October 8, 2025 — Environmental Advisory Board Regular Meeting

Transcript

Captions from City of Boulder YouTube recording.

[0:05] Reporting and progress levels. So, we will kick off the… October EAB meeting, so… So I'll make that we start the meeting. Yep, exactly. Great. Heather, take it away. Welcome, everybody, to the October Environmental Advisory Board meeting. My name's Heather Sandine, and I'll serve as your technical host for tonight's meeting. We'll start out by reading our rules of effect. One second, where'd my mouse go? Great. 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 board members, as well as democracy for people of all ages, identities, lived experiences, and political perspectives.

[1:17] For more information about this vision and the communication process, please visit that website seen on your screen. https://boulder Colorado.gov forward slash services forward slash productive equipment atmospheres, and the Boulder Revised Code section 16E. The City will enforce the rules of decorum found in the Boulder Revised Code, Section 16B, including participants are required to speak about… to sign up to speak using the name they are commonly known by, and individuals must display their whole name before being allowed to speak online. Currently, only audio testimony is permitted online. No attendee shall disrupt, disturb, or otherwise impede the orderly conduct of any board meeting in a manner that obstructs the business of the meeting. This also includes failing to obey any lawful order of the presiding officer to leave the virtual meeting room or refrain from addressing the board.

[2:16] Only one person at a time is allowed at the codium, unless an accommodation like an interpreter is required. However, we only have virtual attendance tonight, so that doesn't apply. All remarks and testimony shall be limited to matters related to city business. And I will skip these next two, since we are not in person. No participant shall make threats or use other forms of intimidation against any person. We ask that you not affix, Items to the podium when we are in person, and signs or flags must… or other items must used to communicate must be held by one person in display. Obscenity, other epithets based on race, gender, or religion, and other speech and behavior that disrupts or otherwise impedes the meeting will not be tolerated.

[3:17] View? Alright, thank you. So, a motion to approve the minutes from our last meeting? Seconded? Do we have any public participation here tonight? I do see that there are some attendees, I do not see any hands raised. As a reminder for folks that are in, the waiting… or not in the waiting room, that are attendees, if you do want to, right below the comment, then you would just use your virtual hand to signal that you want to speak. We do have one now that's raising their hand. We have Elizabeth Blackwell. Elizabeth, you should be able to speak now.

[4:06] Can you hear me now? Yes. Okay. Right. Hi, EAB. I hope that you will consider supporting the policy change I have proposed for the Boulder Valley Comp Plan. It says, Boulder's ag water delivery system depends on 160-year-old legacy irrigation ditches. Which present many opportunities for system upgrades to minimize water loss and maximize the yield of dwindling water supplies. The city and county will partner with local ditch companies, farmers, and ranchers to upgrade our ag water delivery systems to maximize ag water efficiencies and to ensure the survival of viable agriculture in the Boulder Valley. So, just a quick show of hands, but I can't see you, actually. How many of you have been tracking Colorado River water shortages? How many of you know where Boulder's water comes from?

[5:03] And how many of you are familiar with irrigation ditches? I produced a big show about irrigation ditches for Boulder's 2009 sesquicentennial. Our website, ditchproject.org, is a good place to learn more about Boulder's irrigation ditches and ag water. The tagline for the ditch project is Boulder's Constructed Landscape, because we showed how irrigation ditches and water development built new man-made ecosystems, which we now consider natural here on the plains. Boulder's first white settlers found a windswept, grassy desert here. There were no trees, lakes, or wetlands, no Canada geese, bald eagles, or osprey, no white-tailed deer or gray squirrels, and no earthworms when they arrived. These farmers immediately set to building irrigation ditches to spread water across the land to grow food. Later, they built reservoirs and tunneled under the Rockies to bring Colorado River water to the Front Range.

[6:06] Today, 27 tunnels supply Colorado River water to Front Range farms and cities, including Boulder. By spreading around all this new water, farmers inadvertently constructed new ecosystems. They spread riparian vegetation and wetlands across the plains and built a new flyway for water-loving birds. The plat now carries water year-round, it didn't used to, and new animals followed it upstream to Boulder. But these new ecosystems and animals all depend on our farmers to keep water flowing through our irrigation ditches into our reservoirs and across irrigated fields. Colorado River water shortages and climate change are throwing huge monkey wrenches into our farmer-constructed ecosystems. That is why I believe we need to upgrade our ag water delivery systems to ensure the survival of not only local agriculture, but the constructed ecosystems it has created here in Boulder.

[7:07] Thanks very much. Do any of you have any questions for me? I don't think so. Thank you for that, and I think we've probably all got your email, so I think we have your information, and if anyone wants to follow up, we can do that. Great. Thank you for taking the time tonight, we really appreciate it. All right, we, I just want to give a moment for any other attendees who wish to, participate in public comment to raise their hand. And seeing none, we will end our public comment time. Okay, thank you again. So now we're on to our discussion items, which I will pass it off to our staff. Fantastic. Good evening. Environmental Advisory Board members. I think only one of you have actually been in presence before, which is, fun for me, because I used to staff this for about 8 years, and so it's lovely to see a whole new generation of environmental graduate program members, and thank you for your service.

[8:13] Lauren and I are here tonight representing Tamplin's, Nature-Based Climate Solutions team. We're one of three teams within the Climate Initiatives Department. The other two are the energy team, certainly, Huntington. Our work is… Largely around how we support and guide both the city organization and the larger community. in developing strategies for managing our lands, both urban, natural, and working, that will enhance the resilience of these landscapes in our community to the kinds of climate change that we anticipate seeing. So tonight, we're going to be talking about two domains of our work. One, largely around the natural and working lands, the certification risk assessment.

[9:03] Second, around this, exciting new initiative called the Climate Resilient Landscapes Challenge, which is really focused on improving landscape. So I'm going to lead off tonight by talking about the certification risk assessment that's intended to really guide our work Or guide city work in managing, especially the the, the grassland… Hype landscape around us. For this work, the question that we… we're… Exploring in this effort. is Do we… can we develop a system for assessing the condition of our landscapes and their change over time? So that we can determine whether or not we're seeing our landscapes trend towards desertification.

[10:00] And in this case, I want to provide or offer a definition for desertification. Which I will differentiate from another term, a rootification. So, erudification is when land is dry. And there's a really interesting report that's just come out about how significant the drying of our terrestrial land systems globally is. It's really actually kind of terrifying how much water is leaving our land systems for a whole variety of reasons. That's different, however, though, than desertification. Certification It's really intended to talk about when land has aridified, dried, to such an extent that it can no longer really maintain the ecological systems that it had in place. And it sort of ecologically unravels in a way that becomes very difficult to restore. That's what we would call a desertification.

[11:01] The public comment tonight is quite timely for this in the sense that we live in a landscape, as Elizabeth said, that has been significantly altered, especially in post-occupation periods by Anglo settlers, in which we have taken native grasslands Turn them into… Agricultural lands through the introduction of water-dependent species that require irrigation. So, in a context of a drying environment. If those landscapes cannot continue to be irrigated. There's a very high probability that you'll see the kind of phenomena that's just shown in this slide, where suddenly those landscapes can no longer support the vegetation there, and as that vegetation is lost, then the vegetative… structures that hold that soil in place are lost, and we start to see these kinds of dust storm events. So I wanted to provide just a little bit of context for this work.

[12:04] by talking a little bit about where we are, where we see ourselves in the context of climate change. So, 2025 was… Colorado's worst fire year since 2020. 200,000 acres burned. this, included… this was a very significant year for fires across North America, actually, so we saw a lot of fires in both the U.S. and, as you can see, a very large number in the boreal forests in Canada. This is as a part of a larger trend of drought that we've been seeing. This is the national drought map. Sorry, there's quite a delay in this. Apologize. This is the national drought map, so you can see where drought has persisted, how much of the western U.S. is in that context. And then here is the Colorado mapping of drought, and the areas in red are shown as extreme drought. This is actually after we've seen significant recovery from

[13:08] a much larger portion of the state in drought up until recently. We had a relatively good year in most places in the state, but this is just to show the extent of that. And how we're seeing this process of warming and drying, accelerating. This is just an analysis from the IPCC that's kind of confirming that. Part of the reason this is important is because the climate story that we've been telling ourselves for 20-plus years has been focused exclusively on the role that burning fossil fuels plays in causing climate change. But what we're now beginning to realize is that actually land management, and especially the desertification or the eridification of landscapes caused by our development and land management, has been a major driver of climate change. And one of the pieces of evidence of this This is… is in what we see in terms of atmospheric carbon and where it comes from. This is the classic, sort of, explanation of where… what's causing climate change. The pink line is atmospheric carbon.

[14:10] The blue line is the projected carbon releases from burning fossil fuels. You can see that as the Industrial Revolution kicks off, we start burning a lot of coal. In the 1800s, and then oil in the 1900s, you start to see that escalation of the releases from fossil fuels, and that that is believed to see, oh, okay, there you see it, that's what's causing climate change. But actually, some more recent analysis of the loss of soil carbon has shown that, in fact, over a third of I put this part in the slides, but something like a third of what they can track in the atmosphere as excess carbon didn't come from burning fossil fuels. It actually came from land degradation. So this is a major factor, and you can see that the slopes of these curves are very, very similar. This has led to a condition in which

[15:01] the UN estimates that something like 70% of the land area of the planet is deeply degraded, and if you look at this from a variety of different angles, what you see is that, essentially, we're living on a planet that has lost about 50% of its fundamental primary productivity. And that's the bad news. The good news is what's possible if we bring that ecological and biological capability back online? In fact, part of what we now know is that if from large-scale land restoration efforts like those in China, in India, in Africa, is that you can see dramatic recoveries in the span of as little as a decade. And that, in fact, those kinds of changes not only contribute to stabilizing global climate, but they're actually very significant in terms of local climate. So again, this is this picture that was taken here in 2014 from a wind event. That, actually, that picture on the right

[16:02] is on a city property. It's the Bennett property that Elizabeth and I and a bunch of other people have been working on for years to try to restore that. All that area to the right is basically east of our property, which is on the left, and that property lost something like 2 plus inches of topsoil in a single event, and it just blew east, basically. That's the sort of fence line that caught a bunch of that. And this is what that property looked like after that effort. Right, that is the Bennett property, north of Boulder. So, we figure that the loss from those… that event was something in the order of 15,000 to 30,000 tons of soil, which represents thousands of tons of carbon. So, we've done a lot to try to restore that site, and other… and now that site was really the kind of case study that's led to a whole team in LSMP that's working on land recovery.

[17:00] We've tried many different things, keyline plowing, biochar, different seeding mixes across many years, and that property has recovered significantly in many ways, although it's still a work in progress because of the degradation that took place there. So, that led to a further study that we did with OSMP to look at what the carbon sequestration potential of our whole 40,000 acres of open space lands are, thinking that, well, gee, we have a lot of land, perhaps that can offset what the community's overall emissions are. So our cities, you probably remember from Carolyn's presentation rather, our city's emissions as a community are somewhere in the neighborhood of 1.2 million metric tons of carbon per year. That's from all things driving cars and houses and all that stuff. So, the question was, how much carbon could our 40,000 acres of open space lands absorb? So, we worked with LSMP and did this extensive analysis over a year and a half.

[18:01] And one of the things that we quantified was what the carbon sink is, how much carbon is represented in this system that we're managing. And it's about 2.7 million metric tons. The interesting finding, and this is where that carbon lives, as you'll see, it's very interesting that the largest share is actually in the grasslands, and that's one of the reasons why we'll be talking about this site that we're talking about. Forests, clearly, are a big part, and then you can see where the rest of it comes from. Now, what was really revealing was that we determined that on a good year, our landscapes could absorb something on the order of 20,000 tons of carbon annually. So remember, our emissions are 1.2 million tons. So, this isn't to say that the landscapes aren't important in terms of their absorbing carbon, it's just that they're not absorbing carbon anywhere near the volume that we're releasing it.

[19:02] But the other thing we've saw in this analysis is that already, in some years, because of forest fires, our landscapes are net producers of carbon. So, it's part of why we need to really be thinking not so much about how to manage landscapes to capture more carbon, it's how do we manage them so that they don't release more carbon. So, this, is part of the findings that you'll… this is a really interesting report. It's a little, you know, dry in parts, but it does have a lot of really interesting information in it. The bottom line of this is that We really need to be not only thinking about how we manage the carbon cycle, though, but especially in the semi-arid deserts that we live in. What's really important is how we manage the water cycle. And in fact, I would… many of us would now argue that that's the focus That should be the focus of what we monitor and manage for in our landscapes. And you'll see that in this desertification risk assessment.

[20:01] So, some of you have seen this, I just wanted you to be familiar with this, because you'll probably hear us talk about this analysis, many times over your course on the board. This was the, climate projection analysis we did for Boulder. drawing on global climate models that were downscaled so that they could be looked at in the context of just Boulder. And what's fascinating is that even though these, these global models have relatively large pixel sizes, you can see the size of the pixels there. Still, even in that case, there is variation within Boulder, an area the size of Boulder, between what those models are projecting across the number of days of fire, etc, etc. So it's interesting. But this is kind of the take-home message from this. These are what we, have projected to be both… what we know to be both our historic. conditions of these key climate risks, and what the projections at 2030 and 2050 are under different emission scenarios. But what… the bottom line here is that we're likely to see a doubling

[21:11] At least in some of these, cases, like, for example, days over 95, heat waves of 3 days or more, in… by even just in the next decade or so. But then in some categories, like numbers of drought days, or especially things like high fire days, we're just seeing these massive increases. So, really, the bottom line in this analysis is that we have to prepare to live in a really different future than the one that we've been accustomed to. So, that, again, is particularly true and important in some of the aspects of our landscapes that we have modified to serve us in other ways, like agricultural landscapes, where we have completely changed the vegetative mix and that are now dependent on,

[22:00] Not, essentially, things that are not a part of the natural cycle, irrigation that we're going to deliver into those sites on a regular basis. So, as I mentioned, we're already starting to see significant changes in these landscapes. This was… you saw that 2014 picture. This was another one of these, dust storm events that occurred in in 2023. Ironically, this is… our soil scientist was actually on a plane the day that this happened, and was flying over our area as this dust storm let loose. We haven't tried to fully calculate, but the amount… the tons of both soil and carbon that were released that day were massive. What we also know is that we're projecting… these are water flow projections that all basically show that we're going to see significant reductions in the flow of surface water from these systems. So… and that that is leading to really different dynamics in the upper elevations. And one of the reasons I wanted to raise this is because one of the unexpected findings

[23:01] In this desertification Risk Assessment. was that we determined that over the last 10 years, we have had about an inch more moisture falling on that plains area of our analysis in the spring than we had in previous periods. An inch more. Now, interestingly, it's not adding to make that… it's not that we're getting more precipitation over the year, we're just getting more precipitation in the spring, which actually is a good time to get it if you're trying to grow plants. But the interesting phenomenon is that we think that that's probably related to the fact that as the upper elevations warm. they start to release water earlier, not just in surface water, but also in transpiration that the plants are engaging in. So therefore, we're seeing this linkage between how our upper elevations and the plant communities experience warming, and what happens then Climatically, essentially local climatically. Because that, essentially, we're seeing the transportative cycle change.

[24:06] This is especially important as we think about what we need to do to stabilize these landscapes and the implications of this. So, I'll send you, and this is going to be in the notes, so I would so strongly encourage you to go watch this presentation. It came from the Soil Revolution Conference, which is a conference that we hold every year, and it's happening again this year in December at the JCC. And it's one of the most fascinating gatherings of really high-quality speakers from all over the, sort of, Western world. In fact, last year, when this presentation was given. There was a really amazing presentation from Mexico on the dynamics of landscapes there. But what this gal, who's a professor at Wichita State. Elizabeth Heilman noted, and Elizabeth and her husband, Dale Strickman, are leaders in the regenerative agriculture field. And they have been working with ranchers in the Plains states for so long that in some areas of Kansas, she asserts, there's been an adoption of regenerative agriculture at the level of, like, 70% of a count

[25:09] Now, what's so interesting about that is that now you can start to actually test what happens to the climate locally when you have this level of change in water cycle management. And what she asserts is that They now believe that the minimum scale to change local climate is something on the order of 5 square miles. And that's… that is to say, they are increasing the level of precipitation in the areas that are adopting these kinds of practices when you get to the scale of 5 square miles or large. So, it's a really interesting phenomenon that we're starting to understand as we move from thinking about things just in parcels to thinking about things as landscapes. And so what we're really trying to do, then, is not just Manage lands to bring carbon back down, but manage lands to bring a lot more water back down, and it's cycling too.

[26:04] Okay, so with that, let's talk about the desertification Risk Assessment. So, what we need are tools that enable us to see landscape bait, both condition and behavior. In a relatively cost-effective way. We can't afford to send people out, and we don't actually have the permission to go out to all the land in our area, right? So, what we were doing is testing the tools that we have available to us through satellites and remote sensing to see if we could see accurately both condition and change over time. So, we also wanted to put the data that we were gathering into frameworks that would allow us to compare our landscapes to landscapes all over the world. So, I don't know if you were familiar with this, I wasn't for many years, but We all hear about the Climate Convention, the UN Canonic Climate Convention, that's where the IPCC comes from. It's a body of scientists created to support the UN Convention on Climate Change.

[27:02] When that convention was formed in 1990 at the Rio Earth Summit, there were two other UN conventions formed at the same time. The Convention on Biodiversity, which we probably… you've probably heard more of, but there was a third one, the Convention on Combating Desertification. And there's a whole framework for trying to work on desertification globally that we wanted to sort of make sure that our work was sort of aligning with. So we looked at all these different kinds of frameworks, and then we looked at what land information was available to us through these remote sensing systems. So, what kinds of land productivity? The NDVI is a measure of the kind of spectral dynamics. It's a way we can sort of… it's like the greenness of the landscape, so you can see plants through that, the various forms of water dynamics that you see through these Evapotranspiration measures, etc. Land cover, that's just kind of… these are snapshots that are machine interpreted of what kind of vegetation patterns. And then there's some more static ones, like soil, dynamics.

[28:02] So from all that, we get what you saw in the packet. So I'm just going to walk through this really quickly. So this is the sort of final summary analysis for this 23-year period between 2000 and 2023 of what's the condition of our lands. And these are, you know, this is… Keep in mind that this is the first time that anybody's tried to do this. So, this isn't the beginning and end of this kind of analysis, but this gives us a first snapshot to say, what… how are we doing? So, anything that's tan or brown, you could think of as being kind of in a more degraded state. Anything that's yellow to green, green being best, is a sort of more robust state. So then we could actually quantify this. by those different sort of condition classes, negative, neutral, and positive. So you can see, there's… we… we… we set sort of 3 categories, 2000 to 2013, 2014 to 2023, and then we wanted to see just the last 5 years or so, 2019 to 2023. You can see, then, the proportion of landscape in those 3 different categories.

[29:08] We also were trying to see, could you see the change over time? So that's what the lower portion is. How much of the landscape seems to be trending towards a negative direction? How much towards… is staying the same or neutral? And then we looked at this by both city and county properties. So this is, I think the… the representatives, Landscapes that we looked at. For this analysis, and then here's… The city's version, the OSMP lands are all outlined, and the county's versions. So, a lot of data in this process. I think just to quickly point here then, so what's this condition of the city's properties? Well, back up here. It's critical. Okay. So, by this analysis, it would suggest that the county's landscapes are in a somewhat more degraded condition than the city's.

[30:11] that we have, you know, almost half of our landscape in the city's side that's sort of in the neutral condition, and that we don't see a lot of change in this sort of analysis, but there is some, especially in the negative direction. If you want to just kind of get A sense from 2014 to 2023 of, like, where are the problem children? Everything in brown there is kind of what you would see as kind of an area that has… as an area we should be looking at with some concern. So again, these are the clusters of the city properties, here's the clusters of the county properties. And then I wanted to just show you one property. One of the really important findings that we… had in this process was, at first, we were… we were having them interpret the condition of a parcel by its boundary.

[31:01] And then we were getting these readings on what's the condition of that property that we didn't feel like actually represented what the land managers knew to be the case on the ground. So then we said, okay, subdivide that, let's look at the pixels within that property, and analyze the condition by pixel. And that's where we developed. So that brown, that red area, the things that's outlined as black, is… is the Boulder Valley Ranch lease area. And as you can see, if you just gave it one reading. you wouldn't really understand what's happening on that property. In fact, that big green blotch… how many of you have been out there? Do you know where I'm talking about? You know what that green blotch is? That's the pond, right? That's what I see, right? And then you can see, you could probably remember if you've been out there, like, that prairie dog impacted area there on the west, you can see that pretty clearly, right? So, this was part of, like, saying, oh, okay, I think that this tool, which is seeing this from way up in space. Is seeing, kind of, what we're seeing on the ground.

[32:03] So, this is kind of the overall, assessment then. So, something like 22% of that property is in the poor to very poor, 38% in the neutral. You know, something like, what is that? 40 in the… in the neutral to good. We also were able to look at this in a variety of other ways. These are just ways of sort of visually seeing how this property was changing over time. Another really interesting and not surprising, I suppose, dynamic here is… is what… is you can sort of see the signature of the 2013 floods. That inundation event really caused a big response in the vegetation and the properties all across the region. And so I'll close out by just saying, so what did we learn? We learned that we… we believe this tool can give us both condition and trend information that we think is useful.

[33:00] we're not sure yet about whether you could say that what's neutral there is the right sort of normative statement of what's sort of neutral on the landscape. It was just sort of what fell in the middle between what we consider poor and what's good, so there's more to learn there. And I think there's still more ground-truting around how to sort of see this over time. Well, I'm just repeating myself here. So that's… that's a quick summary of about a year and a half's work. But I think maybe the last thing I would say is. we learned a tremendous amount in this, and, you know, at some point you kind of run out of money. And we… we think that it's a good place to have gotten to as a baseline, and then the question will really be. what do we do with this? And I think that the consensus was this would be a really good process to repeat in 2 or 3 years, where we can come back and then look again to see what that change looks like over time. Because the most recent data that was available for this was 2023.

[34:10] So a lot of the more recent land management activities where we've been trying to restore lands, we can't even see in the data yet. So that next cycle of this would actually give us some really valuable information. Plus, we'll learn more, and it will be much less expensive to do, because we kind of know all about the analysis again. So… That's the other last thing I would say, I said that 3 times now. The other last thing I would say is, it's already actually stimulated a very interesting conversation between the city and county. Commissioner Stoltzman has called for a meeting between the city and county staff to look at whether we could identify a project together that would try to work on some of these most degraded lands to see if we can actually effect change that we can see through these systems. So I guess with that, I'd stop and say I'm open for any comments or questions. What's your land management? You just talked about some land management that you're doing. What are the things that you're working on?

[35:04] Yeah, so the primary, actor in this particular area… so that area that you saw, by the way, is essentially the two resource conservation districts that were set up by Natural Resource Conservation Service back in the 30s. Those are the two that exist between Boulder and Longmont. Our land management in that area that we do as a city is all conducted by the Open Space and Mountain Parks Division. They have a team now, which they didn't… 5 years ago, they didn't have this team. They have a team now whose job it is to try to go into these degraded sites and implement different kinds of land restoration work. And that can range from new kinds of, it's called a key line plow, which is designed just to open up channels for water infiltration. new kinds of seeding strategies, they've used some really interesting animal management, they've used both cow grazing, they've used pigs in some cases to try to get rid of teasel and other species. So there's a whole range of different techniques for land restoration that are being tried in those lands out there now.

[36:06] are… The things that they're doing, though, a direct result of the information you got from this study. No. But part of what we're trying to do is to say, can we see the signature of those actions now with this tool so that we can watch them over time? Yeah. The other thing is that what this potentially enables us to do is to see the entire landscape, because right now, up to this point, we've only had data on our own lands. Right. And that's really hard to see a trend across a larger landscape when all you're seeing is your parcels, right? So now, and one of the other findings of this study was that there's essentially nobody minding the store in terms of what's happening with our larger landscapes. The state doesn't… watch this. The feds don't watch this. So, who's keeping track of what's happening on our landscape? So this is one of the first efforts to try to do that.

[37:00] See, it was surprising to me… that things looked relatively stable over the time window you looked at, but it sounds like, I assume, other than flood events or fires that we may have had naturally happening in that window, there wasn't so much that we could track. It's more establishing the baseline, and now that we have imposed explicit mechanisms to try to make improvements. that most likely we'll be able to see those impacts? Yes, there are a few other interesting dynamics, like, we still aren't sure, like, the… a lot of assessing whether a property is doing okay or not is through this, what's called the NDVI, which is a spectral reading of greenness. We're not always sure whether we're seeing a stable, higher order plant, or whether we're seeing bindweed. Sometimes what you're seeing is bindery, and that's better than nothing, right? But that is not a healthy ecosystem. So there's some level of background truthing that we're still going to have to learn how to do.

[38:00] No. Yes, Peter. So, for the… For the areas that are… Kind of non-agricultural, It's classified. would you say that the two major solutions, I guess, or interventions 3, maybe, would be the, you know, the water infiltration. The seeding, and then would that be, like, biochar to try and… you know… bring back the carbon… increased carbon content? Are those kind of the primary interventions that are being focused on right now? Yeah, it… it's so much about trying to get a root established in those grounds so that they can restart that carbon cycling and water holding. So, the key line plowing is a very, promising system, because it creates that opening. You do keyline plowing on contour, so that you're going perpendicular to slope, so that any surface movement is going down.

[39:07] In some of these sites, though, the soils are so degraded that they have no structure, like, you'll run that plow through, and then they just collapse again. So, in some cases, like, Bennett was one of those cases. The soils are so unstable now. That what we needed to do was just get some cover on them again. And so one of the things they tried was bale grazing, where you actually just spread hay over the ground, and then you have the animals out there actually eating that hay, but a lot of that's staying on the ground and covering the soil, plus they're fertilizing that as they go. So they're figuring out how to get some kind of mulch or cover over that land that will stay in place so that the plants can get established is really one of the… that's what I'm saying, that when you lose control of these systems, and they go back to bare soil, it's really hard to get them back. So another thing that they're doing out there is they're, especially on those kinds of sites, is trying to get irrigation systems, like, like Elizabeth was talking about.

[40:07] Functional again, so that you can get water there enough to get the plants restarted. But even if you're able to kind of restart those… reestablish those systems. Aren't they still at risk because of the… because of the increased temperatures in the arid environment. Yeah. Would you… would you still need to have a water filtration part to bring in to be able to sustain that, you know. This is one of the reasons why I think a next part of this analysis is to look at how many… how much of our land area are in these Essentially, artificial plant mixes that are so dependent on water. And can we start facilitating a transition of species in those systems towards dryland types of native bunch grass that are going to be more well-suited and adaptive to drought cycles?

[41:10] so that you would lose everything if you have… like, once you… you have a couple of years of drought in that sort of artificial hay mix, you just… it's all gone, right? And then your… and then your smooth brome and all these weed species that you don't want are going to move in because, you know, the ground wants to be covered. And then you're just fighting weeds again, it's just really hard. So, that's part of, I think, part of one of our next steps is going to be to say, where… where strategically do we need to start transitioning intact systems, systems that are still intact, but are water-dependent, over to species that can be more durable in periods of loosing that water? So we, you know, at the Bennett property, we tried all kinds of different plant seed mixes. partly to try to see what works best, and to be honest with you, sometimes it's just the vagaries of the year. You get a really dry spring, and then none of your seed takes, and it doesn't mean you have the wrong seed mix, it's just like nothing was going to grow that year.

[42:09] Because I know that life There's a group here in Boulder that helps residents transition from Like, your… your grass to, like, a more, kind of, like. Local natural habitat that doesn't require sprinkler systems and all of that stuff. Oh, you're talking about Resource Central? Resource Central. Yeah, the turf conversion program. Well, you'll hear a lot more about that from… so that's a kind of an urban… the urban analog to what we're talking about. Just curious, how much, like, does this, satellites thing? costs. That's a good question. We spent a couple hundred thousand dollars on this analysis, but I don't think very much of that was actually buying data. Right, it's like staff interpreting that stuff. I have a question about that, so…

[43:01] based on, like, the new Google Earth MG model that models, like, what Clay's releasing. Clay's a non-profit that has released Google Earth embeddings for free to, not for private sector, but for public sector and, institutions and academics that have, like, Earth embedding images. Do you see that maybe getting easier to get this data? Not that your team needs to be doing anything with that. As those models come out, and like. Yeah. Google Earth is doing with releasing their embeddings, and even, like, some of the species identification they're doing. Obviously, that takes training to learn how to use them, and… researching, but will that maybe help with, like. having data faster based on other trends. We have a really, amazing asset and resource here in that CU has… Yeah, my boyfriend's a PhD, too, that's how I know about this. So we have this thing called the Earth Lab. They specialize in trying to sort of understand and use all these different systems, so I would really defer to them. He invited them, in fact, they

[44:09] They were observers through this process. And I think that now that we've been through this first cycle, if we then go forward to do it again, we'll have… they'll be clear about what kinds of systems to watch for. I think the other thing that's coming forward, His… his drone-based analysis. So I think we'll see more and more. Because he does wildfire research, and now, well, actually, it's coming from insurance companies, but they're doing drone flyovers of properties that they're giving him access to. So that's… and that helps, obviously, with… he needs education for predictions. Another question I had with the neutral, going back to, like, the questionnaire that was in our packet about surprising, I worried that it would… people would see neutral, and then be like, I don't need to do anything, which I feel like you gave a really good answer, but I wonder if this gets to, like, a more general public

[45:01] I think if I saw neutral, and I'm, like, a company, because I can find… I work for a manufacturing company, I can see them on this thing, and it's brown, but then part of it's green, you're like, oh, if I just keep doing what I'm doing, it's fine, but that doesn't take into account, like, the changing climate And so it's not, keep doing what you're doing, because it's gonna just… disasters in missions, so, like, I don't know if there's a way to Better classify neutral Earth. Well, I don't think we know enough to even be able to say whether neutral really should say called neutral. Yeah. So I think this… this analysis isn't something that we're going to be going out and doing a lot of publicity around, partly because it's such an early stage learning, and I think Hopefully, a couple years in from now, we'll do it again, and then we'll have even more comments. And know better about how to say normatively, this we should call neutral, this we should call it, this we should call that. So you will not be publishing those maps?

[46:00] They're certainly publicly, they're funded publicly, so they're available, but I don't think we're going to be trying to create… we actually are creating a dashboard interface for land managers to be able to use this, mostly to sort of test it and start to try to play with it. So that we can see. Because again, the point of this is. Can we produce something that a land manager can use to see whether they're actually having a positive or negative effect? Along those lines with sharing the information to different extents, and knowing that you guys tend to partner with other cities and share research and results. Across a bunch of the climate space. Is there any intent to try to partner, or at least discuss these initial results and the process, and what you've learned from the process, with other, maybe more relevance, like, western U.S. states, to see if that's something that's of interest to other cities, or would be useful, even as baselines for them? Well, one of the reasons why we spent the first part of the project looking at all these frameworks is because we wanted to be able to actually participate in

[47:07] conversations that are happening with the UN Convention on Combating Distertification to say, here's our results, what are you seeing, how does that relate? Because there are very, very few cities… I don't know of any other city that's doing this kind of analysis, because they, A, they don't have the resources, and B, they don't have the land. So, our most likely collaborators would be more like state and federal land management agencies. I should say, we spent several hundred thousand dollars, half of that came from the county, so I'm delighted that we were partners in that process. But again, I think, we are going to be reaching out, but I don't know, again, how many partners we would find there. sounds like us. So, for the areas that are… Designated as kind of high risk, or at risk of, transitioning to, you know. desert… desertification is… is occurring. Are those areas where… They're man-made, kind of,

[48:09] Describe it with the term. areas that… where the climate and the vegetation has changed because of man-made intervention. Are those the… From ones that, you know, because the… the plant type and the vegetation has changed, and they need a lot more water. Water levels have gone down, temperatures have gone up, and so those ones are at risk, and so the… the best solution seems probably to revert back to the more natural, like, drought-resistant type plants. Is that kind of the… I think it would be safe to say that almost every… Acre of ground has been impacted by human activity. And so is bearing the… the signature of that. In fact, one of the things that we found was that almost all this area was plowed at one point or another, as you had a lot of people just… it was in an agrarian society, a whole Amazon was being produced, except for some of these really hilly, rocky outcrops. And it was there that you would find the sort of intact

[49:16] native plant ecosystems. Yeah. And in the places that were plowed, those are the places that are really weedy, and that are actually… soil structures are still really… so it was… you could see this, like. Generations of legacy of that plow activity. Lands that are no longer being actively used as agriculture. Right. But they were the past. Yeah. So the plowing changed the type of species. And the other thing, to be honest with you, is that the prairie dog impacts are so strongly… it's, like, one of the major factors that you see. I mean. it's overgrazing. It just happens to be a native species that's overgrazing. We overgrazed a lot of that. with cows, too, for years and years and years, so a lot of that land was already degraded. But the conventional cycle of bird dogs plaguing out, which is how it used to go, and so it was like, yeah, it's been getting bad, but pretty soon they'll plague out and the land will recover. They haven't plagued out, and so the impacts have just been

[50:15] And continuing to grow, like, those colonies just keep expanding. It was another one of those things where we know the expansions within our own properties, but we don't know what it looks like across that whole landscape. And one of the things that I'm actually talking to the folks that we do analysis with is they think they can write an AI algorithm to use machine learning to recognize where prairie dog colonies are now, and to actually be able to map what the changes across that entire landscape have been, which would be really, really interesting to see. With the goal of population control. Well, the first is to just know what level of impact we're experiencing. And then, as a society, we need to make some choices. Do we want to see you know, like, what… how are we going to measure this trade-off? We've been, you know, balancing it in different ways over time.

[51:04] I think we haven't necessarily always been trying to evaluate what the full impact of that is. Partly, again, because we… over the past, it used to be like, well, yeah, it's bad now, but it'll go away. And it just has… So, in the technology, the satellite, or whatever technology that's used to identify the different, you know, species and vegetation in their state. Does this technology also have the capability to identify the level of carbon within the soil, or does that need to be still… You… we… you can probably develop some proxies. Okay. But again, this is part of, in fact, part of what was the impetus behind this is that I don't think carbon is the right measure to be trying to monitor for. It's water. And what we really want to know is, can we… can we… can we reverse and improve water cycle? If we can do that, then the carbon will follow.

[52:06] But you can't manage for carbon and get water. It's the other way around. And so, you know, our landscape, I would argue, and I think many people are shifting towards this, that we need to figure out how to incentivize managing for improving water cycles. out, and not worry so much about the carbon. Because again, remember, 40,000 acres, and in our best year, we're capturing 20,000. That's not the right metric to be worried about. You know, yes, I mean, every ton is good, but it's not like it's going to counterbalance Boulder's million and a half tons of emissions. Seems like the predominant solution, then, is to revert back to the native plant species vegetation. Especially if you can't be assured of keeping water on a property. So one of the things that we did do was we tried to do an analysis of the level of seniority of water rights, so we could start to prioritize properties based on how likely it was you could keep watering.

[53:02] Because we're already starting… and with the Colorado River, oh my god, you know, we're gonna see more shutoffs, and anybody that's got a junior water right, you're not going to be able to keep water on your ground. At least as consistently as you did. Where do you see, like. obviously we talked about water, and I think you gave some great explanations to how it plays into, but is there any way to add any type of, like, mapping or visual of, like, water with this work on desertification? Like, I know it plays an important part, but… Maybe, like, for future mapping, like, overlaying some of the justification with those water… either water rights, or access to water, or water levels. just to kind of see how they're comparing, and then I think, obviously, this is baseline. It'll be very exciting to see how different water policies… Yeah. …affect it, but you can't measure that until they happen. Well, I want to make sure I don't cut in too far into Lawrence time, but I would say that's why we started this whole part of the project that was doing that water rights analysis was a first step in that direction. It's really complicated and hard to do that, and they did a really interesting job, and I think it was… it's not thorough, it's not complete, but I think it was a good step in that direction.

[54:12] Yeah. And I like the idea of trying to visualize that. I don't think we're quite there yet, but I think it's a great way for us to go. Any last question? I have one more. I thought it was really interesting, the Wichita State presentation, which would be great to watch in full, but that 5 square miles can form a microclimate. Do you take that information, or would you, and then target certain areas such that you would have the most impact for that part of the conversation? See, that's… to the point that you were making. If I'm going to try to target managing for something. I want to manage for the thing that can change my local plan. And if it's true. that by getting 5 square miles into a regenerative set of practices, where I have live roots in the soil all the time, and I don't have any soil exposed, and I actually start to get that water cycle, and I can actually start to measure that I'm getting an inch more precipitation in that area than I was, that's changing your local climate.

[55:11] And it's going to be making a contribution in its small way to the carbon balance of the planet, but much more importantly is that I'm actually changing my local climate. And that's, I think, the frontier of our work, is that we can change local climate, even if we can't necessarily change global climate. So, I think that… and that's where we want to go. It's like, can we start to manage at scale and then be able to monitor how that affects our local ecosystems and climate. Yeah. And that's why, by the way. I'm… I'm pretty far out on this limb when I say this, but when I'm asserting that when we're seeing the changes in the upper elevations, transpiration rates showing up as more moisture in the spring, lower, that's a… that's an illustration of this property. That we… there is a dynamic there, this water cycle dynamic, that we could potentially be trying to affect, and should be, is my view, if we want to be… if we want to create resilience in this time.

[56:07] Is there… Trying to understand, like, the trade-offs between looking at the kind of the… The natural kind of vegetation, natural species, and then… Your farmland in the regenerative agriculture, and which is more at risk? Of… of… of losing carbon. I guess you have more control, potentially. over the regenerative agriculture prospect, and be able to maintain that. And so, if you maintain that moisture content, and then the carbon follows, and So you have a little bit more control, but in terms of the size, I would assume, like, the… the non-agricultural land is a lot more. So I'm just wondering how you balance, kind of, prioritizing the… Yeah, one thing to just have in your minds as you think about land in this context is what we mean for what we're referring to when we say agricultural.

[57:05] there are… there are really kind of three broad classes, and so there's kind of the market farm, which are usually really small, like half acre to 4 or 5 acres at the most, right? These are the people you're going to see at the farmer's market. Then you might have what they call the broad acre farms. These are people who are plowing and growing at the scale of tens to hundreds of acres at a time. These are the sugar beet farmers and the others that are doing that, the wheat farmers. We have Lookout Road. In fact, one of the candidates, I think, for property work is out there between 75th and 95th on Lookout Road, and if you look north on that road, you'll see these long strips. This guy's still trying to do Interfowlow wheat out there. I'll say anything more. And then you have… the third category of ag would be basically… well, there's probably four… would be hayfields. So you're managing for a crop, but it's a grassland, so you don't ever plow it, theoretically. And then the fourth is grazing land.

[58:04] And that grazing land category kind of also bleeds over into our natural grasslands, some of our natural grasslands we raise. So, the dynamics of those types of land managements are really different. So… What I'm really talking about most, probably, are the grasslands and the grazing lands. The Broadacre Farms is a whole other different discussion. Oops. Okay, thank you so much, I really appreciate… great question. Nice work. Thank you. Work is awesome. Perfect. That unit, I can share. I am obsessed with them, and they're partnering with my boyfriend on his PhD, so I owe them a lot to keeping me alive. Hannah, it's Dan Hammer. Not sure if you know the name, but from a Berkeley PhD, who Lutz, our founder.

[59:08] No, he's the founder behind Clay. He's… Okay. It's like, I haven't done this before. So, I'm Lauren Friels. I'm on the Nature-Based Solutions team with Brett and Karen. I'm new to the city, so I started off in late April. So it's the first time seeing… anyone's seen me in this context. My trainings as a landscape architect, and kind of my focus on our team is on urban lands and landscapes, and starting a new initiative. So, I don't know if you… any of you guys talking about, like, how we can affect our microclimate, Yeah, do you guys know the square, like, how many square miles Boulder it is? I think it's in the… but just left, so I'm not… you would know, probably know it off the top side, but I think our urban lands in Boulder are right around in the 10 square mile

[60:09] like, situation. So, talking about places that we could, in fact, have a significant influence on our microclimate, our urban landscapes can affect our microclimates. Like, OSMP's even bigger, but what we're doing in… within the city, produce a lot of change. So… This year, in response to some of this work we're doing with the landscape manual updates and the wild urban interface code changes and things like that, we're going to be launching what we're provisionally calling the Climate Resilient Landscapes Challenge. This is all draft right now. Because we're working with a steering committee, about… I've gathered together 12, kind of, industries and subject matter specialists to advise on this challenge. But the idea is to have a community mobilizing initiative designed to elevate awareness about our urban land ecosystems' critical role in protecting communities from escalating climate industry dreams.

[61:15] And develop a shared understanding of the best practices for designing, building, and maintaining climate-resilient landscapes in Boulder. We're talking about climate-resilient landscapes. What we're really focusing on is landscapes that use less water, have used less, release less carbon, require less maintenance. And produce, cooling in our microclimates, have increased urban shade canopy, and increase the level of both plant and, animal biodiversity in advanced urban plants. So, animal meaning all of our lovely pollinators, dragonflies and that, as well as, larger creatures. So… We're thinking the kind of draft concept on this is that it'll have two components. One is going to be a competition for existing landscapes, that are already installed, that will receive rewards and recognition.

[62:11] And the other is the opportunity to have proposed projects that will earn… that will win a significant amount of seed funding towards, implementing their designs. And we're hoping this will kind of the implementation projects can come back the next year. This isn't a one-and-done sort of situation. We want to do at least 3 years of this. So that we can see, the project on the ground and come back and build on our knowledge. The idea… on the 16th of October. There's the second meeting for the landscape manual changes from the City Council. The idea is to move that, the landscape. kind of code for the City of Boulder into a city manager role, which will make it easier to update, and then the things that we learned during the Climate Resilient Landscapes Challenge, like, if there's things that are working better in our landscape, then we can take that under advisement and actually iterate on our code.

[63:12] Yeah. Who are the… Participants, targeted market to… The target market for participation is, smaller, properties. So, we have a lot of things, kind of things available if you're, like, on the level of, like, I would be willing to go to ASLA competitions, or, Green Building Council things, or ULI for bigger entities. But we have less, for highlighting the work, or, being able to iterate on that, and have highlight the work of people who are doing things more on the design-build side. So the target market is going to be design-build.

[64:01] contractors and designers, as well as homeowners, small restaurant practices, things like that. We're hoping to have it be really broad, so that it will include everyone from DIY, I've gone and changed my house's landscape to be amazing, to people working with, like, high-end restaurants in town, things like that, but to do it with city-scale landscapes, as opposed to, you know, the name-brand designer from New York. If that makes sense. So the existing project competition, in part, is to, be able to provide examples of what we're looking for when we talk about landscapes for the wildland-urban interface, or landscapes that improve biodiversity, or things like that on an urban scale. So there's a lack of,

[65:01] good examples. I spent… 8 hours, not 8 hours, a good 4, walking through, the, kind of, our wildland-urban interface, trying to find at least one place to show as an example of what our landscape code was asking for. And I managed to find one house that I was willing to, like, really highlight in this, without a lot of photo editing. We would like to improve on that, because we truly believe that you can, be fire resilient and Water-wise, and produce a beautiful, lush landscape that, supports our native ecosystems. Wait, which part of Boulder is that? This one, this is on… Fifth? Yeah, on Mapleton Hill. Oh, okay. So is that… Is that a we, then? Yeah.

[66:02] Yeah, anything east or west of Broadway is now in the Wildland Urban Interface and subject to the Wildland Urban Interface landscape codes. The… so this existing landscape competition, again, this is, proposed, and we're reading through it with the steering committee, so some of these things will change. We're looking to get, broadly, probably 3 to 4 categories, either by price per square foot or by, type, depending on how we work this out with the steering committee. And then we're looking to have 3 categories, for kind of judging, with panels of three to five judges. Trying to have odd numbers so they don't get stuck. And those, categories are broadly, we're thinking, would be heat and drought resilience. fire and flooding resilience, and community and ecosystem resilience. These pairings have been done both because, like, heat and drought are non-catastrophic long-term… long timeline-like risks, that we're facing, but they also produce, like, interesting conversations.

[67:10] Between the judges, where you can have our, you know, water conservation specialist in the same room with The city arborist judging the same property, in decide… kind of having the discussion of how we balance these things to the betterment of our urban landscapes. Can I ask some questions on the previous one? So, heat and drought, I understand, like, you have something that tolerates heat and drought, like, you know, and low water, high heat, and then fire and flooding resilience, how is that? Yeah, so heat and drought, it could be… it tolerates it. It could also be that it improves it. Like, it improves its water use, or it improves the… it incre… increase… lowers the temperature at property as well, right? Fire and flooding, those are both catastrophic events.

[68:07] that we're dealing with. I think these will be the most interesting conversations, because if you have people who are really focused on fire, impacts. It's like, well, how can you produce, landscapes that deal well with your infiltration and your stormwater, all the stormwater aspects of that as well, at the same time following, fire resilience metric… measures. I think that's actually going to be, hopefully, where we get the most interesting, and innovative ideas, because it's two of our most catastrophic risks that we need to be doing things to mitigate for, but we need to be doing them at the same time. on the same properties. And we're thinking of community resilience and ecosystem resilience as, like, focusing on both, say, what an ecologist would be looking for for mitigating for biodiversity loss, but also for how we'd be providing for, those who need food, or doing extra urban agriculture, or,

[69:11] Just creating beautiful spaces for… our human partners. In that category, you would put more native Plants and… Yeah. Yep. I have a question I see here? Yeah. So you have single-family residential home, which makes sense, even multiple… but with multifamily housing, so, like, so I ran… so, like, how would you… how are you going to encourage people who maybe don't own the property they live into, and that… where they have no control? Over the landscape to engage In this activity, like, commercial property, you would have the people who work there, like, be engaged, and then in studio commercial properties or campuses, they often have even landscaping or grounds, or students could Yeah. Or briefly work there could go proposing to enter to the… their institution, but for multifamily housing, how do you see people being able to engage with that? Well, we actually, I'm gonna switch to… Oh, and you can cover it more, thank you.

[70:07] What? If you're covering it more than her, we can get to it. Oh, I'm just gonna… really quickly, like, switch slides, because I have an example of how I was doing… would you like me to cover the last slide on the existing landscapes before I jump into this? Yeah, go for it. This one is just saying that we'll have different categories, basically, and four special awards for excellent, You know, if you're excellent in one resilience category, but don't hit the others. And all of this is, you know, dependent on where the steering committee is going and thinking about going. This is an example of a project that we were actually involved in as the Nature-Based Solutions team this year with our Boulder partners, and it's an example of how a multifamily housing project could potentially, like, engage in this work. So the proposed landscapes projects competition would be, like, entrants have a proposed idea or project that they submit, kind of, what they would like to do.

[71:07] what the idea is, it would hopefully be targeting groups that are working in coalition. So, if you have a multifamily housing property owner who's working with their, community members with the people who live on the property. They could do that together, in collaboration. So this is… this example of earlier this year in April? In April, Boulder Housing Partners reached out with one of their community managers, as well as, like, people who are living on this site, and they wanted to change a degraded landscape into a food forest for the community members, and along with Cool Boulder Partners, we helped realize that design. We planted 33 trees a couple weeks ago along with those partners, and this is a picture from that project.

[72:02] So we would hope that coalitions of people who are living in multifamily housing, along with the owners of the property, would come up with their ideas and propose them, yeah. Where is the other one? If you want to go see… Which one? Yeah, the previous slide. The previous slide, yeah. Oh, this? Yeah. It's, Tantra, which is a Boulder Housing Partners site. Tantra Park? I think so. Yeah. It's on Moorhead. circle. Okay. Yeah, you can, like, peek in. It's, like, on the sidewalk. Yeah, I'm just curious. Yeah, Jamila, who's in this picture, is the one who had the brilliant, like, she's, like, the energy behind the project, and has… it's her vision, to… and all of these food forests for her community members. And it's been a true pleasure to be able to come along and see her, to make that vision a reality.

[73:05] Yeah, the… yeah. Which it was… we want to see more of that, and more people… this is a quote from a steering committee member who's… was saying, we want more people who know what to do and how to do it. And this challenge is hopefully bringing both the community's, kind of brilliance and creativity to the fore. As well as being able to learn from each other more. And have examples of what we want. So, with that, that was all I had. I do have a couple of questions for you guys that I entered into the packet, which is if you had any ideas Is it all I had? Oh, timeline. The timeline for this, we're hoping to do marketing and solicitations throughout the winter to spring, with, entry deadlines somewhere in July, in order, and hopefully having garden tours,

[74:04] in the August and final presentations in September. The choice of August is intentional. We want climate-resilient landscapes, so a landscape that looks really great in June is maybe not exactly the things we want to highlight. We really want the ones that look the best when they're stressed. So, August it is. It also doesn't conflict with the other garden tours that go on in town. Yeah, what are you looking in the… entry deadline? Like, is there a form that you're expecting people to fill, or… Yeah, we're gonna stand up a website, with… you know, an entry module. We will probably offer assistance for people who maybe need help entering for proposed projects, or if they don't have access to being able to take good photographs, we would probably offer that as well. But yeah, you would enter with through form.

[75:02] As you're judging process. Just a thought. Yeah. But, that the, proposals to fix up space. Yeah. I'm wondering if you can launch that. sooner, just because this will then take a whole another cycle for that to… for the garden to kick in, right? Yeah. So it would be nice to get your increase in earlier, so that you have you give the dollars out so that people can start designing and doing the garden in March and April. You see what I mean? Yeah. So break it out into two parts, you know, so do the proposed landscape. portion now, and the existing landscape later, if at all possible. Yeah, so what we're hoping to do is have, those Basically, the proposed landscape plans not be something that's already installed before the competition deadline? Yeah. But to have it be the people who are awarded that money next fall, 2026, come back and present their project in 2027.

[76:05] Yeah, but if you… if you started now, and took entries till March, so then they can They can plant. next season is what I'm saying. Yeah. I… I don't have the funds available to do that right now. They're not encumbered yet. So, we're working on providing the funds for these awards, through a grant with Boulder County, which we won't find out if we have… gotten until, December. So I am working with a timeline where I'm going to have to have that delayed proposed project, cycle, if that makes sense. So, so yes, they'll be coming back, but we're going to try and kickstart it so that the proposed projects can present at the 2027, after having received funds, yeah. I'm… I love this. This is, like, this is totally up my alley. I have lots of questions. You should enter. Definitely. You can read the bottle for the answer. Yeah.

[77:11] Yeah, I know the range, so… So the other question I have is, do you have support right now in your department? Like, if someone had a commercial space, or like that, older housing partners, and they wanted to come to you and ask for, help, more… not necessarily monetary, but advice and guidance on how to convert some spaces. Is there resources for that in the City of Florida? Yeah. Yes. I, for one, would be very happy to answer your email, or anything I can help. And then we, the Nuture-Based Solutions team, it… we kind of… host the Cool Boulder, initiative, which, our Cool Boulder partners are a bunch of people who do this kind of work within the City of Boulder. And so part of

[78:06] the story with Boulder Housing Partners and Jamila is she came to our Boulder, team meeting, and was like, I have this idea, can you guys all help? And our Ourselves, as well as our partners, were like, yep. Let's… let's do that, with you. It was an opportunistic thing, but we definitely have, kind of. That community of support for anybody who's doing that… this kind of work already, yeah. Thank you so much for this. I'm generally very pro, like, this is also right up my alley, but I had a pretty, like, strong negative reaction to this, if I'm being honest, so I hope I can tell you why, and then you can tell me how I'm wrong. Okay. I think… so my… my gut sense, and a few questions, like. Is that it's gonna pull in people who are already into it and already doing it. And give them money, and kind of not bring in this, like, we want more people to know about this and do this.

[79:05] And as someone who's, like, I'm, like, the pollinator advocate, and I've, like, done these trainings. I still think if we're competing against professional landscape architects. Like, this is a real… this is people's livelihood to do some… like, it's… It's kind of like, it feels like an unfair challenge that, like, will focus on professionals winning, of course, because that's their job, to design these kind of landscapes versus, like, community members. And then I also see some… with that, like. equity issues. It's not really incentivizing renters, which is 50% of our community. It's not, You know, people who have existing landscapes that are beautiful. Fifth Street being an example, I also live on 5th Street, like, there's… a lot of people can just, like, pay to do this and outsource it, and so it just feels like it's focusing

[80:01] in the wrong… like, the $75K of cha… like, that's a lot of price money. Like, I think our city dollars could… go somewhere better, personally. I do have some ideas, but… And I… and I think this is an important thing to do, like, I know we need more climate-resilient landscapes. It just… it just feels like challenge structure perhaps will bring in new people and… To the conversation. I'm just curious, like, have you done challenges before that… or the city just… has the city done… done challenges like this before and seen, like, real outcomes and sort of shifts, or is it kind of like… people in the know, or in the know, and getting to find somebody, and nothing really changes. Let me take the last part of this first. This is actually following on a process we did 12 years ago, called the Boulder Energy Challenge. And, that actually talked about a whole series of really interesting companies that got formed, solutions that got moved forward.

[81:05] And so, it… we have done them, and they have been quite successful. I'm not dismissing it in any way any of the equity issues you're describing. We have thought about, I think Lawrence got some responses for you. I think the other thing to call out is that Like it or not, professional industries. shape a lot of older science groups. Yeah. And they're not shaping them in the way that I think would be best for the community around these kinds of values yet. Yeah. So we do need them to be moved, too. But don't they just do what the people, like, say, hire someone? They're just gonna do what I tell them to. That's part of it. The challenge is actually a cultural initiative, too. It's changing… It's inviting us to think about a new set of standards for what we think Cool-looking landscape is. So is the idea to tell, like, have the landscapers, you know, them to try to convince their clients, like, hey.

[82:02] do you want to do this challenge with me? We can, like, win 25K together, just the idea? So I'm gonna… I'm gonna… I'm gonna break it down a little bit. Great. Okay, so the first… Well, there's a number of things I've thought about. So the first thing… I think, given that there are 3 25K things, we would probably be… through the steering committee, we're going to be organizing how those are. what the criteria on those are. Given our conversations we've already had with the steering committee, I think those will be prioritizing things that are coalitions of people doing something interesting that don't have the resources already. Okay. Hence, not your single-family homeowner that has half a million dollars. It's also one of the, you know, first things that we're working through with our steering committee is, were our categories correct? And I think we're actually going to be… I need to check this with them, but we're actually going to be moving towards categories based on price per square foot.

[83:12] Which would also change that, so that the category that's, under $5 per square foot is going to be getting things like HOAs, it's… we're not doing it by size, so you can, like, if your HOA needs to con… convert all of its bluegrass. That's a large budget per square foot, but it's kind of still in a similar category with somebody who's doing a DIY home renovation instead, because they're not being able to dump lots and lots of cash into the design or the implementation of it. So that… that's kind of the first, iteration, which I think is… speaks to some of your concern. The other side of it is that, especially on a water and fire resilience side, we actually have a lot of people with a lot of money who we need to do something else.

[84:03] our DIYers, people potentially like yourself, who are doing their managing their landscapes on their own, are not our properties that are watering too much. Or necessarily doing, like, that we need to move as drastically, as quickly as some of our properties, like, on the hill, who have… landscapes that we need to be more fire resilient and lower water than they currently are. That being said, I think how do we make that cultural shift so that resilient is cool is something we really have to do. And to do that, we need to show examples of it. We got negative feedback at the planning, like, commission… what is it commission? Meeting on the landscape manual changes, because we didn't have enough images of climate-resilient landscapes having been implemented.

[85:07] I've done a lot of work trying to find examples for clients in my previous practice on what does a bioresilient landscape look like? And it's very hard to find them. So there's a kind of imagination gap that we really need to be fitting into, especially to convince, a lot of our population to make this shift. So… So, this is why I'm actually very excited about this process, to be like, how can we, as a community, hold these climate-resilient landscapes in a way that makes them attractive, cool, chic, all of those things, so that they have the cultural cachet for people to, like, make the switch. Yeah. Yeah, and I think, like, for me, I read about gardening as… and I garden a lot, right?

[86:01] So when I first started native, like, having natives and pollinator-friendly plants, I think that's catching on, and I get that, and I understand that. But when you say fire-resistant and flood-resistant and heat and dust, I don't… I don't get it, and I feel like examples would be great, right? Kind of like Resource Central, like, you go online and you get so much information, I think this will prom… I think. this will promote that, but I definitely agree with you on the equity issue. It's… it's going to be a little bit of a challenge, too. cross that hurdle, but I… I… I… I personally would love to hear, right? And see what landscaping is fire-resistant. Yeah, I think the tour idea I really like, like the garden tour. Nice. Is there… would there be budget to do it more than one year? Like… We're hoping to do it at least 3 years. At least 3, yeah. And then, hopefully, it has a life of its own beyond that. Yeah, yeah.

[87:05] So… so I… should I answer in person, or… I have a couple suggestions, and I'd love to get your feedback, anyone's feedback. One is, Standardizing the way in which the criteria for scoring if you can link some of these, goals with, like, specific ways to measure, then you can have a standard way of, okay, we're trying to… it's not just the design, but what are we accomplishing? So for, like, heat. You could have changes in temperatures. For drought, it could be, like, water retained. For fire, it could be how much vegetation is on zones 1, 2, 3, based on the wildfire partner scoring or, you know, other kind of fire hardening metrics. For flooding, you know, how much water can be diverted? you know, ecosystems, resilience, like the number of native plants, or the insect count, or something like that. So if there's a way to kind of standardize that, then it's kind of a level playing field. And then you have the design elements, but you're like, okay, we're trying to accomplish these goals, and we can measure them.

[88:17] You know, in some way, maybe not quantitatively, but, like, a high, medium, low, or I don't know, some, you know, not too subjective. My other suggestion is, could you bring in, like, a landscape architecture, College of Landscape Architecture, or CU, or Urban Design? And have students have kind of like a capstone project or something, where they kind of work through these things, and then they work with the designer, so it spurs kind of innovation. it adds in another element of, you know, a voice into the… to the, you know, perspective. And, so there's multiple parties, and they can kind of bounce ideas up each other, come up

[89:01] You know, creative, innovative ways to do this. And just a question, just to add to that, I was thinking, like, the timeline? Yeah. You can do, presentations at the library or seminars leading up to it, so people have thoughts and ideas and things that they could… You know, When the time comes. Because I think if you have the contractors. per your point, Hannah, they may just do what they've always done. So if they're held to a standard of, oh, we're actually going to measure what you're doing to accomplish these goals. and you bring in the academic side of they have, like, the ideas, like, the design, the, you know, the new creative. Then you get this kind of ecosystem where you have multiple parties, where they're kind of stretched a little bit, and they kind of challenge each other, and they have ideas, and then you have Something that really, comes out of it from, you know, a knowledge sharing.

[90:07] Kind of a collective wizard. Yeah, I will definitely be talking about this with the steering committee. I just, We are, even in the composition of the student community itself, including trying to bridge that gap between practitioners, kind of like city staff and academics. So… because we… I think there's a lot of things that we actually need to talk to each other more about across those realms. Which I think this is a great opportunity to do that as well. It's exciting. I mean, you're hitting so many goals. You're, like, the microclimate ecosystem, water retention, fire safety, and ecosystem. yeah, you're focusing on accomplishing many goals all in one, so I think it's fantastic. Yeah, I think our steering committee has been kind of expressing that they would like to, like, create the judging criteria for each category, once we establish what those categories are, with

[91:16] The experts that we, like, tag to be the judges in that category, so it'll be a collaborative effort to create those criteria. Cross that, too. Yeah. So, I… have similar concerns in terms of the equity, but then I do want to frame it. We've been talking a lot about the proposed $25,000 prizes. There's also the categories of existing landscapes, the $1,000 to $4,000 range. Obviously that's, but I think an important factor as we discuss this. So, from the equity perspective, one of the concerns I have Is, as we've been talking about. Certain neighborhoods have a baseline of

[92:00] Beautification, fundamental greenery that is automatically going to look pretty good. Like, I wasn't too surprised to hear that you found the house in the neighborhood that you did on Mapleton Hill. I actually find a lot more of the examples of good houses in my neighborhood that's not on Mapleton Hill. Okay, okay. Mapleton Hill is actually especially difficult to find what I needed for a fire-resilient pollinator habitat. I was gonna say, what I was picturing is limitations may be, and this is great if this is not a limitation, in something like North Boulder, where there's… they're still trying to grow trees to start with, and things are a little bit more arid, if you will. I guess in… in short, is there a way… That you anticipate, kind of, normalizing the existing landscape prize to, kind of. What the surrounding region started as, and what those people were able to accomplish. you know, that there's, like, an impact factor, if you will, rather than just, we have hit this standard, and we've hit these metrics, but really, I think a lot of what we chase as a city, as people, is where can we have the greatest impact? If you have something that

[93:12] was very, very poor to start with, and they've, you know, had, like, 70% change in impact, but it's still at the same level as where something else started. I think that's also very beneficial as well. So I don't know if there's a way to measure that impact, or have some, you know, baseline reference to fold in there. And that I imagine that you could do that across some of the equity concerns we have, that maybe your fundamental baseline for an HOA-type property, like an apartment within an HOA, or a multi-family home, or a… mobile home park that's gonna have a very different baseline than a single-family home, etc. Yeah, absolutely. I think that would probably be something we should embed in the criteria more than just as the categories themselves. And I do, I think I… I would like to circle back around and say that, like, I've done analysis of, kind of, like, who's our biggest water users? Of, like, houses? Of houses. Okay. And in general, our single-family homes,

[94:16] Our… our most, like, that we're very thrifty, in general, across the city. Except for some of our most wealthy neighborhoods. So… We… we need… we have this tension as a city. I speak into your equity concerns, but we also have this tension in the city where we need to convince people who have the money, money is not a concern. who can… pay their ways out… Lead the charge. Of… yeah, well, they need to lead the charge, and they… they… restricting their water, like, upping their water bill is not going to make the impact. Right.

[95:00] And so we need other ways to make a cultural shift beyond… so we want to be able to hit both equity concerns, and we'll be working through the racial equity instrument with the steering committee next meeting. I guess I do want to flag that some of the people we need to convince the most to make the most change are least likely to be affected by monetary concerns. But then would they be incentivized by a monetary price? Well, this is, like, the way that we're working with the steering committee on those prize numbers. One of the things the steering committee suggested is that we actually get, like, just more notoriety in plaques and, like, gift certificates, and lower the individual prize things. Again, this is draft, I'm coming to you very early. I would love to have more specific, like, answers, but yeah, we'll be considering this. Honestly, I think if the city gave me a little plaque that said, you know, like.

[96:01] idea, whatever, like, won the challenge, or, like, need, you know? I would think that's cool, like, I wouldn't… I wouldn't want the dollars, right? I would think that would be absolutely cool, and if it was using my pictures, use it in the sample. I know, exactly. I'm able to pair with, like, local media that the winners, like, they're, I assume, like, promoted… Yes. …in newspapers, online social media, along with, you know, like, they've got their plaque, and it's kind of… if we're trying to create a… in maybe a positive way, keeping up with the Joneses, improved the neighborhood in that way. You have a plaque to display to one-up your neighbors. Yes, that's the intention. I wonder if there's a way to frame it, because I think where I got caught up Yeah. It's like, it's about looking pretty, but when you were explaining the category, you're not actually judging, like, someone's house… might be viewed in, like, the general eye as not looking as good, but they have their WUI boundaries, and so you would actually award it to them, and so maybe that would also address some of the equity things of, like.

[97:04] you don't get the best thing because you have the nicest, most expensive tree. That person's over there tree might be less grown, but it's 10 feet from their house, so they're actually going to get the price. So maybe making that really clear that it's not… about whose house looks the nicest, because of course then you could say, like, oh, their property's nicer because it's painted. So, I think really highlighting that it's not… about, like, the nicest from, like, a beauty standard, but, like, actually meeting the criteria, and that I, like, really like the measurable criteria idea instead. So then you can be like, these are if you want to win the wildfire criteria, and the flood one, like. This is what the fire expert and the water. I think, yeah, and then… yeah, and you want it to look cool, and really, people with a lot of money, they'll find a way to make it look cool. I have no doubt about that. And creativity, we would like to award people for having new ideas. Yeah, I appreciate it. So, like, I think this is part of, like, creating those… those…

[98:09] Criteria is, yes, we want that to look cool, we want it to look beautiful, we want it to meet all of our criteria, and we want new ideas. So, yeah, I think there's going to be a lot of work to create those criteria, but yeah, I want to reflect back that, yes, I think we should brand it probably more like we're doing 10Ks and trying to be the fastest than the beauty competition. And then my other thought, and this is going back… to, like, the money thing. I… yeah, I agree, maybe that some of the categories don't need money, honestly. would be my thought, because I think it could go to other things, but then I wondered about offering time instead of money, where, like… because I know with wildfire research, a lot of people, like. it's not that they don't care about pruning their bushes, it's that they just don't have the time, or they don't want to do it, and so… Or they don't know that they need… or they don't know that they need to achieve a whole range of issues.

[99:06] And so with this one, one, I think there needs to be a lot of targeted outreach to the people. They might not know that you're over there studying their house, being like, hey, I bet if you released a list of shame for the most water users, that would also… But, like, all this, like, guidance, and then also, like. But then also, like, maybe that instead of the 25K, it's actually, like, we provide you with the resource. to… we pay for the people to do this project, so you just get to come up with the idea for the people who aren't professional landscapers and the projects that wouldn't be done in the nice homes, like. you just get to come up with the idea, then we actually, like, coordinate, we come, you know, all the people that go… because if I ran and worked a full-time job, like, I don't have time, like, I'm not at my apartment, I don't have time to sit around all day, or… to clean our back door, someone has to work two jobs, like, they don't have the weekend to grow garb plants and all those things, so I think thinking about a way to incorporate, like, timing… Yeah. …into it as well, or, like, resources, like, other people manage the project, like, for the bigger ones, because even if you give a multi-family home, like, 25K, they might not have the time.

[100:14] To implement it. And then I also thought. I wasn't living here during the energy challenge, but I thought there was a lot about, like, engaging everyone, so I wondered if there could be, like, another level of activity where everyone's engaged, or you do, like, a check on your property to educate people, or, like, a little scorecard that everyone could do, even if you didn't landscape, so, like. you could be, like, learn about how to do it. Did you cut your trees for fire if you're in the new Louie area? Did you check your water usage? Did you check your irrigation? Like, a little, like, checklist? Or, like, if you live in a rent, like, a little, like, little fun scorecard that everyone, those of us who don't have… no gardening property, or, like, did you… or some… I need some things for people who rent.

[101:01] Just as a way to engage everyone in the community and, like, raise awareness for people who maybe aren't ready to take on a gardening project. Yeah, I think it's a brilliant idea. And that 25K? Yeah. Thinking about it, I think it should grow to groups of people. Yes. It should not go to an individual homeowner. Yes, yes. Yeah, I would love, like, if schools came together to do it, yeah. Some of the schools would use so much help. Crestview Elementary has that nice habitat in the back, I don't know if you've seen it. They have that, so I think most schools need to have that. So… Yeah, you're, you're, you're speaking my language. That's my… one of my other larger work… items is to work with BBSD to do climate-resilient landscape pilots on. Yeah. So, yes. Yeah. So, yeah, I saw the work that you did at High Peaks, so… Oh, yeah. I don't know where my kids come to go to school. We're having a seeding day on November 7th?

[102:06] If you want to come do, dormant seed, part of that project. Super easy. Super easy. It hits into the, like, switching the grass to native plants, and, like, how do you do that carbon level, that kind of transitional capture and water streaming on an urban space. Yeah. Just a plug. Two thoughts. One is along the lines of, like, social media and other… media channels is maybe you could partner or work with, like, a Better Homes and Garden or some type of magazine and say, hey, you get a full feature. And then, you know, here are the… here are the winners, or here are the competitors, or the contestants, and this is what they did. I think that would be, you know, even more… more than any of the prize money. And then for the prize money, would it be… you have to submit, you don't get any money for doing it, but then…

[103:02] You submit the competition, so you're not getting up front. Funding, okay, good. And Hannah brought up a good idea, though, is that maybe for those that are Doing the competition, like, they… have, like… Somehow have it structured so, like, there's a strong incentive for the homeowner To realize, okay, this is the criteria that we want, and then you work with the contractors, rather than having the contractors be like, oh, we'll do something for you, and then… It doesn't accomplish, like, have… make a structured system so there's an incentive to meet these criteria, and they know what those expectations are. Good. So, I… maybe this is repeated, but… No, I… this is this… We're about to walk into the space of the steering committee on how do we set this criteria, and then the… because we want it to be something that you can also bring creative new ideas to, we're in debate about whether or not we set, like, metric targets.

[104:06] Or have a general broad criteria that we're like, we want you to show us the coolest thing for this. And we're currently in the middle of that debate, so I don't have good answers for you on whether or not we will have a published list of specific criteria, or if… It would be broad bucket. Definitely coming from this conversation, I'll bring this to the steering committee to inform their conversation. And with Resource Central, I know one of the goals there is to reduce the amount of water usage for, you know, for sprinkler systems and things like that. Yeah. Do you… Do you know of a good source of… Municipal water use projections, and… What those are like, and how… How that would affect, kind of.

[105:03] existing water uses, like, and a gap between them? Yes, our… so our water utility, creates their… their drought plans. Okay. And I… if you would like a deep dive into our water use projections and things like that, I think the drought plan is well worth reading. I think it's well worth reading anyway. Just… just to… to be more informed. In the drought plan, there is… there… there's outlined assumptions on how much water conservation we'll be able to achieve in our landscapes. I was surprised at going through all of that data with our water utilities, at how, thrifty. our general population is. So that… that has been an interesting part of this discussion, to figure out, like, well, who is using more water, and how much do our, like, bluegrass transitions actually affect, what's going on? Just for your guys' information.

[106:09] Because it's in that drought plan, but you should know. One of the best ways to conserve our water in Boulder is actually to fix leaking pipes, more than it is… we would earn… we would gain more in water conservation by fixing leaking pipes than we will look… get anywhere near achieving. convert everything from the grass to something else. Not that we shouldn't do it, but just know. How do you know if your pipe's releasing? sensors, detect… Yeah. Like, underground, I assume. Like, underground city pipes. So that's part of the… their initiatives to try and see if they can get, remote sense water meter stuff. Are they sit-down pipes, or are people on them? Both. Then there's a gap between… It seems to even raise awareness as part of this? I don't know. So, yeah, what are we doing on that? No, our water company has a lot. They actually fund a lot… they fund Resource Central. They also do a lot of other outreach.

[107:13] Yes. No, Resource Central is working on the public outreach, and like, and they are paid by our water utility to do public outreach on these topics, as well as our water utility's own outreach, and our water utility is working on our legal rights as well. Got it. So, yeah, that's fascinating. Yeah. So, just… I, I mean, I… I strongly believe we need climate-resilient landscapes that can reduce our heat and, like, use less water, but just a tidbit there, if you haven't been tracking, kind of the state of our water, like, something to pay attention to. Another question I have is, have you put any thoughts to this subsetized targeting individual properties, or they, like, the school, or other types of institutions, but have you thought

[108:02] for ways community members who maybe can't engage with their own property could, like, pitch a project for the city to do on, like, either open space land, or work with city planning to, like. Put planters somewhere in the community, or, like, any way we could do something really similar to this, but, like, a category for, like, community projects? Or something like that. I don't know how to think about that, or, like, something on, like, one of the parks, or something, like, community garden, a park, or something. The school. Or, yeah, I think the school… I would do targeted outreach to the schools for this one, for sure. But, like, ways for people Yeah, and then even, like, outreach to parents, like, oh, you could get funding for your kid's school, or this or that, or just, like, ways for other people to engage. We have a monthly meeting with the BVSD maintenance folks, so we will definitely be reaching out to the schools.

[109:01] and PTAs and things like that. I, I think… I haven't really gotten my brain around how we would, address Like, how did community members do something on a city park? It's maybe something we could explore. I think that that would be easier to do if it was a community project that wasn't on city property. Simply because of not giving ourselves… like, you would have to be doing it in coordination. Yeah, that makes sense, that makes sense. So I've been steering a little bit clear of that in order to not… not giving ourselves money part, so… Or, yeah, even turning, like, they want to turn their street into, like, I don't know. Yeah? Absolutely. I have two questions. One quick question is, for the criteria, do you anticipate doing any cannot include lists? Like, for example, if you have juniper, that's an automatic… I like that. Right, are there any certain things that are, like.

[110:06] Such extremes that you… that would disqualify people. I would just steer clear of that and just try to accept creative, innovative ideas? Well, I… I don't think… I can't imagine how you would win if one of the things is fire resilience, then you… it was, like, a juniper hedge, essentially, if that makes sense. Sure. So there's not going to be an explicit list of don't, you are trusting people to develop. Maybe some links to, like, the plant list we reviewed earlier, so that people know, not just land basic resources for development. Yeah, I mean, yes, I, I would love, Can't wait until the 16th right now. I would love to be able to link our approved plan to the… It's almost there. So close. Yeah, and our… as the guidelines, we're also working on, kind of, like, maintenance manuals. We've worked in the background on, like, maintenance manual guidelines and suggestions for…

[111:11] homeowners and small property owners around, like, how to implement the WUI, we're just waiting for the Let's get manual stuff to finalize, but, Yeah, I think we will have a screening process of the submissions, of I have to work out, like, if we're gonna, like, have staff basically look at it and be like. This doesn't meet any of the criteria, so we're just not even… it's like, do we… do we pre-screen and then send the judges, like, you know, the top 50, and if there's something that just, like, doesn't make… doesn't kind of meet the prescriptions of, like, the request, it just doesn't get sent on to the judges. I don't know that I've been overly focused on creating a do not enter list, because I just don't think they would be successful. Yeah.

[112:02] And then my second question, we've been talking a lot about individual homes, some about schools and public parks. In the packet, you did also have, you know, campuses or businesses, I guess, on the business aspect. Can you speak a little more to, like, how they would find success? If you're picturing a lot of our businesses are in strip mall plazas. How do they even begin to put together a design? for a limited space that's primarily concrete, is that something that you imagine getting, applications for, or how do you handle that? I hope so. I hope so. I mean, like, if we had a business like, things I imagined with businesses are, like, if you have a restaurant with a patio, and you've done a lot of work to curate your, like. flowers all around your patio and your trees, so that your patio is actually, like, has less heat, is, like, a beautiful tree-canopied space with plantings that only support native pollinators, and I would really want you to be able to fly, right? And our strip malls are some of our hottest places.

[113:06] So, anything they can be doing to improve flooding, and… like, if they are successful at combating the heat island effects of a strip mall and their, and the flooding effects of strip mall parking, that's something I really want to know, right? So, while I acknowledge, because I've had to design them in the past, how difficult parking lots are for anything to live in. Those are actually some of the things that could change our reality. Like, if we have innovative strategies for dealing with that. condition, then… then that's… that's the goldmine, right? Would that… wouldn't that really be the property owners? Most of our restaurants, right? Right, yeah. So they can't actually do a design and try to get there. Yeah, so I assume if, like, for the patio example, I assume that the strip… I don't see it. They're mostly owned by two people in Boulder. Yeah, so I had… I had this discussion with

[114:09] business where I was like, wow, look at all this space, there's just rocks and Russian sage, you know, why don't we do something of this space? They're like, well, we need to talk to Tebow. Right? And so you can design and do things, but there's… there'll be a process that happens. And you're right, it's like, there's two people who own the properties. There's two people that own, like, most of the border, yeah, public… We, in the energy space, we made quite a lot of strategic investments in commercial property owners because we needed to move the space, and to show what was possible, and they're not going to prioritize that kind of investment over many other things. And we can't really push them to do that until we can show it's successful. So a lot of this is showing what's possible, and then, you know, we're… we're leading with carrots, but there's sticks back.

[115:02] Okay, one more comment. This is off-topic, so… slightly. No, it's not off-topic. But, I would be remiss to not include all this conversation, and Brett, this is actually more for you and your, certification. conversation, as we talk about land use and water, that I'd like to push the city to do more around the importance of what we eat, and I know we can't tell people what to eat, just like we can't tell people how to landscape their yard, but, you know, knowing 55% of the Colorado River Basin comes from cattle irrigation and cattle fed crops, and 7% of agriculture land. Or 70% of… grasslands and land globally have been converted for agriculture, like, it's such a big part of this conversation when we talk about land use, and I feel like there's some things the city could do, and… you're here, so I figured I'd say it. I hear you. I think one of the things that we have to think a lot about, especially with these novel or artificial ecosystems that are water-supported.

[116:09] Is that if we… if we move… too quickly. And cause operators to just leave the leases, but that nobody else can then pick up that lease quickly. Then that land can quickly, if it's no longer being watered. it's not like just taking a piece of ground that's very disturbed, and then just leaving it alone, and it's gonna actually recover itself. It'll actually often go the opposite direction. Yeah, I guess… sorry, maybe I was unclear. I think my point is we should… people need to eat less meat, and be aware of their impacts of diet, and that that's something the city could, along this conversation around land use. It's not like… I'm not… it's not like, oh, nothing, it's not like it's just kind of… Well, on our lands, it's complicated, right? So we have, for example, gamma graphs. who's running their cattle as a fire hazard reduction strategy, and they're actively being used by our land restoration team also. And so that…

[117:09] And he sells his beef. Yeah. probably less focused on our, like, small-scale Boulder County farms, necessarily, but just, like, as a society. where most people get their meat. Of course, we can't. We don't have any capos, we don't have anything here to impact directly, but we can influence, just like here, painting a picture of how you might want to landscape your yard. We can influence people to be like. You know, have… Meat Mondays, ingredients once a week, or Meatless Mondays. They're just, like. It's off-top… I'm a little off-topic here. I'm just gonna pause for just a minute, since we're almost at 8 o'clock? Yeah, can I just… can I just make a motion to extend the meeting? Oh, and I can be done with this. We just… well, we have other items, so… It's great, I just… so I'll motion to extend the meeting.

[118:02] 10 minutes. Second. Great, okay, carry on. That was our last thing. Yeah, carry on, please. No, we can… Well, let me say, the City Council has now mentioned a number of times that they want to actually discuss food systems… Great. …as a community. not necessarily just around the meat issue, but around food security, and about supply chains, and… So, I think that there could be an emerging… and that we don't have a food policy council here. There are some things that really ought to be in place if we want to have a robust conversation about food systems. Yeah, agreed. Thank you, Alyssa. Yeah, of course. Maybe the growing food chain can be part of the garden criteria. Yes. I think you should, though, as part of the food thing, have one. maybe special price for people who grow food, or… or, like, gardens, or community gardens, I don't know if there's a way to have… get, like, them to be their own.

[119:06] little group, or… That's what we're imagining with the community and ecosystem supports, is like… Yeah, maybe give some ideas with that one. I think that one for me all. So if that's where you're mentioning community gardens, I think that'd be really helpful. And then one clarification that just came to me, yeah, is this… encompassing the whole property? Is it front yard space? Anything adjacent? Just anything that's on their property, they can submit. And it can be a subset, it doesn't have to be their entire property either. Yeah, also, I feel like… I was just imagining that it'd be people with ideas and landscapes that they had transitioned. I don't necessarily… I think if you wanted pictures taken of your property and somebody else owned it, and you got permission, like, you could be a renter who had implemented something. because I was just, like, trying to backtrack, and I was like, wait, I don't… I'm not expecting Tebow to be the one to, like, submit all of these, it's like… It'll be a whole stack of Tebow.

[120:04] I was like, my name's never let you do an amazing violin, but it's okay, it's good to speak up for other people. I was hoping to create and make it be project-specific. They would have to outline… if we go the direction of doing it by square footage costs, they would have to outline, like, the area. And we'll have to figure out how to… make that comparison, but… yeah. Any other questions for Lauren? Thank you very much. Thanks for so much engagement and interest, and Mike, your questions were amazing. I think we have some future winners over here. That's your beans.

[121:02] Okay, so just for good… for this group, I do want to put a plug that, Rella Abernathy and I in the Nature-Based Solutions team are working with an ecologist to design a phenology garden. That will be available through Resource Central. So it's for tracking native pollinators. It's, like, to be a part of a really big, broad study on, the timing of whether or not phenology is the study of time, as far as ecology, so are the Are they… when are the flowers blooming? When are the… pollinators coming, well, they'll mess up every season. Yeah. It's like, yeah. So, we would love to… we want to start tracking it, and if any of you guys are interested in that kind of thing, hopefully it'll be available next spring. Cool. Ways to join. You can use a… use a Tesla sensor to… an AI to track bees. Thank you. Thanks. Thank you.

[122:03] Okay, I think next on our list for things that we have… are we going through the Council Calendar Preview, Heather, without Jonathan here? There's one item I'd like to highlight for the board, and that's the Climate Action Plan update that will be going to City Council under matters from the City Manager on November 6th. Other than that one, feel free to look through it. There's a climate Wise Landscaping ordinance reading that's coming up soon. I cannot remember off the top of my head when that one is coming up. They are all there, and if any of you have any questions. about those, feel free to send an email, and I will get information for you. Very cool movie. General announcements. Do we have… did we have something from Jonathan in that? I thought we had two. There was, he was going to send out a reminder about,

[123:02] just precautions to take during election season, just to make sure that, you're following best practices as a city board member, and you will send that over email. Perfect. And then my general announcement is this is my last meeting, unfortunately. What? I know. I am no longer a City of Boulder resident, so… lead of the board. So, I don't know what sort of swearing-in you ought to do. I imagine that you are next to our chair, of course, pass the torch to you. She's the only twin mom, but… What's up? Are you gonna join our board. Maybe. Jonathan, you already had the contacts there, so they could share them with me. I don't know if they have room, but we'll see. like, have another whole process to find someone, or are we gonna wait for the next one? Yeah, so the cycle is…

[124:00] Yeah, there's, there's two times in the year in which Council will appoint new board members, the first being, in March. Application process, of course, backs up prior to that, and then they will often fill unfilled positions during the summer. Since we've… we're past that, we'll… appoint… they will appoint a new board member in the spring. Oh, okay. So if you know people that you want to encourage to apply, like, I already… I reached out to someone who might be interested. You know, they can start to attend some meetings, see what they think, and… from wintertime. And I'll… I'll keep you all opposed when those applications, all of them open, so that you can share that. Cool. Is there anything else? I motion to close the meeting. Okay, you'll do this. Yeah.