August 7, 2024 — Environmental Advisory Board Regular Meeting

Transcript

Captions from City of Boulder YouTube recording.

[0:05] Just in a sense, that's go into that. Yeah. future robots need what was like the whole. And so I could say, also, I'm so allowed that we have, you know. robots without, you know, genders, and it's like, Oh, no! We have the male one and the female one, and they fall in love like wild. There's always a big layer right there. So if any of you happen to notice any attendees joining, then please just wave your hands so that I can scooch over and will do okay? So if we have forum so and again, Heather, if you wanna start us off with

[1:05] meeting protocols. Sorry my computer's being a little glitchy. It's a cheaper if it fails. it's Hey, welcome. Everybody. City has engaged with community members to co-create a vision for productive, meaningful, and inclusive civic conversations. This vision supports physical and emotional safety for community members, staff and work commission members as well as democracy for people of all ages and identities lived experiences and political perspectives.

[2:03] For more information about this vision and community engagement process. Please visit that website. The following example are examples of rules of decorum found in the Border revised code and other guidelines that support decision. These will be upheld during this meeting our remarks and testimony shall be limited to matters related to city business. No participant shall make threats or use other forms of intimidation against any person. obscenity, racial epithets, and other speech and behavior that disrupts or otherwise impedes the ability to conduct the meeting. Participants are required to sign up to speak, using the name they are probably not by. and individuals must display their whole name before being allowed to speak online. Currently, only audio testimony is permitted online because we do not have registration for open and public comment. Tonight you can indicate you would like to participate by using the raise hand function. The raise hand button is in the participant box which can be found in the menu by hovering over the top or the bottom of your screen, and then click on the participant icon.

[3:05] When the box opens, you will see the raise hand button at the bottom. By clicking that button you can indicate. You would like to participate in open or public comment. If you join us by phone, you can press Star 9 and raise your hand. Thank you before that. I would like to make a motion to approve the minutes from our last meeting. Right? Just a quick raise of hand vote in all in favor. Alright and then. seeing no public participants. At the moment I think we can move past that. Turning on to be extended. Madison Cohen. Presentation. Thanks for pointing that out. Yeah. No one wants that less than me to have all the agenda items with your name next to it, so I will apologize in advance. I'll try to make this as painless as possible for the record. Jonathan Cohen, Director of the Content Initiatives Department. It's great to be with you.

[4:16] So we have a handful of items tonight, and many of them are kind of in that update category. So this will give you an opportunity to eat your dinners. But I do want to just emphasize that as we go through some of these updates, if you have specific questions, particularly on the first, st I talked about the Updated Climate Action Plan. I would love to just get some early feedback from the board on the direction that we're heading. Some of the other items, again, are are purely informational items that I just had said I would like to bring back to the board just for your awareness, but I'll kind of jump in at that point, and if you really need a break from my voice we'll just call recess. We'll go outside. Okay, so I'll jump in and talk 1st about the update to our climate action plan and give you a little bit of background.

[5:08] But before I do that I just want to make sure you're aware that this is not the one and done show with the board. I anticipate we're going to be coming back to you on many occasions to give you a sense of where we're headed with the update to the plan. And a little bit of the timeframe right up front. We're intending to try to get something in front of Council Q. 4. This year, with a wrap up by q. 1 of 2,025. And so building in an engagement plan to to try to do that is obviously a a lift. But that's our intention. So I want to talk a little bit about what it is. What's in scope? What's not in scope? And why we're doing this now. So I'll just give you a sense that the original I'm going way back now. The original Climate Action Plan was passed back in 2,006. It was our 1st climate action plan and built on a couple of other

[6:04] kind of frameworks for climate work that really were initiated back in 2,001 and 2 when Boulder became one of the 1st cities to ratify the mayor's climate Protection protocol that was started by Mayor Nichols out of Seattle. So at that time, us not ratifying the Kyoto protocol. And so cities, you might recall, took it upon themselves to say. if the Us. Isn't going to do it. If they're not going to ratify these protocols, then via cities should should take that upon ourselves. And so Boulder was one of the a handful of very early signatories to do that. Fast forward to 2,006, we over a period of about 2 years, developed a pretty rigorous public engagement plan to go out and talk about what a climate action plan should contain? What does it actually mean in terms of being aspirational? And what are the real targets and things we should be doing to address climate.

[7:01] The the majority of the strategies in the original cap were oriented towards the Kyoto target, which was to reduce emissions 7% below 1990 levels. By the end of 2,012. You don't need to know that math. But that was really what Kyoto was all about. So, looking at emissions levels in 1,990, reducing them 7% below that level by the end of 20. So when we, when Council adopted that 1st climate action plan, that was when we coupled it with the funding mechanism which was our climate action plan or carbon tax that passed just after and that allowed us to really create that funding mechanism to develop and fund the strategies in the original Climate Action plan. So just kind of tracking forward a little bit in around 2,010, we did a major update to the cap. Most of that was not so. Just use cap as climate action plan in 2010 we were really starting to understand the role that voluntary actions were playing versus regulatory and policy level actions. What we needed to do as a city, as a governmental body, to achieve the actions, what type of private sector investment was going to be necessary to achieve our targets or achieve Kyoto. And so we did a pretty big overhaul in 2010, and mostly around our programming, not necessarily around the cap.

[8:26] So then Kyoto came and went. We made pretty significant progress. But what we learned is at that time 2,010 to 2012. The biggest source of emissions, of course, is electricity generation, and what we found is the grid intensity of our power was so volatile, based on excel, so as excel brought expansion. 3. Which is their largest coal plant in the State State's history. They brought connection 3 on in 2,010 we saw the grid intensity of our power go through the roof, so that meant that our emissions the emissions from our energy sources went way up. And so that what? That's predominantly what led to our municipalization effort?

[9:09] So 2,012, we realized that Kyoto was not going to weren't going to achieve on the Kyoto target. But we had made progress but the cap receiving the cap tax carbon tax also expired in 2,012 because it was tied together. So that's when we went back to voters with a pretty pretty happy analysis. We worked with a couple of firms breaking out an institute, and another consulting firm called Brendel. and they did 2 things for us. At that time they did a look back to say, How have the cap tax dollars been used? Have they been effective in achieving emission reductions? And then I'll look forward to say, if if that tax is renewed, moving forward, what kind of strategy should be implemented, should we just do more of what we've been doing? Should we broaden it? We did a whole bunch of engagement to understand how we should be using those funds. So

[10:00] 2012 was a big big time, I think, as we were thinking about our policy work in our contractual planning. I'm giving you the whole history now. I should have just done the slide. So then, moving forward to about 2,015, we had another vote on the cap tax, and then, in 2,017, we released the next round of our document, which was our our, not a climate action plan. But it's what we call our climate commitment. That actually was a hard copy document that really started to explore these areas of resilience. We were now post 2,013 flood. We had a really good understanding of how resilience needs to show up in our climate work. We were really starting to explore and understand where we were headed on energy. The roles that the city and government can play in terms of regulating emissions moving beyond just energy efficiency, really starting to think about transportation linkages, really starting to think about nature based solutions. And so not just let's just do more and more of saying, let's start to broaden and really, really think about what's been effective in reducing emissions and

[11:09] really thinking about the conversation you hear from me all the time, which is values. How is our work making lives better health and safety, economic productivity in our community. So not just veterans carbon. But how are we actually contributing to bettering our environment locally? So our climate commitment was the 1st document that really took a pretty pretty hard look at what had been working, what wasn't working and how we updated that. So 2020 was a really important time also. So we did a couple of things. Obviously it was the ballot measure at which we moved away from municipalization to the partnership with excel energy. And that was, I think, very reflective of all the work that we had done to push, excel, to clean up their grid. We realized that we were on a pretty good pathway

[12:00] to reduce emissions, the grid intensity, the carbon intensity of our grid power, and it allowed us to think a little more strategically about the other areas that were really important. So in that year we did go to our Council 2019. And then in 20, early 2021, we went to council. In the community. We talked very openly about our learnings around climate action remotely, what is really effective when you think about locally based climate action and the learnings from that were, I think you've heard these before as well. But we need to work more comfortably outside our boundaries. So how do we build coalition? How do we scale up action? How does individual behavior change incremental change really support collective action at the neighborhood scale at the city scale. How does the how do those collective actions support the big systems that we need to change in order to progress funding? So that was one big learning, the other. Learning is this notion that what we describe as the nation State concept edit the city

[13:00] was very effective in reducing emissions in their own jurisdiction, that another city would see that, and they would model that. And then you just see this kind of take off, and that cities all across the country would actually do that. The idea that if you change your light bulb and you're able to change your light bulbs support, and so on. And we realize doing some analysis with the Institute for Local Self Reliance and a couple of other firms. We did a study across the Us. To look at actual incorporated cities. How many have plans, how many are actually doing things with their plans? How many have made meaningful progress, and we realized pretty quickly that this idea that had been perpetuated for decades really must, happening at the speed and scale that was necessary. A couple of other things that were really important learnings, resilience and equity. Needed to be central design pillars in our climate work. Not just kind of after thoughts or appendages to our kind of work. They needed to be really deeply rooted in how we design the the programs and strategies and policy needs to play a really critical role as well. And that's where we talk a lot. I talk a lot about levers pulling, you know, 50 very small levers versus going to the State and pulling one big lever. How do you balance that in terms of resource time? Investment.

[14:27] So going to the state and passing legislation is like one big lever, in in my opinion, a really good investment of resources. But simultaneously, how do we look at the most effective kind of local smaller. But hopefully, this background is totally mine. But I think it's I think it's relevant. So in 2021, that was also the time we went to council with a resolution resolution 1,300, to codify our our current and most aggressive targets in roles. So.

[15:01] and I use those very those words specifically, because goals mean one thing in my mind versus a target or a milestone. So when we say we want to have 0 free or carbon free electricity. That's a goal. It's not a percentage on the way to get to there. So we were very specific about. We wanted to get to 100% renewable electricity by 2,030. We want to have an 80% reduction in emissions. Excuse me, 70% reduction in emissions by 2,030 community wide across all sectors. That's energy all. If you look at our emissions, portfolio, a 70% reduction in emissions by 2030 to become net 0 by 2035, and net positive by 2040 really aggressive goals, and aggressive targets along the way. Yes, what exactly is like resolution mean? Yeah, really good question. So council has a a few

[16:04] tools to really validate their support for a thing, for a policy statement. A declaration. Councils will do declarations and they'll be resolutions. Declarations are like just kind of stating, I think we're going to declare a day in honor of a certain thing. Resolutions have a little bit more teeth. There is an actual number associated. We have to outline how we're going to achieve a certain thing at a high level and Council effectively endorses that we're going to do the thing that's embedded in that resolution. And it's why we wanted to actually take our goals and targets, our our climate related goals and targets to council and do it through resolution. So we were very clear. That is, council on board with this. because we need you to backstop this as we think about our budgeting as we think about our programming, as we think about the policies necessary to get us to to achieve those goals and targets. So we did it by resolution, we said, here's what we aim to achieve. Environment.

[17:08] Other goals, for example, like our net 0 waste our diversion. Those are it, is it? It's a goal. But we haven't ratified that in in a resolution, it's not legally binding. I will say that. Yeah, but it definitely has moved. Okay. thank you sure? Good question. So that was done in 2021, again. 70% by 2030 from a 2018 baseline. I know I'm talking to like math again. But the the reason I want to emphasize that point is, if you remember, I talked about Kyoto, our climate commitment. It always matters what you're measuring against. What is that, baseline that you're measuring against? And so by advancing it forward, we we met our 1,990, or we met a Kyoto target. But that's not where our missions are today. We need to be honest in our in our accounting. And so we move that baseline up to 2,018, and that makes it harder to achieve, but more meaningful to achieve as well. And if you might if you recall, we also, that's when we move forward with the idea of a consumption based inventory again, honest accounting about goods and services that that we as residents and citizens of this community pay for and contribute to.

[18:28] So okay, I think we're kind of up to up to date now. Yes, all right. So we've always known that we were going to do an update to the climate action plan. But I wanna make a point really, really clear the the 2021 framework. We, we describe it as a framework. It was not necessarily a climate action plan in the traditional sense. You can't go online and print it off, and have, like pretty pictures, and like all kinds of neat charts and graphs. And that was very intentional. When we discussed this with Council in 2,021

[19:04] we were at a really interesting point, even though it was just 3 years ago. How quickly things were changing in the landscape of climate and resilience. And what I did not want to commit to is spending a bunch of staff time trying to create this really snazzy, beautiful, polished document. and as soon as we get it done it's really outdated that just doesn't make sense. So we really, we have limited staff resource and didn't really want to spend a lot of time trying to collect a document that I mean, let's be honest. Not that many people read it. So what we told Council very intentionally is that the framework that was outlined in our memo was really the framework that we were going to use over the next couple of years to really lean into this idea of this new space of locally based climate actions. It talked about our goals and targets, talked about our learning, talked about integrating equity and resilience, and set sign pillars and some things I just showed. We're now at the point that we feel pretty solid that what we laid out there is framework is

[20:10] is the right stuff. We have been very effective at talking with other jurisdictions. Across the country about how we redesigning our framework around locally based climate action. Many cities are kind of following that pathway now which is exciting. And so now we're ready to kind of roll out the next iteration of whatever it is. And so this would be more of a 2025 to 2030 kind of a 5 year strategy. And I I want to emphasize that because we can a lot to 2030, I think our science based targets are oriented towards 2030, because we know we have to make meaningful progress by 2030. And so that's work backwards from there and then. When we establish these goals and and targets, we need our community to understand that there is a possible pathway to get from here to there. There are multiple pathways. There are a lot of ways. You can put things together in order to achieve those goals. But in our opinion we need our community to recognize there is a pathway to get there. It feels aspirational, it feels big and it feels whole. But there is a roadmap.

[21:20] So that's really what this next update is intended to do. It's really focusing on 1st updating some of our goals and targets. In 2021. We didn't establish any real metric around resilience or equity. We talked about them as design principles, but no clear way to measure what that would look like. And so we're ready to bring some of those targets forward. We have some really good ideas that we've been working on around. How do you build resilience? How do you quantify building more, a more resilient community and same way around equity. It's not just numbers of things. But how? How do you assure that we're actually seeing the kind of equitable response to climate that we anticipated and want to do

[22:06] and that can be something like investments of our tax dollars using justice 40 as a guiding principle. So we have a lot of things that we want to bring forward as a package in that way. The the other thing that I feel pretty strongly we need to do at this point is last year. because we didn't really have a thing to point to like, hey, where's your climate, action, plan, and delay sends them to a council which is like insane. That's not cool like. Go read this like 80 page Council memo, and you get it so like, that's not fair. So let's let's synthesize that and distill it down to something that somebody could actually do. You know if you wanted to just kind of reflect on what are the major strategies? What are the goals and targets? What are the major strategies? What's the pathway to get from here to there. Excuse me.

[23:00] it could be just a I have like a 5 page. Document then we have a deeper dive where you can really dig deep into each of the sectors like, what are we doing around energy? What's included in energy? What's included in what is our theory of change. Within each of those areas. And that's a term that we use a lot in the department to understand. What are we trying to affect. And by when? And how do we know when we get there? So really thinking theory of change, is is really important, and how just change circumstances. What? What do we know now that we didn't know a few years ago? What's changed? Not just we have to accelerate. but in what areas? How do we need to accelerate? And maybe energy generation is not our focus anymore because we kind of did it. And I don't say that lightly, and it's been a fight for a very long time. But we know we're going to be about 95% carbon free electricity by 2,030. That's amazing, and I think it'll be sooner than that. Quite frankly. So what does that mean in terms of the remaining emissions? How do we ship this theory around? It's just metric tons. How do we think about carbon? Not as a pollutant, but necessarily. But how do we put it back in the in, in, where it needs to be. And so rehydrating soils all the stuff that we talked about before.

[24:20] Okay, so what this is not. And this is going to be part of our challenge in bringing this forward is a full scale reboot of our climate action. We're not going back and saying. Here, let's do all these strategies. We kind of know what works. And so we want to continue doing what works but we need to be very clear about why we believe most of the right strategies over the next 5 years. Why, they're going to get us where we need to go. So what's in scope is updating some of the goals and targets and love to have conversation with the board about what that looks like. we are going to. Really talk deeply about

[25:05] how we make the existing document more digestible for community. So we can communicate better about what we're doing and why we're doing it. Because I'll be honest with you. I think we've not done a terribly good job of the last couple of years in that regard. We want people to be excited and understand the work that's going on. and I think there's a great literacy building opportunity, too, when we talk about things like circular economy. That's a term that's not really welcoming. It doesn't make a lot of sense to people. It doesn't really resonate. So, starting to think about language around what we're doing, more quantifiable goals and targets. I talked about that, so we can have a dashboard. We already have some dashboards out there and over measures. So I'll I'll give you an example. You can get really excited. I do, too, about When we developed our a hundred percent renewable electricity target, we had a very specific metric around megawatts of installed capacity and renewables. Think I think we talked about this before we hit that target. It's a 2030 target. We hit it 2 years ago.

[26:13] We're now. We just revisited the the amount. And so that is, get to 100 megawatts of locally installed renewable generation. By 2,030. We're at 120 today. So we're on our way to our 2035 target already. But we'd like to update that target instead of just saying, Let's just do more solar. Let's change that target and start to think about how we're using solar to achieve our our true goal. So thinking about resilience. So let's start to add in things like storage. Let's add in some numeric targets around building grid technologies or storage neighborhood or individual storage technologies. And looking at that reliability of our energy supply.

[27:00] Using solar to make sure our most vulnerable are protected during times of more frequent outages. So we're going to try to shape that target into something that's a little bit more meaningful rather than just let's just do more solar. So that's been, I think, a really cool conversation. We're having within our team. As well. Are there quantitative measures that you're discussing associated with that? It feels like it could be a very qualitative space. Yes, and one of the ways we look at energy right now is energy burden. So that is the percentage of a typical household income that goes towards energy, related expenses. And so you might imagine, that in lower income households you're spending a lot on energy related expenses because you have to commute further, because you can't afford to live here. You have lower quality appliances, less efficient appliances. Your home or apartment is is less efficient. Therefore you may use less

[28:02] overall, but the percentage of your cost is higher. So we look at energy burden and trying to levelize and get that down. So we can. We don't see these spikes in energy burden in specific sectors of the population as an example. Kilowatt hours of storage the ability to use. There are indices that we use for reliability. Around the system, duration and frequency of outages. I mean. make no mistake. We are going to see more and more outages. We just we're on the Puc Public Utilities Commission. Meeting this morning, and what we know. If you know that power went out again in the downtown area. And in Chautauqua and Louisville over the weekend. Whenever there's a red flag warning excel is going to utilize their public safety power shut off protocol. So we're going to see more frequent and longer duration outages.

[29:01] So how do we think about connecting storage to vulnerable community members that are on oxygen, for example. So there are a lot of things that we can do numerically and quantitatively to kind of track. How excellent question. and I'm almost done with this. A couple of other things that we're looking to do in this update are really showcasing the role of government versus community. This is an area that we've always struggled with going back to very original climate action plan. When it was, it was a fascinating situation where we talked about it as the city's climate action plan. And so community we're left with, well, in the city's got this like. Well, no, this is our community's kind of action plan. And everyone plays a role in this. You should see yourself. No matter. You don't have to be a climate scientist, an energy expert to take meaningful action on climate. You, you can do what you can do.

[30:01] But what is the role of government? What is the role of the private sector. What is the role of our governmental institutional partners? And so that's we're really trying to kind of continue to shine a little bit more light on that, so everyone has a clear sense of like. Tell me what I should do. Give me my top 3 things. What should I do? We have a really good sense of what you actually should do here, and more, not just, generally speaking, but here, and more, what you should do to help us achieve our goals. And we're also in a really cool place. Now, where we can start to Let let me pause, because the other thing that I meant to say in this introduction is that Council during their council retreat, you might recall, made the Updated Climate action plan their 11th priority. You normally stop at 10 they made an exception, and they called this one their 11th priority. And and the reason they did that is that because when I was asked, I said, this is already on our work plan. We are intending to do this, anyway.

[31:01] So this isn't the big lift. At the time Council was very interested in adding some dimension to that update goals and targets around biodiversity as an example. So we're exploring that as well. La has a really cool system for measuring a biodiversity. As an example, we're doing some really cutting edge work in that space. So I share that with you. Because there was some comment from Council at the time, really interested in starting to build in a lot of the other kind of key areas that we know are connected to climate into the climate action plan like water. I'm I'm not supportive of that. And the reason being is that we have a lot of master plans, and we're trying to change the title of master plans. But we have lots of strategic plans, that where things like water, quality, water, quantity, we talk about drought, those all live in their own plans, and they go very deep. We don't need to take that and put it into a climate action plan. What we need to do

[32:11] is in our document. Talk about the relevance and importance and connectedness to water as an example and direct people to here's where it lives, and that document should connect to and reference the Climate Action Plan, just like ours should reference. The Grasslands master plan and the Boulder Valley Comp plan. And so the specific strategies live within those documents, and the climate action plan just talks about how relevant those areas are and how it helps shape kind of our policies and programs moving forward. So yes, please, with like the water department. Obviously, you're you have priorities around climate action, just the water priority like, would they have to prioritize sustainability about their other stuff that they're working on already? Is that they in my position? Fantastic question. I would not say above, but and this is you kind of led me right into my comment, which was.

[33:05] We are now at this place, where we have such good alignment across the departments. So it once was a situation that climate was kind of. I use that term again. Appendage? Right? We're out over here. We're like, Hey, we deal with water quality and delivering water. you guys do the climate stuff over there. We now have a strategic plan. We have the sustainability, equity, and resilience framework, Sarah framework that sits up above and guides every department to map towards those out sustainability. And so not only do we have a kind of that architecture in place, but we have a really good connection and relationship with the other departments. And so when I talk to Joe Tavci, the director of utilities like, Hey, we are going to update our water efficiency plan. Next year. You all need to be in that. We need to talk about. What are the long-term forecasting implications of climate? What do we need to think about in terms of extreme heat and drought. How do we think about this differently? What do you all know that we need to be referencing?

[34:07] Similarly, we're meeting next week with open space. They develop their own open space. Climate action plan. which is very cool on how they think about their lands, how they think about ecosystems that they oversee, really backstopping against the work that that we have up there. So not. There's going to be a little bit of overlap, but not redundancy. And so what they're doing is referencing. Yes, the city we have this broader objective around climate. Here's how we, as a department are doing our part of that. And so we're seeing a lot more of that take shape facilities, master plan. As an example. It's it's really starting to look at how we think about our buildings and the carbon intensity of not just our energy supply. But do you guys like, do you advise other departments, because I imagine they're not. You guys are experts in climate. So

[35:02] yes, meeting. that's been, I'm sorry. No, you. It's the our role has changed a lot where we were kind of trying to push, and like here comes the Green team. Now, a lot of departments. Do consult with us pretty regularly on, on, whether it's up to plans or specific projects. And so our role has shifted a little bit in terms of thought leadership. But at the same time there is great thought leadership within the other departments. They are really starting to build their okay. That was a lot. just to conclude. Revisit again. My hope is we will have a built out engagement plan. Over the next month or so. We have a team that's been working on this would like to come back and talk to the board about specifically what we are thinking around the updates to the goals and targets. A little bit around the engagement. What might be we need missing

[36:08] but clarifying that we're not going out and doing a whole climate action plan. So we don't need to go out and say, Hey, what do you all want to see in the climate action plan? It's that's not what we want to do But the parts that we are going to be updating we do want to get some good feedback and input from our community service from that. So okay. alright, I promise the other ones won't be nearly as small like you were saying. We want to go beyond just installing more solar. What is it that we do with our renewable energy? How do we increase resilience, equity, etc? You're talking about levers earlier? What sorts of ways do you actually change it? If you see, you know, you have quantitative metrics and saying, seeing full somewhere gaps to fill. how do you then go about actually enacting that change?

[37:02] Yeah, I think the answer to the question is, who the units in that equation? Because you, meaning a department and local government, the the powers that we have. What we would look at is to say, Okay, where are the barriers for adopting do we have restrictions on doing more locally based storage like neighborhood scale storage. The answer is, yes, our codes are problematic. So we need to think about how we can kind of clear that pathway. How do we think about things like micro? So that's a term you probably heard. That is the ability to kind of isolate part of our system. put in storage and backup and isolate it during times of emergency. So that way, if you think about a critical facility and say it's the hospital or emergency operations center and excel de-energizes the system purposefully, or there's an emergency and we lose power. That micro grid kicks on and draws off the batteries that are there for storage. And so

[38:07] our codes and right now don't allow, for it's not just our codes, but there are. There's actual business practices and legislation that doesn't allow cross property sharing of electricity. So like, I gotta use here. I got a big warehouse like with solar on the roof and the hospitals right there. They don't have any property to do a bunch of energy generation and storage. Let's generate it and store it here, and then we'll feed it to them when they need it. You can't cross the public right away. So how do we deal with that? So that you to us would be thinking about where we want to go. And then how do we kind of remove some of those restrictions, barriers, and incentives? I think that's a big piece of it, too. So now we're starting to look at. I just mentioned this 200 million dollar grant that we got for beneficial electrification which is going to be contractor training job training. Really focusing in on what does it look like to electrify the right buildings?

[39:07] what are some of the technologies that we can look at for the commercial industrial sector pilot some of those technologies, so we can move a little more rapidly in that space. You had a look, and I want to come back to it. Peculiar puzzle. But I'm just state guidelines back for me sometimes as they particularly like right of ways and seed off railways. Yeah, you're talking about micro grading is that it was the specifically like, cross yeah, cross building like energy sharing, that's disallow. Do you know what the premise of that is? Oh, yeah, it's wheeling of power. So excel owns the distribution system. And the thought process is, if you are going to we that's the term called wheeling power. So let's just say I'm I'm almost gonna get up and drop

[40:00] If you can imagine, I'll just use the example of Let's say we're talking about outbound, right? So the new facility it's going to be one piece of the property. There is actually multiple parcels there. So they are different properties owned by different entities. Right? So there's a piece of property that the city owns that has parking structure. So let's say, we want to put to put solar on top of that room in order to take the other use on the other parts of the building. let's let's let's make it a little bit more dramatic. Let's just say we generated a lot of electricity there with solar and ideal across the way, said, Hey, we would love to use some of that electricity because we can't. We lease our building. We can't put it on our before we have a bunch of apartments and architectural shading. We can do great. We'd love to do that. We have to use Excel's distribution lines to wheel the power from where we are across the street.

[41:03] Excel, would then say, well, you need to pay us what's called the Open Access transmission tariff in order to it's like a Tollway. You gotta pay them to use their lines. In many cases there's not capacity on their lines because they use their capacity. The other issue, then, is that we are now competing with them directly, because we are selling electricity. And this is what's prohibited by the State in a state where we are a regulated monopoly. so excel gets the exclusive right to serve customers. If we, as the city, are serving a customer because we are generating and they're consuming. We are now an independent power producer. and that is, you know. so trying to break some of those log jams. We have some. We have some work going there. The Public Utilities Commission just convened, a big micro gridding analysis and session. So they're really trying to figure out where our policies are misaligned. And then how do we think about

[42:07] doing what we want to do. which is sharing across different boundaries where it makes sense. So chuck know when it is capitalism excel, has its limits right, and there. either struggling or choose not to do a lot of things that are necessary that are coming into play with climate change by the days, more wildfires, etc. You know you would hope that they play well with it. You would hope you hope right, because this helps them. You know. Heart failure, this past weekend. It could have been avoided. Maybe, if there were microgrids in storage and local, some local solar farms, or whatever grades in

[43:02] supply their own power, they lose out a profit, and if you lose out of profit, then you're failing, and if you're failing, then everything's failing like it's just like it's it, you know, unregulated capitalism with like a state endorsed monopoly on power. It it doesn't matter how like minute the profits they lose in the short term for a day or 2 outage, because they're winning in the long term, because they have a fucking monopoly across the whole State that the State is endorsing. so it doesn't matter which will change. I feel like it will change because these things are coming into place. So rather than that. yeah, it was like all of the campus power outages. You're just sitting around. You're like, Oh, oh, why, it's too hot. Wait. But yeah, I think there are potentially big enough factors that cause them to at least reevaluate like the municipalization effort did ultimately lead to some improvement in

[44:08] great cleanliness, if you will, so there may be some ways to push it. But at the end of the day. Well, that's that's the thing is, it's there are ways to push it and ways to force, excel into becoming more part of podcast and giving that space for people to do that. But that's not going to come from them. It's never gonna start from now. Credit And there are a number of factors, right? The Public Utilities Commission and the State Legislature and General Assembly obviously create the backstop rules that require the utility things. You know what we have seen through our partnership. Is that they really do are looking at ways to really advance a lot of the technologies and solutions. What we're seeing coming out of the wildfire of the Wildfire mitigation plan. There's some of really interesting things there. They're looking at ways to really help support aggressive undergrounding program looking at, we just partnered with them on an application for virtual power plants. And so this idea of microgrids is very connected to the idea of virtual power plants. When you can look at a whole neighborhood of kind of to your point, you have a bunch of people with solar on their roofs. Well, if you can organize

[45:25] that resource, not just one home. But if you can look at that neighborhood and think about it as a microgrid, then the utility can think about that as a virtual power plant. So during times of peak demand, when people turn on the air conditioning, you have a whole neighborhood generating a couple of megawatts of solar. How do we compensate those customers and actually draw that power onto the grid during times that it's most necessary, so we don't have to turn on gas plants. So we have a plan with Excel to to do a little bit of that, looking at some geothermal

[46:00] And so I you know, I think I think to your point. They the the challenge is cost recovery always mean they are a for profit, entity. And so, if they can do this in a way that a secures profit, that's that's our reality. And we need to work with that. But I also think that they are really recognizing the risks. The future risk, particularly in the gas side of their business. And so you know whether it's a smart business price to say, let's electrify everything because we sell more kilowatt hours. sure, that's fine. Support electrification. How do they want to deal with their gas type of businesses. Anyway, we kind of devolved into that. I'll take any chance. I'm gonna drill against capitalism. What's the point? Being the angry child, if you can't be angry.

[47:06] So that's that's it with the the cap update like I said, we'll be back with you. I don't have a date specific yet, but would like to come back to you. I just wanted you all to get a sense in case you're kind of hearing or wondering what's going on with it. That's what's wonderful. So shall we talk about the the, the Congress that the mayor and yeah, this one can be relatively quick. I wanted you to be aware. I don't know how many of the board members who are familiar and and know what Icli is. Is that a okay, so I is the International council for local environmental initiatives. They are. It's an organization founded back in 1990. And it's the network of local and regional governments that really work on sustainability more broadly, they are active in 125 countries. And so Italy is is pretty influential and pretty big mostly in Europe. But there is obviously Ikeley, North America, and they are actually office out of Denver. And so we're very close with the executive director, and have worked with equally for a very long time.

[48:25] as you might expect. Boulder has had this kind of interesting relationship with Icly. Where we were out facing the kind of design programs to get. You know, cities kind of off the ground and moving on sustainability. And you know. A decade ago we were like light years ahead and not much value. But we want to stay connected to them, because I think as a vanguard city. We can help kind of pull them in the right direction. And so they've been great partners to work with. and what I really appreciate about that is, they have really shifted, based on a lot of our input over the last couple of years. Their approach is really driving action. Around nature based solutions around equity, around resilience and a certain economy. So we talked to them kind of about our model. And now they're kind of using that model across their whole network of cities, which is pretty cool.

[49:22] So the Italy Congress just happened. in Brazil, and the Congress happens every 3 years. And it's really about creating a process where official representatives from the world kind of get together. And they talk about key issues challenges. It's it's opportunities. It's highly political, because a lot of equal representation are elected officials. Which is a good thing. Matt Applebaum, our former mayor, was on the Regional Executive Committee. For many years I've been kind of represented David Driscoll, because you might remember David. He was our planning director and led our kind of sustainability effort

[50:06] for a couple of years. He's on the board now. Right now. The Port Collins Mayor, is the North American rep to the equally Congress for the next 3 years, which is awesome. So we have a great connection there. And the other thing that the Congress does is give an opportunity for cities to really showcase some of the leading edge sustainability work that's going on at the local scale. And when you have local officials there elected officials. Kind of seeing some of those ideas as policy makers. They take those things back to their cities. And so it's really actionable. It's really cool. So we were invited. We have a strong connection to Ickley. In many regards what we lead several of the working groups, and we are invited this year to share our work in plastics, reduction, and in circular economy. And then at the end we are invited to talk about water systems and watershed protection as well, which is a little bit different. So the Mayor was invited to attend Frank and Karen we met on my staff also went. He is leading one of the cohorts

[51:12] around nature based solutions. So he was there to do a number of kind of conversations and building some energy and doing some training for some of the other jurisdictions. The thing that was really cool is that we made some really good contract contacts with the Congress. Direct connections between our mayor and the Mayor of Collie Columbia. and Collie is the host of the UN. Cop on biodiversity. So you might remember there are 3 conference of parties. There is the big cop, the climate cop. There is also a cop on the certification, and a cop on biodiversity the lesser cops we were present at the Biodiversity cop last year in Montreal, and it will be in Cali. Coming up this October.

[52:03] What's cool about that is that that biodiversity cop is a really critical juncture for cities to adhere to what is being kind of label, the next round of protocols, just like out of the climate cop protocols around the importance of. So this is increasingly more and more important. As a as a gathering of world leaders. So right now we are looking to have oh! And also the mayor of believe Brazil and they were the host of the 20. They are the host of that 2025 Climate Club. So our mayor was able to make some of those connections. So typically global Congress, and, in fact, has then extended the mayor of Cali's. Extend the invitation to our mayor to go to Cali. and then we would also have staff person there as well. But some comment.

[53:00] So yeah, I just wanted you all to be aware of that. Pretty exciting stuff. I will send out a link. There's a great recap of the events that took place at the Congress. There's a little video piece that I think we did. And I'll just send that link out for all of you who'd like to see? Second question. Do you know if at these things is it ever shared? What doesn't work? Well, I just, you know, I imagine, in in many realms of academia or conferences. the things that work get highlighted. But really you also don't want to waste your time. Yeah, I I think it depends on who's giving the talk. And this is not a gig on elected officials, but elected like to be the champion of successful things. And and that's fine. So I think there are a lot of workshops that take place both at the cops and at these congresses where it really is workshopping. It's really talking about. What are our challenges? What are the collective things that we need to be doing what's not working.

[54:05] And very similarly, albeit the probably new to Cities Alliance Annual meeting. And that's exactly what we do we spend the entire time talking about course correction, what's what's really not working and not just like giving speeches to one another? I don't want to go do that? I mean exotic locations. Sure. But yeah. cool. So other questions. Thoughts again, just an update. See? No participation on that. That sounds like that was a digging people. It wasn't. No, let's let's move on and chat about the challenge. We've been bouncing around for the last few weeks.

[55:03] Yeah, I said, Weeks, like, we need more than like 2 to 3 months. We've been talking about this. Yeah. So you know, hoping to have discussion. But person he is not here. I I mean, we have courts. So legally, I guess we got So yeah, I I'll turn to Jonathan, and I'll I'll just tee it out, and then I promise I will stop talking. I threw together just a really brief memo in your packet system thoughts that I have in my head that might be useful thinking about the background of this. yeah. So this I just as a refresher. This came up. It was something that was shared with me. As a kind of an interesting idea, and you using the power of boards and commissions to really champion the message. As I mentioned in the memo I think it was kind of exciting to see the advice that Denver was getting to try to move in this direction.

[56:15] We, as a board, obviously do this as regular business practice, but not all boards do and in fact, I think we've had some discussion about, how do we start to kind of move in direction of dealing with some of the single use plastics working with vendors that really adhere to some of our core principles as an organization. And so remember, the idea was I heard about this. Wanted to bring it to all of you. There are a few ways that you could think about this. You could consider some type of. And if there's analysis or anything that you'd like from Staff. We can certainly provide that for you, but it could just be something. I call it a challenge, because it could be a letter to the other board chairs could be a letter to the other boards, a bit of a campaign to encourage them to to move in this direction, providing them with some resources on how do you move in this direction?

[57:12] And again, what I had seen? And I did a little bit of research, and not many places do this, and often they just they don't make it mandatory. What they say is, it's like, that is, the default is plant based diets, and they talk about why they do that. But if there is a board member that wants an animal protein they can order that separately. so I will leave it to the board and your capable hand to talk about whether this is something you'd like to do, and how you'd like to structure it. You don't have to complete it all tonight. You can give some instructions back to me, and I can take it back to my team to support. Thank you. Yeah, this this is your area of expertise. So yes, I did some work on this, but I'd like to propose a place to start. so I created a letter to. We can send to other boards.

[58:04] I made a deck a picture, I said. Here's some information you don't have to look at it. I mean, I can go through the deck. Well, I guess that I'll go through the whole thing and talk about that. So my proposal would be, we adopt it as a funding formula. We invite the other courts in on the action. I also think we should go to Council. So West Hollywood, California's council just adopted this other places in addition to Denver Denver, I'm not sure I think their Council didn't adopt it. I know certain people aren't when you say Council adopts it. Do you mean that any meals that Council brings in that are following this practice, or, like Council has enacted something to say, all cities staff, yeah. Okay.

[59:13] like, hey, all of city staff, any city base like, yeah, I think that's the ultimate idea. So kind of starting small, encouraging others for the council, and then saying, Okay, because it is a very inclusive like you said. I don't think policy is the right word. Inclusive. Breakfast suggestion. Yes, practice. I don't know. There's, you know. not as much, for it's not like saying, like everyone has to be and I think that will take a little bit of explaining to people. So I have these letters. I have this information about feedback. What's good about it? Also in terms of people are interested in reaching counsel. I think there's a couple of ways to do it.

[60:01] You know, we could just send them all an email. But yeah, I think the better way would be, I would be happy to like, let people have office hours and stuff. So I can see the idea a little bit more, one on one. either as an individual or as a member, depending on what you guys were comfortable with. And then, once. I've kind of loaded the idea that buy in individually. Then we can kind of get informal resolution. Yeah, from council. I I drafted also some resolutions that I pretty much stole from ever. because there's I just updated. So that let me see if any other questions yeah, I need some fact sheets, too. and I have 2 different versions more like FAQ. And then a fact sheet. and then I think the idea would be to ask them to sign. I don't know declaration or resolution something if they adopt it.

[61:05] and then ideally get some like press around it and reach out to the folder before I know would like this be? I'm guessing by the conversation I had with them on their letter that wouldn't really sure about that. So, and then from there, I do think. start small businesses. So that's I think that so it happens concurrently. We reached to other boards in city Council. Timeline. I don't think that city Council would. It's necessarily weight of the Board's adoption. I don't think so. I mean that that can happen sort of concurrently. If you, if you want to meet with them, one on one. Then, like challenging. challenging the other boards can be done sort of like a send out an email and just happen all at once, and if you want to include counseling up, you can. Or if you want to talk to council members. Yeah, that that would just like by nature. Take a little bit more time to get through. Yeah. My guess is, it would be more effective because

[62:05] they're very busy. An email coming to their inbox about making meals. That's even more priority for their attention. Yeah, they get so many emails, yeah. and talking about online seems like a good way, do you think? And maybe you have a strong opinion on this? Is it more effective, you know, if we have send one representative? If a couple of us go at a time when we can coordinate. Kind of go in a pair to one another pair to, you know. Yeah, thanks. I I just would offer a a a slight amendment to that pathway. That sort of work considered. It seems like that. There's support and excitement for going in this direction, and I guess that would be helpful to know.

[63:02] Would you like to approach all of the other kind of council boards and commissions, as well as council and kind of the challenge to all of the boards that basically use taxpayer dollars to to buy food. And and I think it's just a bit incongruent with kind of our our philosophy and thinking about climate. And it's just an important thing that we can do. It's it's more than symbolic. So one way to think about this is and and I would actually ask Heather to weigh in on this, too, one opportunity is to send a letter to each of the board chairs, and then one of the to the board reps. So they both can understand, because obviously it's the chair that would need to think about that, as a I'll call it a policy, an informal policy of the Board, and then guiding their administrative support to to change the way they do that. and then for council. One option that you could consider is rather than trying to do this in writing.

[64:03] the either a Board representative or multiple members of the Board could go to a council meeting and then open comment. I might draw a little bit more attention. Yeah. So it's like 2 of us. And that could look, I mean, it's it's, I think it's 6 times 5. I mean, it's 50 degrees. It's 2 units per individual. Okay. it's. And also, I feel like it is something that can be communicated relatively. Yeah, concisely like off the top of my head. I think I could come up with a 30 second elevator pitch right now. Totally. So yeah, I think going to public comment would be great. Like as or representatives. However, many of us want to do that. I like that. I still like the idea.

[65:00] maybe leaving most of them ahead of time, because then they can ask questions, and then we use it as a public. and you can decide whether you want to have those conversations before. So you don't take them up, or but I I don't think that I think it's a friendly like. Hey, this is an exciting opportunity. We as a board. This is what we're doing. We challenge you council to follow our lead and reaching out to the other boards. Let's do this. Give you the 5 reasons why we think this is a really powerful statement. and I also think I'm happy to offer to admin folks like oh, no, that sounds really hard, you know. It can sound overwhelming. Wow! We have to totally rethink how we order this is creates a lot of extra work. List of suggestions of you, has it? But this, this is something that we've been doing sort of informally as a board for a while, so I'm sure you have a

[66:07] sort of like list of places that are more doable to do this from. There's actually a shared list across all admin staff across the city that we've identified that that spreadsheet right? But there is talk about basic in there. So is there any reason to change? Well, I I think that this is this specifically what we're talking about is like about my face. But like the reduction in waste is already something that's happening independently like, unless you disagree.

[67:02] Well, Mark, well, I think, from the city side, I think the majority of our departments, that host either boarding commission meetings or any kind of type of public meetings. They try their best to do that, and they work with restaurants and businesses, and I'll I'll just use an example. I'm not trying to throw it, but like like a a chipotle, right? So they bring all of their things, for, like a little taco bar and everything they bring is disposable plastics. It's tongs. It's the metal hangers. It's everything is just like single use. And it's hard. It's hard for I think restaurants to kind of make that shift, which is why we've been supporting them with a lot of incentives to go in that direction. I don't think that will happen overnight, but I can guarantee that. You can walk over there in in that room over there or upstairs. You open a drawer, and it will be filled with plastic tongs. It will be filled with all of this disposable one.

[68:18] I'm obviously very anti waste, and I think that would w like. I think it's a little confusing and kind of see how people can help you. Yeah, I think I I think, just keep them like sort of entirely, separately. And I think that also one leads into the other. I think like. if you're ordering from more registered meeting places.

[69:03] I think that those are going to tend towards the more environmentally sustainable than your tripoka is right. And so that's going to be sort of like. it's not gonna be like cure, all right. But it's it's it's it's a tend in the direction. And then, like, yeah. cause like, I know that chipotle's not gonna change their like catering services for basically, it'd be certain like, even just for like a whole city like, they're not going to change their catering practices for one city. Whereas if you're going to like the local restaurant, like one of in Boulder, or like 3 of in Boulder Fort Collins and lions. Right? Then they're going to be more like open to changing into more reusable catering. because it's just less of a hassle to do it for one city, right? So so in terms of next steps, I think our 1st next step is just like, what do we do for ourselves? Statement, this is our official policy rather than

[70:07] something. So you said that you had some sort of a a draft of it like yes. Well, it was the one for council, but I believe it, I mean. but I think the idea is to play this by default. If anyone wants to request, then you might obviously do. They have some stuff around which I don't think we need to do for ours, but for big events, they're like, if you put immediate and dairy the middle of the buffet they have. They've done all this testing for us. Worry about where things are bigger, bigger events for us. So do we.

[71:05] I think here's my my suggestion. We call for a motion to this is sort of help me do is to be called promotion for the Board to get together and prepare documentation which would be available for the Council and the Powerpoint right. And then. you know, once we've all agreed on the because I I'm not ready to ratify that. But I didn't have access to the letter. So anyway, that's fine to sort of like. Say, what's workout vendor. So what we can do is we can just. I mean, any official vote has to take place like if you want to ratify the position that we want to take as a board that needs to happen during. No, I meant, like us working on drafting, say, a letter or drafting of us could work on that outside of meeting it together.

[72:03] We cannot get together in groups of more than 3 and discuss official policy at a non like noticed and televised or broadcasted meeting. So yes. it's just if you, if they're like more than X number active, you can't it gets I don't know how they track that. It gets a little bit trickier when it's like working on something as a collective that gets a little bit sketchier. It's not even. It's not even about at the same time, it's about like. like in terms of counsel, like, if you send an email about a policy. And one other council will respond with an email about the same policy. You cannot continue that discussion chamber. So sunshine laws just want to be really transparent, that if you're gonna work on a document, what what you could do is you could have that digital document that if one is contributing into. You're just not having conversation about it, meaning you get on the phone like, can we all just like, get on a zoom call and talk about and just do like group editing right now, that's that's not okay.

[73:23] And then, once you have whatever you want, it's going to be an official position of the board. You can bring that back here if you want to do that. But I again, this is the position of the board. I would suggest, if you want to do some kind of or something around, just assuming that this is going to be the protocol that you adopt as a board think that would be helpful to do so. So we we could do sort of like an informal without language like, this is our yeah. For before the motion that the Federal Board proposing on a plant-based challenge for

[74:01] no, I was suggesting, is that you as a board, if you want to adopt that as a policy. I think it's probably important that you do that by vote. To say from this point forward, this will be our policy as Normal Advisory Board. Yes, secondarily, there is, I think, this kind of work piece that's gonna blow out so which is fine. So I I will prefer the motion to adopt the informal, informal plan based job code as it pertains to the impact. Great. Now, all in favor. Okay, with one abstaining that passes, or with one absolutely he's not abstaining. It's just not here. So now, in terms of what we're proposing to other boards, we don't have to vote on anything about that tonight. We just when we come back with official language. Then if we want it to be an official Eab position, then we have to vote on whatever is coming back before us as a official thing.

[75:03] Right? So so if we're gonna work on this this challenge that the boards we don't. We don't have to be like you don't have to vote on working on that. But when we come back with finished product. yeah, if if you. Really, you don't need to be taking a a vote on a process. Necessarily. If if there is a document that is representing the voice of the board. It's probably a good idea to to vote on that, just to make sure that everybody is clear that you as a board are speaking. So that's the form of a letter. Or it's a document that someone will read in front of Council. That's probably the thing that you want people to do so. I can send everyone my draft letter to the boards. Fact sheet, I think you that goes for that draft of the resolution of Denver use at least that we can send the Council, and then a a written statement for public comment. If you guys like that idea

[76:04] moment or for bringing to board which I have not written yet, but just take from wherever it should be. and then everyone can add on this system. Can I you send it to the group. Yeah. So you send it to Heather. But I don't think I have your advisory board app. Yeah, it will go to all of us take it well. And then when you send the link to it, just make sure that's just okay. And so then we can get that. Yeah, we send letters to other boards for something like this, you know, we're sending it to their chair. Does it have to come from our chair? Does you know, Brooke, have to be the official.

[77:03] Sign me on it, or can it come from all of us, can it? What is that? Yeah, it's it's pretty unusual. We don't do much of this. So I think we there's no real specific way to do it. My! My thought is, there are a few things that I have in my head that I would want to do. I want to make sure that I just run this past the city manager. So she has awareness. And obviously you all can do what you want to do. Just so there's awareness. I'll probably just send out a note to the other board liaisons, just to give them a heads up that this is coming. And I think a letter is probably good to come from the entire board, and you can all sign. I'll also offer once more information on. Go to those meetings I can't imagine. But yeah, I I don't just want to like default on you doing all the work of us. So I appreciate all the work you've been doing. I think. Awesome

[78:14] off. Camera got a big smile. Oh, no, you look so. This was one of your priorities. The other thing that you all might want to consider, too, is just. I I I cannot imagine a world in which people would say, just let out, no, yeah. Well, but just a little bit of that tracking. If there's something we want to do on the back end, just to see like the impact of that. So we have 22 boards in Commission Department. Yes, yeah. And departments do a lot of food ordering. Yeah. So you're going to send out the you know, the materials for people to provide

[79:17] is the intent that during the next meeting. You will approve that as a board, and agree to send that out, or is the intent to send it out prior to next one. The intent is to work on and come back to our next meeting with a finalized draft of I can the letter that we're going to send to other boards, as well as a sort of like direct plan forward, and then finalize that at our next meeting, and then send that out. In the meantime. do? Is it possible for us to either heather? Have not necessarily access to the admin spreadsheet? But is there some way that we can reference via you that this spreadsheet exists, or you know, if we're coming up with either the FAQ. Section or just

[80:09] for your further reading, or, you know, to make this easier like the fact that that exists. Maybe we don't want that completely available to everyone. But is there a way to reference that I think so effective? I'm pretty sure we can share it. I can make the link public on. I I didn't want to be cautious about, you know, recommending more business over in my mind we should not be left. But almost all businesses have vegan and vegetarian options. some a little bit more, another like some places, the only vegetarian options, French right? But or any banks, and then there are places where it but I I don't feel comfortable. Well, I I think it might be worth, and I don't know if this this would be more of a you saying heather of like we have the official order that we send to like the other boards. But then, like a letter that gets sent to the staff members responsible as sort of like a separate thing of like, here is recommended logistics. Here's what has worked for us

[81:20] as like 2 separate things. I think that sounds reasonable. I'm also happy to be as a point of contact cause cause we can go. These are the businesses that we recommend ordering from, but, like these are the businesses that we have been ordering from that have been working well for us like that we have been using. So I I think that that would be the best way to to avoid that stickine itself supporting specific businesses in official paperwork. Yeah, okay, do we have

[82:06] more on this that we want to be working. And anything that needs to be done today that needs to be done before we're working on. Yeah. no. I'll just say that this may be like a small little thing, but I I feel like it's a real like you were talking about earlier being like exams from the cities. And I think it's a really big deal like Europe is doing a lot more of this than the Us. Which is. It's a real place, I think. Older. Be another leader. I was able to open the

[83:04] Powerpoint, but not the document, Elliot. And that's just right. Now agree. Okay, cool. So my case, if if we're feeling fulfilled on this topic. yeah, we're good, we're good. Great, then shall we move on to our our final agenda? Item. I'm so sorry. Thank you. Great great conversation. super helpful, and I guess is just to Wrap that one up there, if there's any data or any type of analysis that you all need to kind of support. And I but you mentioned that, Tim. I'm in a conversation with him, but after you all put that out, I also had a conversation with them, and he's very curious why the city doesn't regulate as part of an action plan.

[84:01] and it gets into a sticky kind of interesting space of social engineering when in many cases it's religious preference or otherwise. So in the city to tell people what they should and shouldn't need is a really tricky thing. But I think in this case we're using taxpayer dollars, and I. It's a different situation. I think the language around it being the default. Yes. so thank you. Just a couple of things that I wanted to flag for all of you. There's obviously a busy, busy schedule coming up. The one thing that you may be wondering about is the Williams Village Redevelopment project that's supposed to be coming back the way we just checked in with the project lead. I think I'm looking at Heather to remind me. They were going back to the applicant, and things were a little bit moving, a little bit slower than they anticipated. And so I think they were saying in Q. 4, it should be coming back.

[85:03] So know that that is still on the horizon to come to you a few things that I would just flag, and I I don't know how to get this one. I can get this one on the schedule if you want to move it forward. But there was a discussion. We just had it, Austin. about the project update on access management and parking strategies for the Amps. Mostly. That's around code and policy. But it might be something that the Board would be interested in hearing a little bit about after the Council gives its initial direction. This will be matters from the city manager coming up tomorrow. I was thinking that kind of starting to give it a little bit into that parking infrastructure and parking policy might be topic. Consider, so can talk about that one big big discussions coming up towards the end of the month, August 20 second, it'd be the next big discussion with council on the Valley Comp plan Update. So they did have a conversation just a couple of weeks ago, mostly on the mechanics of what a comp plan is, how Council should be thinking about it. But the 20 second would be much more detail on how we are actually developing an internal process to work with accounting for that update. It's a really critical

[86:22] plan really critical. Update to that 10 Year land use plan. And if you recall from councils, retreat, there is a lot of attention being paid to this update because we want to achieve a lot with it. And I would just assume that the Board would have a lot of interest in and being engaged. Also on the fun side. On September 5th we have our pollinator and little creature declaration. We do this each year. This is where we have council. Wear a little antenna and dress up in the houseke, and they both love and hate it. I think most of them love it. September 5.th That's the pollinator, little creature! Declaration.

[87:14] Yes, it's it's at council. So it's a declaration. That Council does each year. This, I think, is the 10th year. This is the 10th year of doing this declaration. So we hand out little B antenna and council put them on. And it's it's actually a lot of fun. It's it's pretty whimsical, but really cool. Super fun. Moving into September. If there is an interest by the board to talk about the budget. Obviously feels like a little bit tangential. But a lot of discussion about alignment of the budget towards the Sara framework, how the budget is really supporting the overall city, wide strategic plan and the different kind of environmental elements of that and the

[88:03] Council priorities. We certainly can talk about that. Give you an update on that. That is like, take a bit of what's called Thank you for the update. so oh. our next meeting is scheduled for the 4th And then should we talk about October? Now? That that's I mean discussing, rescheduling our October meeting in I mean, I think we should reschedule. And then it's a public forum. Yeah. So I assume that the rescheduling we could not

[89:02] conflict with other grants. So I think that seems like a pretty a pretty easy, pretty simple reschedule. Push it out. Yeah, push it out a week to October 9, th and then we'll use another works and send out an updated invite. Yes, I have a question. Can we, as board members, join from online, or do we have any? I've attended a few meetings from Wyoming. I also understand. Sometimes there's it's kind of like a last minute change. So I I send that zoom link out an hour before. Okay, so anything else anyone would like to bring. We still have, like, half an hour of time. If you want to discuss things, if not, we can also enter a bit.

[90:13] In that case. Motion to a carrot. Second. All right, put all in favor. One absent that passes so thank you so much for your participation. Everyone who was not here. So everyone in the future that'll do it for tonight. Thank you so much. That's good.