May 5, 2021 — Environmental Advisory Board Regular Meeting

Transcript

Captions from City of Boulder YouTube recording.

[0:01] i just need to slip away for one second sure this will take me a few minutes anyway okay so we are recording [Laughter] ah very good well good evening everyone um we are very pleased that you could join us um and as a part of the city's process for these online digital meetings we have to be thoughtful about how we are creating both a meaningful and transparent engagement process and promoting online security so we have the following rules for all city uh public meetings the meetings are uh called to conduct order to conduct the business of the city of boulder

[1:00] activities that disrupt delay or otherwise interfere with the meetings are prohibited the time for speaking or asking questions may be limited in this case the public comment periods for environmental advisory board are three minutes no person shall speak except when recognized by the person presiding and no person shall speak for longer than that time allotted each person shall register to speak at the meeting using that person's real name any person believed to be using a pseudonym will not be permitted to speak at the meeting if someone comes into the meeting with a telephone number or a 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 except for city officials employees and invited speakers or presenters all other participants will be 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 only with

[2:00] the host and it will be used only for technical or online platform related questions if an attendee attempts to use chat for any other reason other than seeking assistance from the host the city reserves the right to disable that individual's access to chat and only the hosts and individuals designated by the host will be permitted to share the screen during the meeting and with that marty i'll turn it over to you okay great well again welcome everybody um thank you for that um information that we all get to hear every every month before meetings um let's first maybe start by doing a um well let's call the meeting order and um officially and let's see if we can do an approval of the minutes there any comments on the menace from the last month's meeting in april um but if you want to go ahead and vote

[3:00] i think that's fine i i don't think i quite caught that a little bit garbled house we lost a board member we lost iran um i don't see him as a participant oh you are correct oh there he is okay great technical difficulties we were in there all the time um iron i'm just going to start off here by asking for approval of the minutes from the april meeting um and if there are no objections then i'll ask for a second um i actually had a correction sorry i'm i'm opening them up um exciting miriam we don't usually have to go for it [Laughter] um they're long i know they were long yeah um we did a lot last month um

[4:01] and and oh that was the wrong link sorry i should have been organized for this in the minutes um uh now i remember it was uh you see we were talking about um i'm finding it now i'm not finding it i'm sorry you guys was it in the air quality section i thought it was but i'm not seeing

[5:00] it i apologize no worries okay then i'm i move to approve oh we got a minute do you remember roughly i mean i'll help you i may actually be confusing two different documents that i read and it doesn't look like it's in this one sorry guys okay any other um comments need for revision hearing none and i heard the approval from miriam if someone would second that i'll second that all right susan thank you so let's look at the agenda in terms of the public participation um we have a public participant online looks like we do lynn siegel is going to um speak to us for

[6:00] a three minutes welcome lynn then then did you want to uh speak as a part of public participation tonight yeah i just came out the pentagon rushed in and took a while to get me logged in yeah um yeah i would like to say something about pre uh saving pre-existing housing in boulder as was marked at marpa house last night um they're going to redo marpa house into um you know thousand dollar room bedrooms you know uh 16 times three of those 48 people times 2 000 a month you know and and you know marpa house marpa house is fine you know my house is fine it needs to have a contractor that doesn't want to do pop brand new

[7:01] construction it's desperately in need of that and i'm never gonna find one like that you know so what are you the eab gonna do to find me a contractor when he's got plenty of money to put up a new uh you know have you seen across from the chamber of commerce there's an army of high-end condos there like they're like on every corner why would anyone want to work on a pre-existing house they need subsidy to work on my house because they have and we have to get something going on at cu where they're going to have programs for creative architecture for guys to do you know or women to do jobs that are complicated you know and and what are you gonna do about alpine balsam coming up you know like that hospital should not be taken down i mean the medical pavilion they could have sprayed insulation on

[8:01] the outside and put new siding on the side if it was low on its energy efficiency they didn't need to friggin get it for 40 million dollars or however many million they spent of city money it was a high end indoors have you ever been in the boulder medical pavilion it was high-end stuff and they freaking gutted it and this happened in boulder on eab's watch why and now they're going to carry that hospital out you know it's a beautiful integrated system there the pavilion into the hospital the hospital a little bit straighter lines that's the only difference you can change that there's still the whole parking lot to put a new stuff on but you know there's got to be more creativity in boulder for doing redoing pre-existing housing and pre-existing freaking hospitals you know that's a lot of carbon footprint to move

[9:02] uh on truck all of that heavy stuff of alpine balsam hospitals that's like unbelievable so where's the ab on these issues to the city council just saying so that's my two thanks thank you lynn appreciate you calling in any other public participants i don't see any you know you don't see me yeah now i do my mistake hi paul hi um yeah how's your crawl space doing [Laughter] i think we live in proximity so we know we're talking about yes yeah and good to see susan back um i'm not back i'm still on the road oh you look call me i'm at a friend's house nice um so i've been following a lot

[10:02] going on in the state there's a lot going on to legislators going on at the air quality control commission and the public utilities commission but what i'd like eab to be looking at is the electric resource plan that excel is filed at the pc and light eab to push on the excel and the pc electricity in this proceeding and i have to admit i don't know how you're going to do that catch here paul you're mike oh boy sorry start back where you were talking about excel in the puc paul okay um yeah i'm sorry i should have had my headset on um i'd like uh eap to be following

[11:00] what's going on with the electric resource plan at the puc and pushing excel and pushing the puc to make sure that boulder has a path to 100 renewable electricity by 2030. we're still having audio issues it's just a bit low volume paul all right is this any better yes thank you i'm sorry i apologize i should have been better prepared um so i'd i'd like for eab to take an interest in the electric resource plan that's going on at the puc um so i don't know that that's on your agenda probably not for tonight but maybe at some point you guys can take a look at uh something that's very important to

[12:00] all of colorado's future including boulder and that's excel is decarbonizing but we'd like them to go faster and further we like boulder to be able to accomplish our goal of 100 renewable electricity so that's that's where i'm at i i'm honored to follow my friend lynn siegel and comments and it's always an adventure thank you well thank you appreciate appreciate your calling let's see and i think that's our only two public participants i don't see any others on my screen so with that i think we're ready to go to our agenda for the meeting thank you again for those that called in lynn and paul we have as a first item on the agenda to return to what we were sort of

[13:00] finishing on last month which was discussing the sort of existing climate commitment document um that that has been shared and hopefully you've had a chance to look at it i know it came a little bit abrupt maybe last meeting it's worth circling back to it the city is working you on revisiting some aspects of this it's informative stages still for and and brett gave us some insight on that last month um what i would like to do if this is okay i mean i've jotted a couple of points that struck me that i'd like to just chat about i don't know how much time we would have a lot of from looking at this what do you think maybe 15 to 25 minutes max brett we we could go even up two and a half an hour with us you think we have a half hour space okay that'd be great um and maybe i'll just share what i had put in my notes and and if that's a good point for discussion then let's do it and others may have their own points and we'll bring those forward

[14:00] um so you might recall from the document 2017 there are four action areas that are called out in it and the most extensive one in in the um climate action plan is on energy which makes sense the energy aspect makes sense because the stated goal in that document is for an 80 reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 for the city as i understand it and the vast majority arises from the energy that we use to just do our work and live our lives so this gets very much in our community now my read of of the plan is to achieve that by three activities um and these need to be kind of going on at the same time so three simultaneous not sequential and this isn't necessarily in the order of importance but it could be the first one is to improve efficiency

[15:00] in how the energy is used in everything that we do the second was to electrify energy use in what we how we do our work and how we live our lives and the third one was to replace coal and natural gas with a wind solar green energy if you will um clean energy let me call it that i think that's the phrase that more commonly used not clean energy for the grid electricity so here's so that that's just a summary of what i read um and here are the points that i wanted to be able to discuss a little bit um the document estimates that as of 2015 the total electricity usage the equivalent that would include automobile mobility and the actual electrical uses in in um in in homes and in in commercial buildings was somewhere between 285 to 380 megawatts

[16:03] um that's residential commercial and mobility that's how much electricity would be the equivalent usage um to do what we've been doing at least as of 2015. and so i had a couple of questions on that one and that was how much has and i don't know that anyone has the numbers here so this is kind of to brett um if he has some insight since that 2015 estimate how much has the boulder energy consumption um now we've had five years and what is the trajectory for the next five years what i'm trying to get out here brett a little bit is you know are we able to are we in the right direction are we reducing our total electrical equivalent electric usage um or are we kind of running uphill that is to say we're actually growing the city is growing it's electricity use is growing so we even have a harder

[17:00] pull push up the hill so to speak any thoughts it's been a while since i've looked at the numbers but as i remember it the last time i saw them we are we are flat or maybe slightly decreasing around residential energy use electricity use but increasing around the commercial side um our per capita use is is trending in the right direction but i think one of the things that you know plays into this discussion is what is the source of the of the electrons that you're using so yes conservation is always an important thing to try to emphasize but i think more of the emphasis has been heading towards changing the source energy you know in other words reducing the amount of energy generated by coal and natural gas so sort of depaul's comments from earlier it's really important

[18:00] that we be focusing on that i also just while i'm talking to say this whole issue of the um the balance of energy and where it's coming from is really going to be one of the center pieces of the excel partnership citizen advisory group and so while i think it is certainly an interest area of the of the environmental advisory board it's going to be an explicit focus of that partnership group so just wanted to make sure that everyone's aware that there's yet another city advisory group that's going to be working quite extensively on that got it maybe let's take some other inputs on this topic for the moment susan you have to definitely go yeah i guess as i i took a closer look at the 2017 plan i reflected on all the changes that have taken place since 2017 that i hope are reflected in the 2021 plan and i just captured some of those number one the 2017 plan refers frequently to

[19:00] the municipalization of our electricity grid right and that's definitely changed we're now part of the excel franchise and as a result i think we really need to listen to what paul had to say about gee what are we going to do to make sure um we provide oversight for excel and the puc to get to our goals of 100 renewable electricity by 2030 and 100 megabytes sorry megawatts of um locally produced electricity and so that's one change to change and and i invite others to like come up with these changes is that the cost of renewables has come down so significantly since 2017 that it's actually more cost effective than fossil based generation and so that should make a significant plan in our 2021 climate plan um number three of course probably should have been number one and that's accelerating climate change

[20:01] right even in 2017 it didn't seem as dire as it clearly is right now and and brett i know that you know you have in the first introduction that we went over a couple of months ago you pointed that out um but i'm constantly pulling my hair out that we're talking about things like environmental stewardship which is awesome but that's kind of like saying hey my front yard needs mowing but my house is on fire right you know like this is climate action is what we need right now relative to accelerating climate change um other things that have changed is both colorado and the united states as a result of having a new administration we're in a much friendlier environment with regard to investing not only in renewable energy but big changes to our transportation system and i hope to see that reflected in the 2021 plan um

[21:03] number five is covid covet has changed so much it's the reason we're meeting online here tonight right it's the reason people don't have to commute to work every day and i think taking advantage of some of the opportunities that covet has given us to learn how to do things more virtually could have great benefits environmentally and i hope we address that in the 2021 plan and last but not least is just increased density in boulder you know i'm driving across the united states right now i've currently made it to santa fe yesterday i came through oklahoma and i was in a city called ada oklahoma which it's just buildings all the way out to the sidewalk and no trees and downtown ada it was 87 degrees and when i got just outside ada where there's actually rolling hills and grasslands and trees the temperature dropped to 77 degrees

[22:04] it was so poignant to me that the whole issue of heat islands and the impact of density on our client our very local climate is huge and that's why i think it is important for us in our climate plan to get more involved with more green biophilic development because i think that has now become a critical part uh in boulder and around the world of our climate action so those are some things i that have really changed since 2017 that i'd like to see us embracing in the new plan that's great susan thank you thanks for those thoughts we're going to come back to a couple of them that you called out very nicely stated um miriam do you have some thoughts on on this topic not specifically i mean i'm looking forward to seeing what what brad has to do i mean we've already heard snippets of what is being presented for the 2021 plan um and i know the city has already done

[23:02] an extensive amount of work on this um and i'm looking forward to to seeing uh more about what the city has done towards us yeah definitely all right miriam we'll come back we'll circle around again because there's a few more elements that are really intriguing in the 2017 aaron i know you you know your expertise is efficiency and and architectural design um maybe you have some particular views on this question of which is number one on there three parallel activities the energy usage reduction by increased efficiency i think you're a mute that's okay yep it should be lower it should be in the lower left hand corner of the screen if you move your

[24:02] right mine is when i click on my image in the upper right hand corner there's a mute or a mute a little blue oh heidi are we having heidi are we we may have uh the mute on okay hold on for who for her oh it's kind of the hazing we do for new members okay okay sorry uh heidi i also got my okay good i found my chat disabled and i couldn't go mute myself yeah you know i'm so sorry i didn't when you jerry miller when you logged back in i forgot to make you a co-host again and so for um for participants speaking at public participation we typically only allow them to unmute

[25:02] themselves during that portion of the meeting okay okay well actually so i was listening to all the stuff you were that you guys were saying and um i guess what i would like to discuss more is i think this goes back to what brad said in the last meeting is like what is what we as a city can do realistically to address these problems and i was almost thinking like going in a different direction is like should we propose a budget to lobby the state to be like because if we can achieve something as a city maybe we can achieve it at the county or state level but i wonder if i don't know if it's even legal but yeah set up a lobby budget so the city can go and you know lobby the state for changes that we don't necess we cannot necessarily

[26:01] implement just ourselves we need like a bigger budget and that will be more like at the state level i don't know what do you think about that brett i don't know if there's something that has been ever proposed or discussed or if it's a dumb idea oh i i'd like to i'm going to do a global response to all the things that are said but i've just written down i have some thoughts for you on that that's a really interesting idea okay okay um yeah i think that's all i want to say for now we'll come back to this aaron that's actually an interesting point that never crossed my mind um that's the scientist to me i suppose you know is kind of grind grind forward but that's a really interesting thought so here's another aspect that i read that i wondered um about um according to the report um as of 2015 17 megawatts of installed solar existed in boulder which at that time was a meeting about

[27:00] locally meeting about five percent of the total electricity need and that that's also accounting for the mobility electrification equivalent um and it goes on to estimate though the report that boulder rooftop generation capacity is over 500mb that struck me that as of 2015 the total electricity consumption including mobility was much less than 500 megawatts so it struck me that hey you know is it back to here non-use of the word what is realistic is it realistic that the city could really ramp up um its incentives or it's it's you know it's advocacy for building out a solar production capacity to help meet the electrification needs

[28:00] now i think that 17 megawatts struck me as a small number i think a lot has changed since 2015 and back to brett number one do you know roughly where we are today and and where are we in terms of achieving something close to 500 megawatts if that is actually within the reach according to the report yeah so um i want to just illustrate a point here um around the numbers so to quickly to your point so we had 17 megawatts then we've been pushing really hard on that since that time i think we're over 50 now we we've i mean there's been a lot of movement in the marketplace the city's done a lot so we're i think we're on task or on track to hit our targets there but and i think you know there's a lot of people who said well we should just put more money into solar and it's the same issue really around the issue of electrification so it's really useful if you just think about how many structures there are

[29:00] and how much it costs so in the case of solar let's just say that um we only needed to spend ten thousand dollars per structure to actually get solar in place there's 000 uh single-family structures in boulder that's 400 million dollars so it's not like there's any way that the city has enough money to do that and that the expenditure that we're even calling on individuals to make in many cases is beyond their means or beyond their current priorities so it gets back to this issue that hernan was talking about which is how do we move whole systems and so in the case of electrification i think maybe susan's heard me say this we one of the we did this very extensive process in 2015-16 where we looked at how what what it would take to enable all the houses in boulder to switch from natural gas to electricity and it was an extremely instructive process because we built one of the first and most prominent incentive systems around elect heat pump

[30:02] based high efficiency heat pump based electrification and we increased adoption by 400 in that effort which meant that we went from 50 installations a year to 200 installations a year and we need to have something more like 1500 to 2000 a year if we're really talking about making that shift and so we really need to be thinking about this as a sort of society-wide infrastructure reinvestment and how you mobilize the capital in the market to make that happen and some of us have suggested for example around electrification that we should make the utility pay for that process because it's ultimately going to build their base so rather than making it this enormous financial choice that i have to make personally and that i don't really get to reap the whole benefits of because i probably won't be in my house for 30 years you associate that expense to the structure and let each successive owner of that structure carry part of that cost so i think that there are these strategies that we can employ

[31:00] for making this infrastructure change but it we've thought in the past i think we've over relied on this notion if i can just get her nod to do this then everything will happen no a lot of times that's creating too much of a burden on a single individual and a single owner brett that's helpful and i'm gonna go to susan right away susan in your hands up i see you there um rhett you know i've seen as we've all seen housing developments since 2015 in in the boulder area infills and some more substantial but i don't see solar as being on all of those um does the city require new builds to actually at least for the new builds let the builder pay or require the builder to provide and have it folded into the costs i guess of that structure or somehow or another their new build to have solar yeah in boulder we have we in 2014 we set in motion a code updating process which arrives at

[32:01] basically a net zero requirement for all major remodels and new constructions by 2031. and so it's already getting to the place in fact there's a threshold now it might be a 3 000 foot square foot structure where you basically can't build it without making it net zero and so that might be with solar or any number of other different passive house design or what have you so we're we're in the in the transition to that but susan did you want to make some comment around this yeah it's hard to get to net zero without doing solar but some people are still doing it i see i see that kind of development in my neighborhood and the fact of the matter is at least according to carolyn elam is you know most people there are very few houses being built in boulder that are less than 3 000 square feet however commercial buildings which generate i can't remember the percentages now i think residences are something like 30 and

[33:01] commercial buildings are like the rest and apartments count as commercial buildings and we all know that there are lots of apartment buildings going up in boulder don't have kind of the same requirements and i think there's an opportunity for improvement there but i also wanted to comment on what ernan was saying and that is basically um there are many things that we should be doing at the state level in fact boulder is is currently um intervening in the electric resource plan with the puc um because that's super important for us in order for us to reach our goals in fact there is legislature that's being put forth by steve benberg right now to get us past the 120 percent limit the limit to how much solar you can put on your house which is based on 120 percent of what you did the uh what you use the year before so that it opens up opens things up to people actually putting more solar on their house and i i do think that

[34:01] being more active in at least state if not federal kinds of restrictions that are hamstringing us in terms of being able to take the kind of aggressive climate action we'd like to um is super important thanks susan miriam you have any thoughts on some of that i'm familiar with the county at least i and i would imagine the city participating in most uh statewide legal aqcc actions anything related to um the city's involved i i know they are because i hear them speaking and providing input and comment all the time so it's um i'm i i would like to hear what brett has to say as far as you know how the the city is participating in government action or communication with excel or or

[35:02] whatever i'm sure it's quite extensive um but uh i mean yes all of the comments that everybody's making are very valuable and um and yes we i think we have much to do to make our electrification of the city more viable and and i think that the city of boulder is really working hard to make that happen maybe marty i could just pick up a few of these comments and then so but to so to turn on to your point yes that we actually have been very actively engaging in policy advocacy at both the state and federal level and the city actually retains a lobbyist in washington dc as well as lobbyists at the state so it's it's very legal and it's a part of the business but i think we have been having the same conversation internally which is that given the pace of change that has to happen and the scale of change that has to happen

[36:00] we increasingly think that policy work may be one of the most important places for us to engage um as opposed not as opposed to but balanced against things like local incentive programs to sponsor energy efficiency which you know just hit a very few number of properties i want to make sure i do say that we had actually hoped to bring to you the draft of the memo that we're taking to council for the june 8 meeting for this session we weren't quite ready to do that so you're going to get that in this next month and then we'll discuss that at the next meeting it's not going to be a plan i just want to prepare you for this it's going to be an update on our current strategy development because we're working on that full plan that we'll be bringing to council in december but part of why we're not trying to bring a plan is because we're really going to propose essentially a very significant shift in how we approach climate action very much in keeping with what you've been saying

[37:00] which is that we have to move beyond kind of just locally focused essentially incremental efforts and think about how we're going to help support larger systems change and we think that means some different approaches than we've had in the past so that's going to be the essence of that i do want to note that one of the things that has changed and susan i thought your list was really great between when we wrote that last plan and now is the recognition that the energy systems are still a very important driving factor of climate change but but they are by means the only thing and as you were saying our our our natural landscapes are also a significant part of this both how we've decarbonized landscapes through how we farm and and ranch and things and also the ways that landscapes could be a part of taking carbon back out and then we also dramatically underestimated the contributions that consumption and material economies are contributing and that we now sort of see that each of these three areas energy systems ecosystems and material economy are

[38:01] contributing roughly a third to this process and so one of the issues around this is that our accounting systems for greenhouse gases really are biased towards looking at energy systems and they don't well capture these other effects so that's another area where we're having to think about consumption based emissions accounting and other elements that give us a better picture of what we're doing so just to interrupt real quick on this so what you're saying is the accounting is almost exclusively looking at the sources not the sinks not just that but also it's not even capturing all the sources adequately oh okay yeah the way my 27 year old son puts it is mom it's not enough to think about net zero you need to be thinking about regenerative systems if you really want to create the world that you want your grandchildren to live in i don't have grandchildren yet but i hope i don't for a little while yet but you know

[39:00] net zero is kind of how we were thinking about it and i think regenerative is how we it's not just accounting for what we're putting into the air like brett's saying it's like how do we get back to enabling the earth to regenerate itself yeah and and uh very much to your point and and to what you've been working and promoting before miriam we'll um we'll i'll follow up with you about the biophilic aspect um i kind of gave that to planning we had a really good meeting with the biophilic group and i think that we're going to get more active in that um so i'm super interested in that so i'd love to be a part of that if there's any way to do that yeah absolutely um yeah so and i think um yeah i'll leave it there for now but those those are some responses to the questions raised hi michael hi mike just to recap we're kind of going through the energy part the energy section of the 2017 climate action plan

[40:02] and uh you know we started some discussion about really the electrification and the different strategies um and so we're kind of going around the um the the board for their thoughts and um i'm going to go to hernan here who's next in line and and and mike uh i'll catch you next after aaron has a chance to provide some of his thoughts okay awesome thanks hi mike yeah you bet aaron did you want to add something more um no none of the time i think i already said um what i thought and um my ideas because i feel like in terms of like building codes i feel that's i mean in the right path i don't feel like there's any major change there to do honestly um and you know something that a basically a different department handles you know they have the you have the building code department uh the city

[41:01] um so yeah i mean i just i think i would like to just focus on yeah just what is realistic for us as a city to achieve and then what is not realistic for us as a city to achieve try to you know build policies that we can push at the state level that's i think that's yeah my main idea right now um susan can i come back to you in just a minute um i i'm looking at the time here so i want to be mindful of the agenda um just one more point i wanted to raise and this we'll get back to policy i think um and and that is so there was a third element um in the electrification and that was to do with the um charging stations so the opportunity for folks to um move out of the gas vehicle and into an electric vehicle now leaving aside for the moment the cost aspects may not make sense it may not be realistic as or not like you say a lot of people

[42:01] can't afford to go elect electric but that may change in fact i'm sure it will change hopefully it'll change quickly but the question it really is charging stations and according to my read somewhere i had written down there there weren't that many charging stations at 2015 i don't see it here in my notes exactly how many um but i guess my my question this comes back to brett is number one um do we roughly know how many of our residents have electric vehicles versus gas um and how can the city and maybe it's not the city's ability to do this back to announce point to incentivize individuals to more rapidly adopt electric mobility and then the third element and this is policy the new federal infrastructure plan if it gets approved is to do a massive scale

[43:00] um recharge station um investment and um and i'm wondering how boulder would would benefit or how it's positioning itself to advocate for being part of that i imagine that's occurring through a state level interaction so red maybe to start things off and then then mike afterwards oh i'm sorry i should get the order right susan and then mike yeah that's fine okay yeah i i can't remember the number exactly i remember when we were doing the plan in 2015 and i i think there was maybe there was probably less than a dozen charging stations in town we were like you know we were cheering every time we got one and i saw a number recently i can't remember it was the last couple months i mean it's it's it's gone up by almost an order of magnitude just in the last five years so lots of progress there but as you're saying marty and i think this is really an important piece and it's one of the themes that you're going to hear in this report that we give you

[44:00] is the notion of a sort of city-centric climate action approach has in a certain kind of way taken the focus off the the need the the fact that we have to have federal level action and state level action to be able to get the scale of change and so that's what's exciting about this moment of when we have an administration that wants to make this move we will see some really exciting big steps in that direction i do also just want to make sure i say because susan said something else that was important i wanted to note we were thinking about resilience in 2015 we were thinking about equity in 2015 but you'll see that those are now more like fundamentals in our new plan and in fact the notion of climate action in the past was just about emissions reduction we're saying that climate action now must be essentially defined as both mitigation emissions reduction adaptation and resilience and how we're accomplishing that in equitable ways so these are really significant changes

[45:01] that have come just since the last plan has been put together susan oh i i i it may be a late late comment now but non-mentioned well building codes were kind of like moving in the right direction but i think it's not just building code it's land development and urban planning practices that have to be an important part of that resiliency and climate action and towards equity because a lot of the development that we've seen recently um is driven by some you know new urbanism kind of concepts and by the way new urbanism is about 50 years old that are pretty out of sync with what we're dealing with in terms of climate change right now so it needs to go beyond building codes and into land use and development ike yeah i so

[46:02] i don't i'm a little still not quite sure exactly talking about well one thing that i thought was really interesting brett was in the i'm trying to find it in the study session stuff can we is that what we're talking about too or just the 2017 we're in the 27 but but feel free to go where you want on that but we were looking at the the energy section um and four action areas um in the 2017 document okay yeah i've got that open too okay we'll come back i've got some i want to season with the other one but um i'll come back that largely i mean i i still feel like i want to talk a little bit more about the electric vehicle thing i still don't like have a sense of okay i get confused like i don't have a sense of like if i think about how many gas stations exist in like the city of boulder right versus like i don't have a sense for like how what's the number for like how many charging stations per is there like a metric that you try to meet that like people have figured out for like because i look around like i can think of like

[47:00] within my my half of my house there's so many gas stations right and like to me do do do people assume that like 75 percent of people are gonna charge your stuff at home and not need to charge during the day and they're like what is that metric and like is it reasonable to try to hit i would think you're really trying to hit the folks that commute into boulder to do their work in boulder and then have to go home but they'd have to and that exceed the range of a typical car is that like how do you even calculate it i just have always struggled with that understanding of like what that would really look like if it was built out brett do you well is there a new transportation master plan that just got approved maybe we should have somebody from tab come and do a little presentation on that because i think a lot of the questions you're asking are in that transportation okay although i haven't uh reviewed the newest one the the thing is that the the dynamics the questions that you're asking mike are changing are being changed by the rapid advancements in the technologies themselves so it's a

[48:00] really different thing when you're when your range is maybe 100 miles per charge which is where it was in 2015 to the where we are now and what's coming is cars that are going to have a 3 4 500 mile range and so one of the real significant issues and i don't think anybody's quite figured this out yet is there are lots of of dwellings in boulder for example especially the multi-family unit dwellings where it's not there's no easy charging fix right away yeah really significant infrastructure development but there are these now fast charging strategies coming forward and more and more of the vehicles that are being made are prepared for these fast charging stations where in you know 10 or 15 minutes you can get these multi-hundred mile charges okay so i don't think that there's an easy solution or formula yet because the technology is changing so fast okay yeah i've just like never been able to wrap my head around like what it would look like to have if everyone had

[49:00] a car like an electric vehicle like how that would look you know or if ever like 75 percent of people did i think what if everyone had an electric vehicle and it was actually part of our storage system to enable us to have battery systems in our homes that stored energy from our rooftops i mean that's the kind of bigger thinking that we need to get into yeah i was just hearing about this new f-150 truck that they're building which is going to be available in the next couple of years i mean it's got a massive battery to it so this whole vehicle to grid thing completely changes when you're talking about batteries the sizes that they're putting in some of these vehicles so so i think oh i was just going to say the other thing i always think about reading through this plan is the housing part and i know we've talked a lot about this before but i just get so worried about like housing is already so expensive you know and here and i just worry about like is like how do you really pay for this

[50:02] how do you really make it affordable and how do you not make housing already more difficult and stressful and make our can like just price people out right and maybe like lose other interesting and good parts of a community so that everyone can gain a little bit of efficiency or something you know what i mean i just worry about that too and like i don't know necessarily how you balance that belongs in here but it's always a concern to me it's always something that i think of you know um yes and i think susan referred to it earlier when we first went out to the community in 2019 to try to start this new climate action cycle planning just before kovid and we took the the original three climate action focus areas which were energy ecosystems and resources the community came back and said yeah but there's two others we want you to really look at one is the role of the economy and financial systems in driving climate change and the other was land use so i think that these are very active uh themes i know it's a it's a theme

[51:00] that lin and others bring forward as important considerations um that i think it's it's needs to be on the table yeah i think so and like i you know you've talked before brett about that idea of like it being paid for kind of at the meter and dispersed across whoever the homeowner is over yeah and like that's such a cool idea right like so i and i think that comes back to that notion that we've talked about the switch from like the individual to the massive systemic change right and when i read these type of things i keep you know since we've talked about more about that and the presentation you gave us and thinking more about that in the nature and timelines like i i really do think that that's sort of the way we need to be heading like those big things are so critical so when you think about for example the electric grid and what we had to do as a society to make electricity available to everyone it was one of those problems that you couldn't solve at an individual level right it's why we basically created the the phenomena of a regulated monopoly

[52:01] because we needed entities that could aggregate enough capital to deploy huge amounts of infrastructure it's the reason we created the rural electric association so that they could do that kind of thing too i think we need to be thinking about the 21st century version of these kind of publicly controlled capital concentrations that retrofit a whole bunch of infrastructure very quickly i agree and it's like such a great opportunity to create employment for people with wealth and yeah yeah i just wanted to mention i i sat in on the consultant's presentation on the development at alpine balsam where that uh hospital used to be that lynn referred to and i just was actually super encouraged relative to the kinds of new technology they were talking about they were talking about using let's see sewer heat recovery there's a sewer line that runs down broadway that could provide substantial heat if they had a district energy kind of system where people were sharing heat

[53:01] and electricity at that site and it's an opportunity because the city owns that property to have way more affordable housing than ever before um or at other sites and so as the eab i think getting involved in major developments like that because we don't have that many spaces of land around boulder where we're going to have like really the ability to have a big impact in terms of embracing new energy and all kinds of new technology you know like we should be behind that and helping with that i think that's a really cool point season like i like that idea of like those type of bigger things like make that whole area and that new development like and you know superhero coverage would just say real quickly and that we probably should be moving um that we're gonna one of the things that is becoming clear and clear as we get into an

[54:00] era in which the the reality of climate change is becoming more and more imposing is that local government is where climate change really manifests i mean it doesn't really happen at the federal level it happens at a local level and that we're going to find i think over time that more and more of our resources have to be committed to the recovery from and the preparation for change as opposed to or not necessarily as opposed to but this is why finding solutions that can intersect both climate stabilization and preparing for and responding to climate change is going to are going to be really important okay that's a great discussion uh good ending point for now will we continue that will we have an opportunity next month to go a little bit further into the document or will we be moving on to the new uh we'll be moving on to the new okay all right so that was good i think we covered a lot of territory not all of it in there to be sure but that was good well i just would call out that one of

[55:01] the things i think you'll see is in 2015 we were thinking about ecosystems and we were starting to think about the material economy but most of our discussion most of our focus was on that energy systems piece i think you'll see some maturing and evolving of those other two areas in this new document but i'm really glad that you had a chance to kind of dig into this because i think it will provide a useful contrast in now thinking about what this next plan looks like great and thanks everyone that was good discussion on the air quality update air quality efforts before we jump in there and i presume we'll hear from from marion and brett on this in particular um i wanted to just sort of touch on i sent an email out for a seminar that was hosted through stanford seminar series it was actually harder to get into that talk and listen than i had assumed it would be you needed to have a papal dispensation as it turns out to be able to log in and so they sent me a link to the talk

[56:01] afterwards and then i watched it and so this was a talk on air quality and health i just wanted to real briefly highlight what i took away from the talk and hopefully it'll connect with some of our air quality efforts and concerns that we have locally the talk was given by a dr mary pernicki and she is from the sean parker center for allergy and asthma research so she her expertise is knowing how the lungs and the and the whole um a body system responds to the effects of smoke and what what i took away from this and this is a person from california so they've been really under the gun from smoke exposure and so that's why this is such a important topic for them um that you know pm 2.5 was what she mainly talked about which is 80 of wildfire smoke is a as i was told in the talk i didn't realize was quite that high

[57:01] eighty percent of wildfire smoke consists of pm 2.5 and it's pm 2.5 that is especially problematic um as was discussed um it because it penetrates deeper into the lungs uh than in the larger particulates and enters the bloodstream quite readily and so they had some nice illustrations of this of course we think of people with asthma and pre-existing conditions that are especially vulnerable and i was so surprised to see the presentation and later the q a go to the young folks and kids and school-age kids and it really went there and the evidence that she presented about how kids ages six to eight and how their cell functions were fairly quickly compromised by being exposed to the types of loads from the fires that are not uncommon in in california and so the discussion came about concerning standards for monitoring

[58:00] pm 2.5 and and also for sort of cleansing the air if you will in facilities in particular schools so the q a part was all about schools and um filtration and air systems for cleaning and protecting youngsters they talked about options that included n95 masks that was quickly dismissed it wasn't practical to use their non phrase it really doesn't make sense you can't imagine a six and seventy year old wearing wearing um n95 masks um air purifiers and classrooms hvac and clean room safety was sort of the main uh feeling that that was a good good source of providing protection in the case of exposure to pm 2.5 interestingly enough california of all the fires they said they have no measures of air quality in schools there's no monitoring there's no baseline they really don't know how bad it is in their school i was surprised yeah

[59:01] that i was surprised and so the talk was about a need for uniform air quality measurement in the school system that it didn't exist surprise me too mike so those are just the highlights and [Music] maybe just move on to the agenda item and see if any of that dovetails to some of the things that you want to share on our air quality efforts here maybe i can start it out and okay miriam um complete it uh this is again i want to start by just offering uh deep gratitude to miriam for really continuing to push this piece forward and to offer not as an excuse but just as an explanation that we are as a department understaffed at the moment and also that the city organization is not only also struggling with the same issue but that air quality falls into a gap that no city department really covers so we're still struggling to figure out how to

[60:00] effectively respond to this important issue and the and the sort of um guidance and leadership that i think that you guys are providing here so with that though i would say that we're continuing to explore how the city can engage in and support maybe two major tracks of effort here one is how do we improve the awareness and the information getting to the community and especially in the context of getting to all aspects of the community and the other is how do we find ways to build the capacity of our community to respond effectively to that information especially again the most vulnerable and most at risk and so miriam has been providing guidance in thinking about both of those um but that's kind of the the the key areas i think we're now trying to narrow in on i would just say and i don't know i've said if i've said this to you miriam i've been talking a lot about this issue

[61:00] with jonathan cohen our director and how we could have could staff this and we do have a sort of open position an unfilled position in our in our department around resilience um part of the issue that we're having right now is that we don't jonathan is in an acting role as a director and so it's it isn't yet clear whether he's going to assume that role as a permanent position or not and until that is decided it's hard to actually allocate some of these other open positions but we jonathan and i both believe that we will eventually figure out how to staff that resilience person and that that will be the position that will probably really take this issue forward so i'm i'm playing in adequately right now this sort of um support role for this but so with that um that was a whole lot of qualifications and i don't mean um i just i don't have a ton more to add but um i've been still participating in the regional air

[62:02] quality messaging and monitoring meetings um they to my surprise have not been as focused on the equity piece of it and i and i brought that to um to brett's attention and we'll try to bring that more forward to the regional group um uh they've actually asked me to bring it forward so i guess i will um it's surprising that the rest of the group is is not addressing this um but one one of the things that brett and i have talked about is is maybe finding a person to contract out to from city of boulder that can help city of boulder at appropriately communicate and basically find the uh the right people

[63:01] to address the air quality problem in a way that people can understand what the problem is and how they can help themselves and so it'll be a process where we we find the person who's able to assist the city in that way but it hopefully will start fairly soon that we can we can start that ball rolling um in the meantime uh michael ogletree from um from city of denver is moving forward with creating the data platform that will be shareable among all of the different regional cities and counties um that will be able to be accessed from you know from their various websites if they want to have that information available um and that information can be localized as

[64:01] we talked about before so um uh that's that's just a starting point you know where we have the data and the information about what is happening available and then i've also talked to brett about you know creating just having a landing point where we can have resources available you know from you know an internet standpoint but you know there will be other ways that we can communicate the availability of resources to other communities that aren't accessing the the website or other means as well miriam thanks uh brett do you want to follow up or which is that um you all might remember that we had a presentation from a graduate student team that was doing a project on air quality and they have um apparently come up with a with a pretty impressive set of

[65:00] final recommendations so i'm i'm working to get that and get that both back to miriam and to all of you because they had apparently some really interesting ideas around how to resource access to air filtration systems for you know people who are at risk which to be honest with you that is my biggest concern at this point which is this next fire season and the parts of our the members of our community who don't have easy access to expensive air filters or what have you and i feel like that's where we've really gotta focus to make sure that gap is at least addressed as much as possible so anyway i'll get that back out to you and i think it's i i would suggest that we just keep this as an ongoing topic and our agendas to keep moving this process forward thanks brett i'm going to end up going through reverse order this time i'll go mike andernan and susan uh just a quick comment um so last month we we kind of talked

[66:00] about monitoring which is still an issue as we just heard um that that's still a challenge um but then also the hvac clean room if you will the clean room space a safe zone um this came this was a big topic in the talk that i listened to and again surprising how poorly prepared it seemed to be right and and i've actually brought that forward to brett as well as as part of the actions that should be taken um for the city they should that we should identify safe spaces that are public spaces you know community centers um religious buildings schools where we can create safe spaces and and enable places where people can go yeah yeah no exactly and this course this this was an issue the schools were of great concern in the presentation from the california person and um and that few schools had actually been canvassed to figure out whether they actually have the requisite a standard for hvac and

[67:02] and clean room safety zones within their school systems so i think i think something that's really interesting marty is that um a lot of schools have updated their hvac systems enormously because of kovid and and so i think if we if we look at what has been done in the schools we will be pleasantly surprised about you know the ability to meet the filtering needs um but i mean certainly we should it should be reviewed and understood yeah that's the right capability so maybe we're taking care of two problems at once hopefully yeah oh yeah over lighting mike um let's start with you mike then we'll go to aaron and susan i mean i think um the the two things that you know i think about what i think about this is i think the safe space idea and the clean room and like the place for people to go is the most

[68:00] important i think in my mind i think um more so in my mind than the monitoring to some degree because i feel like i think the monitoring of schools is important but i think you know if peop people are going to know it's smoky at some point whether or not it's monitored and if it's a point if it gets bad enough they're going to want to seek a safe space so i guess that's sort of that safe space and that clean space for people to go to is really important in mind and then the second thing i like i was thinking the other day about like you know i don't know is there like a better for like for like my furnace at home is there a better filter i can put in my system that i don't offer my system that's not ridiculously expensive and like where do i find that information and right that's the kind of information we're going to try to make available to people i think that's super awesome like i was just like i don't know actually you know i think about it like is there i don't want to spend five thousand dollars for something super fancy but like is there one that i could spend 80 bucks and you know or 25 dollars more when i replace the filter in my furnace and it does a better job come fire season and you know and is a little safer and i

[69:01] have no freaking idea so it'd be awesome you know and then i like the idea you know i really like that idea and i like the idea of like having a place for people to go when it gets really bad um whose houses are leaky and don't go or if they're just by proximity in a place where they're closer to the fire maybe not evacuate but the smoke is just unbearable and dangerous so they have elderly family you know so those are the two things that i really think of as important um when it comes to this yeah okay that's great you know i was thinking when you're mentioning furnaces my house happens to be all electric which which was not a good selling point when i bought it people said oh you know we're sorry we don't have gas in this house but they didn't extend the line you know through that part of the neighborhood now of course it goes the opposite i i don't like gas i wouldn't want at my house but because i have all electric baseboard or now solar whatever i do um i don't have a furnace there you go that's pretty good and i wonder is that generally going to be true if we retrofit houses to be all

[70:01] electric that we would also be removing their houses or look and i'll be so mad if someone tries to take my gas stove i'd be so okay okay well there's a go this is a good question here and on i mean do we lose our ability to filter our air if we replace you know uh re you know um redesign our homes to be all electric don't take my stove hernan you know i had the same thought because i did have a gas line installed in my kitchen because i like gas better than electric [Laughter] so i don't know i guess you will always i mean i i think gas is still like especially for kitchens so it's gonna be hard to but i mean still you know i think most of your gas most of your electricity will go towards like heating and cooling so uh i think you will still need a filter because you're still recycling air through your firmness regardless of whether you have gas or

[71:00] not i will think well most i think where we're heading generally in the the space conditioning in buildings is towards heat pumps but those heat pumps can either be isolated what they call mini split units which are separate individual units or they can have a central air function so there's a drop in replacement for natural gas furnaces that mitsubishi produces that's a heat pump um it fits into houses of up to about 1500 square feet and so but this is actually a really interesting example of an intersectional opportunity because we have all these houses in boulder that have central air gas furnaces and we have all these houses that don't have air conditioning and we have all these houses that may not have air filtration so if you could put a heat pump based system into these

[72:00] houses and use their existing ducting systems you could have a high efficiency electric based system that actually also has the capacity to filter your indoor air and i think that it could turn out to be that heat pumps the adoption of heat pumps is driven more by the need for cool clean air than it is by anything else interesting yeah that's interesting to think about i never thought about that like that you're not yet yet some more thoughts there nope thanks thank you appreciate it and uh and you you can you can have my stove but it's electric i do want to just say the the literature is becoming extremely clear on this one of the single biggest air quality uh problems in homes is gas cook stoves yeah i read that recently and i was like

[73:00] it's worth the risk fan you haven't tried have you tried it have you tried production stove i have a gas kitchen so yeah no but have you tried it and you should you should go try an induction stove yeah that's what i have i love it they are they're they're far faster than gas you have better control over them and they're so much safer not just the air quality piece but like you know little kids running around the kitchen and you've got gas going just open your mind open your mind you might decide that there's i love it i love it because i can check it out i love it because i can burn my dinner much faster than i've ever burned it before ah yeah susan um i think i'm most interested in the intersection between climate change air quality and public health right there was a great article in national geographic i can't remember it was last month or the month before where some a woman has been doing research on um

[74:02] public health as it relates to air quality around the world and has been tracking it for like 20 years and i think if you can bring it to people's attention that this is really a public health hazard and i think if we have another summer i hope we don't like we had last summer but doesn't does it does anybody remember that the sky was smoky for two and a half months it was awful almost every day yeah right and like if if that doesn't spur people to action doesn't spur people to change some behaviors i you know the problem is people don't understand the impact that that the negative air quality has on them in large part and they don't understand that it's hurting them i also think people are just like adaptable and to a fault and kind of forget after a couple months and they're like you know i think that's part of it too

[75:01] you know but i i don't know about you but it had an impact on my health like throughout the winter i felt like you know i was congested that i've been breathing that nasty smoky air for two and a half months yeah i remember going i don't want to stay inside i live in boulder i want to go outside now here here's a maybe a small benefit if i can call it that of covid that we all have masks many of us have n95 maybe we should hold on to them even as covid wanes away because those are the kinds of masks that can help you you know if you do need to be out and about when there is the particulate so we're now accustomed to actually wearing masks or maybe we should get serious about climate action and its relationship to air quality to actually improve our air quality and study i agree all of the above but there's the there's the adaptation part that that brett mentioned so you know mitigation adaptation have to go hand in hand yeah yeah and i

[76:00] i also wanted to mention you know i i apologize i have kind of a standing conflict that's this is the last month i have to do this but i need to depart at 7 30. um and my apologies but i'll be signing off at 7 30. and this is the last month i'll have that conflict susan before you let's see we got almost 7 20 if there are some things you want to bring to our attention before you leave um i'll go to marion first here but then we'll circle back just make sure that we get what you what's on your mind if you want to share any more i did i wanted to say one thing and that was um one thing that is really important about the monitoring is helping people understand when they're in danger when they are not and when it's not present like when the wildfire smoke is not right in their face you know and there are a lot of instances with ozone and particulate that can get at high levels and you wouldn't know it without having some sort of warning mechanism or or ability to see

[77:00] you know the danger through a measurement you know um and so i think we shouldn't disregard the monitoring i think it's valuable uh for providing warning when it's needed um and so i just want to put that out there exactly and i see our non next the monitoring of course is always going to be important from a scientific point of view this is me speaking science language a little bit but you want to be able to understand what is the relationship between various levels of air quality degradation and human health and if you don't have the monitor values you really don't know quite what is the attributable effect you need to have that information from from a study point of view and we're marty i think too like just generally like we're not in a static period like everything's changing in the environment and you can't without monitoring in a changing system you're kind of hosed when it comes to drawing mechanisms and understanding later when you do one right yep yep no we're on the same page good and on

[78:04] yeah i just wanted to say that i will definitely i'm definitely on the ignorant camp so like what are the dangers like when we had those um really bad air quality because of the fires like what are the long-term effects because like short term like if i went out i know i had like issues breathing if i you know because i wasn't wearing a mask or anything i think i went on a run in the middle of you know like the sky being orange and then uh when i go home my father was breathing um but then you know like the fire went away and breathing issues disappeared after a day so it's like what are the long-term effects like if you wanna warn people and you want them to be worried like i'm definitely more concerned about the long term because the short term like oh yeah i have breathing issues but they'll go away by tomorrow but like what damage did i do to my body for example my watching cigarettes i just burned through given just being outside today you know it can

[79:02] be a cumulative effect you know damage is done for one day and then it's not done the next day and more damage can be done in another day that has a high level of pollution it's it can be cumulative in your body and it can affect you over time there's so many more kids with asthma these days because of air quality it's it's really a horrible health hazard yeah i think cumulative is a good way of thinking of it you know i don't think anyone questions that they would never want to work in a coal mine right because of the lung damage resulting from inhaling cumulatively the fine dust particles and and i think you know routine and regular exposure if that's what our future looks like to a lot of small particulates is like working in a coal mine as part of your night or daytime you know job so to speak no one would choose that for themselves or their family so that is another way of thinking about it the cumulative effect is like being in a coal mine if we continue to have summers like we

[80:00] had last summer so um the idea will be like if like get some sort of notification telling me hey the air quality is bad today if you go out wear a mask or something is that the idea um yeah it'll give you solutions it'll say the the the health hazard is so bad that you should wear a mask today or the health hazard is so bad you shouldn't be outside today you need to find a clean air space inside i mean it it and that happened last year where it was so bad that people should not have been outside so can the state i mean i mean since we're working with the city of denver could the states send like amber alerts style messages the state does and and they i mean well i mean they have their warning mechanism the same and and they are actually involved in this whole messaging group that this regional messenger group as well you know they're struggling to get information out to

[81:00] the general public the same way everybody else is um and um yeah it's there and and part of the point of this group is to try to make the messaging more understandable and how getting to the right people and and you know what is the best message to give people and how to give it to them and it's all of that kind of thing and yes and a lot of it will be solutions like you can find a safe space here you can find um filters here you can find you know it's solution based yeah so so when we had those fires uh did they say send a warning because i was kind of long ago so i don't remember you you would have had to have looked for it and i mean if you're using your phone air quality meter it would have told you it's a bad air quality day today you know i never would have told you go hang out yeah like you yeah but i guess i guess that's what i'm

[82:01] getting at like will it be possible for the you know what like i i didn't sign up for amber alerts you know if there's a like somebody steals a kid i get a message on my phone right automatically without even asking for it so could the state use part of the same network or the same messaging system to just be like hey you know the air quality is really bad today so that way you know like everybody whether you're on iphone or android you get these amber alerts could you will it be possible or could it be proposed to do the same wealth or air quality that way you know like people don't have to download anything part of the problem with that is that the air quality is different in different places and and maybe really bad in boulder but not so bad in denver you know and and for the state to put out an alert like that i don't know that's why you know the different regional bodies or different you know sectors kind of have to take care of their own

[83:00] here i don't think that there is any mechanism to do what you're suggesting i mean there i mean we've talked about putting out like a flag system you know a warning system with flags so that people can see you know if it's a red flag it's a bad day like you know like the four we've talked about this last time like the forest service does for fire danger right it's a you know when they put it on the red fire danger you don't light a fire right i mean so there's lots of ideas going on out there um you know i think your idea is a good one or none and and i'll bring it to the to the table you know to the conversation and see if there's some way to to do that but but i don't know if that's something that the state really can take responsibility for because it's not usually a statewide problem well i guess i guess i want to jump in real quick

[84:00] because i want to sorry here and i will come back this is a good conversation i just want to make sure that susan has anything she wanted to add because we're at 7 26 on my clock and susan uh before parting word yeah in in four minutes three things um one is i would like to suggest that in future meetings we talk a little bit about setting some objectives as a board related to the things that we recommended in our letter to city council much as miriam has made great progress on air quality because we had some objectives she was working towards i i'm hopeful that we can you know have an objective for instance relative to urban heat islands and land use codes so we're not just talking about it but we have something that we're really trying to implement so i'd like to see that in a future agenda um i wanted to mention that in particular with regard to urban heat islands i'm super interested in biophilic design

[85:01] bret and any way i can get involved in that would be terrific and one aspect of that that's super important in boulder right now is our tree canopy and that might be an an objective that that we can look at you know we're losing trees far faster than we are replacing them uh and thanks to tree disease and wildfires and there's such an important part to re building a regenerative uh environment that that perhaps is an objective that we could add to the list and along those same lines i sent out an email about um this notion of rights of nature that i would really uh encourage us to have a presentation from this gentleman grant wilson who has an organization called earth law and i wondered uh if if we don't have time for it now if people could let me know how they felt about that in email i um we could have him do a 15-minute presentation at a

[86:00] future meeting so those are my main things i'm sorry i have to drop off early and um i'll be back in boulder in a couple days great i could just follow up real quick marty so um susan i'm i'm so glad you've been raised you're raising that issue around the urban forest and i wanted to let you know in particular i'm laying the groundwork for trying to launch a whole major community campaign around urban forestry as a climate action for next year and so i would love to be talking with you and with and have ea be a very big part of that that's great yeah you know people love to donate benches in the names of relatives people even love more i think to donate a tree that would be dedicated to something or someone that they want to remember tree donations are a place that people gravitate towards a community can really get involved with tree donations to make sure we accelerate planting anyway small thought thank you susan we'll see you next meeting all right thanks so much

[87:01] bye hernan i cut you short i didn't mean to there just want to make sure susan got in um hopefully you kept your thought um can we pick up on it again or should we move on uh no we're just looking at this amber alert system and i mean right now it's a federal thing but it used to be before they went federal in 96 it used to be state managed so you had amber alerts in georgia hawaii arkansas utah um and it basically sends um yeah all sorts of messages through text messages uh radio stations um and it even teamed up with google facebook to relay information so i mean you know there are some criteria as to what constitutes a an amber alert not all child adoptions are numbered alerts for example so i mean if the stake will you know

[88:00] kind of piggyback on this technology and create a similar protocol um i feel like that will be really useful because then i mean i didn't sign up for number alerts and i still receive them you know and they it makes me wary of the situation um so i think that will be a really good way to reach people to reach people without uh you know having them to without any effort on the part yeah and i wonder if like the framework turned on for like the like colorado tracker for like covet exposures did anyone do this do that like on your phone and it would track your like basically tell you if you're in close proximity to someone who had tested positive recently and i would just give you an alert um but something like that might be another framework that could be built on too for i don't know oh and one more thing the summer alerts are local so it's like local law enforcement the one who the ones who submit the the alert so basically it will be for example the city of boulder or the county of boulder

[89:00] that submits the alert to the county or the city so it's not like the state has to do it the state will just maybe manage the system like you know previous states did before they went federal but then it's like local um institutions that one could actually send the alerts to their citizens um so i don't know just something i thought of very good uh and now one more thing uh i know you mentioned wanting to make this data available um i don't know if you guys have discussed building like some sort of um api uh miriam like where like like not only like basically public entities or researchers could access the data have you heard of berkeley earth so they uh they're in a lab not specifically no yeah they're a lot their lab at the uh university of california berkeley and they do like tons of data collection on temperature oh you know they have censored all over the globe

[90:00] and they're like i think the main data collection center for uh you know climate change um so what they have is um a data page where you can access all the data they have so if i was a researcher and wanted to do some you know write a paper on air quality or even if i was a private company and was like hey you know i want to offer notifications to the people who download my app and um i feel like it will be really useful i don't know if i can share my screen um just to show you guys quickly let me see one participant oh there we go

[91:00] so for example this page has a bunch of data uh on their temperature measurements yeah we use that data we use that data in our lab yeah so then like if i was a developer a public company or a researcher then you know i could like download the data um so just do you know in my app like do some some sort of like um i get the data and then in my app or on the on my like boulder cast could use this data you know then i open it and then i can visualize the the data you know and then i could put like some pretty user interface on top of this and then you know boom i have a product or you know so what's being developed is you know based on a map and it'll show you the result of the monitoring information that's being

[92:00] accessed um for this you know based on what's available in the state um and so yeah i mean there's lots of data sources out there um and and that looks like a good one as well yeah but um but that's temp that's temperature and i guess what i was what i would like to maybe suggest is like make sure like this data is really easy to access so like anybody can download it because i mean my idea or what i thought of is like if your data is really good then why wouldn't private companies use it you know because then if i was a private company and i know you guys are going to be collecting this data and it's free and it's better than mine then i feel like it's gonna a no-brainer to just use your data so then next time i look at my phone it may be a private company that is showing me the data but it's your data under the hood does that make sense

[93:01] i don't know just i believe that city of denver is going to make the data accessible um yeah i believe that that is part of the process you know it's kind of interesting or not that you went to that site so if you wanted to look at time series of globally average temperature or temperature over the u.s you know there you go you can hit a few buttons and suddenly you're a scientist and you have the graphics and you can tell your neighbors and friends that the planet is getting warmer but but there is even with that ease of access to data there's a question of the quality of data and it can be you know it can be risky sometimes to enable people with data that hasn't been quality controlled or homogenized as we like to use the phrase so like the berkeley earth data is not homogenized for temporal variations and how measurements of temperature were done through time so in the old days people took temperatures at a certain time of day that's different than the way it's done today it produces an artificial trend in temperature so if you grab the berkeley earth data make your time

[94:01] series and you were doing it really quickly you're gonna get something that's very interesting but very wrong in some areas so all i'm saying is that and we heard some of this from um miriam last last month is you know the network needs to have a consistent quality to it so that you can compare a point to a point in a meaningful way that the measures are using the same calibration or instrumentation or whatever it is that you're using to measure your air quality and that you do consistent measurement through time so that you can create time series if you want to know what was it like a year ago or a month or a week ago so that's really an important part of enabling if you wanted to enable people with data that the data actually is quality controlled just throwing data out there can be as risky as not providing anything at all anyway i just that's an editorial comment we we should probably go on um letter to counsel is the next thing and um

[95:00] brett would you help us on this well i i i wonder especially with susan um having to step out this was kind of part of her desired discussion which is what are the next steps that eab might want to consider in some of the other areas that it outlined in its letter to council it's it's obviously working quite actively on the air quality piece i did put out an invitation to the planning director to to come and talk about urban heat island um i haven't heard back from him about that yet um so i think maybe it might be worth a kind of quick pass through this topic but i know that susan would want to be very actively involved in this discussion too so and this is our letter to council that we submitted yes um and you know when i opened up the uh the link and i i didn't know if i was opening up the right thing it was like

[96:00] 200 somewhat pages said well we didn't submit 200 page letter to counsel so um and maybe you can pull it up on the screen to share just our first page i think it's probably the first page that is relevant or mistaken here no i've got i've got it here i'll i'll pull it up for you okay by the way while you're doing that just as a note next month's meeting is wednesday june 2nd i won't be able to be present at that meeting um so i think your vice chair is michael san clementes yes i believe i believe he is and that's why i'm so glad to see him yeah i got it and if you can if you can fill in and i'll also bring you our dog then you can also watch two dogs sweet drop her off marty that means that you will miss this discussion of the the the climate action strategy so we'll we'll make sure you know that that meeting will be recorded so you'll be able to to hear that if you want so this this is you know right now my schedule looks

[97:00] like i'd be in transit i could be mistaken so i'm kind of you know laying the groundwork if mike is is prepared that's best if i can get in in time then i'll go ahead and do my best to dial in okay okay i won't have the commitment that's like picking up hats and stuff that's kept me late the last two wednesdays so i like with school over i can be here on time yeah yeah super so i'm can you all see this my screen the letter that i'm scrolling through so the first one was air quality obviously we've been talking about that um the second one is around the excel settlement and i think some of the topics that paul and others were raising in the comment period brett i have a question on that actually was susan able to get into that advisory group or which did she try do you know i i do not i think that she did try i don't know whether she

[98:02] um so this is the second topic um just to go through them all the third was regenerative ecosystems uh this is a somewhat broader i think topic um probably really bringing in some of the forest wildfire considerations that the board has discussed in the past soils and sequestration a piece that michael has mike has helped lead focus on for a number of years and then the urban heat island i think that was a yeah and you know i guess the the urban heat island and the regen regenerative were forced um regenerative we're kind of connected in a way especially when we think about ecosystems within our city area and the canopy issue that susan was raising if i remember write the numbers in the um in the in the 2017 draft indicated that our canopy was was it 14 or expected to go

[99:02] to 12 or 10 percent because of the um ash borer um do you know roughly where that canopy is and the goal what is it to be a 20 is that what's viewed as desirable yeah so we we're about to get a new round of what's called lidar data i think most we know it's a high resolution imagery that comes from satellites that can see topical or elevational things so we're going to get that this fall and then it'll be on the basis of that that we can do a new urban forest canopy analysis to get a really good reading of what because i think we did the last one in 2014 or 15. um it's a really interesting question because you know uh forests were not endemic to this location it was a plains it was a grassland and so when we say you know what is the canopy

[100:02] closure goal there is no natural reference point for that there is a reference point that we could think about and that's something where i think we're trying to create some new science around this like how much canopy closure would we want to achieve in order to achieve other benefits like urban heat island management or stormwater implementation can i step in for a minute the eab has done work on this for the last several years and and i have documents and work studies that we've done on this so um are we gonna use any of the information that we've already reviewed like over i have stuff from 2018 2019 um are you talking about uh heat island stuff yeah and urban cam

[101:00] canopy well yeah i was just trying to set up for this for this point which is okay what's the right canopy closure goal for boulder and and i think um i think our current um urban forest management strategy was like 14 because our urban forester was saying like what's possible given how we currently fund and fund urban forestry i think that's one of the reasons why we're trying to raise this issue more because i i personally think we should be probably shooting for a much more ambitious goal like 20 percent but that is a huge undertaking to achieve and would require both a significant reprioritization of city funding but also a significant engagement of the community and something that it doesn't normally commit itself to doing so i guess the short answer to what you're saying is i think we're going to know a lot more by early next year when we do this new

[102:00] analysis based on the lidar data but it is partly to be informed i think by some of this urban heat island analysis and this is maybe what miriam's point is the the meta research that has been done on eab in the past um and i i was only part of that briefly but there were studies that estimated the cooling effect that doubling a canopy would have you know using a reference of some amount doubling that canopy which is kind of what you're talking about brett 10 to 20 that's almost that's a doubling would have a certain temperature effect depends upon the the latitude and the exposure of the city overall to climate but you know it's on the order of of a of more than a degree let's put it that way in a sort of urban integrated sense degree fahrenheit um which you know when you start thinking about climate change what does that buy you in

[103:01] terms of time right because in a way we're fighting the clock here kind of like we've covered we want to get vaccines in arms but we also you know we we want to um you know so we don't want to get the exposure to the the variance so we we're we're fighting against time and the mutation we're fighting against climate change and being able to be adaptive in a way that we can be resilient and and so because the hope is that at some point we'll actually be able to take carbon out of the air we will technology is there we will actually be able to draw carbon back out but it's going to take a while so in the meantime you want to buy that time a degree fahrenheit buys you something on the order of oh 20 years of climate change that's a rough number all right the globe has warmed about two degrees fahrenheit in the last hundred years

[104:00] is expected to warm another about double that over the rest of the 21st century so it'll buy you a couple of decades now how long would it take to actually grow a canopy from 10 to 20 even if you could you know if it was practical um any idea how long that would take i mean that wouldn't happen in 10 years i gather well it would i mean to have a functional impact in terms of what those trees provide it's probably a 25 to 30-year time if you've got all those trees planted so you have to do some growing yeah yeah yep yeah and brett i'm sorry i broke in there before but i i hope that you know some of the work that was done has has informed what the city is doing now towards this and and so we can feel good about that well um i think we talked about this a little bit last time

[105:00] um there have been there's been such a a period of leadership transition over the last three years in the city that i think we we maybe this topic has not advanced as much as i think we would like to see it advance and that's part of the reason why i'm trying to get the new planning director to visit with you because i think this is an issue that that's the land use department and the and the parks and rec department are the ones that truly manage those two resources and one thing i would just note is in the in the context of urban heating impervious surfaces are immensely powerful as a as a thermal force and i've heard the statistic i haven't seen the research that says you need to increase tree canopy 10 percent to achieve the same impact that reducing per impervious services one percent will

[106:00] achieve so one of the things that we have to also be looking at in addition to increasing tree cover is increasing our pervious surfaces yeah so like as long as you're back to the letter i will continue to try to push to get the um planning director on the eab agenda so that we can pick up this urban heat island topic with him as well as the sort of influence of land use in climate change i think those are two topics that i understand would be really good to talk with him about i think brett too there are some really cool stuff in the notes i collected from like it was the city of louisville urban heat island study where they did a bunch talked a lot about the trade-offs and synergies between like canopy and porous surfaces and the overall cumulative effects of different mixes of those was i think in that study which was pretty neat i could try to i pretty sure i have those notes somewhere in google yeah i would really appreciate it i know

[107:01] this is a we also as you all know lost our administrative assistant during this whole period of time and so some of that stuff was being captured by by fellaini and others if you could bring back to me all the stuff that you have that's easy to access around the urban heat island stuff i'd really appreciate that i have a lot i keep everything great please um in fact i'm here just finding it in my google drive well heidi i was going to say heidi one of the things we've done in the past uh when we were working on documents is to set up a google drive and maybe this is i don't remember when delaney left if we transferred that google drive to you but i think it would be great if we could set one up so that we could put all this information that the eabs collected in that place that's accessible to everyone yeah you can definitely look into that thank you yeah and yeah coming back to

[108:00] susan's parting words she she was um you know challenging us to think as we as we've been doing you know wonderfully on the air quality effort to find the actionable activity um related to our other items on on our letter to uh council um so maybe in the near term collecting what the board has done previously over the last many years on the urban heat island you know condensing it refreshing it where it's appropriate i mean the experience of 2020 brings it back to the four as being a concern that can't just be sort of relegated to well we don't have a heat island problem here it was terribly hot last summer yeah um so i think it brought the awareness back and um and maybe the action would be let's recollect what we had done refresh it as is possible new information if there is any and then report back to um i guess to this

[109:03] board but then perhaps find a space on an agenda to city somewhere council somewhere or yeah i think again i think the next really good step would be for us to get uh jacob lindsay the planning director in if we can and start a conversation there um yeah so that's good action items that okay uh marty i was there you're at noah right yep um i also think that last summer was a very telling um time frame in terms of the the summer temperatures and especially the evening temperatures is there somebody at noaa that's tracking that for our local area so it's interesting um we have a weather station that's almost on the noaa facility side of broadway and 27th way

[110:02] they monitor daily high and low temperature precipitation we don't have a great boulder record it's moved around it's it's kind of a small bit of shame for a city that has all this technical scientific capability on and uh you know that we have to be apologetic about our climate records in in the area so i'm going to say it's not as good as we would like it to be okay but we might at least be able to oh well yeah i would love to see if there's already a clear signature these last several summers have been i've in my experience substantially warmer just noticing how much air conditioning needs uh our household and others have been describing maybe we can also see if cd phe is is to is monitoring temperature and at any of the stations that they have here as well

[111:00] yeah and neon's had our same tower in the parking lot at headquarters here running for 10 years now collecting temperature the same way as the other 47 sites around the country so well that'd be cool if we could even just pick up those three different sources and see what we could see there let me also put it on my list i mean there's a data set which we like to use from time to time it's four kilometers in scale covers the whole us and it gives maximum maximum and minimum temperature goes back monthly to 1895 if you believe it wow but it's more reliable in the last 50 years than it was before then but you know one of the outstanding characteristics of the temperature time series over the last century for the us is is that the minimum temperature has risen um at least as much if not more than the maximum temperature this is especially true in the middle of the country where the maximum temperatures haven't risen nearly as much as the men and so that's led to heat stress concerns because the min is really where the heat stress begins to become an

[112:01] issue the night time if it doesn't cool off if you can't find ventilation that's where the body really suffers so i know where you're going with this i think the health component really links to the men as much as maybe even more than the max usually as bad as the max is the hottest time of day it's the driest time of day and so the body has a way of cooling itself in a way that it can at night when the temperature drops down to the dew point the the other aspect in this environment of course is that it was always the minimum it was the evening temperatures that were really important to cooling all of the built environment and we don't have that sort of cooling force now in the evenings as we once did yeah now back to your point about all the concrete that we have road surfaces and concrete and buildings is is that they emit the heat accumulated during the day for a good part of the night and and so you know you hardly get that's that's part of the conspiracy of the heat island yeah yeah

[113:03] yeah i just think about like in the summer like walking our trash cans out to the curb at like 9 30 p.m or 10 p.m sometimes and it's like without shoes on the sidewalk still so hot like our driver's so hot brett who was the professor that gave a presentation on the temperature measurements from cu we had paul volchanowski yeah is he still tracking it or no uh i that's a good question and there's a there's a project with the county that it might be really good to get in front of this eab where they're working with paul on um climate resilience and and sort of risk vulnerable like mapping the most vulnerable areas against a number of different hazards or threats so i'll um try to circle around and find out about that as well okay

[114:00] well marty i think that's probably we don't have anything else on the agenda for tonight no okay we're good and then again no item eight we have next month's meeting scheduled for june 2nd um mike is graciously going to prepare himself to be be the chair of the day i have a question actually for brett do is the city have any thoughts or timelines on reconvening these boards in person oh that's a really interesting question we still don't know when we're even going to bring the majority of the city's staff back on so i think i don't know how many of you saw the reporting over this last week or so but this new realization that we're probably not going to hit herd immunity anytime soon in the in the country i think has a lot of people sort of reconsidering what our safe strategies are so i don't i

[115:01] certainly wouldn't anticipate us doing that until late this year at the earliest okay it's interesting that same conversation mike and brett came up in the call i was on with management noah today the local you know the um this facility on broadway i'm in the david skaggs research building of course we would all love to be able to re-enter our buildings if nothing else and to collect our personal belongings including our baseball cards and whatnot that we left in our offices and toys but we can't go in and so the question was well what's the plan right um and you know president biden has made it very clear he wants to see the country opened up for fourth of july [Music] noah has made it very clear that they're not going that fast they have no intentions of going that fast and of course that that creates an interesting tension within government if the president wants you to be opened up on fourth of july this being a federal building um but the right now it's kind of in turmoil

[116:00] um no one really knows what the standard should be no one really knows what the legal aspects should be you know what's required what can you require a person to have a vaccine or not there's all com complexity around this and the risk you just want to be as conservative with the risk as possible and so you know we're also looking at a situation where probably not until after labor day at the earliest yeah and i was talking um we have some workshop funds from nsf with like ncar right now i do and we're talking about like we had asked for a no-cost extension because it was like there's no way even in the early fall that we would be in this fiscal year that we're going to get up to end car and get people together in person from like around the country there's no way so yeah i think locally yeah i'm just curious if people will start the city it comes down to figuring out what's essential what's not if you're essential it's a different story but you know i've been a non-essential worker for the federal government for 35 years

[117:01] and that's not going to change tomorrow so so long as we party maybe tomorrow's the big day you think it's a big day yeah suddenly i became essential i don't think so and so the question you know is the ea be essential to city functioning well probably not not at that level of risk-taking yeah but we can function in this manner too it's not it's it's not ideal but it works yeah have you not been into your office once no wow that's amazing yeah and the amazing thing about this is you know i kind of direct the team there's about 10 of us is that i would have never predicted this of course you know being in climate my predictions are worthless anyway but i would have never predicted the productivity of the group and you know the the internet and and the access you know high s it's incredible right none of this none of this existed 35 40 years ago we would have really been in trouble yeah actually the opposite direction though i think it's it's made us hyper productive in a way that's really damaging to well-being i agree that was

[118:02] my point to management today i said you know the numbers may look great but it's not sustainable no it's not people are going to burn out man yes absolute people need to see the goal post where this is going to come to an end you know give us give us a date roughly and give us an aspiration that we can begin expecting to return yeah your point is gazette mark on brett yeah well with that it's eight o'clock all right you all um so let's do a um closing of the meeting um what was the protocol move to adjourn thank you turn second that yep second all right sounds good we're not on your second meeting way to go hi everybody take care bye