures so solid manholes we have 23,000 just in the storm water system thank you I have several questions related to I'll say the cost structure to make sure I understood first of all at I guess 30,000 foot level does the utility and its revenue cover our costs adequately in other words are we in a situation where we're looking at our

034storm water activities broadly and we're falling behind X dollars per year and we have some mounting amount of work that's that's gathering where we're gonna say 5 years from now 20 years from now oh we've got this 50 million dollar bill coming yes but only because a couple years ago we did a rate study and we worked with a financial model to plug in our capital improvements plan our operations and maintenance for the next 20 years and so all of our rate increases over the next several years are based on those future needs and at this time we are on track for current spending it's a good question thank you I have a couple if I may um I want to also make sure I understood the budget is roughly nine million dollars a year

035and if I take the 31 million dollars in improvements and divide that by 10 roughly because it was over 10 years that means that we're spending roughly three million dollars a year in improvements out of this out of the nine million the math isn't that easy because I don't have the operations and maintenance numbers in here and I don't have the administration numbers in here if you are interested in those numbers for the stormwater revenue as a whole so what's the nine million then the nine million is a revenue revenue okay the nine million is the revenue that is created by the utility right for us to do operations and maintenance capital improvements and administration of the program so but that's covering the roughly three million dollars a year in the kind of projects that

036you showed in each one of the creeks sheds moving forward yes previous to this we only had six million or five million or four million so it hasn't been a static number okay and it won't be a static number as we progressively improve components of our system okay then I guess my my major question is goes to some discussions that you're probably aware of related to the city budget and the County millage rebate so there are as you know a resolution sponsored by the mayor co-sponsored by councilmember Griswold that would basically take the money that comes from the rebate and without tying it to the rebate in the millage would allocate a certain amount of money to climate action to affordable housing and to pedestrian safety there's likely going to be another resolution that's going

037to say residents fed back that we have certain issues and priorities and we think we should spend fifteen percent here ten percent there eight percent there the the percentage that came from that survey would if it's allocated that way would increase the spending on water and sewer and structure by 250,000 dollars so that's roughly 2.7 percent of the total amount that's just the 9 million I don't know what the water portion is of that I don't know if that's one of the other figures that you showed on your circular chart what I'm wondering is does $250,000 change anything in terms of how the sewer system is run and how it's fine and how improvements are financed because that's going to take a significant amount of money way from affordable housing and from climate action it

038will more than double climate action funding it will have a big impact in terms of leverage on the affordable housing side and so on what I'm wondering is if we take that money in that allocation and shift it to a different allocation where it's spread out over six or seven different issue areas what does 250,000 dollars do for the sewer system something to keep I know that I'm putting you in a spot you're all right putting me on the spot something to keep in mind stormwater revenue can only be spent on stormwater so when we think about where we need to be with our rate structure for stormwater we've been very very diligent to make sure that we're covering our costs and one thing that I didn't really Express I kind of sort of tried

039to is that the way we manage our system does include climate adaptation and climate change the way that we are designing our stormwater system the way that we are requiring developers to mitigate stormwater it does address climate adaptation strategies if if someone came to me and said I have 250,000 dollars for you to find and spend on stormwater I'm sure I could find somewhere we have a lot of projects in our capital improvement plan that do get poisoned we have a lot of programs that I would love to see implemented that again we only in the city of in the stormwater program we have roughly 19 full-time equivalent staff people I mentioned the six wonderful gentlemen in public works that are the boots on the ground fixing things but those 19 full-time equivalents a lot

040of it is programmatic engineering staffing regulatory enforcement there are always programs that we would love to be able to implement some of them on the public education side some of them on the outreach side really to build awareness in our community about stormwater about stormwater management I I'm not really answering your question but of what I'm saying is there are certainly going to there could be opportunities for that 250 would it assist us any new capital project probably not would it assist us in some sort of program probably did that answer your question yes okay I have one last question MA and that is what would you say our key takeaways for residents what should residents be doing or based on everything you presented and we what can we do to help improve storm water

041quality stormwater runoff etc I mean I we just heard taking an asphalt or concrete driveway and making it a gravel driveways really not a significant strategy so what are the kinds of things that we should be doing in our everyday lives and the people that we interface with and encouraging them to do to improve stormwater issues in general that is a really big question to answer one of the things that I that I have dealt with my entire career focused around stormwater is stormwater awareness if I went into a school tomorrow morning and asked the third graders if they knew first of all where the Huron River was I think in Ann Arbor they might know but where the catch basin at the end of their Road actually went to I don't know how many

042of them would actually know that we just recently about 12 or 13 years ago got the word watershed into the states benchmarks and standards for education and that's at a fourth-grade level is when they learn about watershed but stormwater is not there so when I think about what the ultimate thing is it's really awareness it's the fact that your actions on your property business property home property the roads all do impact stormwater from a quality standpoint from a quantity standpoint that and my wonderful example that I always use that cold cup of coffee that you dumped out if you don't dump it on the grass it's gonna end up in the storm drain it's gonna end up in the river everything that ends up on our roads the cigarette butts that are flicked out of

043the windows the leaves that people blow into the road because they don't want it on their lawn our pets our pets that was my next one patch that we don't pick up after all of these have what you think minor but they start adding up there are so many ways that everybody affects storm water quality and storm water quantity but I my favorite example is my in-laws if I ask them about that they first of all they're not really sure what River is even close what watershed they live in it's not the world that they grew up in and it's not something that they worry about every day I think about it daily so of course I know but I don't think a lot of people actually fully comprehend how their lives touch stormwater and

044it's actually a good segue into some of the things that I put in front of you guys so one of the other programs that I didn't I could talk for an hour about is some of our education and outreach for water awareness in the city you have a sticker that is a - h2o I'd love to see those stickers all over town I put mine on my laptop I actually did have a guy say what's that chemistry to explain him it wasn't you have a chip clip that is one of the strongest magnets I've ever seen use it for chips put it on your fridge that'd be great but again a little bit of that awareness that stormwater is around and the last two pieces kind of go hand in hand the little button if

045you look closely is actually a teenage raindrop we have a program with a local artist we're actually morphing it into a different local artist where we built a comic around the life of a teenage raindrop teaching the water cycle teaching stormwater management we have three issues that we're working on so this first issue I think is the my life as a teenage raindrop and you kind of go through the water cycle and maybe he's going into the ground the second issue we have or the second article is teenage raindrop visiting City Hall so a couple of years ago we did a lot of stormwater improvements here at City Hall in fact we are zero runoff here we use infiltrates and up take all of the stormwater that falls on a City Hall but we told

046the story of that through a teenage raindrop who was visiting and the third one coming out hopefully in the next couple of months is teenage raindrops cousin who's going to visit the skate park because our skate park was built around a lot of really cool rain gardens and infiltration beds and when she goes skateboarding we want to be able to talk about how different places around town improve water quality and address stormwater management so those are given out at most of the schools elementary school some high schools all of our public events and we partnered with the county as well to do some of that outreach so those are just little teasers of some of the fun educational outreach things that we have we do partner with the Ann Arbor Schools for an urban hydrology

047curriculum from second through sixth grade so a lot of the students in the Ann Arbor program do kind of learn about the water system here in the city of Ann Arbor so thank you for that segue other questions for Miss Rose I guess I first just like to say that somebody who works in this and somebody who questioned have a question for you Jen around this - because of sitting on Planning Commission as well there were some developments in the kind of in the Glendale neighborhood where it became clear that some of those streets actually don't have stormwater infrastructure on them and so a development was you know going to be doing their own stormwater management but it became very clear that the neighborhood was suffering in other ways that may or may not have

048been affected by the development but as part of the public input process many people showed up and said you know our streets are flooding during rain events and things like that so so there are parts of the city that don't even have storm system at all so in which would eat up $250,000 like that but I'm just wondering so my first question is are there plans for some of these areas in terms of the long term capital improvements plan to be able to address some of these issues it's hard I mean it's difficult toils you know it's all kinds of things that are challenges there and I'm just wondering how the city sees they're they're 9 million dollar budget in relation to some of these areas that just you know kind of missed the boat

049so to speak in terms of when some of those things are being constructed in big strong ways in the 50s and so it's a little bit of a slippery slope that you're asking so just because a road is in the city of Ann Arbor that was not built with stormwater doesn't mean that we can just put stormwater in our stormwater utility is set up so that first time in provements must be assessed to that property owner I can't take money from the utility for first-time improvements this actually happened over on Gettys a couple years ago we were doing the big Gettys road improvement and we had a lot of areas on that road that never had stormwater and we did have to assess for what we would have paid for the typical stormwater design no

050we did green infrastructure design over there with infiltration beds and we also found wonderful sandy soil over there but we didn't assess them for all of that we just assess them for what it would have cost us to put in a pipe so in a lot of those areas that you're referencing Shannan it really would be on a case-by-case basis to determine if it's a first-time improvement or if it is and a like an upgrade or an existing system improvement to understand yes another question I have and this has to do with my own neighborhood so you're gonna bear with me on this one I completely believe in the power of trees to be able to citrus trees especially to be able to intercept stormwater there was some extremely severe tree pruning that came through

051our neighborhood and took off a whole bunch of lower branches which seems to be you know you don't just want to leave this stuff on top you want there to be layers and it was way above any kind of you know garbage truck kind of clearance issue and boy it was just it felt very harsh in in light of just what the road looks like but also you know its impact on stormwater management too it was not Deadwood it was it seemed like it was kind of like we're going up this high and I'm just curious if you know sort of what the what the intent was behind behind that kind of I do feel like I have all the answers this evening so a couple of years ago well I really started about eight

052or nine years ago the city realized that we were way behind on three maintenance we did not have a regular pruning cycle because our forestry crews had been pulled off of regular tree pruning maintenance to address the emerald ash borer all of the trees that died from that emerald ash borer was so widespread our forestry crews didn't do any preventative maintenance because they were dealing with dead trees they had to remove so when we completed our urban community forestry management plan a couple of years ago one of the recommendations in that plan was to evaluate and implement a proactive street tree pruning program which in theory sounds great but we had to play catch-up and so over the past several years what you've seen is catch up on tree pruning some of these trees that

053we had planted years and years ago had never been pruned and so there were certain areas and again depending on the species they did look really harsh because they had to really look at the overall health of those trees I don't necessarily know which trees you're talking about but when you have a tree that has never been pruned coming in from an urban forestry standpoint the trees aren't necessarily grown for their their habitat and ecological like we're used to seeing there a street tree they do have clearance issues they have to deal with even the species and types of trees that are planted they do look at the underground utilities that are in that area I do know that at the time that the program started with this ketchup of the routine street tree pruning

054our Forester was getting daily calls just because it was very shocking for so many people to see trees that had never been pruned now we're getting pruned um if you are still concerned I can certainly send our Forester out they we have sort of frayed arborists looking at this it's not just you know someone going out and cutting trees willy-nilly but I first personal level I want to come and see which trees are talking about because I'm concerned my last question that has to do with the stroma stormwater utility and some of the lawsuits that have been happening around stormwater in especially the greater Detroit area where some of the programs have basically been going through the wringer in terms of the court system and that they're saying it's a tax instead of a fee

055and things like that I'm just wondering how you feel about the program the way that ours is set up and how robust it is in terms of anybody trying to go at it and in the courts I love that you use the word robust I probably get a phone call once a week from Detroit area Michigan community asking how in the world we have a successful utility some of the lawsuits that have occurred over the past several years have been based on communities that are implementing utilities unfairly there was a decision made back in the 1990's called the bolt versus Lansing decision and at that time that really set the precedent on how a stormwater utility function how it was implemented and the city of Lansing didn't implement a utility based on the amount of

056rainfall that fell they made some pretty broad strokes and said anybody under an acre you're gonna pay hundred dollars or whatever the number was back then which as we all know isn't fair that's not equitable so the city of Ann Arbor does fly over the city every three years with color infrared photography to evaluate and assess the square footage of impervious area per parcel and we updated every three years so just with that alone we're charging what that parcel creates so that's one the second aspect of bolt is that it has to allow the parcel owner to control their use you can make an analogy to a drinking water utility if you don't use the water you're not really gonna get billed because if there's a meter on there so we have a credits program

057with the stormwater utility if people put in rain gardens on their parcel if they reduce the impervious surface if they put rain barrels or bioswales or cisterns and reduce that amount of runoff they can get credits on their bill so we feel very strongly that our program as implemented is very very we call bolt proof based on that lawsuit from the 1990s but you know we're always watching we're always certainly paying attention but because we use again that data and science making sure that we are assessing exactly what the property owner produces and that's a really strong piece which a lot of these other municipalities in Michigan don't do they do that broad brushstroke another analogy the city of Jackson just about a year or two ago they tried implementing a utility and it fell

058through because anything under two got two acres they just did a broad brushstroke that they paid a the same fee which really is not fair so does that answer your question and make you feel a little better yet definitely it's good I know that our attorneys also are very much watching it and we watch all the briefs that kanata Lansing regarding the stormwater utilities councilmember Romney has introduced a resolution to ban blowing of like cigarette butts from city streets into the storm drain and ban that kind of equipment because of the noise and the pollution that the two-stroke mowers so we've been breaking it down and it would take a whole bunch of battery he's you know to do this but from an environmental standpoint do we have any information on how much cigarette butts

059and junk and dirt street dirt is going into the downtown storm drains that this would help by banning this and making people go back to brooms I don't immediately have it but I do have the tonnage from our Vactor truck we vacuumed out catch basins and so I do have the tonnage that would be that we would have brought back to our decant facility that I can pull so historical data maybe maybe it might be helpful as we as we break it down and see all the different ways thank you and it wouldn't I mean we don't separate it by cigarette butts and that kind of thing it's just tonnage of what we vacuumed out which could be any number of things that get washed into the catch basins yeah can I come in and

060that is I encourage you to look at the resolution we looked at it in a draft form and I don't think it says anything about preventing things going into the storm sewer it only addresses the way the unit is driven and it outlaws two-stroke engines it doesn't say that even if you use a broom you can still broom it into the storm sewer or if you use the battery driven one that you could put it in the storm sewer so I don't think that the resolution really has any impact as it's drafted on storm water and the quality of storm water or anything else thank you for adding that I am just saying that as council members were talking about it and saying that well what was the real goal that they were trying to

061do here and part of it was protect the storm drain and so that it's evolving and amending is what's is this is it so it's part of the creation of this that's where it came in I two other quick questions yet another one um when you showed that one about the modeling of a flood and it looked like maybe that was the fourth war we had the U of M Stadium in it and all that area is that did you use that picture because that is the most flood risk no I used it because the U of M Stadium is recognizable okay well that was sort of my question is that are there certain Ward's or neighborhoods or creeks beside L and creeks that are for its dirtiness so in our in our calibration model

062report we identified 13 I think 16 areas that are when we run the model there they're problem areas and each of those problem areas have been addressed in our capital improvements plan and we have recommended improvements in our CIP to address all of those areas okay but your to your question of is there a certain area Allen Creek is is very hard hit but it's not where all of our flooding areas are they are interspersed around town and that model report is actually available online as well great and on the trees a couple things on the trees these this subcommittee of the of the Environmental Council the natural features committee we met and are interested in tree inventories and mapping and I'm reading from minutes here from Commissioner Graham about how we what we're interested

063in native forest fragments tree canopy cover turf grass areas wetlands waterways flooding drainage all of that are you how current is your inventory Orion do you have any plans this year to enhance that not this year but next year we are actually updating archery inventory that's that's proposed as a new it's not a capital project per se but it is in our capital budget to update our tree inventory yes that's addressing all the trees in the city stormwater pays for the street trees we do have an inventory of park trees but I'm not going to call it a complete inventory the recreation area parts of parks not to naturalize yes as for an inventory of park trees I can't address that I'm not sure the valuable stuffs already done by NAB this is addressing the

064great great swath of non city-owned non public property across the city did an eye tree evaluation which is a citywide assessment of our urban forests as a whole in 2011 it is online one of the other projects that I didn't list is the update of our urban community forestry management plan we just hired a brand new forester and that's one of the things on her plate for next year well one of the ideas that they'd come out would be is would we have some sort of app phone app where it would signify when you're walking past a special heritage tree or even just beep and identify you know to your right is a 200 year old tree on your phone as part of the interface with the tree inventory have you heard of any things

065like that not here at the city but the update of our tree inventory and the management plan I can certainly pass it along well then that sort of under your education outreach and awareness and my last question I was just on that that I know dr. Missy Stoltz and Lisa wand rash and people at the county we have a whole bunch of different folks working on communications do you guys coordinate any of your communications with those other yes all of our communications go through our communications office so we have a campaign that many of you may have seen on Twitter or on Facebook about the infrastructure system but that's run through our communications office our entire outreach strategy is run through our communications office all of the water matters publications waste Watchers publications there's always

066water storm water education in those and that again is run through our communications office thank you so most these guys have a pipe that goes down very few of them have some main line so you catch basins that the vector cleans that means somewhere in the lines there are pits I presume that where the line comes through and and Reed drops into them is that what you mean in most areas yes how many of those are there I've never actually calculated but I can get it back to you thousands hundreds thousands really so that's very helpful to keep a lot of it is our sumps in our Inlet structures do keep a lot of your larger debris it's not gonna keep a lot of your fine sediments out but it does provide an opportunity for

067a lot of those larger sediments to fall out or drop out into the sump is there a design of those things that keeps them from being scoured on the High Flow events no not in the traditional design ones no and that's why we have a lot of this green infrastructure in place to capture it before it even gets into the system drinking water and sanitary systems I will pass that along to staff lucky any other questions thinking about is the MRO facility in the composting system and things like that and I'm just wondering what your opinion is about not having curbside pickup for leaves and the leaf impact on our waterways in terms of stormwater and the chemistry that it then you know how it affects our waterways in that way so special spot in

068my heart Shannon there is a an enormous detriment to stormwater quality if you think about the amount of biological oxygen demand that comes from a rotting leaf so all of those leaves that could be in bags or containers brought to a compost facility instead they they would be sitting in our curb lines and rotting and sucking oxygen out of the water that eventually is ending up in the here on river not to mention the actual solid so that leaf debris and litter those floats they don't think and so that all is going to go out to the Huron River there are I I have memo upon memo that I've drafted annually on the detriment to storm water quality and stormwater management if we went back to a leaf pickup system if you're interested in that

069memo we can certainly share it with the environmental Commission I think it would give a lot of good insight and information about what a leaf pickup would mean for water quality and again it's focused water quality there's a lot of other issues at hand but we're we're looking at storm water quality and stormwater management there are some big issues around that yeah that's I think really important for us to think about those intersections like that because I'm sure a lot of you remember you know every fall the city used to come through and clean out everything the street you were responsible for your your your own home and your yard but not for the street and I think what's really happened at this point is that people do their own yard but all the stuff

070in the street many people don't take care of and so the net result is that it's it's all flowing down so I just would like us to kind of think about that as we're thinking about our the potential changes that we are considering for the composting that happens for the city and how that has an impact on stormwater and water quality thanks very much really appreciate your time thank you so the next item on the agenda is considering a draft work plan for the Commission for the coming year and as you recall the the way we've done that is our three work groups natural features water quality we're just calling the water water working group and solid waste working group really really thank you to the chairs of the groups in particular as well as

071everyone who participated in coming up with these ideas so quickly I think this is really great and we do have before us then the combined proposed goals for each group which I brought together into a proposed work plan for the Commission for the year just wanted to say a couple things about this and I'll ask each work group chair person to just briefly go through this but the idea here we're required to submit a work plan to the City Council by the the bylaws we recently adopted so that's what's spurring this but the way I look at it is it is a plan it's not an ordinance it's not an ironclad commitment these are the things that we intend to do and if we don't get to some you know it's not ideal but we're

072not we're not necessarily committing to this this is this is what we hope to accomplish and by the same token this is not meant to be comprehensive we can add things I'm sure we will add things as the year goes on we can add things that don't naturally fall to one of our working groups any Commissioner is of course still very welcome and encouraged to bring individual topics forward but this hopefully will give us some direction for things that we want to tackle so with that as an introduction I will just ask each workgroup chairperson to briefly go through the work that their group has done so far so I guess we'll just go in order Commissioner Brown okay yeah I was chairing the solid waste working group and so we met three times once

073a week before this meeting and we agreed on two smart goals and then three other goals which aren't so related to our our mission but that we think we can play a positive role in working with the city staff and with the council to try to make these happen the first was smart goal was to define comprehensive reliable metrics and data collection processes for solid waste operations citywide by June 1st in partnership with city staff the city has a sustainability framework that's been posted for many years and however it's come to the attention of the Commission and others that there has not been a very systematic effort to capture the metrics that we would need to rightfully measure quantities such as diversion rates consistently over the years so that we could track progress in the

074areas as we might want to go to a zero waste solid waste future the second goal was to draft a zero waste vision for the city incorporating elements of the Optim solid waste resource management planning it's in progress right now and the Washington our regional materials something a agency the WR Mme this is a proposal it's put forth by Washtenaw County where solid waste contracts percent perhaps or solid waste management across the county might be coordinated through an association of or an authority of local governments the city is posted a zero waste declaration in 2016 but it doesn't really have any meter action to so and the current planning process managed by the consultant group app to the best W RMP process as pretty much as made it clear that it's that a zero-waste vision

075is outside the scope of their current contract so so we feel that working on these two issues would provide a benefit to the community over the over the year so there are other opportunities that are also equally important but it's just more difficult for the you know for the Commission to generate a smart goal to help council and staff make these things happen one of them is restarting and we getting and revitalizing a functional local Murph the Murph has been closed really for three and a half years now and so I think it's very important to to get our functional local Murph so that we're not trucking our recyclables all the way to Cincinnati every month which is costing the city I think an extra twenty thousand dollars a month there might be better invested

076in a local facility so and then the fourth item would be Sunday organics and recycling collections downtown over the last five years there's been an increasing there's been the balance of businesses in the downtown area has shifted more towards restaurants so they've generated more especially organic material and and the activity downtown which we all treasure has created more recyclables so you know a lot of that activities on the weekends so this stuff piles up so through conversations and the community it seems like a Sunday collection both for recycling and organics would improve solid waste program in the downtown area especially so we'd like to focus on that but we don't exactly know what role would be in making that happen the the last thing is year-round residential composting where I for example have been putting

077all my kitchen waste into my yard container all winter and it's no problem it's in the garage it's frozen so and then it's picked up in the spring so I don't think it's well known citywide that you can actually put most of your your food waste you can put all of it you can put the meat and bones and everything into your composting card here which is labeled yard waste but you can add all of your organic material that would be compostable into those containers and it could be also done year-round so I think there's a role for the Commission to play especially in communication and outreach to the residents and it's some of the businesses to make that happen but it's not yet clear what exactly we might do any questions for with the

078State Street area businesses and the Main Street area businesses and their the whole downtown restaurant business organizations and they have us a slide presentation they've been shopping it around to council members because they as you said one seven-day-a-week pickup of trash and and recycling and they're exploring a special assessment district where they would pay extra and pay for it themselves and so I'd be happy to share with you that slideshow and the specific contact people that requested to meet with me rolls em Planning Commission has also be a partner with the the DDA partners committee the DDA has done a tremendous amount of work on this already like a whole lot and they're like brokering things between people and they really understand a lot of the issues that are going on and I highly suggest

079you get in touch with them so that you're not reinventing the wheel in terms of how to assess a lot of this because they've done a lot of great thinking on it so I would get in touch with them because I think they're gonna get you going and then to figure out what role the environmental Commission could play in order to be able to move that forward because they've they've just taken on a big chunk of this and it may make sense also for environmental commission to be able to be a partner in that in a more active way yeah so I would suggest you watch out to them because I think they're really going to get you up to speed fast on a lot of work that they've already done over the last couple

080of years oh absolutely we've we've had conversations with the DDA and some of the business street associations in this respect over the last year and they do have a plan that's fairly far along and I believe them at Shaffer onus is the main spokesman for the DDA and this in this regard so we're going to continue to speak with them and we'll just see what kind of roles made emerge for the for the Commission to help facilitate a solution there any other questions Commissioner Graham would you take us through the natural features groups the underlying assumption I think that and that's a futures group has been working under very increasingly since last fall and the understanding of how much carbon is sequestered in a hardwood tree as it ages is that if we all if

081we the city can do a better job at engaging with our citizens in every corner and in every endeavor private and public property to do a better job at stewarding their property planting trees diminishing the amount of turf grass that's out there doing a better job at containing runoff on our properties we will have over the long run a significant impact in diminishing the effects of climate change at least in our own backyards the big questions about dealing with carbon emissions are really questions that our state and federal at the scale that we really need to have much more action than we're getting but what we can do here is it is what's beginning to be suggested in from your natural features committee and there are really two parts to the the first part is

082is a team within the city of staff members who who's a part of whose work would be to go out and begin to engage neighborhoods and individual property owners big and small public and private with recipe for and for better stewardship and that recipe goes from a team member already existing and Jennifer's program for and in the county's program on rain gardens to work on collecting more water runoff I think there probably are team members for energy I'm not exactly sure who but one piece of this is to engage people about doing more about conserving energy and perhaps solar panels and the third is of course how the landscape in general is dealt with we have a cliche here and across the United States well the eastern United States where its moist enough of turf

083grass everywhere the environmental cost carbon emissions cost the pollutant cost the negative impact on the climate from maintaining so much or turf grasses even in just a place like Ann Arbor quite gigantic and if we could encourage people to convert to oak trees and short grass prairie or anything but turf grass it would completely change the chemistry of water and filtration it would bring back pollinators if you're using native plants or even non-native ones they are attractive to pollinators you bring back native shrubs that are especially attractive to caterpillars you really sponsor our bird population there are just so many things that so many people don't know about that they could do would be excited to do if we engage them and teach them and encourage them and and facilitate so those are the recommendations

084to try to get that horse going at the city and a key part of it is measuring what we do I know the counties measuring their ring garden program very well Jennifer said she's measuring everything that they're doing we we really do need to measure this so that we can maybe sell carbon offsets as a function of the results we get so that we really can you know grow about the kind of stewardship that happens in fact what the change might be if you look at aerial imagery of Ann Arbor where the slopes were steep you have a lot of native forest fragments because it was difficult to farm them farm steep slopes didn't work very well to cut the trees in the 1860s but they didn't turn the soil and so then a facsimile

085of the native ecosystems have come back south of the river south of about Burns Park almost all farmland great deal more turfgrass many fewer trees lots of opportunity to plant a lot of trees we have to measure and know what the results are and so part of the process here over the next few months is to try to design what those things might be it'll take the team sitting down and really beginning to do things before I really have good ways of documenting and keeping those measurements but at least we can begin to talk about them I'm really excited it's been a long time since I've been excited as excited as I am now about natural features in the city and hooking it to results that benefit us in our goal to adapt to a

086changing climate really makes a difference thank you questions for as we do go through the budget and are making budget decisions now and and finally in mid May that we should also be thinking of what we would need from this document that we're looking at what we might want to like for example Jennifer Lawson said she was doing the tree inventory in 2020 possibly we would suggest we and expanded inventory this year and move some money into this year instead things like that it's what I'm thinking yes again the inventory that she's that the stormwater fund pays for is that of street trees and some dark trees this larger picture is addressing all property in the city no matter the ownership and which is a great deal many more trees and a great deal larger

087amount of land and there is a lot of existing imagery that much more than I last knew a year ago that can be interpreted reasonably cost very cost-effectively to help in this process without new imagery it might be at some point we like some new imagery but I think we can go a long way if the pilot areas of the city that we looked at in this way work at producing maps and educational materials and graphics and things that we can take out lay out and show people in neighborhoods what their natural features are what their runoff is where it's going encourage stewardship and all the various channels that it can happen and respond the citizen requests for help and attention like idea of the graphics in the inventory is first of all really know

088very well what we're talking about and ain't given part of the city at least recently well and to get people excited it's you know I can sit up here and talk about trees but when you look at the pattern of your neighborhood and see it in person when you have at least some inventory when I begin to work on a pilot project we'll send people in the field so they can really have an understanding of what that neighborhoods doing and how it might be different from others and and try to get people to be genuinely proud of the resource they have it's a matter of engaging it's a matter of being really positive with people it's a matter of encouraging them to not be in denial climate change and and and by encouraging in the

089active part of that is courage to make changes to turf grass in the front yard for example that's radical but it's not radical if you're thinking about the climate impact of maintaining that I would be really interested in in terms of something I see a lot of um Planning Commission is we we really protect our Woodlands all pretty much the same whether it's a buckthorn wasteland or whether it's absolutely glorious gorgeous old forest fragments and I think it's really important for us to start to have some and and I don't mean go out to every single site and assess it but I think there are some tools that we have just with old aerial photographs that we can get from the county that can start to look at smaller areas then to be able to

090go out and check those areas and something that I use all the time to be able to get a general assessment of quality is going back to the photographs in the 1940s that the city has and you can see all those kind of like old hedgerows and the big trees you can see them and you can also see which things were just being actively farmed and most of those areas that we're being actively farmed the forests are pretty poor quality now and the areas that weren't actively farmed that's where your good stuff is and so if there's some way to kind of filter maybe so that you're not looking at like all everywhere because that's just too much time but you could start to filter it down to look at like that 1940s imagery to

091see where some of those hotspots maybe are and then maybe deploy people to have some sense of quality assessment I think would be really helpful so that people can start to get the story you know in many of our neighborhoods in my neighborhood there's old hedgerows of these folks that are huge they're huge and well they were once you know whatever their property lines and they're just these regular intervals that go every three or four blocks and when I talk to people about them like Oh I mean they're fascinated and so I think that that encouragement is there but those old photographs can really help to start to tell that story too and so it would be there are some tools that are available that I think can make this a whole lot easier what

092you're what you're doing and sending out to do which i think is wonderful another thing I would just toss out there that might be interesting is to maybe as part of the city stormwater program because native areas are so much better at absorbing water than lawns that perhaps you can get a small credit on turf transition from turf to something else and even though it's not a water concentration area water is still flowing over the top of it and lawns are pretty bad at absorbing it so maybe there's a way to be able to have that be part of the stormwater I credit program if you convert a turf to something else that you might be able to get so there is a defined natural feature in the city called native forest fragments and it

093was and that came about because we did go back and look at the earlier air photos and really began to understand that we had this unusual resource in the city where farming didn't happen and when farming happens as you know the soil gets and that destroyed the seed stock in the soil where it didn't happen there was enough seed stock in the soil to bring back a lot of the species that were here prior to the arrival of Europeans not all of them unfortunately in a lot of those areas were grazed by cattle which again ruined some degree so we have already built a lot of that in and it really is important here but so is the city that was farmed in my view that's the opportunity to really restore maybe native forests maybe

094others but in any case but many more trees and so our we're thinking of doing to pilot areas one is an area Lakewood subdivision out Ivanoff Lakes where there's a really nice native forest fragment intact in whole and that stretches out to the neighborhood over houses and then to the south east of that along Maple Road which is farmland where there aren't so many trees and those two would be sort of I think will be the pilot areas to work on both sides of this coin the really valuable inherent neighborhoods and the park parts of the city where we really need to go to work in 2004 whenever it was the natural his program began it began because of a lot of push from the Sierra Club to do something about the dawning realization of

095how extraordinary the impact of invasive shrubs had become in Ann Arbor when I was a boy you'd rarely see a honeysuckle and almost never see a buckthorn by the time I got into business in 1980 the great majority of untended spaces across the city were completely full of these plants to the extent they were shade they were casting eliminated most ground cover wildflowers certainly eliminated the regeneration of trees that were above them and were radically changing the fundamental ecology of the city Sierra Club and a lot of other people got together and said well okay at least on our parks we need to deal with this and in that process the people of city of Ann Arbor were converted almost everyone at this table I think knows what buckthorn and honeysuckle are that wasn't true

096twenty years ago and I'm sure your eyeballing one in your back yard if you have one of these things and thinking about whether what you'll do with it the downside of those plants is they are a really great screen early in the spring and late in the fall and if you take those big things out what do you do look at the neighbors it's it's something to work out with people so the see changes can happen and they have happened here on this general area and I think the sea change can really happen about doing a better job at stewarding our landscapes across the city and I just say put a little wish list and price tag on that and we could move any other questions I definitely will we are probably a little bit

097farther behind the other working groups because we only have the chance to meet one time so we have some broad outlines for what we're thinking about and intend to refine them and bring them back to the Commission at our next meeting but where we are right now is we are considering two that we will propose a mechanism by which that we can recommend the city measure improvement in controlling runoff and then draft a resolution to achieve this and some of our thoughts include working with city staff and some of the city interns that will be working over the summer so we can capitalize on that work and perhaps propose a percentage reduction of runoff perhaps proposed places where green infrastructure would be particularly effective and then possibly also work in coordination with the Planning Commission

098to see we could make such a recommendation jointly to City Council we're also hoping to review and propose revisions to the Green Streets policy which Jen had referenced earlier the city has changed the way we approach road repair and now we raid a road in in terms of its its quality and make improvements in that way rather than completely rebuilding it and one of the intermittent things that has happened through this approach is that we have taken out the Green Streets work that required that green infrastructure was built into the road repair and so we're hoping to look at the policy and see if there's a way we can redraft it so that that unintentional loophole is eliminated and our third goal is as staff and time permits to review and recommend changes to the

099floodplain ordinance yeah make questions so I'm not understanding what the loophole is in the Green Streets path I don't know exactly what it is yet either I just know there is one so I think I think what's going on is and I couldn't attend the meeting and I really wish I could have been there forgiven but my understanding of it is that for Road reconstruction there and this is where you really go down and and redesign the road and you're looking at all the utilities and everything like that that's when the the Green Streets policy kicks in yeah if you're resurfacing if you're just doing kind of the surface layer stuff then you don't have to and so there's a whole lot of road projects that are happening that could be doing some green infrastructure

100component that aren't because of that so that's my understanding innocence is that the the big wholesale things they're doing but it's just not very often that we actually take on those and we do them mm-hmm you know but there's a lot more road resurfacing and it seems like well this is what we can get into right well apparently in the years after the policy was initially adopted there was a lot more green infrastructure that was included in these projects and now it just isn't for exactly the reason for you a lot of that I said we're so far behind on surface issues on roads difficult finance and fund and go as fast as we need to go to catch up on roads well there must be a way that we can refine that so we

101mean clearly there are some opportunities in some places some of the time so okay I have a quick comment I I serve on two of these committees so I'd like to hold myself and work working groups to the same standard that I hold others to and that is one of the things that we should do is we should these really should be a smart goal with T meaning time bound and there's in looking at all these in I buyers that I was involved in some of the drafting of these there's only one that he it has a time bound target on them so I really recommend that we define what that is is it the end of this year is it a year from today is it 2025 or when is it what when do

102we want to deliver these things we should be held responsible and accountable and the other only other thing is at least for the two committees or working groups that I served on the solid waste and natural features I really want to say Steve and Chris did a great job and I really want to thank them for their leadership I think we can praise each other's occasionally and they really deserve it yeah I think everyone has done a great job you as far as the time questions I'm not sure that's true with you too I didn't I wasn't its first the time so are we bound by these work plans just until December and then we're going to revisit them well we will come back with the key with our cool any other discussion on this

103are we generally comfortable with this approach and moving forward here okay I would entertain a motion to approve the document in front of us as our 2019 work plan with the one slight correction that I my intro paragraph does references and subcommittees those need to be groups so with that change I would entertain a motion to approve this is our work plan all in favor I have one comment it's fine it's consistent with what I said before the first line says proposes to address the following topics to me that's just far too general okay so I'd really like us to say that you know we want to these goals during calendar year 19 as you said so that was in the first line which I didn't catch and we're not going to you know get

104punished if we don't but I really do think we should try to hold ourselves accountable for that makes sense great all in favor all right great thanks everyone I think we can consider that our committee reports so we'll have reports from other Commission's Commissioner murski Energy the Commission is working on a resolution in support of transparency from contributions from electric investor-owned utilities called io u--'s in Michigan which would prohibit them and their parent companies from making dark money contributions to 501 C Force since they have essentially near protected monopoly status and we know that in several cases consumers for example has been reached an agreement with the MDS C that they couldn't make any for the next 18 months because resolution to do that in addition to the ordinances that were working on which I

105mentioned in past meetings lighting et readiness home energy score at time of market we're also now going to be working on a solar access ordinance so that would define if someone puts up solar and someone puts up a structure or a tree that then shades that solar what if any compensation or adjustment would be made in that kind of situation and then lastly and this goes a little bit hand-in-hand with what commissioner Graham talked about we are conducting 3a - energy power outer hours we've done those in the past we're promoting primarily energy efficiency and renewable energy measures oh thank you and we're doing those this month and next month and we're trying to fit those in because the MPSC is going to be making a decision on a DTE rate case submission which is

106likely to replace net metering with inflow outflow rates which will if anything close to the DTE recommendations are adopted would make solar much less financially attractive so we're trying to get these in under that under that date so to speak but one of the things that we're doing Christopher is we added a slide at the beginning of that to talk not just about the smart energy home but the smart sustainable residence where we talk about native trees and replacing turf grass and putting in rain gardens and reducing perme impervious surfaces and things like that and I think when we get out of this phase right now what we're talking a lot about the specific time frame that we have and we do these power hours maybe we should look more holistically about these not just

107being energy focused but sustainability focused and how all this fits together not everybody that would be sitting in the audience can put solar on but almost everybody can do something with a tree or vice versa if they don't have a tree then they can put solar or whatever so - we need to get and make the Bret message broad enough that we cover all these sustainability issues that's it the presentation that we had I don't know a little over a year ago about the new lighting potential lighting standards that is now in draft form as a new lighting ordinance so that came through here and went through to Planning Commission and it looks like it's gonna happen it's not all the way there yet we had a working session on it and there's changes coming

108but it looks like it's all gonna happen so it's it's working people [Laughter] so we're getting good progress yeah great yeah so that's exciting to see that the other thing is that um we are considering some changes to the office district and how you might be able to have a percentage perhaps or something of it that could be towards retail and in that discussion one of the things that came up was actually partly through our public input so thank you Dave for that is really starting to look at changes to our unified development code through a sustainability lens when we're doing ordinance changes and so I talked to the Planning Commission about the sustainability framework and about the metrics and all that sort of things so I feel like there really could start to be

109some interesting integration that's happening between some of the things we're discussing here and how changes to our code happen so that's exciting too that there's some kind of potential changes afoot in terms of the connections I think between some of these bodies so that we can have good influences on each other and be able to take good public input and really integrate all those things together thanks to our council members have any news for us as some of you probably noticed mr. Smith and I nominated Dean Jonathan overpack to be on the commission and I believe he says accepted so probably by the next meeting if we confirmed in join us that's really great exciting to see that council will be having our caucus again on Sunday nights every Sunday before a council meeting so

110this this Sunday at 7 o'clock in this room and it's a great informal opportunity for residents and council members to talk about Monday night's agenda and there's also usually light refreshments of some kind and I'm gonna reach out to a dr. Kathy Tyson the veterinarian who was active in the chimney Swifts because the chimney Swifts will be coming back here soon and and yeah and and I I don't think any sustaining he and I were together grants have been pulled but I don't know if the Audubon Society hasn't been doing something and so I've got to get back on that and so we're working hard on the budget and looking at the city org chart and how much FTE and how much revenue and expenses are from all these different departments and getting updated figures

111from dr. Stoltz on her budgets and work plans so all of that is being dissected in great detail and one of the things that came up tonight that was interesting I think it was Shannon who mentioned it in a question with Jennifer that if we wanted to fix the roads that first time assessment if it's the first time that has to be assessed to the resident which is possibly an obstacle and that theme has come up again when we talk about filling sidewalk gaps that if it's your first time sidewalk then some big portion thousands is usually assessed to the homeowner and so I'm met this week with Craig goopy and Howard Lazarus and people from the legal department and a couple council members and all and so we were looking at redoing those ordinances

112and rules that require that first time assessments have to go to the individual because that might help with our climate action goals if it's if we can show in the data that it's a community benefit then we can get it done if it's just because the resident and themself can't afford it person so they used if yours if your assessed and you pay overtime and sell your house the next owner is responsible for the unpaid balance as time goes on in other words you don't get the bill your property gets the bill for those things that's true and that's something that's much easier to amend the length of time that the homeowner has to spread out those payments not more than the life of the asset itself yep and but I'm still interested in exploring

113the high priority sidewalk gaps or high priority gaps that you mentioned to see if we could fund those together rather than on the individual thank you don't remember Smith anything else I mean to follow up on that last point you know the sidewalks are completely different than the stormwater infrastructure because stormwater is a utility and the sidewalks are you know that is falls under the city's general fund you know right now we fund that through a millage and you know I think the broader philosophical point is you know can we broaden that millage to use that to pay for sidewalk gap completion which right now is not a city policy you know but as far as the stormwater goes you know that is a utility issue and and we can't modify that with a city

114policy that way at least that's the takeaway I got from what what Jen told us I think the only thing that I would want to add this evening is presentations are really great I do this was very informative but I don't know what we're supposed to do with it and I would encourage us to only have presentations that are tied to things that we are working on or things that we should be working on and things that we can be doing I think we all like to talk and we all like to we all care very deeply about these things but I think we need to prioritize our time on we've got a pretty ambitious work plan and to have working sessions where we actually accomplish something to take to Council and to provide the

115recommendations that we have so you know and that's true of all the boards and commissions that I sit on is we had a lot of presentations and it's a lot of really great information but it's just information and if it's not actionable it's taking up a lot of the time we could be working on something thank you good thoughts mr. Annan do you have a staff report I do so some exciting news the sustainability forum we had last week set a new record for attendance we had 106 attendees it was a Dean overpack and myself giving a climate 201 talk talks our next sustainability forum is Thursday April 18th and we're going to be looking specifically at racial and class equity in Ann Arbor in Washington County the link will be online shortly we submitted

116an application to learn more about a low income evie car sharing project in LA called blue la so there are several cities that are interested in learning more about it and we took a lead role in that so we should find out in about a month whether that got funded we've been working with some quite a few student groups from U of M on our green rental housing policy right now we're hoping that they will unify the rental housing inspection database and the Assessors database so we can get some really good information about our rental housing that we don't know at this point age of properties size of properties we're looking to get twenty prototypical rental houses rental housing types and then we're hoping to do a energy assessment on those types of properties so

117that we have better understanding of of what we can ask for in the green rental housing policy we're doing some planning for summer public outreach season we're gonna be a green fair here on River day and Earth Day this year which we are every year the green fleets were working on our first annual report which will be the fiscal year 2017 and 2018 hopefully as we get the first annual report under our belt it'll go a lot faster and it won't be this huge lag time but this is the first time we're doing it so we're gonna you know do the best we can the bolts are here and they will go into service in early April we believe one of them will be a pool car for here at City Hall so we're looking

118at doing some education for city staff about how to charge the bolt how to drive the bolt how to not be scared of the bolt if you've never driven an Eevee it can be a little intimidating and just trying to make it make it palatable to to staff to electrify their miles that they drive one is at the water treatment plant and the other is at oh I totally am blanking on where the other ones going it'll come to me and then the other thing we're working with is electrifying golf carts so if Mike were here he would probably know about this but we're looking at getting all electric golf carts for the next time that they're leased and lastly we are starting very early stages of starting a smart city action we had probably

11925 people in the basement conference room to really kick it off I t's taking the lead on it and it's been something that I've been personally really excited about but we haven't had the capacity to lead so I'm thrilled that I t's doing it okay thanks very much at this point I don't know of anything for our next agenda but hopefully our working groups will start to bring some things forward and our next meeting will be at 7 p.m. April 25th back here would anyone like to speak at public comment you could just state your name thank you David de pais I thought was wonderful to hear about how the solid waste committee is looking to work with the DDA about solving our dismal collections downtown and recycling and organics that's terrific it's wonderful we

120can when we can work with our partners too often we haven't done that in this city so I think it's great and encourage you to keep working with them I know they've done a lot of thinking about this issue and they're also trying to look at it from helping our desolate and disgusting alleys in downtown and certainly this getting together and working on this solution solutions could solve sort of two issues at the same time I did appreciate the stormwater presentation and I do wish some there was some way this could be more available as staff member Lawson pointed out education is a big problem in the city of what's going on so that was a terrific presentation how could we bring that to the bigger general public if you know when somebody says well

121what about stormwater well here let's not bury this in the ledger star system but have it available somewhere that people could go and look at those my comments for tonight thank you thank you very much anyone else for public comment anything else all right we're adjourned thanks everyone you