Environmental Matters Committee - Regular Meeting

Good afternoon, everybody. I'd like to call to order, Parnell Matters Committee meeting for February 12. And for roll call, have Alderman McConty, but Alderman Huntley is unable to attend today. Let's see. Approval of the agenda. Is there a motion to approve the agenda?

Yes.

I'll second that. All those in favor, please say aye.

Aye.

Aye. Motion carries. Next up, approval of the minutes from January 8. Is there a motion to approve the minutes from January 8? Aye. I'll second that. All those in favor, please say aye.

Aye.

Aye. Motion carries. Next up, we will start with we have somebody from the public who wants to take just three minutes.

So I would like to invite oh, is he ready for the presentation?

I can

go back to him.

It's alright. Because I mean, the the next presentations are gonna be longer. Sure. Yeah. So it's fine.

Brian, it'll just be, like, five minutes. Oh, you're for your presentation?

I think Brian

Well, first up is the Yes. It can Yeah. Legislation. We're gonna do the legislation after the public comments and then Yeah. Storm water fee and then tree canopy.

Can you see it now? It's a PDF. Okay. Okay. Well, Imma just put it in full screen.

Just introduce yourself. Name and address for the record.

Okay. They don't get to see the slides?

You can go ahead. I'll make sure they can.

Okay you're gonna pull it up. My name is Matthew Wallace. My address is 701 Chesapeake Avenue. I lead a small nonprofit in Eastport called Joy Groves. And I'm ready to present. We'll be on the projector.

She's she's trying to get it up, but you can just just make sure you yes. She's she has it. She's gonna make sure it's updated. You go ahead. Okay. Yeah. For sure. Okay. So I sent the tea. We

are creating a half acre farm space in Eastport in collaboration with community members who have had gardens for years. Our nonprofit is facilitating the creation of community neighborhood scale food systems to empower communities to have less dependency on on free food and aid and and more ability to produce fresh vegetables right in the neighborhood. Eastport is identified as a food desert. It's the only area for source certain sources that is actually identified as a foods desert in Annapolis. This farm will be in the center of the identified food desert in Madison and President Street in Eastport.

Yeah. Next slide, this is an overview. It zoomed in, there's a large ball field behind Eastport Terraces. The neighborhood is roughly 300 units. And everyone many people are greatly interested, the kids, the adults, and the fresh vegetables, and the projects the project based youth enrichment of actually building the farm space.

Of course this comes in the context of the c and I redevelopment pending. We see this as a transferable pilot program to really be a shining example and then be transferred and reintegrated into the neighborhood's redevelopment when that comes. The most involved component, involving the city here is the permitting for the greenhouse. We have a meeting with the city, a pre permit meeting next Wednesday. So the greenhouse is really exciting.

It's the first slide, second slide. That's just an overview of general components, perennials, annuals, 10,000 square feet of production space. It'll be a real production oriented farm while also being community education and youth enrichment. If you scroll down one more, there's a general location in the Harbor House East Port Terrace neighborhood. Next next one please. That's just a wider view of the field, which is the phase one of the CNI redevelopment. However, we have at least two growing seasons through which we hope to produce more than a 100,000 servings of fresh vegetables. This would be an impactful project. Next. That's what the greenhouse will look like.

Next. That's the greenhouse which we are purchasing. It's currently standing in Millersville. It will be a gutter equipped for rain catchment. It was a nursery if you keep scrolling. Lots of flowers, keep going. There's an example, president of a greenhouse at Phoenix Academy, was incredibly impactful for the youth at Phoenix Academy who are now at Mary Moss. But that was hydroponics, great project. Next. Another example.

A lot of just community capacity building, empowerment, small business ownership, whatnot. Really important to this project. Next. An example examples from city blossoms, a notable DC nonprofit which has large scale community gardening projects, youth cooperative businesses and classrooms. They actually published a guide on greenhouse classrooms for our use and whatnot. And next is just an example of possible layout. We're working on this. The MOU was approved by director Maddox Evans yesterday. So we're looking forward to launching this to the public in the next couple weeks. And again, of course, continuing input and collaboration with community members.

It really makes is why we're doing the project is because of the community members who want this to happen. So we're really excited about this.

Yeah. These these don't work unless they have community partnership. See, these don't work unless they have community partnerships. I'm glad to hear that's already in place.

Yeah. Was it we're excited about this. Yeah. Any any questions?

Do you have any questions? Okay.

Your mic's not on.

Oh, make sure your mic's on too.

Oh, I don't really have no questions. I see everything that he's doing. Like, it's right outside of my house. My son's a part of it, so I'm excited to see them Yeah. Get it started.

Yeah. That's great. I I commend you on it. I I think to your point, it's out it is a food desert in this area, so it's great to be having some movement on that issue. I think it's also gonna address some of the hopefully, improve the health of the community. Mhmm. I think it's very good. If you need anything from the city, please do let us know. You know, we do have a community grant program that you can submit an application to to get some funding through. Yeah, do But you have anything else specific for us?

Not at the moment. And notably, are excited about our collaboration with No Harm. It's a great group through the mayor's office and whatnot. Yeah. And most importantly, we're growing leaders. Yeah. That's what we're most excited about. And like I said at the last meeting, May 2 ribbon cutting. You guys are all invited.

You're send us a email? Yeah. You you will get the invite for sure.

Thank you. And the deputy city manager, have a question.

Thank you. Deputy city manager for resilience and sustainability. So your organization is called Joy Grows?

Yes, ma'am.

And your name is Matthew Wallace? Yes. Okay. Make sure I had that right. So addressing food deserts and resilience around food sources was a priority for my work for quite a few years but I was understaffed and we weren't able to address it.

So thank you so much for stepping into this space and I hope we can expand this throughout the city perhaps. So if you need anything and I'd like to stay in touch with you, you know work with you on this, you know we're looking at other things like not throwing away ugly food, know that sort of thing with grocery stores and other places and with and at working with our local farmers markets to do the same, know. And so ways we can support you and the entire community with this. So thank you again and looking forward to working with you.

Look forward to collaborating. Yeah, of course. One other note is the two other HACA properties, which is Morris Plum and Robin Wood. We also have sites within walking distance of both. So our focus is here at the moment, but we're also establishing a project at Mary Moss Adams Academy which is in walking distance of Morse Plum. And then of course we already have a project in Robinwood. So we're excited about it.

And mister chair, the city currently I do not believe has provides any funding for community gardens and unity gardens does work in this space too. Not sure if it's food production though. I think our community grants are a good source to support work like this and I was just speaking to someone about you know when they open up again and you know I'll get you connected with that. But I did note that the county does spend some money on community gardens. Was last year saw a new one pop up that's very visible off of Route 2 heading south on Route 2. It's on the right, it's brand new, it's fenced off, looks very nice. It's just putting it out there and I know the city doesn't put funding toward that but we can find ways I think to support this.

Yeah. And so the point mister Adams in the back, you raise your hand for me. So he's our our city arborist. And just an idea occurred to me. He may have funding at some point to help, especially if you wanna incorporate, say, a couple trees for, an orchard to put some fruit bearing trees. We may be able to have a win win there to assist you with planting. So I don't know if I didn't see that in your plan, but I Mhmm. Again, I would love to see that to help address multiple goals at once if you're open to having some kind of fruit bearing trees.

The kids want fruit. You need trees if you want apples.

Yeah.

Perennials are certainly great, specifically at Harper House Eastward Terrace. We're dealing with the uncertainty of the redevelopment and wanting to invest in shorter term fruit crops like berries. But yeah, canopy establishment is definitely valuable to us as well.

But not pear trees. No. Not pear trees, right Brian?

No, we will not Bradford pears.

No Bradford pears.

They don't even produce fruit.

They're tiny.

Tiny little ones, yeah. Some jurisdictions pay you, like it's a bounty to take them down.

Oh, man.

So are you have

you thought about adding any kind of pollinator hives? Pollinator hives? Do are you referring to honey bees?

Yeah.

Actually, I was a beekeeper for a while. It's it's fun. They're not native bees. So our our route for that would be establishing plantings of insectary plants that could host the native bees. Yeah. Bees and livestock in general are fun. We'd love to have chickens. And we do plan to have a a large investment into pollinator plants. A large support of this project is Chesapeake Bay Trust, so that's important to them.

Well, if you run into permitting issues, code issues, let us know. We can always update the code or possibly give a waiver of some kind. Just keep us posted.

Thank you for that. And Eric, notably Eric Lashinsky has been a great partner in developing our permit application and whatnot.

Good. Alright. Well thank you very much for

Thank you, mister Alderman. Joining us. Thank you for letting me get in here at the beginning. I really appreciate it.

Yeah. You're welcome. Alright. Next item we have let me find my agenda here. Legislation. So we have r 01/26. This is fiscal year 2027 annual statement of performance standards. I'm gonna ask for a motion to postpone because I know some departments are updating their standards. City manager is gonna be updating this as well. And so based on what we see, we may wanna because I was looking for the deputy city manager's sake, I was looking back at f y twenty one.

I knew we did in the past. I didn't realize it was that long ago. Time flies. But that was underneath, I think, David Jarrell. I really liked the format we had at the time, and I know you've had standards from your when it was an office of environmental policy that didn't seem to get carried over in the most recent version.

Mhmm.

And so

You mean with more metrics? Mhmm. You mean with more metrics?

Well, Some of the metrics and those specific goals didn't really get carried over. And to mister Adams and, well, to both departments, you know, I wanted to take a closer look at incorporating some of the tree canopy goals that you had in your in those 2021. Well And also

We have a week. Acting City Manager Buckland has provided an additional week from yesterday for directors to revise these performance standards. If there's anything you want to any ideas or information you want to provide to me or to mister Adams, you could do that today because we're not gonna be able we can't wait to get them done again and then resubmit it within now like

Gibbs, so for the tree canopy, I just wanted I think we should have to think specific metrics for street tree tree additions, plantings, general tree plantings, possibly conservation easement, inspections, maintenance. And then perhaps some associated with, even though we don't have that many these days, associated with the Forest Conservation Act. And then trying to think if we need anything for critical area. I mean, some of the enforcement measures on critical area might be good metrics to have. I'm trying to think what else might come out of that.

Perhaps some of the use of the fee and lieu in both FCA and the critical area. And then for the stormwater program, again, I'd had I'd I don't know off the top of my head what the current metrics are, but what I would look towards are so metrics associated with the inspection program for private facilities as far as make sure the maintenance plans plans are are adhered adhered to. To. And then for our own facilities too, making sure they're inspected sufficiently. And then the we could work in the incentive program.

I know that's not gonna be in place for the next fiscal year, but just to keep in mind. And then, I don't know, you might wanna put in something in there regarding the stormwater plan reviews for development projects. And then some information as far as the MS four program with the restoration projects or BNP retrofits, if there are any metrics that you think we should clue for that. And then we again, we may already have this, but for both the stormwater and the sewer and water to utility systems, do we have metrics in place for inspections as far as how many linear feet we wanna inspect a year? How many, you know, how many improvements, upgrades we're gonna do as far as, like, lining to address those deficiencies?

And and then what am I missing? Stormwater. I think that's about it. Your off well, yeah, your office in particular, you're gonna need some metrics too. So the sustainability metrics. Yeah. So, like, I think it'd be interesting to look at getting some climate related metrics for greenhouse gas emissions, electric vehicles maybe as far as the fleet conversion, which I know we haven't adopted yet. We might need to put a pin in that one.

We do have we will have green gas data because we just completed our update of the inventories. So we will have metrics around that.

Can we get a presentation on that in the next few months?

Yes. You can.

I don't I don't know if it needs to happen.

If I know we're gonna be busy with the budget. It'd be great to get in the next few months, but if it needs to wait until after the budget, I get it. Try ing think. Is there anything else? Do you have any thoughts on oh, sediment control program. How could I forget? It'd be good to get some metrics on that. Sediment control program. Sediment. Sediment control.

Okay.

So just to make sure we're meeting our targets for, like, inspection frequency, resolution of deficiencies in a timely manner. Yeah. Like, yeah, you know, maybe something to do with off-site discharge. What else? It's all off the top of my head.

Good. What else from your well, I'm sure you'll give plenty of thought to your on and off Yes. Office. But we have a lot of sustainability programs we could I'm trying to think of what might be ongoing that we could get in there as metrics. I don't know, I'll have to think about that one.

I'll give us more thought. I mean some of them are not difficult like the EVs purchases and things like that. We have that data through central services. And as I said, we've just done our greenhouse gas inventory updates for both city facilities and the community. Some of our goals, know, water quality improvement, air quality improvement, etcetera, are much tougher to quantify. I was just in a meeting with people from other jurisdictions that are in my role, and we were discussing that. You know, for reporting, it's sometimes difficult to quantify and provide data and metrics around some of these goals. I'll put some more thought into it.

And who a question for the stormwater group. Who's response to our own city facilities? Are they all managed by public works, or are does record parks handle their own? If you could sorry. If you could come up to them, Mike. And

identify yourself.

Mike Ross Rossberg, stormwater program stormwater program manager in public works. The inspection the required inspection per our permit is all in public works, but there is ongoing discussion as far as ownership of each facility. Yeah. Parks and rec, central services, police station, all the different department facilities. It's it's a goal that you've talked about performance metrics. It's a

goal this year for us to make a plan and determine that.

Okay. Because in the end, we

don't wanna cite ourselves for our own deficiencies and other parts. So we wanna make sure that plan is take care of

our own stuff and make sure we have a plan moving forward. So that's the ownership and who's required to maintain it is still kind of an ongoing goal for this

year. Okay. Alright. Thank you.

That there there is a plan I've already spoken with Rec and Parks, at least, on what's Rec and Parks and what's DPW's maintenance responsibilities. And there had been some outside perception that perhaps Rec and Parks didn't want to take responsibility. That is not true. I'm I'm now been assigned to work directly at Wreckham Parks. So I discussed this with director Johnson, and she said no. There there are certain ones that she knows belong to Wreckham Parks and that she's responsible for her crew to maintain, but there's some question marks. So she does want to get together with public works and probably central services too. All department, these three departments need to get together and iron out for sure who is responsible for which.

Because I don't know the accuracy of this statement, but I have heard some concerns about rec and parks storm water facilities.

Yeah. They are not equipped to handle certain BM, not so much BMPs, but like street ends that are failing, large failures, bulkhead failures. We tend to get into waterway improvement grants with those with the harbor master and working with public works. So that's beyond, we agree, that's beyond Rec and Parks' abilities to maintain. But they do require additional training beyond what training they'd received I believe last year. Director Johnson doesn't feel confident that they feel confident in knowing what decisions to make. So we'll look into further training for them or working with other groups on maintenance.

Okay. All right I think that's all I have. Did you? Well I will entertain a motion to postpone until our next meeting.

So moved.

I'll second. All those in favor please say aye. Aye. Motion carries. Thank you. And next up, we have r 326, water service agreement with North Point property. Is there anybody from staff who could give us rundown on this? No. I think I forgot to ask somebody from staff to come on this, but not a big deal. So my understanding is it's just there's a it's in my ward.

Well, outside my ward. It's actually in the county. It's next to Annapolis Roads I'm sorry, Chesapeake Harbor. And it's just a single family home that wants to get hooked up to our water system, and there are associated fees with that. And this basically just approves that connection. I don't really have any questions on this at this point. Do you have any questions, alder Woman?

No.

Okay. Well, would you be willing to make a motion to recommend favorably?

Yes. So

moved. I'll second. All those in favor, please say aye.

Aye.

Motion carries. Thank you. And on to next item, general discussion. We have ID 626 storm water fee incentive slash rebate program. So how it works, please join us.

Mr. Adams, are you able to alright. So so we're gonna switch to ID 3926 just because that presentation is ready to go without delay. Thank you. If you could introduce yourself for the record, mister Adams.

No. Hi.

That one's

the the the Boston one's. Okay. Brian

Adams, Urban Forester Planning and Zoning.

There we go.

So I'm not entirely sure what you wanna discuss, but I did just put a few slides together just sort of a brief overview of the program. What is tree canopy? Why are we tracking it? Why do we care? Just a little bit of history on the program for the new committee members.

Yeah, that's perfect.

Yeah, so urban tree canopy, what is it? It is basically the crown of the tree and what you see if you're looking down from space or from the sky. And in these photos you can see it is basically the leaves, the canopy of the tree that you would see from above. And so these are a few drone shots of our city that's Church Circle, and then looking down Main Street, and you can see some of tree canopy around there. This is just quick, some of the benefits of urban trees.

Cool the air. They've got a lot of positive impact on physical and mental health. There's a lot of studies have been done by the World Health Organization and other organizations that have found very strong links between improved mental health, improved recovery after surgeries. There's a lot of research being put into the positive aspects of urban trees. Obviously they filter pollutants through the air and water.

They increase our biodiversity and property value. They really Mature trees can do a lot for property value. 15 to 20% is the estimate. On the left, this is as a result of the analysis I had done in 2024. This is based on eye tree modeling. Our total benefits coming from our cities, urban forests. So it's an annual basis. So total ecosystem benefits 859,000. You see the storm water, 23,000,000 gallons of runoff avoided. Carbon sequestration and air quality removal.

So going back to where our goal came from, this was in our 2009 comp plan set a goal of 50% by the year 2036. That 2036 came out of a study done by the DNR in 2006 that did an analysis of our canopy in our land area, and determined there was enough open acreage that that our city should be able to reach a a canopy cover goal of 50%. In within thirty years. At that time, our canopy coverage was around 41. We have not met that goal.

Know 2036 is just around the corner. And one of the reasons was that while place, there was never adequate funding over many years for this program. So there weren't enough trees being planted. There wasn't enough maintenance being done on what we do have. The program was really just sweeping by doing the very minimum.

So just recently for our 2040 comp plan, we revised that goal, we kept it at 50%, but we bumped the year out to 2050. So that gives us some time. And with proper funding, we're hoping that now that goal is much more attainable. And a very positive note, our canopy coverage, this most recent analysis showed us at 43%. So even over that time period that we were not really fully funding the program, you know our trees were doing what they do and they continue to grow.

And fortunately we have you know tree preservation in our code and we have some pretty good ordinances that are kind of making up for what we're losing. But now with this dedicated funding from the mortar restoration fee, think we've really got a much more robust program to include proactive maintenance and tree planting that we did not have before. And obviously, urban forestry is essential to some of our comp plan priorities. Sustainable development, lowering our carbon footprint, environmental assets. And one year, one reason I'm sorry that we did go with 2,050 because trees take a long time to mature.

And for those canopies to be picked up in an analysis, they need ten, fifteen, twenty years of maturing before they're even going to be picked up. So we felt like 2050 gave us enough time that if we were to get a significant start on planting in the next five to ten years, you know, that'll give some time for these trees to mature. So this is where we are now. These are our wards and our tree coverage in those wards. Doing pretty well through the city, some of them are exceeding 50%.

We do have some work to do in Ward 3, specifically the Design District area, there's a lot of impervious surface over there. Looking at a few projects over there to get some street trees planted, but there needs to be a pretty holistic effort to do quite a bit of greening in that neighborhood. So these are just some numbers. Our total acreage in area, or total area and acreage. Where we're at now, is 1,966 acres of canopy coverage.

The analysis shows about 790 acres of plantable space. What that doesn't take into consideration is land use. You know, have rec and parks. They have open fields that from above look like they're optimal plantable space, but they really in reality are not because they want to keep them open. It also doesn't account for planting trees in what are currently impervious surfaces along streets and sidewalks.

Again, we're at 43% and that leaves us with three zero eight acres needed to meet our goal. I did find this fact interesting that only 7% of our canopy covers impervious surfaces. Which I felt was pretty low. I think that's an area that we can really, we need to really focus on as a city and making up increasing that number just because of the impact of the heat island and the storm water runoff from impervious surface. Any questions yet so far?

Yeah, but I'll save them at So the

right now, this is sort of our current view of what the program is doing to try to meet this goal. And some things that we've implemented since getting fully funded in the last, I think it's been a year and a half now that we've been fully funded. So we've moved from a reactive to more proactive maintenance program for our tree canopy. In the past we really just relied on finding out that a tree was dead or looking at finding hazardous trees that need to be removed and sort of addressing them on a case by case basis. Whereas now we're looking more holistically.

I've started looking at entire streets to just go through and do pruning and maintenance that's way over due. Many of our street trees really haven't had anything done to them in a long time. So there's a lot of catch up, but we are moving in the direction of more proactive maintenance. We've got some new planting programs we've established. Replant Annapolis being one of the bigger ones.

It's a partnership with Watershed Stores Academy of Anne Arundel County. We are in our fourth year, I believe, of that program. And it's going really well. Know it's taken a little bit of time to get the word out, but we had a meeting today to discuss the past year and sort of our goals for next year. They planted 130 trees approximately with community organizations this year, this past year.

And they've been training residents that are interested. They have a tree trooper program where they do like an online training program and teaches basics, you know tree biology and other basic things. And then also sort of how to plan planting projects and scoping and design. So they see some participation in the training and then they get, they find that the people come for the training and then don't actually follow through with the project. You know, it's a challenge.

It really is. They take a small fee for the trees and they'll offer contractor planted trees so they don't all have to be volunteer projects. So we hope to just continue to grow that program and get more participation because they do a really good job of working in the communities and getting these projects installed. There's a maintenance aftercare plan. The other thing that I was able to start this year is a, I'm calling it a front yard and street tree program.

I made it available in the summer, advertised on social media. Basically have residents sign up, request a tree, come out, see if the tree will work as a street tree. Well it started as a street tree only program, but what I found was a lot of people were requesting trees and then they didn't really have a street tree space, but they had a front yard. And so I just sort of started saying listen, if we can plant it near our right of way, we won't maintain it in the future, but we will plant it for you. So that was, it was really popular this year, in the first year.

And it's helped me to identify a lot of neighborhoods where we have a tree lawn, you know a strip between the sidewalk and street that have no trees, where we can fit some in. Planted a few in the Admiral Heights neighborhood. The residents were really excited and wanted to hopefully spread the word. That neighborhood has a lot of opportunities for street trees. We did our free tree giveaway in the fall with, I worked with the Arbor Day Foundation.

I think we gave away 150 trees in the fall. And then I also just, I have street tree planting that I do in the fall and spring as well. So last year we planted three ninety five trees. So you know we were talking, you mentioned goals and performance metrics. And I'll touch on my budget after this.

But what I found, know, looking at this program more and looking at our city and our space and the resident engagement interest in trees, I think it's going to be difficult to reach the sort of levels that we might, I had previously recommended. I think we can plant a lot of trees, but I don't think we can get to some of the upper hundreds that I had put in previous budgets. I think what we really need to focus on, as well as planting, is this next section, which is the code and policy changes. Because I think meeting our goal, there's gonna be a, need to be a focus on that, as well as planting trees. So the Forest Conservation Act has been revised at the state level.

There was a Senate and House bill last year. They're actually catching up to where we are. Where they're gonna get sort of, not only no net loss, a gain is what they're hoping for. But it is a one to one mitigation. They made some other, there's various changes in the law. One of the good things, and I was happy to see is that they've now, they've come out with an urban forest as a priority forest. So yeah. That makes a big difference for city projects. Makes it much more difficult for developers to clear urban forests. So a lot of positive changes in that.

I am working on revising our ordinance now. It needs to be in place in July. So I'm hoping to get a draft to you and the council to start reviewing.

Excellent.

There's the critical area legislation that we've talked about. I'm not sure where we are with that, but it's another thing that would help us to retain mature trees if we have more restrictions on removals in the critical area. And then one of the other things I'm looking at is our site design standards and trying to just create some additional requirements street trees, for soil volume, and that sort of thing in our zoning code. And just requiring developers to put in street trees when there's space for them. And to ensure that whatever trees are being planted are being planted properly with enough soil volume that they're not going to last for a few years and die or whatever.

So there's a few places in our code that I'm sort of looking at right now at trying to just make some adjustments to try to just increase our, the number of trees being planted and then the quality of those plantings. I started a or I I'm working with the trust Chesapeake Bay Trust. They had an Anne Arundel County planting community planting mini grant. We were able to get the city of Annapolis included in that. It wasn't previously.

So that is available to any community groups and it's up to $5,000 for tree planting in the city. And that can include some invasive management along with planting. We've had two applications, two Maryland Hall put in a number of trees last year with that program and we have another one sort of in the process right now. So that's another opportunity for residents to get involved, to take advantage, meet these goals and just with time and not their money. But it's a matter of getting the word out and getting people interested.

And then lastly, as far as the grants, so we added money to the watershed restoration grant that our public works department currently has with the trust. We used some of our critical area fee in lieu money to put towards that grant, And this year what they've done is they've combined that with one of their other grants, was a forestry protected lands grant, and they've combined the two. So now this is watershed restoration and forestry. So And grants can be for planting, for reforestation, for improving existing forests, and also for conservation. So the county uses it to get tracks of land conserved.

I think for us it's gonna be more about helping pay to get conservation easements documented. We have one right now, St. Luke's. They're very interested in the grant in getting that into a conservation easement. Church is gonna donate the property but we'll assist in getting the easement documented.

Yeah, well that's a great thing. It connects, ties with our next conversation on the storm water fee incentive program. Because the fee is potentially gonna go up quite a bit for, well actually not quite a bit, gonna go up somewhat for churches, I think. So having a way to reduce that would be important.

And we did, Anne and I met with Heritage Baptist Church about that alternative compliance and we're gonna direct them to the replant program. They wanna plant trees on their property to sort of work on reducing their fee, we're gonna link them up with the replant program and get trees planted that way. So other than that, the resident engagement piece. I work with our PIO to get things on social media. I really think our city needs to get more involved with that.

I don't think it's easy right now. It's been very difficult to promote things. I know the Jackie Guild's group has considered maybe a social media account. I think it'd be a great idea. Also, what else about, oh the website.

So the urban forestry website's been around for a little while, but it was not, it hadn't been updated in long time. So I've put a lot of effort into making that more usable, more helpful for our residents. Know, added an FAQ section trying to make people more aware of our code, the ordinance we have, you know, the potential fines if they're removing trees without permits. You know, and I think I mentioned to you that you know if we do make any changes to our critical area permit requirements, I'd really like to do a pretty intensive outreach you know to make, just make everyone aware of what it is we require, what's in our code. And lastly, just having that analysis conducted at least every five years so we can just sort of keep up and know where we are.

Just making sure that we're making progress. You know, again going back to trees and the time it takes to grow, it'll be hard to see what we've planted in these last few years. But it'll be good to make sure that we're not losing significant amount. Mean projects like Providence Point, that's gonna hurt during one analysis. But in the end overall in the long term it will come back.

Going to fluctuate, but I think it'd be good to know where we are every five years or so. And with some of the new technology they're using to do these analysis, they're using machine learning to help evaluate satellite imagery, and it's becoming more affordable. Whereas you don't have to contract with a lidar company to fly lidar to collect data. You can use machine learning to do it much faster. So this is just sort of a five year proposed budget for the program.

So like I said, this past year we planted nearly 400 trees, and so I'm increasing that to four fifty, and then by 50 each year moving forward. Maintenance costs go up a little bit each year as we continue to plant more trees. There is a line item for an additional staff member. I don't know the exact amount that that'll cost, but I just have a placeholder in here. And then there's the inventory and canopy update in five years.

One of the other things that we've added to our website is the analysis we did, and our street tree inventory is all available now to the public. I think it's a really good tool for people to be able to see what their neighborhood has. They can look at their street trees, they can look at the species. It's just another way for the public to interact and be aware of what we have, what's out there, and hopefully become more interested or engaged in continuing to grow the canopy. I think that's everything I have. I'm sure you have some questions for me.

Alright, well thank you Mr. Adams. Do you have any questions Alderman? Nope. Well you know me, I have a lot of questions. So I love the how you included the ecosystem benefits. You know, I would suggest maybe getting these included in the budget somewhere or the STANTech report just to I just think it's important for people to have this on their minds as far as the actual benefits to, fiscal benefits to having a tree, robust tree program.

And

do you happen to have a chart anywhere showing the change in tree canopy over time? Say since like, what was the first tree canopy report? I think it was 2006 or so.

One of the, no, because one of the issues with that is that over that time the methods and the way it's done has changed. So that is something that like moving forward if we continue to use this method, we will start to establish that change over time and we'll be able to look back and see. And they get that data every couple of years. So it's like if we want to pull up a certain year and go back to it, will be able to. But right now it's difficult to compare past assessments to the current assessments. Okay. And,

yeah, think, so on the tree canopy goal change, to emphasize I'll say, for my colleagues, you know, the original goal we we have was 2036, but we realized again we didn't have enough time to plant the trees for the trees to grow to actually meet the tree canopy goal. Because it was one of the things over my time on the council before the tree program would get cut every year as far as the planting allocation. But tying it to the Wireshed Fund eliminates that eliminates that problem. So for the staffing increase, when are you planning on proposing that? Because I think last time we spoke you think you thought at the time you you didn't quite have everything set up yet in the program to necessarily justify.

Is that changed or is that something that's gonna be proposed in the next budget?

I don't know. I will say that there were some issues with the budget and HR, there was some miscommunication. We were told that it was in the budget last year and then when it came time to start developing it we were told it wasn't documented. I don't know how that process works but that was what I heard from my director. You're right in that I wanted to give some of these programs some time to grow, to make sure that if we're going to bring someone on they're going to have enough work to keep them busy.

So I would say that if, I think we'll have this placeholder in the budget this year and I think that we could look at hiring this year assuming that all the HR issues are worked out. I think it's because there's also some discrepancy about like how that, what that position, would it be in a new position, an entirely new position with a new description or would it be another position that I have and so there's still some HR issues to resolve.

Well, can you maybe you were the deputy city manager to refresh my memory. It's one of these things I remember thinking about, but I'm not sure if we did it. And for the class and comp study, did we add a couple different we talked about adding some other positions related to the forest program. Did we do that? No.

Okay. So alright. So that's something I guess alright. I'm gonna add that to my shortlist for the budget amendments. If you could if either one of you or both of you could give me some ideas as far as how that'd be structured because I'd like to set the framework for I don't know how we wanna do it.

We wanna have similar to what we do with the environmental program coordinator, have a one, three or have a more of a middle manager kind of position with a couple underneath. But I think we need to start to lay the framework for where we want to see this in the future. I think it's clear at some point we're going to need additional staff, especially once the stormwater program gets their incentive program out there. Because what I would think is that this position would also be working on the promotion we're talking about. Right?

Getting homeowners it would be informing homeowners and property owners about the storm water fee credit that they can get. And you're working on getting easements if we need them. I mean, guess an alternate approach to staff, thinking out loud here, would be to have money set aside for a consultant to have on board who could do some of those random things. They could still do some promotion. They could do some targeted sector studies like as far as looking at street tree coverage, identifying areas that have a lack streets that have a lack of tree cover, planting opportunities.

I don't know. It might make sense to have both at least one additional staff and then along with the pool of money because that money could also potentially be used for yeah, maybe supporting some community groups, I don't know.

I think I like that idea. I think the idea of another staff member and then something more, something that could be ramped up or ramped down at different times a year. Planting seasons are always incredibly busy. So the work is overwhelming at that time. But then in February things slow down a little bit. So I think that's a good approach. We can certainly support and another person would be really helpful. And as you said, if the storm water compliance or alternative compliance moves forward and we can promote that. But I think the promotion and the resident engagement is an important piece that we need more of.

All right. Yeah. And, because I would like to I'm curious if we could get analysis at some point on the street tree because I am it's some kind of a Kinda like a heat map for a tree canopy cover, right? So we can just see that and see which streets have zero coverage. Which, again, just to show us where we need to focus our efforts. I'm assuming there's somebody out there or some kind of firm that could do that

analysis. And I do have one of the things that I've had them do the last time they did an inventory was identify potential planting spots along streets. So I do have sort of a GIS based list of areas that have open or potential planting sites. And so that is what I am targeting with my street tree planting. But I think a heat map is something I would love to have. I think it's just a matter of getting that done. I don't think it's hard, it's just getting the right firm to, because some of the bigger national data sets they don't do, they cover Baltimore, they cover D. C, but they don't don't come to Annapolis.

Yeah. Well if it's something you think it's worth pursuing we can figure out what the cost might be and get that added to budget.

Thank Mr. Chair. I just, question for you Brian on this chart. So you're showing how many trees you need to plant, and I'm assuming that is to get to the 50 by 50 goal. Like you would extend that beyond 2031 as you're there, but the trajectory you need to be on 50 trees

That each would ideally continue. At some point we run out of space. And I think each year we continue to plant that many trees it's gonna become more difficult. Because we don't have the space on city property. Property.

Unless we start looking at schools and parks and they let us get more creative with space around ball fields, which I've always advocated for as a shady place for both players and families to stand or sit during a game. I think we need to work on that because that is such potential for the city. And as Brian's pointed out, we're running out of plantable space if we don't use the spaces within the city but are controlled by the county and by our rec spaces. So like schools are paramount, not just around the rec fields but in other places. And then our recreation parks allowing us to plant around our fields.

And then of course libraries. Or like the new library, they put in a fair amount of trees. They do. Retained trees on West Street. I think that's another potential source for us. I wanted to ask you also, Brian, about so when you're making this calculation about how many trees to plant each year, are figuring in how many we lose by either natural causes or by the trees that are coming down and the residents are screaming, Brian there's another tree that came down in Eastport.

So it's not a perfect science. But what I will say because our canopy coverage grew very slightly, very slightly over the last six, eight years, I think the growth of our existing forest is making up for a lot of our losses So at the I think if we continue on that trajectory along with more tree preservation, better tree preservation standards in construction and development, more restrictions on when trees can be removed in the critical area, and enhance that with a lot more trees being planted than we've ever planted. I think that's how we can reach the goal. But it's not an exact science.

So tree preservation, either it's by working with Save Our Trees and other groups, and just enforcement in general is critical. Because we lose trees, sometimes they're down, and then all Brian's left with is a fine and you know, plant three trees which are too small to be counted within the tree canopy for another fifteen years And everyone appeals that and tries to work around that every time he tells them they have to buy three trees. So I think keeping the trees we have is really of utmost importance too. We're gonna keep advancing. Yeah.

Yeah I have some legislation I'm working on that would create like a conservation landscaping program. So it would allow homeowners to have native yards as long as they don't get out of control and they're maintained. But also have a require some kind of requirement for property owners in particular like, I'm thinking like HOAs or people have large properties to maintain their trees as far as maintaining those invasive species, making sure the vines aren't out of control. So that would be an enforcement mechanism. But I'm thinking there's a lot of connection to I think that's something the stormwater group actually mentioned in their incentive program is having a proper maintenance of the forest count towards some of the credit.

We have maturity retention. Yeah. Yeah. Right. And as far as yeah. So as far as the the tree planting potential, I've mentioned this before, but the impervious surface is is a large I think we need to focus on that because the data you the one data point you had in here, which is only 7% of Annapolis tree canopy covers impervious surface. That's surprising. That really, to my mind, tells you that we need to give more focus on that. We don't have enough tree canopy cover on that. And so that shows that we have to address the parking lots, and that's part of my grand plan vision here is to get to that point.

Not quite sure how yet, but what I'm thinking is we need to start target well, as the fee increases for some of these properties, we need to able to go to them and say, look, if you remove a couple of your parking spaces, put in some tree wells Mhmm. You can get this credit. Right? But I think we need to make sure our parking regs they're I don't know if the parking regs are gonna be barrier, if we have to make sure we can give them a waiver, permanent waiver to the parking requirements. But I really wanna move in that direction.

But again, that certainly requires staff time to go to, the giant shopping center and say, look, we'll give you this a break on this if you let us put a tree here Mhmm. In this parking spot. And I know Eastport's gonna require some negotiation to remove some of their parking spots, but I'd like to see some more. But we could also look at if we need space for street trees, remove some curbside parking to put in storm water management and tree. But in any case, that's something on my mind.

And that's also something for related thinking of the schools because the schools have looking at the storm water fee, the presentation looking ahead, that the schools have significant amount of impervious surface and their fee potentially would jump up significantly. And that's an opportunity for us to go to them and say, look. Your fee is gonna increase. You're willing to work with us. And if we have adequate funds, we might be able to just do some of the work ourselves on pay for it ourselves or partner with the school to get work done on their properties.

What else? There's Looking through my notes.

That's about it. I will just make a note that the impervious conversion, that is something we're really targeting with that watershed restoration grant and the critical area money. We are looking for conversion of impervious surface to either storm water, best management practices, trees, combination thereof. So that is really the sort of projects we're targeting with that grant money.

Okay, great. And so my last point I think. So the the budget slide, are these costs incorporated into the storm water the planned storm water fee increase? So for next so for this next fiscal year, the budget, I saw that it was in your slides slides for storm water management. There's a proposed 12% actual increase to the storm water fee.

Oh, that was last year's slides. Okay. Well, I know last year's slides included them, but so for I just wanna make sure the fee going forward includes all these program costs automatically with the analysis being done by Stantec. So I don't know. I'm assuming it's gonna go up some percentage this next fiscal year. So could Mr. Adams could you look into that with public works at some point? Because that's certainly I think the intent.

Yeah actually budget FY '27 budget is actually going to be the same as what I requested last year. I was told that budgets need to stay the same this year and so I've sort of made my numbers fit into that.

Well that doesn't, I don't think that applies to the utility fees because those are paid by the utility fee increases. It's not coming out of, what would you call it? The I mean, it's all operating funds, I suppose. But it's it already has a funding stream. So I know we Unless there was a directive to keep the fees the same, which I don't

went up quite a bit last year.

It did. It did. So but I think, like, for example, for an additional staff, you have 90,000, but that's not gonna be enough because you actually have to include the benefits. It's gonna be at least 150 to put in there for placeholder. And if you knee name, I'm just throwing that out there.

I might be, I guess, have worth a discussion with city manager, deputy city manager, and your director to see if that request or directive included the expenses supported by fees. So I think that's that's all I have for you, mister Adams. Thank you. You had a great presentation.

Alright. Thank you.

So yes, please introduce yourselves. You can start anytime.

I'll go first. Mike Rosberg, I'm the storm water program manager in public works.

Ann Ruterer, storm water engineer, public works. Am I not on? I'm sorry. Oh, I love that echo. So thanks for having us here today.

We are going to do an overview going from 100,000 feet above, down to single site level, looking at storm water regulations, pollutant control that's in storm water. So we're gonna start with that background overview of just what the sort of primary legislation is, and the mechanisms that have been set up to control, to manage and regulate storm water pollutants, primarily through the municipal separate storm sewer system. Storm water is full of acronyms and jargon just like every other discipline, and in general I will try to avoid that, but I am going to say MS4 from this point forward because that municipal separate storm sewer system is just not particularly helpful, and MS4 is easy to say. So we'll talk about what's included in that program, which is, and then we will zoom into the city of Annapolis and how our particular MS4 permit operates and is funded. And then our next zoom in will be looking at the mechanism, that particular funding mechanism, which is the storm water utility fee, which we have fees for residential properties and non residential properties, and rules and procedures around that.

And we're going to talk about changing the potential structure of those fees for both programs. Next slide. So just from the 100,000 foot, maybe 30,000 feet, just talking about sources of water pollution. So usually when you when we're talking, so first zoom in, I did not include a view of the hydrologic cycle which would be where I would actually want to start. But we're zooming in to talk specifically about storm water and water, surface water flowing to receiving water bodies.

So the sources of pollutants that carry the, the sources of pollutants carried to those water bodies include direct deposits, that's not the right word but I'm just gonna say it right now, Waste water treatment plants in factories, as well as pollutants carried in surface flow from farmland, from suburban development, from urban storm water runoff. And that's more commonly referred to as storm water. Discharge is the word that I meant to say instead of deposit. Next slide please. So this is a terrifying slide and I'm not going to step through every detail of it.

But I do want to just give you a general timeline and framework for how storm water is regulated. And basically, and how the MS4 program came to be. So it all comes back to the Clean Water Act, which was established in, which was implemented in '19 enacted in 1972. That federal statute created the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System, otherwise known as NPDES or NPDES depending on which region of the country you live in. And that is a permit program that regulates pollutants into water bodies.

The other portion of the Clean Water Act that's relevant to this conversation today is section three zero three d, which established the federal authority and then that is then designated states typically, to establish water quality standards, to establish monitoring and reporting of those water qualities to determine where there are impaired water bodies, and to set pollutant limits to address those impairments. Those pollutant limits are called TMDLs, is total maximum daily load. And those are basically a diet of pollutants that are allowed to be discharged into the water bodies. So those TMDLs are enforced by this permitting program, the MS4 program. Here in Maryland, Maryland is designated to administer those programs, state of Maryland, Maryland Department of the Environment.

But we have another layer, which is the Chesapeake Bay program, the Bay Cleanup Program, which was founded, formed in the early 80s. And Maryland was an original member. Now it spans six states and the District Of Columbia plus the Chesapeake Bay Commission to cover the whole geography of the Chesapeake Bay watershed. That is important because the Bay program has really driven a focus on nutrient reduction. Nutrients being nitrogen, phosphorus, and total suspended solids, which really underlie a whole lot of the work that we do.

There are hundreds of pollutants, and different regions have different priorities, but those are the ones that have been specifically prioritized for our region under this agreement. So the Bay Creek program was formed in the early 80s, and they established their first nutrient reduction goal in 1987. At the same time, the MS4 program was established by the EPA. And shortly after that, the first phase one regulations were issued by the EPA for medium and large scale municipalities or jurisdictions serving over a 100,000 population. And those permits for pollutants from those large scale, medium and large scale jurisdictions were issued in the early 90s.

I'm gonna go faster, promise. I'm just getting, just building speed. So after that the EPA initiated, they added, expanded the focus to include smaller urbanized areas which Annapolis would would fall under. So serving populations less than a 100,000 through their MS4 system. And shortly after that, there were storm water regulations that were formalized that were focused on these storm water, these pollution reduction practices through storm water management control.

Simultaneously, the Chesapeake Bay agreement kept moving forward. There were hundreds of thousands of different lawsuits and changes to changes to goals throughout this period and that that is a trend that continues. But anyways, so in 2003 to 2004, the MS4 phase two, so the smaller scale permits were issued, including for Annapolis. And then the next big thing that happened was the Maryland Stormwater Act of 2007, which really honed in the focus of our work for the MS4 on restoration projects, environmental site design. So that's basically nature based practices to control stormwater rather than gray infrastructure, hard infrastructure projects.

The other thing that it did, and this is where we're coming to the end of the slide, is it established the water watershed restoration fund mechanism by by which the jurisdictions and municipalities can con connect collect a stormwater fee. So that stormwater fee is mandated by this storm water act of 2007, and there are rules in place within that legislation about how that that fee can be administered. So that leads us closer to today. So the permits, the MS4 permits are in theory five years long. The most recent one for the city of Annapolis was issued in 2018 and has been, what is it called?

Extended. Administratively extended. That's the term. However, we are coming up close to a new draft for our permit which will likely up our our attention and requirements for restoration work moving forward. At the same time, the state is has issued new regulations a draft of new regulations and standards for storm water. So we anticipate that the funds and efforts going towards restoration will continue to grow as we move forward. Alright, with that Mike is going to talk about the Annapolis.

Need to take

a break after that. Next slide.

Yep, thank you. So do you need to take a break after that, right?

So yeah, thanks Ann. I think another point of that slide was to show how regulations over time have changed and they are still changing. And we are on what feels like weekly calls, but monthly tech groups and legislative working groups with MDE and other jurisdictions to talk about draft upcoming regulations. So it's constantly changing, and it's a big part of what we do to try to stay on top of it, know what's going on because the draft regulations are, yeah, they're still they're constantly changing and it's it's it's a moving target. But we're still although things are changing, we're still doing storm water.

We're not stopping. We're still doing projects, restoration, all that good stuff. So like Anne said, MS four, municipal separate storm sewer systems. Our storm water does not go the same place where our sinks go. Part of this permit we have up here are overview of basically the targets of this permit, what we have to meet.

Our annual reports are posted online. You can go into more detail of of more of all these controls. The first one is that restoration target that we have to meet, which is a 20% reduction from our 2018 baseline of impervious area. I don't know the numbers off the top my head, and from that our baseline had been changing based on new impervious we've had discovered or new treatment or new restoration that was was in place. But that's all in our annual report.

So that's the restoration target, and with in addition to that, we have six minimum controls that we have to meet. Public education outreach, public involvement or participation, illicit discharge detection elimination, sometimes you'll see IDDE, that's illicit discharge detection elimination. Construction site stormwater runoff, post construction stormwater runoff or stormwater management, and pollution prevention and good housekeeping. So also to the right, we've listed some things that are not regulated under the m s four, but are still possible other regulations that will you know, we still have to abide by depending on the circumstance. Next slide.

I just put up this brief slide here to kinda show what how we are organized as a stormwater program in this city. Like I said, I'm the stormwater program manager, and under that, we have two stormwater engineers and two environmental compliance inspectors all working towards those to meet those MS four goals. And if you the watershed ratio agent fund right there, you know, if you you look in the capital budget, you know, this the watershed restoration fund supports the operations capital projects related to public storm water management systems, watershed implementation plans, stream and wetland restoration activities, and the, again, more acronyms, MPS, MS four, team DL requirements and goals. So all big challenge of what we try to do is is try to make sure all this work that we do fits under this MS four permit requirement and make sure that we're reporting everything we do. So next slide, please.

And in here I have a I like a picture slide. I think kind of to that point, we do a lot of things in various different ways and a very different capacities as far as planning, design, construction, maintenance, outreach, and they're all great, and they're all really successful. So the the time I've been here, we've done a lot of good work. I you know, and this is a lot of these are our grant program, so a lot of our restoration work that we do is through the Chesapeake Bay Trust grant. So there's a couple of photos of the of the activities we've done there.

Those two pictures to the right is the College Creek Wetland and the green roof on top of the police station. Just showing that we mentioned earlier the maintenance of our city owned BMPs is still under our under our watch. So we we we make sure we keep keep our existing facilities up in up in passing grade. That's next slide, if that's all I got.

Yeah. So Alderman Savage started to touch on this earlier. But storm the storm water utility fee that was enabled by that 2007 act allows us to issue a utility fee based on the potential use and contribution of a particular site to our storm sewer system. And so basically, typically municipalities or jurisdictions issue this fee based on impervious area of that site. This is an illustration showing a natural site left, with good infiltration and limited runoff, which is not taxing the system or adding pollutants.

It's still contributing, but not extensively. And as you move further to the right, the impervious area which would include things like roofs, or driveways, or roads, any area that water doesn't permeate into. The higher the impervious area, the higher it taxes the system, and therefore the higher we could in theory issue a fee. Next slide. Just a side note that storm water management practices that we're usually talking about when we talk about restoration, we're talking about storm water control measures, or storm water best management practices.

There are different terms for them. But they are usually targeted at managing the first one inch of rainfall, what we call the first flush on a site, that one inch seems like intuitively doesn't seem like that much of that big of a deal, but that one inch is carrying, it has the highest energy, is moving the fastest, and is carrying the largest amount of pollutants. And this is just an illustration of different ways you can think about that one inch, and how you're contributing to taxing the system. Next slide. So our fees in the city of Annapolis for our storm water utility fees.

This slide, as was noted, this slide was included that includes our fees from last year and our current fees fiscal year twenty six. We don't have a projection yet for fiscal year twenty seven, but I just wanted to keep that in there to acknowledge that our fees do have been going up. The trend is that they have been going up because our watershed restoration fund needs continue to increase. But anyways, we have two different kinds of fees. We have one for non residential properties, which would be commercial properties or institutional properties.

So churches, schools, city property. We actually charge fees on state property, which is very interesting to me. And so those all fall under non residential, and then residential is obviously housing. So we have a fee for single family houses, and we also have a fee for multi family houses, is a, those are both flat fees. The residential fee is based on kind of an average, a median size of, calculated median size of residential property, what we call equivalent residential unit.

And that fee is, one equivalent residential unit is charged 34.53 at the moment, and then a multi family property is charged half of that. Next slide.

Hold on. And go back to the last

You wanna talk about the tiers?

So can you remind me, last year we made, I think we made some changes to the nonresidential. Right? We we created more tiers?

No. I'll get to the two the changes, but we we have this this is just what we are right now, and it hasn't changed yet. Nothing's changed yet.

Pointing out for my colleagues. If you look at the residential fee, you'll see there's just a flat fee for residential single family and then one for multifamily. So there's a lot in between. As well as the looking at the nonresidential tier four, there's a lot of room. And so I think Anne will get into some of the the proposals to change it to kinda get more nuance, but also kinda equity as far as making sure people are only getting charged for what they have on their property.

Because in residential single family, you can have, like and she'll get into, like, a a home with a thousand square feet of imperfect service, getting charged the same as somebody with 10,000. It's something we're looking to change.

So there are lots of different structures out there that different jurisdictions use. This is not an uncommon one. But this is our current structure and we'll talk more about possibilities for changing that for both the fees in different ways. So they're structured differently now, might be structured the same, or they might be structured differently, we'll talk about it. Next slide.

Just to ground our fees into sort of a benchmark of local fees. This shows our fee from last year, from fiscal year twenty six proposed, and then if we change the structure, which we'll get into. So two different approaches, but in either case, it's showing that Annapolis tends to be falling kind of somewhere in the middle. It's not the most expensive fee out there, but it's also not the least expensive in the region. And next slide, That's the non residential one, and then the residential one is also towards the middle, but a little bit higher compared to our regional.

If you could back a second to the last Yes. Because I mean I think it's so it's important to point out that currently we're second from the bottom. Right? Of

of this group that we randomly pitched. Yeah. Yeah. And this is

just for non residential. But so the two proposals, the first proposal would bring us to a 170. Next one would bring us up towards higher to the top. But so I just think it's important to keep that in mind for future conversation as far as where we currently are and where we may go.

Next slide and then probably next slide. And then just looking at the two different types of fees, the residential and non residential, and their contribution to our watershed restoration fund. This is looking at over three years time, but also just you can see that the residential fee makes up a larger percentage of the whole of the revenue and will continue to do so even if we change the structure which is illustrated in the third chart. Next slide.

Does that reflect the potential changes to the residential structure?

No, that was only the non residential.

Do you have a similar slide showing

No that analysis has not been done.

Not been completed yet. Is that something that STANTech is gonna work on?

Let's talk about it.

Okay.

Okay, so I just started with the non residential because that's what we've done already and it's fully analyzed. I just wanna start there as a grand point, and then we'll move on to residential if that's okay. So yeah, so last year we did an analysis of switching the structure, the fee structure for non residential properties from that tiered structure, which is basically small, medium, large, extra large, to an ERU based, and I'm going to explain the acronym again, an ERU based measured impervious area approach. So what that would mean is instead of just charging four different levels of fees, we would look at the actual site, the actual impervious area that is on that site, and establish a base ERU fee, the equivalent residential unit. So in our case we've established that that's 2,100 square feet.

We would give that a base rate, and then if your site was one ERU, you would get charged that base rate. If your site was two ERUs, you would get charged twice that base rate. Next slide.

So I think the important thing on that one to look at is, so there would be a reduction for folks in tier one, so the smaller

houses. I have some examples that we can look at. Yeah, so the proposal is to make that change. And the idea, the goals of that change would be to more accurately reflect the existing impervious conditions and stormwater practices on a particular site. To have a more equitable billing approach, and this is the caveat that I'll come to in a second.

And also to raise awareness and incentivize storm water management by large property owners. Because the larger the property, the more impervious area on the property, the greater contribution it's making to the pollutants. So the caveat there is that the impact on the non residential rate payers will vary depending on where they fall in that tier system right now. So some rates will increase, some rate payers will have increased fees, some rate payers will have decreased fees because if they're at the top of a range right now, they're paying less than they technically should be. If they're at the bottom of the range, they're paying more.

So it will kind of wash out in a certain way, but the big change is that the cap on the tier four on the extra large category will go away, and they will be, we will be able to charge them for however many ERUs they have. Next slide.

Yeah and just again, reiterate that point, the importance is like, think of large properties like, just a well, I'll pick on my own word. The giant shopping center, really large parking lot, which is probably yeah. Something like probably But that allow us to actually get some more money from them and give them more of an incentive to make changes. Although they are making changes right now as you're

They are. And they are planning to get a credit on that. Okay so yeah, so here's an example of this. So if you have an existing property that has 21,000 square feet of impervious area, in our current structure, current non residential structure, that would fall in the second tier of billing. So their quarterly rate is a $170.86.

So and as I mentioned, properties towards the top of the tier range like this one are currently paying less than their actual contribution to the system. Next slide. If we change the structure to ERU based, meaning we're going to charge them for the measured impervious area, sort of rounded, then that 21,000 square feet equals 10 ERUs, equivalent residential units, that 2,100 square feet is equivalent residential units. Then we can charge them for the full 10 ERUs. So if we go back to that base rate for the ERU, that means their quarterly charge would increase to $345.30.

So property owners with more impervious cover will pay more to fund the storm water system, and we and that wouldn't be limited by the tiers or the caps. Next slide. So we looked at this last year to understand what the impact would be to all of our non residential ratepayers, and this shows the spread of the impact, and the property we were just looking at, they were increasing by 200 ish dollars per quarter, so they would fall in that big bar there, the five fifty one bar. So the majority of property owners that would have an increase would have an increase of 0 to $200 quarterly fee. And then a certain number, under 90, would actually see their bills reduced because they are probably at the bottom of their rate their tier range right now, so they are in theory overpaying at the moment.

And then there's a small number of properties that would see substantial increases, And essentially those small numbers of properties reflect very large, the extra large property owners that would no longer be limited by the cap. Next slide. And this is a terrifying slide illustrating the impacts by property use and our all over strange use codes. And I think Alderman Savagy mentioned church. So here we're actually showing that the wash, some churches will see big increases, other churches will see small increases, and the overall net is there will be a slight reduction for all churches, but when you talk about a specific church, that impact could be radically different.

That's just the average. The biggest increases we see in kind of more standard office and commercial spaces with presumably large parking lots and also government facilities.

Yeah that's the largest most significant change are other business. So you said that's Yeah. Probably the shopping centers and things like that? Yeah.

Next slide.

Well, we could pause here a minute because we're running out of time. Go ahead. And what I'm thinking is it's kind of about halfway looking at the slides. I'm thinking I'm gonna stop you here because I still wanna hear from deputy city manager and try to get everybody out by five. So if if you could come back, plan on joining us next month, that'd be great.

We can pick up the residential fee changes, jump into the credit program. And then you also had some of your other recommendations, some of the alternative compliance. So, yeah, there's a just because I don't as much as I wanna jump into this, it's probably gonna take another forty five minutes, I guess. Forty five minutes. Not your fault. I know I have a ton of questions too. So again, let's just stop there. Thank you so much. Excellent presentation. A lot of information in here.

Let me see if there's anything I need to leave you with for follow-up. So I guess you have a couple questions before we do go. Stantec, when can we because again, I think the last report I have is from, let me check, I think it's from fiscal year '24 doesn't make sense. '25?

I believe I just checked. I sent you the one that was dated 06/15/2025. You did. So you should have that one. And I, it should be I was having trouble with accessibility getting it on our website, but I just got the accessible format. So it should

be online tomorrow. So I'll make sure you get those links.

If you could send that to miss Jackson. Okay. Because then I'd like to add that to the agenda. That will remind us, me, when I see the agenda for next month to review that.

Sure. Absolutely.

I think I also yeah. So some of the things just as a preview I wanna dig into are you you couple of the different scenarios that you're proposing. I'm assuming you're looking for some feedback from committee as far as going the ERE model based tier for residential.

And yeah, guess I'll just leave it there. Is there anything

else you wanna say before we

Yeah, I guess I'll just try to close that section and say, for the non residential change, structure change, we had proposed that last year. It was well received. The next steps for that were laid out and we have been working through them. Really the biggest next step is to introduce it as an amendment to move it forward.

Okay, yeah, thank you. Very important point. Okay, so you are ready to do that if

Yeah, so we are currently running a pilot program with Heritage Baptist Church, which Brian mentioned earlier, working through the kinks a little bit. But I I think that's, you know, that's very helpful for us. And so we, if if it does move forward as an amendment, then we we need to work through the timing and and Yeah. Work coordinate it with billing, the website updates and all those things. But we'd be ready to do that. For the residential change, that is not something that has been properly analyzed or

Understood.

Outreached. There's a whole lot more parts. There's 800 non residential properties. There are over 10,000 residential properties. So the scale of it is just radically different and requires much more conversation.

Yeah, I think one of the important points to of analysis that I'd like to see would be so you have the slide showing how the increase how the change to the new model for nonresidential is gonna help us as far as bringing in more money for the projects and everything. Just thinking out loud. I guess for Stantec as, because again they typically present forecasts moving forward as far as how it's going to impact our ability to get bond funding for projects. And in the past they've shown a deficit if we don't increase our fee. So at some point I'd like to see that comparison of with this change, how is this change gonna help us as far as the long term projections for the health of the fund?

Yeah, so bottom line at this point we haven't had Stan Tech do that analysis because StanTech does not recommend this change. We don't believe that the revenue increase will balance out the extra administrative burden.

For the non residential?

Oh for the residential. For the non residential we have that already analyzed, yeah.

Okay.

For the residential.

Yeah, alright, thank you. Alright, deputy city manager.

Questions?

I have different questions?

Do you have any particular questions?

Oh. Let me bring up your list.

Because there's a couple of things that are not in this very comprehensive report, which both of you obviously can read later, and Alderman Huntley. But I wanted to bring up a couple of things that are not here. And one being with the rising electrical rates.

Oh, you haven't.

You know, we have a lot of concern among the residents about that, and this was brought up at the mayor's last town meeting that you attended in your ward. And I did mention that this is something the city we've had on our list to address with BG and E of any ways we can get some relief for our neighbors. But also in the meantime, I have tasked one of our environmental program managers with a webpage that addresses residential home efficiency and the programs that are available through BG and E, the no cost and low cost energy audits and other services through the Empower Maryland program. We need to get those up front and center. They're working on that right now.

But also today, the subject of the Maryland Cities and Counties for Climate Action group that I participated in, our topic was energy and energy efficiency. And I asked that group to highlight, for me especially, what do they offer? You know, what do they pay for as a city that goes outside of Empower? And I learned quite a lot today and have lots of ideas to bring back to staff and get going. Of course some of these are larger jurisdictions with more funding.

I mean Montgomery County has a position for almost everything and they have someone dedicated just to this. And they have a team actually dedicated to providing rebates and incentives and cost free services to their residents. And they do a lot of education around it too. They even have BG and E do tabling events as much as possible to get the things at BG and E, the services they offer, out to the public. One lesson learned from that presentation today was if community solar someone knocks on your door and they say well this is free and you can do this, people don't tend to trust that.

Know this is too good to be true. It's a business. It's gonna get you you know somewhere along the line. But if a city staff person does the same kind of door knocking or tabling event and is just talking about even BG and E incentives, it comes across as much more trustworthy and credible The city is telling us this is something we should do. But at the same time, there should be city programs and incentives.

Now you can look for grant funding. Sometimes these types of programs that are ongoing are tough to fund with grants, so you can get some start up money. But Montgomery County has $4,000 out of its own budget dedicated to just these types of services. And there's simple things we can start out doing such as bulb returns, like bulb event returns. You can do them at libraries, you can do them in bars.

They have this like brew crawl they call it. Know it sounds great, sounds fun, but when you get there there's a tabling event. You can return your incandescent bulbs and get maybe coupons from local hardware stores for discounts for LEDs. They do partner quite a bit with their local hardware stores. They look I got all sorts of ideas for doing this.

But my my staff's at capacity right now. And so I I mean, I was thinking along the lines of I might have to ask for an enhancement in this budget for even a contract position to get this up and started. Part of it depends on how much outside of resilience work I will continue to do. I'm doing quite a bit of city manager outside of resilience work right now, so I'm not very available to my staff and I'm not working as closely with them as I would like. We might be looking at some enhancement funds for.

And I think this is really important to our residents and rates are only climbing. It's not just low income people either and that's what all the other jurisdictions are seeing as well. Something that a statistic about people spending more than 15% of their income on electricity and that's like a tipping point for when it gets really bad for people. And that's across all incomes. So this is something we're spending some time on right now looking at. And you know, any feedback from this committee or council in general about, you know, would you like us to focus on this more? You know, your ideas will be appreciated. But it's been on our list and it's just come to a head now with this very cold winter and rates climbing. And It's one of

certainly not gonna get better anytime soon. No. We probably should start thinking about, well I guess adding this capacity. If you have any other examples.

Yeah and I have other examples of ways we can do this. Know they said the entry point with people is light bulbs. Know that's how you get their attention and then you get them involved with solar and other things like that.

But still if, trying to remember when I lived in an apartment, I guess the individual units do pay their own electricity,

The individual?

Apartment owner?

I believe so. Most of them do. I mean some apartments are rented with utilities but that's not the typical

What about housing authority properties? Do you know Alderman? Like do the people living in housing authority, do they pay their own electricity or is that him?

Yeah. So

that wasn't paying their own electricity was Willborn Estates before it became Willborn. So I don't know if they had to do that and Woodside. Both of them didn't have, but I think they do now, I'm not sure.

Yeah, because if anything we should really target those communities

and

see if BG has money. But I get like you need staff to do it.

Right, there's so much exploring to do with other jurisdictions on what they're providing their citizens and what sort of rebates they're providing to them. There's some tax incentives and if you do certain things you get a credit on your taxes or rebate from the city or county. And they've taken on a lot of rebates where the city just pays them and then seeks the rebate elsewhere so it's really easy for residents. But lots of great ideas around that to ease the burden on our residents and on businesses. That's another focus.

Some of the jurisdictions are looking at how to get businesses to engage more in energy efficiency. And one other thing I want to mention that's not in this report under electric vehicles is that BG partnership, but I'm going to get the regulatory agency wrong so I'm not going to say it, offered a program where if you pay $2,500 into the program as your jurisdiction, you can get a very detailed inventory and plan for your EV replacement for your fleet. Now we've done some cursory investigations and some planning with central purchasing around EV and Ashley Diaz, our environmental program manager is working closely with Matt Flinner, the fleet manager on this incentive for EV replacement in the city. EV purchases and vehicle replacement with EVs that is. But this provides a much deeper dive, a very detailed inventory about what you should buy, when you should buy it, to get to your goals, and savings, etc.

This is worth, has a value of $25,000 on it. This was something I considered asking for an enhancement a couple of years ago to do, but this is for $2,500 we put in, we get this back. So central services is provided at $2,500 to go forward with this which should be our inventory should be completed by April or May. And then once you purchase one EV, which we already do every year, you can get that $2,500 back. So this is basically no cost for us as a city to get a very detailed inventory and plan forward.

And then central purchasing can the fleet manager can bring that before council as this is what we need to do every year to get to net zero emissions in our fleet and this is what it will cost us. So it'll be very clear for council to consider. And one other item that's not on here because I've been working with ICMA on this this week. ICMA through the U. S.

Department of State sponsors about 50 or 60 professionals from the Southeast Asia between the ages of 25 to 35 for on projects that they're interested in their countries and to go forward within their countries once they learn some things from us. So they approached me about a Malaysian man who is a fellow with it's called the Young Southeast Asian Leadership Initiative, YUSILI, and that he has a business he started around marine plastics, debris and plastics, and is interested in doing something around that. Said well we're perfect you know. I had plastic boot wrap on my radar for a couple of years. I spoke with Annapolis Green about a potential project.

DNR is very focused on marine plastic marine debris. And then the person of my CMA mentioned Surfrider to me, which I am I have a close working relationship and personal relationship with Surfrider. So I said, well, I could do something interesting that involves resilience and sustainability. Our Department of Public Works, which is our recycling department, DNR, and Surfrider as an experience. And perhaps this person who was already in this business could come up with a action plan for us, a business plan around how we can encourage or require recycling of boat wrap in particular.

So that person would, I'm working on you know jumping through the hoops with the State Department right now getting everything signed but they would join us on March 6 and be with us for six weeks. And this may be one of the programs that the State Department is going to offer for this group. Their funding has been, it was paused. They did not have a program last year and then it's been you know they've been told it may not continue after 2026. So we're looking forward. His name is Zee. That's his nickname ZHI. I don't have his last name with me right now but I'll be introducing him probably to you soon. So any questions on any of these initiatives?

Alderman do you have any? So not necessarily on those, but some of the other stuff. Mhmm. So one, city doc. I did mention to, miss Jackson mentioned to public works director, I'd like to get an update to this committee from, I think it's mostly director Vogel, but just to get an update on the seawall, the barrier the flood barrier, I know that it may have well, it's it's changed from what I originally thought it was gonna be as far as the self deployable.

Now it's deployable. And I just wanna get an idea of what the technology is. If is it finalized? What's the cost difference? Why we made the shift? But I'm also concerned about the labor. Where are we gonna store these pieces of barrier? I know they only have to be his director is saying they may only need to be installed once every five, ten years.

Before a major storm.

I'm just

wondering if some of that modeling's been done. But if even so, we still have have a place to install it. We have to make sure staff is trained and able to do it. Are they gonna practice? How long does it take

to

install? I mean, when I looked at the details he sent, it looked like it requires some manual besides manual install, man, you have to actually have to drill these bolts in every time. So, anyway, those kind of things, I'm a little concerned about it because it just opens up to more human error.

Okay. So would you like director Vogel at the March meeting?

Yeah.

You've already asked for the stormwater engineers to come back to finish their presentation.

Yeah. Mean, I guess I mean, or April will be fine too, but the thing is that the project the project's actually active. And Mhmm. I don't wanna miss an opportunity to Not that it's necessarily needed, I don't know. But if we ever do need a course correction, I wanna make sure we have time to

do that. I'll check with director Vogel

for I just don't know enough yet to determine if it needs a course correction or not. Just Okay. It's new information to me.

Okay. I'll check with them for March and April.

Thank you. And then greenhouse gas. We talked about this, but just for the Canadian public's sake, I guess, would you wanna plan on maybe April presenting on that?

So the greenhouse gas inventory for the city facilities and the community has already been updated. I need to review it for before it can be published. Okay. So we're taking that information and it rolls into the climate action plan which the tasks, targets for the climate action plan and the recommended actions have been drafted and I need to look at them before they can move forward again. With it, there will be a draft plan out hopefully by the February that we can publish and get feedback on.

The plan is to have the CAP rollout in April. That was our target was earth month. So we may want to do a presentation on that March.

Yeah, I guess so. Yeah. Thank you. And for the EV discussion, think I think maybe you and I could just meet offline to chat about that for the sake of time.

Okay.

I still need to review the materials that we've the city has. But I just need to figure out if we wanna propose code changes for our now goal and then figure out if there's anything we need to do with this upcoming budget. And then another topic, AMRI. Could we get the tie I noticed in here you said there's like a they did come up with a top 10 list.

Mhmm.

I don't know if we need a meeting on this yet, but could you have them send us the the if they have a map or something

Okay.

Showing the top 10. And then it's top 10 list of potential flood mitigation projects.

Right?

In Eastport, I think. Well that general Eastport works out.

It's it's for the Eastport Peninsula. So it goes beyond just what we consider Eastport. That's a whole peninsula.

Lastly, to give you a heads up, I'm working with Cynthia here on legislation, waste reduction legislation that came from part of it came from surf riders.

Okay.

And it's to do three things. One would be one would be what they wanted is to eliminate the the plastic utensils and things that are automatically included in takeout. I'm free I forget what they're calling that off the top of my head. Some other jurisdictions have, you know, adopted bans on that kind of thing. Second thing would be, which I wanna do is get some kind of incentive not incentive.

Some kind of prohibition in place on restaurants so they can't use disposable kitchenware for sit down meals and just try to get them, maybe have it phased in over a couple years so they can get to, you know, I know they probably have to install dishwashing equipment, but and then the third thing is enhancing our commercial recycling program. I need to do some background research on that because I know we used to have a program for Main Street where businesses could sign on. I don't know what happened to that, if we still have it or not. And I know it's an added cost for businesses to have recycling, but it just I don't know. I just, things I'm thinking about for legislation.

Okay. Alright. You noted all of those?

I'll certainly give you a draft once I. Okay. I think Cynthia sent me one but I haven't had a chance to look at it.

I'll say, Alderman Conti, so you know, I have a long report I put in there what's going on throughout the city. Some of these projects, a lot of, most of the projects are ones that are spearheaded or led by resilience and sustainability staff. But some we participate in, especially we participate quite a bit with public works and planning and zoning. With transportation as well now. In recreation and parks, kind of everywhere, in Harbor Master. But some that we lead and we initiate. Some we participate in. Some stay abreast of and support as needed. Ashley Diaz has jumped in with events and outreach to help support public works. Especially now we're missing an engineer in public works that was responsible for our recycling program.

So hopefully someone will be hired soon. Keep that in mind when you put in your legislation. Don't have anyone. Tracy Brown is assigned to it right now, but that is not her primary focus. So anytime you have questions on any of these topics or you want to discuss something of concern to you, just reach out to me or one of my staff.

Alright, is there anything else before we wrap up?

No. All

right, anything else in the order? No. All

right,

is there a motion to adjourn? Yes. All right, I'll second that. All those in favor of adjourning, please say

aye. Aye.

Aye, motion carries. Meeting's adjourned. Thank you.