September 2, 2020 — Environmental Advisory Board Regular Meeting

Transcript

Captions from City of Boulder YouTube recording.

[0:01] great i'd like to call this meeting of the environmental advisory board to order um i think the first thing on our agenda is to approve the minutes from the last meeting motion to approve the minutes seconded or is it just the motion i can't remember but yes i think you make the motion and someone else has the minutes else willing to second i don't know that i can i don't think you can yeah i mean i'll second but i wasn't on for the entire call last time true um marty susan i'm happy to second grade um all right is everyone in favor of approving the minutes they looked fine

[1:01] to me i guess hi great um all right with that i guess we're on to public participation seems like we have one member of the public um i assume who wants to speak yes so heidi could you please bring up the um rules slides of course hold on let me pull up the right so as is heidi and brett um just a reminder when we come to public participation to unmute the speakers yeah okay so we have one person from the public here to speak tonight i believe uh lynn if that is you we do ask as i think you know that all public uh participants rename themselves with their full name in the upper right hand corner of your photo of your meeting tile you'll see

[2:01] those three dots if you could please go up there and put rename hit the rename while i'm reading the sort of rules that were required so this is the protocol for all public meetings conducted over zoom that we sort of lay out the ground rules so we're pleased to have everyone join us to strike the balance between meaningful and transparent engagement and loan security the following rules will be applied for this meeting the meeting has been called to conduct the business of the city of boulder activities that disrupt delay or otherwise interfere with the meeting are prohibited the time for speaking or asking questions may be limited no person shall speak except when recognized by the person presiding and no person shall speak for longer than the time allotted each person shall register to speak at the meeting using that person's real and full name any person believed to be using a synonym will not be permitted to speak at the meeting if someone comes into the meeting with a telephone number or name associated with a specific device the host may ask for a full name before allowing the individual to speak no video will be permitted for those

[3:01] speaking except for city officials employees and invited speakers and presenters all others will participate by voice only the person presiding at the meeting shall enforce these rules by muting anyone who violates any rule if the chat function is enabled it will be used for individuals to communicate with the host it should be used for technical online platform related questions only if an attendee attempts to use chat for any reason other than seeking assistance from the host the city reserves the right to disable the individual's access to chat only the hosts and individuals designated by the host should be permitted to share the screen during this meeting okay so i think we're now ready for public participation uh i am going to unmute uh lynn siegel thank you lynn for including your address and your your name anyway so heidi if you could bring up share the screen for the timer uh as you all know lynn that you'll be given three minutes

[4:00] um to speak so i'm going to um have you can i ask you things uh you can use your three minutes in any way that you'd like could you switch it so that this meeting doesn't conflict with another one i've tried to go to this meeting for six months you always conflict i believe with landmarks board and it's not fair to have these things um conflicting because i've got enough things to do without having to have too many city meetings in the night it's really inappropriate so can you do that or does this conflict because i haven't been able to go also you haven't been meeting why haven't you been meeting for five months so lynn after you've completed your uh yeah i'm waiting why haven't you been meeting for five months because we've been working out our covid protocols lin and because well planning board's been meeting every week use tables has been meeting every week for five months so like what's the problem with eab i

[5:00] just don't understand so city so when we were following the city's protocols um we can't change the meeting the meetings are set by the city um manager's office right but why haven't you been meeting planning board has been i'm saying all the time lynn as i said we were following the protocols given to us by the city okay so who do i talk to with the city to get this resolved because this is not okay the city manager's office lynn like who jane yes that's right okay yeah so what i want to know is why is eab um not involved with the resiliency program and the excel um situation and all of the larger issues in boulder about environmental issues why is it just we reverse reduced to like the um the landfill type issues and like composting and like you know like i

[6:01] don't understand the whole board the function of the board and then it and then it hardly ever meets so to me it seems like it's kind of a wasted um resource for the taxpayers to cover lynn if you'd like to go back and look at the minutes from the previous meeting i don't think you were able to attend the september meeting over the years meeting you to see that we actually did cover the excel issue and what else what did you say about the excel issue you can find that in the minutes of the meeting lin yeah but can you just tell me briefly no i can't i'm sure you'll have to go back and review the minutes lynn yeah well when i'm i'm reviewing i'm covering eight boards brett so it's hard for me to go to agendas and read you know i already only get two or three hours of sleep a night so i kind of would like a little help here i'm trying to get the whole broad picture in boulder and i think that the eav needs to be part of the broad picture and i don't see it very

[7:01] very much in that kind of a scope and that's very disturbing to me because it is the eab um so can you argue the case a little bit or what i mean then we're all adapting to the cobit situation and the eap will now be meeting regularly and be hearing all the issues related to the environment yeah i'm aware of that but the copit's been around since march and like i said planning board's been meeting like crazy so done bye i guess that's the end of me and i'm just a black box okay thank you lynn for your comments um public participation tonight great so i think the next thing on our agenda is the first discussion item uh with hubert talking about update on where what the council decided around

[8:02] the prairie dogs i'd like to actually make a suggestion tonight in terms of our agenda since it's sort of more of a retreat format that we come into the discussion section uh sorry oops oh i'm so sorry marty we need to make you a co-host which we just didn't get because you came in uh sorry hold on now marty you should be able to un-mute yourself sorry about that so what i'd like to suggest tonight is that we come into the discussions of those topics after we do a little bit of kind of warming up a bit and also kind of setting the stage for these issues because i think we could put those issues in context and then use them to think about this sort of broader view of what eab uh will be think could have could be thinking about in this year i think it's interesting that lynn you know rightly points out that there has been a disruption in the eab schedule because everything's taken place and that

[9:00] really kind of creates both the need and the opportunity for us to step back and this is we typically would have a full three-hour segment for a retreat because of the digital format i didn't want to impose that experience on all of you so we've just extended this a little bit so what i'd like to do though is to kind of we also have a new board member which i think some of you maybe haven't had a chance to interact with susan that much yet um so we're going to do a little bit of dyad work we're just kind of get ourselves warmed up here and i'm going to get you into breakout rooms with just one other person and i'm going to ask you to answer a couple of questions in the dyads the questions and i'll put these in the chat the questions will be who are you and kind of a brief you know history of yourself and what you're currently doing and then one thing that most people don't know about you and i'd like the other person to listen quite carefully because when we come back into the main uh room i'd like each person to

[10:00] introduce the other person so it's kind of an opportunity to to listen and learn about each other let me just put these ques these questions into the chat um [Music] okay here we go okay and so the the breakout rooms are assigned um uh automatically and so i don't know who will be in each room and i'm i will probably end up with one of you or heidi and i will so susan did you want to make a comment um do you want me to read this oath before we proceed well i'm so sorry thank you so much yes please yes let's do that all right hi susan peterson do you solemnly swear that i will support the constitution of the united states of america and of the state of colorado and the charter and ordinances of the city of boulder and faithfully perform the duties of the office of a member of the

[11:00] environmental advisory board which i am about to enter perfect okay thanks excellent um very good now let's see if i can actually um oh i'm just suddenly this is uh the danger of having somebody who hasn't done too much zooming trying to make a breakout room uh lynn it's interesting we now have you under video which we're not supposed to this is [Music] okay and now i have to figure out how to do this breakout with well you know what i'm going to have to avoid this because i can't figure out how to not have i could have only the eab members in this segment so why don't we just go around and do this more conventionally um so miriam if

[12:01] you'd be willing to start to say a little bit about yourself and then um maybe one thing that we don't know about you uh okay i am an environmental engineer i i specialize in air quality work in my career i have been working on that field for 25 plus years i have two kids i have um that are going through the kobe school in-house fun and um and uh let's see something y'all don't know about me i think i said this last time so let's see if anybody remembers um i sing in boulder corral oh nice right nice thank you justin

[13:03] my name's justin brandt um i work in energy policy currently work at a non-profit called the southwestern new efficiency project we advocate for increased energy efficiency and clean energy in six southwestern states um been in boulder about five years um let's see something you all don't know about me um let's see i've been taking advantage of the coved situation to do a lot of trail running which is exciting for me so

[14:01] so you did a 15 mile loop up on the continental divide last week that was really nice very nice that's been my use of quarantine nice uh susan um let's see i i started out studying environmental engineering and switched to civil and structural that was uh in the mid 70s i then had a 40-year career that was primarily i started out as a structural engineer and then i moved into high tech during that career i also um helped to found a company called renewable choice energy where we were marketing the use of green energy certificates and that was about 20 years ago but i'm still very much connected with those folks and working with the environment has always been kind of a sideline for me not my main job but now i'm retired i

[15:00] retired uh two years ago and um so i have a little more time to devote to it and i really do believe that we're in a climate emergency and that it's one of the most important things that i can devote my time to right now which is why i applied for this board and see something that you don't know about me is i will never be able to make up for my terrible greenhouse gas footprint because i'm a million mile flyer on two different airlines as a result of all my worldwide business travel but i always took advantage of any mountain that was nearby so i'm also um an avid climber and i've climbed kilimanjaro and mount fuji and mount olympus and uh mont blanc and lots of fourteeners in colorado and it's a real passion of mine nice marty well hello um i'm marty hurling and

[16:02] who am i was the question uh that's an existential question i'm a person that loves the environment i could sit out on my deck and listen to the birds in our backyard and look at the clouds and i get inspired by things like that i could watch the grass grow and find that actually rather inspiring um so i guess that says i'm a little bit boring in some ways but i do love the outdoors and anything outdoors um i came to boulder in 1989 from wisconsin where i went to school i've been working at noaa for about 30 some odd years i'm a climate scientist working for noah [Music] my wife and i have been living in boulder for quite a long time here we have three kids who are all working in the workforce and so we're grateful for that what you may not know what inspired me about the environment was sitting on an airplane pan am boeing 707 in 1964

[17:01] when my mom and dad called my brother and i to come from europe to join them to establish a new homeland in america and so i was inspired looking out the window at the clouds and that always stuck with me so if i am on an airplane maybe not a million miles probably enough to be complicit with the global warming catastrophe um i that inspiration stands with me today i always have my nose to the window looking out to see what it's doing outside welcome susan by the way thank you mike hi i'm mike sanclements um i we've been in boulder 11 years now i work for the national ecological observatory network and also for the university of colorado at the institute of arctic and alpine research i'm a soil biogeochemist something you don't know about me let's see um i really really like um and do a lot of

[18:02] brazilian jiu jitsu which is essentially wrestling but can't really do that during a pandemic so i've been riding my mountain bike every morning at six a.m instead gotten a lot faster so seven minutes off of my of this loop this morning actually that i've been doing nice um i i hear you uh heidi do you want to just say a little bit about you since they'll get to see you every every year month or so oh sure um so my name is heidi joyce i provide administrative support to the climate initiatives department i've worked for the city for 24 years um i have one 12 year old daughter three dogs and a parrot and a husband too so huge animal lover um one fun fact and this kind of goes way back i performed on a drill team in the 1984

[19:02] olympics for equestrian which was really fun wow heidi that's a reveal i've never heard in the department yes it was more like a halftime show but it was a really cool experience i'm gonna have to use this question more often around you so um yeah brett can karen um i've been with the city now seven and a half years um i grew up in wyoming so part of what you might not know about me is that i grew up in wyoming and i'm actually leaving right after this meeting on my first solo trip away from family for a very long time and i'm going up to wyoming to go wander around some of my old jaunts i've done a lot of different things mostly around sustainable land management and uh renewable energy and uh working with indigenous communities and others around these types of issues so but

[20:02] really delighted to be here at the city i'm also now um serving as the director of an entity that the city has helped launch called the urban drawdown initiative where i'm also serving other cities outside of boulder working on this sort of issue so so anyway that's uh a lot of fun to know more about all of you so um i i suddenly realized and i should have thought about this ahead of time that being in the public meeting context it does make our um using breakouts and things somewhat more complicated because uh technically they should all be accessible at least visible to the public so i'm going to try something um we'll see if this works um and so in the chat let's see or in your emails i just sent all of you a link to a mural board so i don't know if you've ever used mural it's essentially like a digital whiteboard and so what you should see um

[21:00] if you get that link and it opens for you is something that looks like uh this so can you see um an eab action priorities map in front of you on the screen now it's asking for a work email should we just put in like whatever email we use for eab and can you see my screen now the the neural map okay good um so tell me if you're if it's letting you into this um do we have to make an account you shouldn't have to make an account you should just be able to go in through

[22:00] the link it made me making us make an account oh is it okay i'm sorry i just signed in with google okay justin i see you i see mike i see susan well done um marty how are you doing over there um i'm giving it he wants a password to get my account going here the dreaded make a password so for those of you who are in um well maybe i could see a show of hands who have you who has used mural before oh um anyone okay fantastic it's really a lot like a whiteboard and this this is essentially a whiteboard

[23:01] that's got a an image superimposed on it but if you take your cursor out and go wander around in here and let's just say mike um go actually you can go just about anywhere but double click just double click not on top of something but on on something yeah just you'll see that it immediately makes a sort of a sticky note so but i've already made these for you um but just so you know just we'll show i'll show you a few kind of fun things about this so uh i'm can you all see my screen so we're going to make a sticky note up here it's yellow you can see i can make it bigger you can it pulls up a menu of things i can change the color here um i can put text in it i can draw in it or i can even also change it into a circle if i want oops i think let's even try this again uh

[24:00] well there is a there's a way to make them circle i'm not remembering at the moment but what's really fun about it is you can actually also you can load up images if you wanted to add things you can come over this bar on the left and you can say let's see i want something that has to do with boots and it will immediately go to the internet and you can then drag one of these over and we can have a boot image and so it's a lot there's a lot of fun things you can do with this but what we're going to use it for tonight is something much simpler um which is i've made already a set of three sticky notes for each of you and so you can go over and just click on it and once you've clicked on it you can start to write in it you can zoom in and out with your mouse so i'm just going here and i'll just start in on merriam's and i could just start saying okay and what i'm going to ask you to do is say what are the three issues or or sort of big ideas that you're hoping that eab could really focus on because of your own view of what's happening in the world and around environmental issues so let's just say

[25:00] it's air quality and so i would have you do all three of your sticky notes like that i'll just take this out now in fact i'll just i can delete that and then i can double click and make another one and i'll just move that back down here so and then i'll zoom out so don't move them out we're gonna we'll do that in a subsequent exercise but for this for the moment just go in here and fill in your three uh issues and see if that will open work for you excellent miriam's going fantastic

[26:08] oh yeah and uh i can see somebody's needed to actually make their sticky note bigger you can also do this by just zooming in and then you won't need to make the sticky notes that much bigger but either way it's fine you can start big and then go smaller and please give us three brett i'm not quite sure what i'm doing

[27:01] it took me just a minute to get logged in and get into kind of how did that because i'm on an ipad to do this but that's fine it looks like i'm on there now but i'm a little bit confused as to do you see that i'm in there i do uh my sticky notes can you you're blue can you see the blue ones oh i'm blue i see and if you just go down and click on one of the blue ones got it uh so yeah there you go so if you marty go just down and click on say one of them i didn't listen to your directions that's right so if you see the blue sticky notes just going and and uh click on one of them can you uh this could be an issue of ipad so i'm not i've thought about that issue um or marty you could do this tell you

[28:01] what why don't you tell me what you'd like to enter and i can do it for you i think i have let me see i think i am in the edit mode oh yeah there it is so that's working now remind me what it is that you're asking us to uh what are the three issues that you think uh that you would like to see the ea be focusing on over this next and mike do you have a third issue yeah i was trying to decide which i was gonna put i was pouring i'm torn between a couple no worries

[29:10] uh you're not supposed to be in any particular order of priority from left to right or anything right they're just that's correct that's correct uh so i will give you a sneak peek so later on after we've had our discussion of issues we're going to come back to this and we're going to start trying to place these in this graphic of kind of importance and feasibility now i think obviously we're putting these issues on the table because we think they're important um but we're going to try together to start mapping where where we think they are in terms of importance and then for feasibility or just some way to start thinking about how we might prioritize those so but we're not going to do that yet so i think it looks like we've got everybody oops no wait a minute marty marty you're

[30:00] you're not yet not marty i make a mistake no you're just we're not putting him out there yet i'm gonna oh i'm sorry that's all right there you go whoops oops i lost it there you go all right very good i didn't know what i was doing anyway let's just take a quick look though so um so miriam's ideas you want to just read them out miriam i'm miriam you're on mute i know i'm dealing it's hard to go between all the different screens um so what i said is i would like to see more transparent communication on how to sit how citizens can protect their health under negative air quality conditions i'd like to see improved communication and transparency around the excel deal and a plan of action around preparation and response to smoke

[31:02] impacts from wildfires terrific thank you marty yeah air quality just very simple this summer gives us a good example of that i worry about the heat stress and drought um this is sort of the climate change concern one of the studies i'm currently doing is understanding the the millennium drought in the western u.s and making sense as to whether that is a mega drought that will go away or whether this is the drought of the future that we should be expecting as an ongoing concern so i think we need to deal with that and then really related to that drought and heat is the wildfire threat and i'm thinking not just only the colorado wide or the west wide but really the front range the urban interface with the wildlife wildling interface corridor so um the local wildfire threat you

[32:00] um your your uh yours are so nicely developed as topical uh stickers that's perfect um justin um i guess i put the excel franchise agreement um assuming it's passed by voters and i guess the municipalization process if it's not um the steam app process which i guess i'm assuming is still somewhere out there in the city's covered related regions and ongoing and um i think we still have i think what we've been doing on urban heat islands is interesting and there's still lots of work we can do perfect um susan um yeah so i headlined all of my climate emergency because it makes me a little crazy that we're in a climate emergency but very few people in the city seem to

[33:02] mention that very often and i think i prioritize based on the things that i think if you just did a pareto analysis are the biggest contributors so number one is electricity production and distribution you could put that right next to excel franchise um because that's essentially the short-term term thing facing us um the second biggest producer of greenhouse gases is the way we fuel our transportation um so that's the second most important thing to me and the third most important thing is building an urban planning because of the impacts of the way we're doing things on climate emergency and you can put that near urban heat islands which is one of the problems with the way we do building and urban planning uh right right here sure

[34:02] yeah okay great um and this is kind of a new one uh and then mike yeah so i had excel um and kind of along the same lines of justin depending on where that goes i would just like to see something happen so anything we can do to make something happen would be great um urban heat um oh sorry i had an extra blank sticky there um urban heat um is a big one for me i think it there's still a lot of interesting stuff to do there and i i've always liked this one because i think that a lot of what happens with climate is outside the scope of you know we can do whatever we want and and produce no carbon but that doesn't mean it's not going to get hotter here but we can you know do something for our citizens by addressing the urban heat island and making it more pleasant to be here when it is hotter um and then soil quality i think is another good one um and there's a lot under that

[35:00] but um and i think sort of prairie dogs touch on that as well there's a bunch of things that go there but that's meant to okay terrific so as you can see i've been trying to quickly do some categorization here they they mark or they clump pretty nicely there are some um good outliers here that so we have soil quality um sort of transportation issues which are a little different from uh others but we have this urban heat heat stress uh climate emergency around buildings and planning you i'll put this one down here and we have the excel agreement um let's move this kind of into the middle

[36:00] uh and then wildfire threat and air quality and so and uh oh and this is an air quality issue too though isn't it miriam the the um the wildfire aspect so these are all these are kind of closely related is that right transportation can go in there too that's interesting uh-huh so that's enough i'd be okay with that um and when you thought of transportation impacts susan what were you thinking about i'm thinking about the second biggest producer of greenhouse gases at coming in at 28 is transportation so you were thinking about as a ghg issue which is an air quality issue and also but a little bit different so we could um make sure that we note

[37:02] that so this is maybe um it's one of those great solution multipliers right you fix it for one thing and it fixes more than one thing so it's right next to air quality okay and if i had four i would put air quality okay all right good well let's let's leave that where where it is and we'll come back to this but this is really interesting and useful and i think very much aligned with um how we have done the kind of issue identification we've done in the past so i wanted to do that first before we go into the sort of topical discussions just because i think it's kind of helpful to get a sense of what people's broader concerns are and what issues they're tracking and that also probably gives us a little bit of a reference point as we listen to each other talk about what our perspectives on these issues

[38:01] that we're going to dive into now are but before we go there i wanted to just make sure that we kind of refreshed our our understanding our remembrance of what the charge of the eab is and in a way as a way of also reminding us that there are certain sort of charter boundaries within which we're expected to um operate um and i'll say a little bit more about that in a second but let's let's pull up in your in your in your packet one of the documents is this environmental advisory board mission i think this is a really good way to start this conversation because it's the most concise description of what the eab is so the environmental advisory board consists of five members appointed by the city each to serve a five-year term it advises council and staff on issues including solid waste disposal

[39:01] recycling pollution prevention energy green building integrated pest management and air quality so basically everything we've talked about in this discussion so far certainly fits into that domain the board provides advice to other city boards and city council concerning the effects of any proposed master plan or vision on the physical environment so that's actually kind of another specific feature that environment that the eab is called to review which is any sort of master planning effort as well and that includes uptune including even the comprehensive plan so the second thing i wanted to look at quickly is the environmental advisory board charter and specifically i wanted to look at section 1.6 because that's where it really lays out the board's responsibilities

[40:00] so um again this is essentially a bit of a more detailed description of what we just um which we read in the mission two so under one six um subsection a the responsibilities include to advise city council this is very important the environmental advisory board and advisory boards in general are intended to really help council by being a sort of extension of this citizen's leadership and advisory and oversight process to the city to advise city council and the city manager which therefore includes all of staff concerning waste management recycling energy efficiency environmental risks and pollution control acceptance is already assigned to other boards and commissions this is another piece that sometimes it doesn't come up very often but sometimes it could come up like for example around open space issues the eab may have an opinion but it could be that it's actually an issue that is clearly under the jurisdiction of osbt to be the primary advisory board on

[41:01] same thing could happen around parks or other these users that sometimes overlap with us to advise city council concerning an appropriate advocacy role for the city and state regional and federal environmental matters um last the very beginning of this year i think marty had raised an issue asking for the environmental advisory board to take a position on the federal emergency um the national environmental policy act so again i think marty that was entirely within the purview and the charter of the board to to do such a thing c to advise the affected board in the city council concerning the effects on the environment of any proposed city master plan or revision and then this is a bit of the catch-all d to advise on environmental issues not specified by matters through c a uh through c listed above as authorized by the city council so there is this um this sort of opening that eab can weigh in on other issues um

[42:02] typically city council would be the one that sort of directed eab to pick up an issue and look at it more deeply or city council could say if vab started to look at something no that's not since it's not in your charter that's not something that you should look at but i think everything that we've talked about so far is already well within the charter so it's so perfectly legitimate for the board to be looking at so i just but i think one of the most important things i do want to emphasize and this is an issue that's come up many times in this board and the ebbs and wayne's depending on the kind of level of ambition frankly of the people who come onto the board which is how much prerogative does the eab have to pursue its own environmental concerns and interests versus its role in responding to what staff or council ask eab to comment on so

[43:03] one sort of typical um dynamic of the environmental advisory board under certain um settings is that it pretty much just sits and waits for topics to be brought to it to respond to whether that's staff having to bring matters before eab because it's our obligation if it's an environmental issue in it for eab to give its feedback or this is much more rare but sometimes can happen where council would say we're interested in what eab thinks about a particular issue so that's that's a kind of very conventional way eab is operated a couple of years ago some some of the board members started to be frustrated that that felt like that you were essentially being asked to kind of do a rubber stamping process and not having input on things ahead of time or really having the prerogative to try to raise issues and so actually eab in some ways

[44:02] maybe more than many boards uh started to agitate with council for a little bit more um prerogative to explore issues that it viewed as relevant and within its charter and that's where the work that um several this this board has been exploring for several years around urban heat island and now around air quality really emerged as issues that came out of eab not necessarily came from staff or council and so far nobody has reigned us in from that work and it's it's been my interest to keep supporting the board in continuing to um consider these issues and tonight will be a good example miriam's going to provide a a presentation that in many ways i view as a as a an exploration by this board

[45:00] of an issue it thinks the city should be concerned about and the next step in that process will be for us to think about and for me and in my role to think about how i can bring that issue back to the city and see how it wants to prioritize that issue so let me stop i've been doing a lot of talking but i did want to make that distinction susan i'm i'm just wondering as a new person here how often has city council actually asked eab for advice since you guys folks have been here we we write a letter every year that tells the city council what our priorities are and we we provide that sort of information to them and then based on that letter um we are given rain to to go after topics that we think are

[46:00] important and that we can help guide the sustainability group to go forward with yeah yeah but that that that's good information but that wasn't really my question because under section a b and c is to advise city council like when they ask us but i'm kind of wondering if they ever asked us for advice they do and in the respect that we are given the opportunity to comment on certain aspects that are brought to our attention like the prairie dog issue or like the excel issue um that's our opportunity to give advice so so that's a good question and i think the way um the way the process is intended to be designed is that that council wouldn't have to ask you for feedback on these key issues because staff would have already been here and then staff is obligated to include your feedback in our memos that go then to council

[47:02] under there there's a section in most memos that say here's the feedback from transportation advisory board parks advisor board environmental advisory board so they wouldn't theoretically have to ask specifically for that okay thanks yeah but do any uh justin or mike anybody who's been a little here a little longer you want to add any comments to that no i think i think miriam did a good job and you did a good job of kind of summing up how we provide feedback marty yeah i mean i was um involved in this year's drafting of the letter that went to council which we laid out some details of what we're not called advice but we're called suggestions and this is actually i think susan gets at an important point and i struggle with it myself in a brief time to me there's a difference between a suggestion a advice

[48:01] and a recommendation they carry different weights and i know that gets into semantics maybe a little bit of hair splitting but at some high levels i think at council level those different phrases probably mean something different they imply a different level of expertise perhaps even authority or importance of what's being stated and so maybe this is what we can talk about during the course of the evening as to you know where do we fall in terms of advice suggestions and recommendations in the letter that we drafted here this past year i'm just reading the uh the lead paragraph the words that are used are actually um we are providing suggestions for how boulder can show leadership in the following areas so that actually doesn't even use the word advice uh uses suggestions and we're not a suggestion board we are an advisory board but do we go is recommendation stronger than advice at least in terms of the way council perceives it

[49:02] yes other questions or comments i have a few responses but i want to see if there's anything else i was just going to say one other thing that we didn't talk about but we'll talk about later so i haven't mentioned it yet was we do get to also sometimes have representatives on other like advisory efforts where people from a bunch of different boards come together like the greenways advisory committee which we'll talk about later because that's another interesting way i think we can provide we end up providing advice for filtering up through either group efforts would you say that's right brett yeah absolutely and then there's a there's another way that this board is actually done more than any other board i've seen which is um to call for a joint board meetings in which there's an issue that is perceived to be cross-cutting we we did this very extensively in 2016 around the drafting of the new climate action plan we met with all the other boards and then last year we did this with regard to

[50:00] ecosystems because we were really focusing as staff last year or this was last year on um the ecosystems issues in climate so so that's another opportunity an option that this board has for broader engagement so i do i'm i'm wanting to emphasize this point because i want to make sure that we um we we we set reasonable or appropriate expectations for what role this board can and should play and and and so what i would what i would say is that we're we're blazing a little bit of new ground with this board to see how far marty in a sense we can stretch this from just responding to things provided to it versus seeing issues that it sees that believes that there should be con the city should be concerned about which

[51:00] is as miriam said the place that's typically raised is in the annual letter and then council theoretically sets the agenda of the city about whether those issues from this board or others are made priorities for staff and then a third category which is perhaps being a little bit more assertive to say yes yes yes we see that you've set those priorities but we think that this is actually relatively urgent for you to consider and then it might be something that is not only emphasized in your annual letter but there might be and this is this is where the territory's doing i frankly don't frankly know exactly what forums we would use if you wanted to move in this room we need to make recommendations to you about how you move forward in this kind of interim way so so i think this is um part of the reason i wanted to discuss this is because i think we're starting to tread out into this territory around this issue of air quality and because it is

[52:02] becoming increasingly urgent and has not yet been as far as i have known inside our city organization been prioritized in part because of the way the jurisdictions over issues is distributed between city and county so as miriam knows better than anybody like county is seen as the people who are responsible for public health and air quality and therefore you know we might do some codes and ordinances around say wood smoke or something but that broader air quality is not something that we've seen as part of our domain but if as i think you're probably going to say tonight miriam we think that there's a public health risks because of the way these jurisdictions are managing the issue maybe it's one that needs to be raised somehow on the priorities for the city so i don't i don't want to over burden on this issue but i just want to make sure we have that discussion especially i think it's almost worth having every year when we do this

[53:00] so i did want to just quickly so susan go ahead i i just wanted to mention that the fact we're in a declared climate emergency i think makes a difference in terms of perhaps the scope of the environmental advisory board and the charter was written at a time when we were not in an environmental a climate emergency so you know i think we need to take that seriously as a board i i entirely agree with that and i think it's a very important and legitimate statement to make um in some way and perhaps together we can think about how to most effectively say that uh especially perhaps to counsel in the organization yeah i mean you know i think eabs for as long as i've been on it has struggled with what our role is i mean there we have no regulatory authority we have no real

[54:01] defined regulatory rules just general advice um so i mean to me it seems like the way we've added the most value or some of these issues we were trying to bring attention to things that you know orphan issues or whatever you want to call them things that aren't getting um much attention within the city and you know i think we all care passionately about things like the energy sector and the city's you know municipalization in those process but at least as long as i've been on eab it doesn't seem like we can it's too big an issue and there's a lot of people working on it and it's hard to figure out what if any impact we can have on that i guess to the extent um you know i think the extent we can add value is probably thinking about these other

[55:01] things that have flipped through the cracks a little yes although i would say some of the key issues we can use the excel franchise agreement as an example i would hope that we would feel like it's the responsibility of the environmental advisory board to take a look at that situation through an environmental lens lots of people are looking at it through a financial and profitability lens or an equity lens or other lenses but that as a board that would be kind of like our we take the range on that and say hey from an environmental standpoint here's what the outcome of the franchise agreement would be in 2030 and 2050 relative to the environment and here's what it would be if we kept going municipality you don't even

[56:01] necessarily need to make a recommendation but at least give them the information from an environmental point of view yeah i mean i guess i i agree with the theory behind that i just as we've gotten into how you actualize that type of thing i think it's been difficult you know like brett says traditionally we're sort of responding you know i see eab is that you know we work in two ways there's the in one is sort of the traditional way where you know staff brings us a report or something in draft form before it goes to counselor recommendation and is looking for input and you know whether they take it or not whether they bring it early enough in the process you know those are i think the things that have frustrated other eap members previously or if we're just sort of a you know learning about these things and

[57:01] providing some input but i guess it's for me it's harder to well i agree with the theory i think the way it's been set up it's harder for us to provide value in that way and it each issue is a little different and municipalization is a uniquely uh dynamic issue in this particular way and maybe not one that's common as as others are and i want to maybe suggest that since we are we do have that excel agreement on the agenda to talk about here just a second but i think that what we're really talking about is is the the bigger picture of how eab relates and is weighing in on these different types of issues and i don't think i want to emphasize this one anymore except but i do want to point your attention to one last document that was in the packet which is just again more background on the thoughts of the sort of previous iteration of the eab which is the the executive the summary of the letter to counsel from last year and so

[58:02] um just to note that there were six issues that were identified the pesticide issue the urban heat island issue storm water management study native plant strategy air quality and soil conservation so and i would note that three of these issues were significantly moved forward in this past year that those being we worked very hard on the local pesticide ordinance and it was going to be in uh legislature before covid hit um so it's unfortunate that that happened there's been a lot of work done on the native planting strategy and then a lot of work on soil conservation the other three i think the board did a lot of great

[59:01] work around urban heat and starting the discussion around air quality and i don't think we really got very much into the material around stormwater so i just want to put that out just so that as you're thinking about where we go forward just to look at what we were thinking about in the past i'd also like to add though that we as a board all of us are focused on the climate emergency and this isn't something that we are ignoring in any way shape or form yeah thank you miriam that's yeah we do feel like the city is spending an enormous amount of resources in trying to address how the city of boulder can do better and improve the situation for the city of boulder and beyond they're they're involved you know in discussions with other cities and states and and in a lot of places and so there's only so much that we as a board can do that is not already being done by the

[60:02] city staff already yeah thank you miriam very much for emphasizing that which isn't to say susan at all that we don't need to keep making the point that we're in a climate emergency and that we need to think about things differently so i think you know we welcome that continued emphasis so so at this point what i'd like to do is turn this section of the meeting back over to uh your board chair justin to talk to go through this set of topics that are listed in the um the agenda for this evening and also to have the presentation from miriam and then um around 7 15 or so i'd like to maybe come back and we'll just kind of do a wrap up of this kind of broader set of uh prioritizing issues and we'll think about how to close that up for this for the session so justin

[61:02] okay i don't know i guess are you providing an update on what council did relate to prairie dogs is that someone else yeah thank you yeah did anybody have a chance to tune into the meeting last night um oh well i i don't blame you um we weren't on the agenda until we didn't get on the topic until i think 9 30 and then council literally discussed that topic for three hours before they finally at 12 45 came to a vote and uh so to make a long story short the council voted eight to one to endorse without qualification the preferred alternative that's laid out by osbt um and staff to allow for lethal control in the project area on irrigated agricultural lands in just that particular project area to allow for burrow disturbance with a

[62:00] very bright set of criteria and um to basically initiate a process of starting to gather data that can be used as a baseline to understand how um those those these treatments are gonna change the the character of the landscape so it's actually a pretty watershed moment in osbt's history um there was a lot that led up to that over the last two weeks between when the council first had the public comments and when they deliberated again including an incident that some of you may have heard of in which um county prairie dog lethal control equipment was vandalized to the tune of about a hundred thousand dollars with the damage and then a lot of social media that actually started to kind of um profile the legitimacy of of vandalism and destruction as a legitimate response to um this whole situation so it's been

[63:02] pretty tense um around all this but even despite all that council made a very definitive statement so one of the proposals that was made was to that by the prairie dog advocates was to sunset the lethal control uh authorizations at the end of 2022 and council rejected that so they did uh however implement an uh or they endorsed a staff proposal that there will be an annual review of all the actions taking place and a sort of description of the the plans for each year going forward including the rationale for using whatever treatments are being used then the last thing i wanted to note because i think it could actually be something that eab is is invited in some ways to relate to there was a proposal that a collaborative learning or shared learning process be initiated

[64:00] that would bring together representatives from all the different stakeholder groups with the city to work on specific parcels and explore a range of different types of alternative treatments and implement monitoring to observe the effects of that as a way of trying to build community knowledge and understanding about what the most effective approaches to land restoration and recovery can be and so i think there wasn't a firm or formal request that staff do that but there was a very strong signal from council that they want to see that happen there have been some discussions already about the possibility that something like the center for sustainable landscapes and communities at cu sharon collings group might become a third convener for something like that so i'm actually really excited about that as a possibility i've seen that kind of cross-stakeholder

[65:01] collaborative learning process be a real game changer for very polarized conflicts and other resource management situations and the thing i wanted to convey to you is that during this whole last couple of weeks of of trying to negotiate through this to the council session i did have conversations with a number of um osbt members and they were very adamant that they have appreciated and they want eab to be actively involved in this issue of soils and land recovery and view you as a very um legitimate and important partner in that process so far from them saying this is our domain you guys stay out of it they were exactly the opposite like thank you for being an active part of this we want you to continue to be an active part of that so and again i think that reflects on the fact that you've been saying for the last several years this is an issue we think it's an important issue and we have an opinion about that so

[66:02] any any uh questions about that i could answer around that topic i don't have any questions but i just think it's exciting to see like a decision made and after this all this time and um one that we you know weighed in on in the direction it went i think that's it's pretty cool glad to see it yeah and by the way sort of susan again back to your points council was watching for what eab said on this issue i heard at least one council member say did eab have a chance to comment yes it's in the memo okay so um one other thing mike you might be interested to know is that um so we we do now have a a new position that just about a year old in the city the soil health coordinator um uh her name's lauren cold fantastic phd in soil stuff yeah i went to grad school with her i know her really well oh that's fantastic that's right yeah um so she has been out gathering a

[67:02] lot of field data on soils this season but she was not gathering data in a lot of those contested prairie dog areas because we didn't know how the policy was going to go and we didn't want to be putting a lot of time and effort in places that we weren't going to be able to have an effect council was really clear and especially sam weaver said over and over again i want to see you guys gathering baseline data on all the sites that we're treating so i think that there's a real interesting opportunity for some significant learning both as sort of psych community science but also broader science as well yeah that's great to hear and she's fantastic so i think that's really it's really encouraging it's really cool yeah i'm excited about it that's all i have justin on that anyone have any questions for brad or comments well then it looks like um the cell settlement process and castle deliberations are up next

[68:00] this is another just you bring everyone up to speed on where we are right now believe there's anything i mean it's on the ballot at this point right well i i think more i wanted to make sure that you all had a chance to feel like you completed the conversation that you started last month i think it was getting late and people were feeling a little anxious about not being able to reach a kind of consensus decision so i want to make sure there was plenty of room for any further discussion about this there has been those further developments council last night did refer this to the ballot so um i think that's another important development that does mean that that you know it's whatever september the second that's not going to happen until november um it could be that you guys might want to decide whether you want to have staff come back to do any further presentation or clarification about the settlement or whether there's any further discussion that you all want to have about whether the board wants to take a

[69:00] position about this ahead of that et cetera how does the actual language and who crafts the language for the ballot and how how does it craft what's that i'm just curious you don't have to spend a lot of time explaining it to me but i'm just curious yeah so the city attorney uh drafts the language for that and my guess is that's probably in the enormous packet that council had last night um yeah so there's a whole bunch of there's a whole bunch of text in that because it covers a lot of different aspects of the franchise and a whole bunch of different pieces in there okay brett i i would imagine that that the city has done the kind of analysis that susan was interested in about what are the environmental impacts uh or in specifically the co2 impacts of going forward with the municipality versus not versus going to the route that

[70:01] they're proposing at this point i mean is there is that information available to us um that's a really good question um heidi can you hear me yes i'm so sorry okay could you repeat the question so i would imagine this is the city has done an analysis of what are the what is the difference in the co2 impacts that we will see whether we go with the municipality versus not going with the municipalization right yeah i mean i i think um there's some team some team members matt lerman is probably the one to speak with um on that specific question um one thing to note brett i was just about to send um a note to you is that since council put the franchise on the ballot last night

[71:01] we are in what's called a going dark period and so what that means is staff can only provide certain factual information um [Music] to the community and so we would need to so depending on what the board is interested in we would need to talk to our attorneys about what we can and cannot do um and at this point it's really just you know answering questions and miriam i'm sorry i don't have the specific answer to your question but that's something that i can bring back to our team and see if they can provide a response to you no sure and susan i think you can just talk yeah please don't need to raise your hand susan you're somehow let's see we can't hear you susan can you hear me now okay

[72:02] i participated in a meeting with um city staff and a group of concerned citizens on friday it included matt lehrman and jonathan um and steve katnack and tom carr wasn't there but the other attorney whose name i can't remember um and where we were asking for some of that information so because essentially what the franchise agreement does is guarantee that excel will reduce their greenhouse gas emissions relative to 2005 by 80 percent which by the way is required by colorado state law so we're not really getting anything extra there and what the boulder goal is is that we get to renewal 100 renewable energy by 2030. so you know the question was from a greenhouse gas impact standpoint what's the difference between 100 renewable energy and an 80 reduction in

[73:01] greenhouse gases and they weren't able to give us that information um but we did ask that anticipating that there would be a blackout period as of today that we would want to get access to data and they did say they could give us data they just can't comment on it or share studies with us yes and by the way there are two there are two items on the ballot one is the franchise agreement and one is the utility occupation tax which basically goes away if we approve the franchise agreement yeah thanks susan i i think um as you say i think that staff was under the sort of direction to try to put together some response based on the questions that came out friday so that's something that we could certainly share with this board so um one thing i would like to offer as a as a as something to think about with this issue

[74:01] is a is a is a theme that we raised last year in july when we went to council with basically the climate emergency declaration and the statement that our current climate action plan was in no way sufficient to address that emergency and that was that we needed to think about and and evaluate all of our city climate related actions from the perspective of whether how it responded to two questions did the action does the action that we are either doing or contemplating result in systems level change and is that action scalable and replicable to other places because clearly as we know at this point with something like maybe 10 years to

[75:01] change the direction of the global context doing something that might be really fantastic for our for something for something local for example but isn't really going to change a system and isn't likely to be replicable in other places might be something that we have to think about and decide whether it's still really a climate-related action in terms of intending to have an effect on global climate change or whether it's something that we're choosing to do for other reasons because it might generate a lot of local benefits but isn't really necessarily about trying to change climate systems because and i think so one argument that has been made and i think there's some some relatively uh persuasive evidence is this is that continuing to pursue municipalization assuming that it's going to be something that many other places pursue hasn't proven to be true and so it doesn't necessarily look like it's a scalable solution

[76:00] and in terms of changing the system does our being able to achieve a certain level of emissions reduction locally change how excel or or the larger system does business and so i think those are the questions that might be useful to think about as you're looking at whatever solutions are being proposed not only in this case but in others as well i just thought at brett also i feel like you know something to consider on that scalable front is that you know municipalities or cities and towns aren't exactly going to have booming budgets in the next few years given the current situation so yeah that's just something i just when you said scale that's just something that comes to mind like you know money that might have been there might not be there anymore for a lot of places right yeah if i can throw a um a point out and this is something that's maybe technical perhaps it's beyond what an eab could discuss uh in a quantitative manner but i want to come back to susan's point the language of the settlement process and the

[77:01] options that exist are two different metrics whose inner comparability is not obvious so to say that we will have 100 renewable energy is not the same as saying we won't be emitting co2 renewable energy requires co2 and it requires base load so there's lots of details underneath what 100 renewable means it doesn't mean you don't emit co2 and 80 reduction in co2 emissions which actually i would prefer because it is a little bit more of a hard metric but doesn't address methane so it needs to be generalized for example you can replace coal with with natural gas and get a substantial reduction in your co2 emissions but if you don't regulate the methane ch4 your greenhouse gas forcing can actually increase so this is really important to know how these are measured and what they include and exclude in terms of the enforcement of the environmental you

[78:02] know degradation that's implicit underneath these numbers that we read about it's way beyond you know what the average public person this is why i think we all had some concerns about how the public can actually cut their way through this and make sense of choice a and choice b and what it means these metrics are complicated and they're different and they're difficult to intercompare great brand thanks for bringing it up susan i think yeah but it's not just the public it's council too and i'm afraid they're not really understanding those underlying issues that you just brought up some maybe it's part of our function is to educate them on that yeah i mean just changing 80 reduction in co2 emissions to 80 reductions in greenhouse gas emissions is a major change in the language and that and that actually was something i think this is i'm i'm not trying to advocate here but i am trying to point out

[79:00] that part of what the city used its municipalization effort as was leveraged to negotiate with excel around and that is at least as i understand it in the last week ahead of the release of the settlement excel attempted to try to hold it to co2 and we said we won't sign unless it's co2e unless it's ghgs and so it's my understanding that that is the concession that we won and that is actually sort of emblematic of this figuring out how to create systems change versus just sort of local change that we potentially are exerting across the entire system because in the state legislation it doesn't say co2e i think it just said co2 i think so and that's that's really important yeah thanks for clarifying that yeah i mean i guess i think these are all good points but i mean at this point this issue is

[80:01] before the voters i mean i don't see what role we can have in the next two months honestly or should have i mean i don't feel comfortable as a board weighing in on an issue that's you know before the voters we're all free in our you know if we want to bring staff in to learn more in our role as private citizens i guess we'd have to talk about what the sort of ethical or how are we allowed to do that or could we turn a eab meeting into you know a way to learn more about this process to help educate us and open it up to the public and the public if they're interested but it seems like at this point you know that this isn't an issue that i'd feel comfortable weighing in on as a board or really learning more about in the next few months seems like it's sort of at our of our hands and i think as as heidi's rightly pointed out i don't think we actually could call for staff to present based on the sort of go dart period

[81:00] ship has sailed i i guess what i keep coming back to is this issue impacts almost 50 of our greenhouse gas production right 48 something like 48 of our greenhouse gas comes from the way we produce electricity so it just seems like it ought to be central to our concern i think as a private citizen i work every day on this issue so i'm very concerned about it but as eab um i mean i think we should be concerned about it moving forward but at this point you know it's it's it's moved beyond any way that we have to influence it [Music] and i think um i would just note that eab will have a not dissimilar

[82:01] context to consider post november 4th that the city organization and particularly our department climate initiatives will have which is like now what um now that whatever's happened has happened what is our strategy now and so i think that the the issue is not i mean excel as a the settlement issue and how we proceed there is no will be whatever it is but as you're saying susan the issue will still remain and we'll still need to figure out what the next steps are to try to have yeah and that's why i put it on one of my virtual sticky notes i mean i think once we know one way or another what's going on then i think it would be valid to pick up again and try to figure out what the board's role in whether it's implementing the franchise agreement which has a number of public process and input steps or you know components to it or it's i guess trying if it fails figuring out what the health city's

[83:00] going to do next yeah i agree justin i think that's good good logic worth knowing there's that there's a multiplier effect on the settlement process through the transportation so it's true uh maybe half of our co2 emissions is related to our electricity but we're electrifying transportation at a very rapid speed and so you want that transportation electrification coming off of renewable electricity not off of other and so there's really a multiplying effect that needs to be made clear to people here that just buying an electric car and putting it onto a grid that is non-renewable isn't really solving many problems at the end of the day so this is much more than just electrification for electricity production but for the whole movement of society ultimately yeah because an electric car uses about half as much as what your house uses so if everybody has two electric cars in their garage we just doubled our electricity production and we doubled

[84:00] our greenhouse gas impact but the only the only thing i would just say again is what will move the entire system that's what we have to be thinking about what will move the entire system because if we don't move the entire system our moving our little piece of it will be nice but in terms of the global impact it won't be that significant always storage yeah and i think the state policy related to this as well as the lifting of the net metering cap commitment is probably more important than will lead to greater reductions in greenhouse gas emissions than whatever the city of boulder can muster well i want to make sure we have plenty of time to to review the the or to listen to the presentation that miriam uh has spent time preparing for us tonight so um

[85:02] so justin i'm sorry i sort of interviewed yeah i'm on mute um any last comments folks want to make or should we move on you should move on [Music] so miriam i think it's to you all right i'm gonna try to share my screen and you guys let me know if you can see what i see miriam just earlier you were sort of your voice was like coming in and cutting out so i don't know if there's something on your end you can do to make might be just here to proximity to my computer my my my aunts and uncles always tell me they can't hear me any when i do zoom calls so i'll try to be closer is that better yeah yeah all right um i i don't think that i exactly addressed

[86:01] the topic that uh brett posted but what i basically looked at was was how do we protect our quality in public health during wildfires because that was very present in my mind when this was all going forward um and it definitely was a public health emergency really i mean we had enormous uh measurements of of pm10 and the ozone has been going insane um over the last few weeks so uh so it's timely that we should be looking at this and basically what i'm going to go through is just showing you guys um you know information that i've tried to try to gather and and point out examples of what other cities are doing um and things that we could propose for the city of boulder to do that would be more proactive and helpful for the citizens

[87:00] in our city that's my intent anyway okay so my uh i don't know there we go so yeah i was gonna just go quickly through what's currently available available to boulder residents um then go through some examples and then uh there have been several uh presentations that have been able available through the iron waste management association enormous amounts of information coming through about the wildfires in california and how california is dealing with this very tough issue and this was even before the fires that happened this year so these these are all papers that were done because of the campfire that happened are i think that's the right fire name um a year or so ago and then uh just pulling together a few different topics for information resources that would be useful things that would be useful to use and and present to

[88:00] us the citizens that it could be helpful for them so for boulder's current information availability if you type in city of boulder and air quality the only thing that comes up is boulder county uh air quality and the the county's website is not horrible but it does not address what is happening currently and no real time information it doesn't give you the aqi it doesn't say we are having an air quality situation that needs to be dealt with right now you need to protect yourself and and that to me is astounding like people need to be able to have that information and they need to know that they need to protect themselves so um i put some links in here i'm gonna try to switch back and forth to the internet and let's see if i can do that so this is what you see when can you see the screen yeah switch okay this is what you see when

[89:00] you go to the city of boulder or the boulder county website they do give you an air quality action day sort of what you need to do if it's an air quality action day but they don't tell you that it is it didn't switch screens it did not okay see that was what i was worried about okay um all right let's see there now you guys can see yeah it talks to the air quality action days but doesn't tell you what it is if you do click on this it does take you to cdphe's website you can see that now right which gives you more much more information it tells you right here whether it's an air quality action day if you have high impacts that you need to be concerned with it does give you more information uh this is the bulk of the information

[90:00] and i'm gonna go there actually let's go back to this screen this is hard see if it brings you to the air quality um advisory there when i went there during the wildfire events the impacts were huge they were very high there was a special advisory that provided a further link about how to protect yourself what you can do as a citizen to protect yourself and it was important information it gave you a forecast it gave you a for what the air quality might be in the next few days also important information stay inside keep your air conditioning on if you can you know that kind of information [Music] so mary it struck me when we had the event this summer recently that um a site like the kovitz site that we have for boulder county which is very informative real time tells you how many people are getting sick and who's in the hospital and would have been useful to have that as a template

[91:01] maybe that's something to come back to as a very informative um uh public health uh website for the covet could be applied to the air quality right and and the example i'm about to give you was fort collins who was actually doing something like that and you you go to their website they have a immediate update on what's happening with the fire right near them and and how to connect to the incident management and how to protect yourself from smoke impacts to at this link and get updated fire information and alerts you can sign up for these things through their website it would it was really quite astounding um and uh very helpful and informative and and this is something that is not very hard for the city of boulder to do for the citizens i would highly recommend if nothing else we just advocate for improving the website and and putting something up that is useful and helpful

[92:05] is that is that a recommendation that would go to council by the way or where do you see that who needs to hear that yeah marty i was just thinking about that i i think that um again we're in a bit of new territory um i'm gonna do some research on this but i do think it's something that probably should go both to the city manager's office and to council but let me let me figure out what the right channeling of this is i i i was going to say this at the end but miriam i think this is such fantastic information and i want to think about how we bundle it together with maybe a concise recommendation statement perhaps from the eab as a whole so that i could then figure out how to do that presentation so yeah okay um so one thing that uh sorry my phone is ringing right behind

[93:01] us um uh another uh presentation that i got to attend was megan the masters from the city of fort collins gave a presentation to the air and waste management association for a lunchtime presentation and they are specifically focusing on smoked impact management in the city up there and i thought it was very interesting and and something that we could also you know look at i mean she she gave me uh full rights to to present her information to you guys at this point so why do they focus on smoke impacts because it travels it varies all the time depending on you know wind direction and heat and everything else there's different sizes of events and the particulate creates really highly hazardous air quality conditions it's something that needs to be addressed um she brought brings up you know what

[94:00] is a smoke-ready community it's one where public buildings have the filtration that they need to get rid of the smoke if it's coming into the building community members need to understand the health risks that are potentially associated with the smoking exposure and then they need to have access to the tools to protect themselves and then what fort collins is focused on on is is to make sure that the most at-risk and underserved members of the community are being addressed that the resources are available to those people i heard some talking about each home should have a a smoke-safe room basically a sanctuary room right i mean we personally in my house we changed our our filter and our air conditioner we you know i mean you not everybody knows that that's something that you need to be doing you know it's an interesting challenge because here you've got air conditioners running off of coal energy

[95:01] emitting co2 every home has an air conditioner have a safe room that's why the speed of moving to renewable is so important so you can have safe rooms that aren't also destroying the environment through the emissions of greenhouse gases right what percentage of houses in boulder actually have uh solar panels i would venture to say it's fairly large but that's a different conversation um smoke impact management of what is fort collins doing they're collaborating with partners they're looking they're putting together a wild fire smoke campaign and they're considering equity um they're putting together plans associated with emergency response and community scale monitoring which i think is a super interesting uh potential and for long term they're looking at building upgrades and and again looking at their most underserved uh population

[96:01] so the the idea of developing a partic particle monitoring plan um is really interesting it will help the city understand where the impacts are and how to protect people more readily it gives a better representation of spatial and temporal variability in the smoke from for most of the public awareness it informs the responders it's a citizen's science-based program you'll see that the the monitors that they're proposing they're super low cost people can put them in their next to their houses they can put them in their houses to see what the particular levels are in the house um it just helps people understand what exactly is happening the other example that i brought up here is the city of denver and they haven't specifically addressed the wildfire smoke problem but they are implementing a very

[97:02] robust monitoring program to help protect the air quality associated with um their oh sorry lynn oh am i supposed to take comments from lynn at this point no you're not no okay um sorry uh so the city of denver is is implementing you know this very robust uh air quality monitoring plan they're doing it around the schools they're involving they're implementing it sort of an educational component to it so that the kids coming through the schools understand what's going on here and can take part in the solution for themselves it's really an interesting program and i would high really recommend that you see what the city of denver is doing as far as their monitoring program i just i i know that they they have a a website that's accessible and easy to read it gives you

[98:00] by minute air quality information from their monitors that that everyone can access they're talking about or they just put out an rfp to create a phone app so that people can put this information on their phones and have immediate access to it i just love it i think it's really interesting um they have a link on their page on what you can do to to improve your your to improve your quality in the area and i mean just giving people information will help them make the change that they can make to make their equality better and i think that's important yeah i guess i really like what i mean denver's doing i know they came and talked at a previous uav meeting and yeah you know school started recently in the you know the principal put out a

[99:01] you know video message about you know welcome back to school and i guess he just had a really interesting comment to me with you know it was mostly about coven and how are we dealing with this new reality but he's like you know in a normal year the biggest decision i'd be facing right now is whether to let the kids outside to you know play because of the air quality this was a couple of weeks ago and it was pretty bad and like but he doesn't have any information that's local to you know anywhere near where my kid goes to school about what the air quality actually is so exactly seems like such an elegant program you know targeting kids and vulnerable people that have sort of monitoring it you know in those locations right i mean and we actually i know that casey um i believe it's casey there's there's one science teacher there that is actually doing it you know she's bringing you she has educational tools and she's bringing her kids into you know how to learn about how to

[100:01] you know how to measure how to read you know the information that she can access so i you know it's it's not rocket science it's like it's it's something that's very accessible and easy to learn about that i think is very useful mary not to throw you off track but real quick do you have any information on how many more respiratory situations occurred that brought people into emergency rooms or doctors offices hospitals so on the city of denver's website they talk about that a little bit um no they don't actually they don't actually give you the data and no i don't have those numbers specifically but that is that is information that's accessible and it can be found certainly so the next topic i was going to go to is the uh impacts from wildfire and preparedness prevention and response

[101:00] that the bay area is basically doing and this was as i said from a presentation that was was given before the last round of great big fires that were happening in california and just i mean i thought some of these um these ideas were you know really uh interesting ideas that can be used and presented to the city and and things that we can do as a city to promote more action i think um so for instance they have grants and incentives that help people pay for lost homes and and rebuild to encourage building with energy efficient homes and that reduced the climate impacts right i think you know and we haven't i mean there were fires nearby boulder you know in sunshine canyon where you know people lost their homes and what they're rebuilding was there any incentive associated with

[102:01] that i don't know miriam you're going to have to speak closer again you're cutting sorry okay um and then grant development associated with establishing clean air centers across the region where people can go and be safe and how they're taking care of their their lungs basically and they build up partnerships and regional allowance alliances and you know i looked at you know the the rack that is local to our community the regional air quality council and they had nothing on wildfires and and smoke management it's just astounding to me that that there is nothing that is being done even on a state or regional level that uh should be addressing these kinds of things i mean we get wildfires in the state consistently with the drought conditions that we have it is definitely something that needs to be looked at

[103:02] community information and resources um you know this is just stuff that uh you know tools that they've provided to their citizens that help them understand what they can do to protect themselves better they have a regional toolkit that allows people to understand what they can do i i just thought that was you know stuff there are lots of there's lots of information out there that can be shared and and if we can uh if we can encourage the city to make that more accessible to the citizens i think we've done a good thing so i was going to go into other informational tools and ideas just briefly just a few things these portable air cleaners are things that were brought up recently in in all of the wild fire smoke in california and um it's just these things that you you can buy one you can build one yourself it's it it's

[104:03] basically a filter in your house that helps you um reduce the smoky air in the house you can this is a do do it yourself air cleaner which i thought was really funny it's from maripocopa county um and it just helps people build it themselves tape it together you know and it just helps with the air cleaning it's i it's a great idea the next thing i was going to bring out was the low-cost air quality monitors there's these purple air air sensors and they're really inexpensive they measure pm10 pm 2.5 all of the particulate that get into our lungs and make us very sick and it's and it's it's not epa standard measurements but it's good enough to really get a good understanding of what um what is out there and

[105:02] whether we need to protect ourselves the greatest thing about the purple air monitors is that they have this um they have this website that if you have a monitor you implement a monitor at your house and i'm going to go to the other screen and show you this sorry now i can't see what i'm doing that's the the filter this is the purple air monitors and you click on this data and here's california over here they're still having really high high concentrations and it gives you a minute by minute average of what's happening it tells you what kind of air quality it is and and what you need to be doing being careful right and when i was first looking at this in

[106:00] colorado we were having fairly high conversation concentrations over here let's see where is that that's utah maureen how how long are some of those time series they're minute by minute yeah i know i mean back in like 10 years 20 years no i'm not sure how long it goes back yeah i don't know how how available that data is that would be something that you could learn from you know probably when you buy a purple air sensor they would tell you that and one of the things that can be very useful especially in speaking to um maybe it's council or whoever needs to know if we can characterize the event that we experienced in boulder this summer and say hey this is the worst event in all right 20 years of data we don't know maybe it's maybe it's 100 years a day if we had it um but can we say can the eab make a

[107:02] statement and say what we experienced in the summer of 2020 in boulder county was the ranks the worst over a certain period of time well i would imagine that cdphe is doing that they have monitors that are measuring this as well and so but i think that but marty's point is could we get that data to be able to make some statement everybody knows it was bad but a reference point to that historically um i'm sure that that's accessible i'm sure that we can we can get the data from the monitors that that cphe is is using i don't know about the purple air monitors i don't know how accessible that is and let me take it one step further real quick could we then say that the let's let's just say that for the sake of argument it was the worst in 25 years of available data are we then able to also say that the reason it was so bad was a fires on the west slope b fires in four columns area c the heat wave right the

[108:02] the staggering that existed that didn't mix the smoke away from the area but kept it in the area circulating for an inordinate number of weeks because then it gets into different aspects of attribution and likelihood of recurring behavior of this environmental catastrophe really for some people it was catastrophic it was a bad concerns as dakota was yeah i was going to say marty i think strategically it's interesting we you guys did some really good work on the urban heat island efforts but we we weren't able to really get um as much traction as we wanted in part because there wasn't an event that had really made that dynamic very personal whereas this this smoke piece is a very tangible personal experience although i would say also one of the things that probably a lot of people were noticing was how hot this summer was but i was just thinking that we probably

[109:00] can use the air quality issue as a bridge to start talking about heat in a way that's even more persuasive like you said right and there there are many other tools that are coming from noaa and encar as well that i'm going to show you here as well so this is just a brief on the sensors and as you can see they're really low cost like you can get one for just a couple hundred dollars and put it outside and if you have access to the data and information like right away and this is a quantity purchased i actually did this research for for the city of denver because he was looking at using these purple air monitors there um so this is really an interesting map the smoke and fire and smoke map uh this is an epa website and i'm gonna try to go there can you guys see that

[110:00] there it's initializing the map and my location is bolder and when you click on this it actually gives you what is the sensor telling you there but if i zoom out let's see if i can do that again stay close to your mic at miriam what stay close to your mic okay sorry this is like a network of cooperative observers that have these devices i know but look at this yeah this is showing you the fire it's giving you information about the fire it's giving you information about the air quality around that fire oh i don't know why that just happened sorry is this the network of people that have the purple air sensors or what am i looking at every time you see something that says a low-cost sensor that's purple air they're all over california wow i like that really cool you see this

[111:00] is the federal site that's drawing in this this private data say that again brent sorry is this a federal site that's bringing in this private data so this is an epa firearnow.gov it's a it's an epa i believe um program that is bringing in this and it says the sensor data plot at it it's a pilot that adds a new layer of air quality data from the low-cost sensors and then it has a caveat associated with it wow interesting how cool they're so they're aggregating that publicly available private data sorry there's a lot of back and forth with this okay so i just i do want to do a time check miriam also okay i'm just gonna let i've got two more

[112:01] things to show you this this one is from noah and it's an experimental smoke model and this is what it produces so when i i did a screenshot when i don't open this one up and it shows you where the fire and smoke is traveling so you can actually see like in real time what's happening and then it's and then it's also giving you forecasts again experimental so i don't know how much we can use it and then this i learned from um from again doing research for the denver group these guys are doing forecasting of air quality um conditions for the front range see this is a contract with cd phds so they're actually giving you forecasts for what the air quality is going to be like in the next few days through this website and it's all different pollutants pm 2.5

[113:00] ozone there's a whole bunch of different there's a drawdown here that gives you a lot of different options so these are the resources that i found you know just doing a pretty quick search there's tons of stuff out there oh sorry hello [Music] can you guys hear me yeah okay now i can't see anything oh yeah there okay all right so i'm going to stop sharing and we can just discuss very nice marine thank you that's great so i would just note by the way that one of the things that always gets boulder's attention is when fort collins does something better or new yeah um sorry it seemed like long mom was doing it better than us we don't have to go all the way to fort collins it gets showing up for the air quality

[114:02] no the other thing that i found interesting about fort collins is not only do they have an entire group focused on air quality in their city program they have an advisory board focused on air quality well i think um it may be because fort collins has had more smoke impacts in the last decade or so that they've taken this a little bit further but um i think i think what you've put together miriam is a very compelling case for why we have to start taking this more seriously i guess what i'd like to think with all of you about is how do we put this together in a somewhat concise um document and statement because you know it's just sending the the deck of slides won't necessarily do it obviously so thoughts and comments about

[115:01] how we could put this together so that i could figure out how to then get it to the city so i i can try to craft something you know that's much more concise and just bullet points and bits of information and then if you guys want to just add on to it based on what i put together then that's fine and i think maybe what we could do is i'll do a little bit of thinking and checking about how we then take it to the city and what what pathways and perhaps we put this on the agenda for next meeting justin and that maybe at that point the the board could do some kind of a formal statement or recommendation or something that you would sort of attach to this report um that could then go probably both to council and to staff yeah that seems reasonable it seems like it would be great if we could have some sort of draft of something to discuss at the next meeting to try to

[116:00] move it forward i mean it seems like you know just saying you feel it's important that boulder do something and here's a couple examples of you know relatively easy to you know sort of the minimum level of effort is just collect some information and get it out to the public in a user-friendly way yeah so just a thought on this um i mean we've got two of our six sort of priority items from the um details of what we were recommending i guess i should say what we were suggesting to counsel for our 20 20 21 activities um air quality and heat really are both captured a storyboard would be wonderful i mean less words and more images you know where you almost have a movie that takes us through the summer of 2020. you know it takes us through the beginning of it where we were all

[117:00] you know clean air and we had a very snowy winter and spring and then all of a sudden you know the fires and the heat really starts in late july and all of a sudden the fires begin and and to create a narrative a story that's visual uh would be much more impactful than a bullet list i mean i love what you had marian many resources very practical but if we want to catch the attention of the public and maybe even the council turning it into a storyboard that is a visual i mean you may be familiar with storyboards that go through animations of with only limited language that takes a person through a narration of what was just experienced right i think it's i think it's useful to talk about what was just experienced to give the you know to help them understand you know how we can make an impact because of the current situation but i think it's also helpful to bring up ideas about simple things that can be done

[118:01] that will make will have a major impact that will do something useful so both i mean i guess if you can if you can create the excitement if i can use that word excitement isn't quite the recognition of what just happened in a visual sense that's compelling marty would you like would you like to put something like that together well yeah that's a great question since i opened my mouth obviously um and and i'm hoping that there's some skill sets either within um that we could advise whether their staff um or other people who are so inclined to do things like this that we can advise maybe find a content material for them finding images that can be created and provide a short spiffy pithy language that transitions from one image to another that takes us through the summer of 2020. there is no staff that that will do that for us am i right brent let's not uh go to what resources are available yet

[119:01] let's talk about what the i what the right strategy would be and i think um i think miriam you've done a fantastic job of starting to build the the informational foundation and marty's now talking about a kind of presentational aspect of this and then i think there's a kind of there's so sort of frankly a political aspect then how does all that get included but um so marty i think um this is a great idea i think the first step is finish the process of compiling information in miriam i think you've committed to doing that first step right to then handle and marty i would be happy to to think with you about the presentational aspects and maybe for you to identify some what you think of as really good examples of that and that maybe even you and i could start as a draft for the board putting together this kind of storyboard that you were just laying out i was taking some notes i thought they were really fantastic and then then we have things to discuss which i need to do

[120:01] some research for you about which is like well then what do we do with this once we get this fantastic thing so i'm finding certain images i won't worry whether they're public domain yet or not but you know some of this you can create on an apple movie honestly all right you just put nice images in you can set it to music right uh you know earth wind and fire if you want to really get the right um band behind this thing and you know you could really make a big impact you know you start that and then you go into okay now here's your resources here's what you can do to prevent this from affecting the health of our community wonderful first you inspire them with their eyes as somebody who's almost 60 i can say this without worrying that i'm going to be charged as kind of ageist but i think that marty's demonstrating that old dogs can learn some new tricks here so um so marty i think i'm i'm up with you here on this i think that the idea of creating more compelling presentation stuff is really key on a lot of levels on a lot of topics and so i'm with you to start exploring that um marty the other

[121:00] thing though i do want to put in your bucket maybe this is something mike that you would also but others we do need to make this connection to climate change so it's not just about how we had a bad summer and we should be worried about others it's like this is going to happen it's going to get worse it's going to compound other issues like urban heat and we need to be using this as a bridge i think to also be talking about how we need to be managing urban heat also um so and marty you're uniquely well positioned because of who you work for i think to help us make that case too susan you're you're muted susan about that um it was a great presentation miriam thank you i was also hoping to learn more about like what are the key um

[122:00] causes of the demise of our air quality and what can what can we do to bring down the root cause in in addition to uh working on dealing with the end effects occasionally specifically around the wildfire and the particulate associated with that i mean we can talk about ozone on a different aspect as well i mean there's certain certainly our energy systems are creating a back a very high background level of air pollutants there's no question about that that they they need to be pointing out and raising that up and it's interesting how we've sort of lost touch with or we haven't talked much about local air quality issues caused by our energy systems that much it's been so much about ghgs over the last few years but i think we are in this unique new territory that we're going to face very significant air quality impacts because of wildfires now probably very consistently going forward

[123:02] so this is again i think this is fantastic work and really groundbreaking i think for both this board and for the city in terms of how you're bringing it forward so let's take this as the next steps and we're amazing i knew this time was going to fly by miriam's going to put something together we could marry him if you want to post a draft we can we can create that sort of google doc that's publicly viewable that you can post into so that maybe there's even something posted that people can look at ahead of the next meeting if people want to make comments or additions there that we could bring that forward to be discussed and perhaps brought into some sort of near final form after next meeting and then marty you and i and whoever else hopefully others too would be interested can start thinking about how we put that into a presentation format great sounds great well good so i am if we go back to the

[124:02] the agenda here i did want to we're basically there i wanted to take one last look at the mural board we did have one more topic here which was an update on the greenways advisory committee maybe we could do that right now if you don't mind just to see if there's anything that mike wants to throw in about that topic before we do that i'm happy to do that actually so that that meeting was actually really great um it ended up running long but we had some really good discussions and ultimately you know we're the the plan we were asked to review was basically the projects that are laid out over the next year right and whether you know in the future and whether or not we agreed that they were good projects and there was unanimous um like buy-in from everyone that like the plan itself was great and we issued a statement saying that we are supported the plan but we also um drafted a couple of suggestions for them

[125:00] um after a really good conversation with um staff and everyone and um those are basically that you know we agree the master's plan is great we go forward but we um also said that there is we got into this long discussion about the inter-department like departmental nature of the greenways um program and that there's all these programs contributing but there isn't really anyone in charge and there are sort of like i brought up some things and some other people brought up some issues around things that was like oh well who's in charge of that i've noticed changes and like in these things on our greenways over the last year you know we talked about like the amount of litter or things like that or erosion and people were like well there's not really anyone so it kind of gets muddled and so we made a recommendation that we support the plan but that i'm just looking at my notes that we recommended that they rehire the forward position of the greenways coordinator that was limited and eliminated in 2018 to sort of tie all these departments together and then um we also spent some time

[126:01] talking about um the funding of the greenways program and the fundings you know um it's 28 the transportation transportation fund stormwater flood management fund is 28 and the lottery fund is 44 and so then we talked about how like um [Music] there's other departments that have tie-ins to greenways like open space and parks and recreation etc that don't actually contribute um to the budget it seems like and so we also recommended that they like that we for all these people who are sort of influenced by the greenways program and bought up against that maybe there be consideration of having a more equal pitch in fiscally and seeking new funding resources to potentially expand the program and um fill that position of the green rays coordinator and at least that be investigated moving forward so that was really the takeaway and the suggestions we made in addition to just um supporting the plan but it was a really good discussion i really enjoyed it and learned quite a bit about being ways that like

[127:00] hadn't actually been made um you know i've been on a couple of those meetings now and that hadn't really come out before um so i think it was actually a really informative meeting that's great mike and what's the what's the frequency of those meetings do you know you know it doesn't i think this is the third one i've been involved in but i do not have to look back at my calendar but they seem to be pretty infrequent like every you know like every six to eight months it seems like we've had one or something like that maybe but there was also it seemed like a gap of a year where we didn't so i'm not to be honest i'm not sure if it's a regular cadence it doesn't seem to be but um it was a good discussion and a good meeting and oh and one other recommendation we made was um that um there's then you know we all came to the we all unanimously agreed that it seems like over the last couple years there's like some really great spots in our greenways that have um where we've started to see

[128:00] like deterioration of whether it be stream banks or just overcrowding or insufficient um trash disposal things like that around high use areas and that that you know the greenways committee and if they do hire this new coordinator should really look at some of these areas and make sure that the usage that the areas are seeing is still like aligned with the amount of resources being provided to them because they're starting it seems like there's some disconnects people felt like on the panel between the amount like certain areas of getting really high usage but maybe they don't have the resources for that usage as it's picked up over the last few years and stuff like that yeah yep mike that kind of reminds me of last month's presentation regarding the chautauqua area use of that um obviously it's much more than a greenway it's a park preserve open space and but its uses have overwhelmed the resources

[129:00] mike how would you how would you compare the greenways that you that you learned about in your meeting in terms of scale and use and use and and how it serves our community compared to what chautauqua brings to our community you know i think that's an interesting question so i think you know shitakua is i think they're both kind of hallmarks of like boulder right like um because you think about the greenways they're all like the riparian paths and corridors right and like um you know we started off the meeting saying like why we were interested in like participating in this role from another board and i was saying that like there's some of my favorite parts of boulder like riding along all these different creek paths with my daughter on her bikes and exploring them and you know everyone kind of felt that way and they're like a really interesting foundational part of boulder um so similar to chautauqua and in that aspect they're kind of like something very unique and very great about boulder um but they're just distributed up through everywhere so i um you know i think i think about how many times i go to chautauqua a year and i think about how often i interact with

[130:00] the greenways right and it's like greenways are way more so i think but they're not like necessarily viewed as like some as one great like monument to like open space but there's something that people interact with i think more regularly and so sometimes they get a little bit forgotten is it's just like riding down the sidewalk but we and they get a little more taken for granted i think is maybe what i would say yeah no i hear you you know just a quick point chautauqua is accessed increasingly by cars it's so dismaying you know when you see all the cars backed up not only up and down the street you know baseline but into the park and then in the neighborhoods that go you know back into toward town it's probably you know 100 cars or more just for the folks who go there whereas the greenways i think people walk and bike there i don't think there's much car used to get onto the greenway system is there there really isn't and you know they and if you look at the greenways map um you know they they cut through every neighborhood in boulder like or at least you know everyone's got one close to them so i think

[131:00] where shitake was just one spot right and so these are like a yeah a great network um so yeah i think um i think there's a lot to gain from having like a coach like that position filled the coordinator position filled to sort of start thinking you know where all these resources intersect with the green waves and how do we best you know make that work any greenways actually intersect chautauqua uh i don't remember off the top of my head i don't know that any of the greek no i don't think any of the greenway paths themselves actually do not really yeah yep yeah i could forward the map around i i was looking at it again if everyone wants to see it i can send it sometime thank you yeah well terrific thank you mike and uh mike do you feel comfortable continuing to serve as the eab rep to that board yeah i'd like to yeah that's fine if everyone else is comfortable with it i'm happy too

[132:03] great um that was great thanks mike sure i i'm glad that we have that example too because it it could very well be that as i mentioned earlier there might be a similar kind of advisory or citizens group that eab may be asked to have a representative on around this collaborative learning circle around land recovery so there could be another example like that coming forward uh um i was hoping that maybe i could just do one last visit of this um mural board before we close up tonight is that okay with you it's fine with me i guess we got nine minutes in our okay scheduled time all right oops um hold on one second nine minutes away from being on zoom for 12 hours today literally without a break except for

[133:00] when i turned off my camera ahead and ran into the map i'm so sorry the new world record so i'm going to just do a last chair screen with you all of um i've done a little bit more um sorting labeling of the mural board we did earlier and so this doesn't have to be the end statement of this but i i wanted to just kind of get a we won't try to move these onto the board but i just want to get a sense from you all of this if this feels like these are the kind of primary issues that you see um you're wanting to work on and be paying attention to over this next six to 12 months i say six to 12 months because of course our context changes significantly in some ways if the city goes back into full operation if there's sort of a lifting of all these restrictions etc so the world is you know it's contingent so anyway i've

[134:01] tried to categorize these air quality urban heat energy systems change susan in response to what you said i i sort of used climate emergency response to be a kind of broader term around the cmap piece and mike i took a little liberties here and you can tell me to pull this out but we have done a fair amount of discussion about not just soil health but the sort of sequestration and the kind of carbon drawdown potential um that that that work might create you feel comfortable kind of lumping that into that title absolutely yeah so first i guess the most important question is is there anything missing like is there any other topic or theme that you feel like um is something that eab should be tracking and positioning itself around that's not sort of shown in this set well just a quick point had this summer delivered some thunderstorm action or something of the sort of 2013 september we would be having on here

[135:02] flooding as a concern in our river systems and risks of more intense rains producing more intense runoffs and we don't have anything that actually speaks to flooding as a concern which is also a climate change symptom justice here obviously was determined by dryness heat drought and fires so we shouldn't forget to flood risk have we written this in 2013 flooding would have been on here yeah good point marty um uh we just need a summer we have a big rain on snow event and then drought and then we'll have both on the it'll be great yeah well and it's interesting uh you could say probably the same thing about how we didn't have any big fires in our of our own here so we weren't talking about that either i guess it's you know like extreme water resources we seem to be

[136:00] going back and forth between too much and too little um you know we've heard about the volatility of weather patterns has been increasing and so you know we're getting both tails from time to time yeah tail risks are probably increasing on both ends other issues that people want to make sure we throw in here i still think storm water is important and i feel like i've pushed this in years past and it's never risen to the top but if we're trying to lift i'm sorry this is okay this is not gonna uh it's obviously getting late here

[137:00] storm water flooding fire anything else and and not not to be any a wordsmith here but i i don't know that we get the spirit of what we need to do in the energy system space with the word change it really is a revolution we're really requiring something to change on a very short time scale and and and with the aim of preservation of a certain form of life really and so really it's energy system revolution more than it is change um the urgency is not quite there when we use the word change but i don't want to alarm anyone with the word revolution i mean we're not we're not socialists are we anybody else want to vote strongly for using the word revolution instead of change i mean i think marty makes a good point but i think probably can go either way for the sake of just the plot today but i understand i think it's very valid though because a change is just like a tweak perhaps

[138:01] right we're not talking about that we're talking about like systemic yeah whopping of energy systems that's a better way of saying it mike i agree yep all right very good well i want to respect our time um uh so justin i'll let you close but i just want to thank everybody here um for two and a half more hours of zoom like thank you um yeah that's your thing but my daughter brought me tacos so that's once again uh welcome susan for uh to your now second meeting i guess and uh and so and then uh justin thanks so much for letting me be um so intrusive this meeting i typically we would actually have a facilitator for our retreats so it wouldn't be me but um i'll be next next meeting it'll be entirely back in your hands this is um great oh this is a great meeting thanks everyone thanks everyone

[139:00] i enjoyed it and yeah see you everyone in a month yeah do you you need a normally uh clothes i guess we are adjourned and i don't hear i mean there's nothing else to say yeah let's go all right thanks everyone bye mike take care