Environmental Review Committee - Regular Meeting

Commissioner Hansen?

Commissioner Pagliar? Yes. Commissioner Yeh? Here. Vice Chair Carter?

Here.

Chair Pfum?

Present.

For the record, Commissioner Hansen is absent. And before we proceed, Chair, Commissioners, and members of the public, Vice Chair Carter is participating remotely this evening. We have not heard from any members of the public that they plan to participate in tonight's meeting from Vice Chair Carter's remote location. Vice Chair Carter, are you at 21411 Bay Avenue, Cupertino, California, 95014?

Yes.

Can you confirm that you posted the agenda at your location?

Yes.

Are there any individuals over the age of 18 with you who have indicated that they wish to make public comment or address the commission?

No.

or rely on you to notify me if any member of the public wishes to speak from your location. Thank you.

I have heard of nothing.

All right. Thank you so much. Let's go ahead with the approval. The approval of minutes. We've got two minutes on the agenda, which is April 16th and May 21st. Do we have to do this in one or two actions? It elections of a sir is that ocean and a second to approve the sustainability commission minutes from April 16th.

I make a motion to approve. I said the second.

Also shall we proceed with the roll call.

They're dancing is absent commissioner Pat go-kart yes, I sure Carter. Vice Chair Carter, was that a nay?

That's a, I'm sorry, that was with a Y, that's a yes.

Oh, okay, that was a yes. Chair Fung?

Aye.

The motion carries unanimously with Commissioner Henson absent.

All right, thank you so much. Let's proceed with the May 21st Commission Minutes. Is there a motion and a second?

I can motion approve the minutes. A second?

All right.

Sure, yes, it is absent commissioner Pat Gompard. Yes, sure. Yeah, by share harder. Yes, they're fun. Yes, motion carries insurance and absent.

I thank you so much. And let's move on to the next item on the agenda, seeing that there are no postponements. We can move on to the oral communications. Are there any oral communications for today?

We have no speakers chair.

All right, seeing that there are no members of the public here, we can move on to staff and commission reports.

Great. I just have a few calendar updates for you. Our next compost educate workshop is planned for August 1st. The environmental waste and paper shredding day is August 29th. The creek cleanup will be September 19th. The annual garage sale will be September 19th and 20th. And then the annual bike fest will be September 24th. Let me know if you need specific times or dates for those. Additionally, our Waste Warriors application is open as of Monday. That is the title for the commissioner project. And then my last update is that we got approved budget for a new sustainability part-time intern. So this intern will be working on the new state law about not watering grass. So AB 1572. Were you the hiring manager? I will be, yes.

So they're going to report directly to you. Yeah.

All right. Thank you so much. Are there any other questions?

Commission updates? No commission updates. I just have a comment. Can I do it now or later?

Later. Did you learn anything at the meeting last night?

Yeah. So that was my first commission chair meeting with the mayor. It was last night. So we selected the Crest Awards winners. So that was quite fun. There were a lot of applications. I'm not going to reveal the winners here since it's a public meeting, but a lot of the applications were basically voided. They didn't count because a lot of the applicants didn't follow instructions. I kind of feel bad as more than half of them were removed. There will not be business of the year because, again, just, yeah, people now follow constructions. But instead, there will be two winners for the Rising Star Award. And then there's a lot of concerns, I think, and suggestions from other chairs about how the criteria of the CREST awards needed to be changed. So what the next mayor's commission chair meeting, that's what we'll talk about in September. But yeah, it was productive. Thanks for asking. Are there any other commission reports? All right. If I share, Carter, do you have anything?

No.

All right. Sounds good. Then let's move on to our next item, old business, and there are no old business. So under new business, we've got agenda item three, strategies for identifying and engaging local stakeholders to advance plan goals.

Yes, I didn't prepare a PowerPoint for this one because I didn't want to sway your conversation. However, I am here to participate in the conversation. You can ask me questions about what we're currently doing, but I know that you all are going to give us some new strategies, what we maybe haven't considered yet. So with that, we can go to questions or public comment if there's any questions.

I do, and I'll just start with reading the recommended action of this item, which is for the Commission to identify opportunities to engage with local contractors, realtors, HOAs, and labor organizations, and provide other recommendations to staff. So I'll open it up for the Commission.

So is there a particular area we are looking at?

No, this item was proposed by you all for how we might network better with those groups.

I want to narrow it down. So kind of blanking here. This is regarding sustainability. So we want to narrow it down to certain things like material recycling, creating sustainable material, what kind of things.

I think that's all for you to decide the way that the item was written. It just said to promote climate action. So that could be greenhouse gases or building energy is, I believe what we talked about when we wrote this out, but we didn't want to limit it to just building energy at the time. We can talk about water and how we're going to do our turf education to stop watering. That's commercial in HOA. We could talk about compliance with energy benchmarking and reporting building usage for energy. We could talk about waste and how we're complying with AB 1383, SB 1383. and what we're doing to educate different sectors there. So that's why I didn't want to sway you. Like there's conversations about green biz or transportation.

Sorry to interject there. Maybe it would be helpful for you to share maybe like a quick one minute overview of the different types of outreach programs that you have. I know we are out there moving. And then there's the new climate conference coming up, and sometimes the commissioners can also share. But from staff's perspective, if you have a strategy or an outline of what you're really doing, then that would be very helpful.

Our standard protocol, we have different levels of engagement, right? So if we are promoting a survey, it might be, an online promotion, doing tabling that you've all helped us with. Most of our workshops that are available, it's mostly just social media. For garage sale, we'll do some additional print ad newspaper marketing. For waste in 1383, you actually have to visit all of our commercial businesses in person annually. So those are like the main strategies we have right now is like digital print flyers, newspapers, social media, this is digital, and then some door to door.

And did you mention that you also have a dashboard that will communicate the city's climate progress right at work?

We do have several different types. So our climate nav hub is like our one central place of like what communities can do to take action and then what is the city doing. And then we just have so much content on our websites that we very frequently just point back to certain web pages.

Yeah. Do we have, when somebody is applying to build something, do we have a way to get the builder some new information about what is available for this stuff? Because if I was a builder, I would be tired and I would do the least I could in order to move forward. And I'm so I'm not reading up. I'm not up to date. They don't I don't know that it may be doing green stuff is more economical. I don't know. I'm just wondering when. So I think Cupertino's. opportunity and this might be just you know way too much work for Cupertino but Cupertino's opportunity is they have to if someone has to apply to get a permit and that's our um that's our hook and I was wondering is is that would be a conduit to maybe getting more um sustainable building

Yeah, we do have a trifold handout at the building counter for specifically education around heat pumps because they're supposed to get a permit for heat pumps so that you can consider your options and then other resources and rebates available around heat pumps. Heat pumps, so the water heating and space heating to go from gas to electric. So that is like a very streamlined permitting process that just gives you some more education and options specifically for rebates and why you should switch. And so we keep that pretty consistent. A few years ago when we had our Climate Victory Gardens program, we actually did a big effort to remove permit barriers for landscape conversion if you're going from grass to water drought-restrictive landscaping because we didn't want people to have to go through an additional permitting process just to re-landscape and doing the right thing. So it depends on what exactly you're talking about, but most of our building permit counters and permit processes just have to comply with our municipal code. So there's not a whole lot of choice.

No, I'm not talking about forcing people to do anything. It's just more like if I'm putting up, you know, if I'm building a new, if I'm framing out a house and everything, there might be Egyptian gypsum greener, what do you call it, drywall options or whatever. I mean, just as things change constantly and maybe just that they just get an informational, not something that says, no, you can't do this or you have to do it this way. It's just like saying, here are the options that we, you know, we think are pretty cool if you want to do it or flop. Better wording, of course, than that, but.

Is that extending from what he's saying, right? So we built our house and at every point we had to have an inspection, right? So is there a way we can enforce, if you don't want to say enforce, but sustainability inspection, like whatever they could do, have they done it or not? Normally people do. Like we have LEDs in our house because we want electricity bills. Lower whatever, but there are other things we never thought about.

Yeah, our climate action plan is actually sequel qualified, which means that when people submit for building a larger project, residential and commercial, they have to fill out our sequence, streamline checklist. And that tells us how sustainable they're being. It is not, you hear about CEQA exempt all the time. And like most residential projects are CEQA exempt. So they don't have to comply. It's more of an informational gathering exercise for us right now because they don't need to fill it out. So we can't require them to do a lot of the things.

Do you have statistics of how many people are doing it and how many not? We're doing what? Sorry. How many people are filling this and how many people are not?

They have to fill it. They have to fill it out. Whether or not they're doing it will be different. We can't enforce them to do it. So there's no code enforcement piece to that. We just have an informational database. And that is through the building permit system.

Okay, that's closer to what I was asking about. I mean, I think sometimes people... aren't aware that there are options there that are actually going to do well.

And that checklist covers everything. It was built from our climate action plan. So it goes into foodware. It goes into bike racks and how many bike racks they have. It goes into what appliances they're installing. It's very detailed.

What is the name of it?

A CEQA? C-E-Q-A? CEQA. a streamlined checklist. When did this start? With the adoption of our Climate Action Plan, it had to be 22. Yeah, it had to be approved by the state that we qualify and meet these targets and can ask these questions.

I have a question, but let me know if it's off topic. If it is, then we can go past it. I have a quick question about SEO, so search engine optimization. I'm wondering, you mentioned newspapers, digital, social media, all that stuff. Which one has been the most effective based off what you've seen?

That's such a great question and something that I think about as I Google or on web pages. that they don't come up very high in our ranking. And I have worked with IT, not for a while now, but our website views are pretty low. Slow. Waste. Everyone loves waste. And those are our pages that are visited the most by far.

It's when someone types it up versus when they click a link that redirects them to that page. I've been seeing a lot of optimization analytics and I'm wondering what works for City of Cupertino and then how do we maximize what people are going to? Is it QR codes? Is it these booths? What are we missing? And then how do we target that and exemplify so the thing is that this is not a required thing right like oh no sustainability nothing it's not like they're high on people's minds yeah they don't wake up and be like how can i be more sustainable but when when they get that rabbit hole they're like oh i want to learn more wait i didn't know about that oh now i can see this thing so i'm wondering like what is their mind map and how do we kind of navigate that for them guide them through

friendly reminder we're in question period downstairs what works for your team well my question is um do you have the staff have any specific engagements with the business community now um besides waste audits and foodware coordinates

Yeah, we do a lot of restaurant audits to comply with, make sure they're compliant with foodware and a lot of business audits for educating around waste sorting. But that's because it's been state law. We had green biz. Are you familiar? Green business has been defunded at the county level as of last year. So before COVID, Cupertino would expand the county's program by offering like a white glove service where we would come in and actually sit with them while they filled out the application and gave them gift cards to go to Staples to buy the recycled paper and to help them find what printer worked. And we spent many hours as staff sitting down and working with the businesses, but they had to go through the inspection process at the county, which no longer is an option.

Okay. Is this related to the funding that was also dismissed last year? No, I'm wrong. There was a grant where we applied for, and it was looking good, and then it just got dropped. I think it's different.

I was thinking the same thing. Can we have a grant for that somewhere?

Well, the audits would have to come from the county. So unless the county applied for a grant and received that, then the city wouldn't be able to administer that.

Can we just fund the city level or no?

I mean, we could help them implement the actions. They just want to get the recognition for it.

Can we do the citywide recognition? Do we have to do countywide? I know that we don't want to spend a lot of money countywide. There is something that's smaller on smaller scale.

Yeah. One of the big perks of the green biz is that it was like a national level program. state or national. I think they had it nationally, but it was really recognized in California. And so they, as their business would get certified, they would be on a huge map of all of the other green businesses.

And they had that sticker, or not sticker, they had, I remember they had it outside their restaurant.

So why did they drop that?

The county's in a huge budget deficit. I think they're in a billion dollar deficit this year.

I don't understand this in California, but anyway.

Yeah, that's what I've heard. Where did it go wrong? Well, it's all of the federal. Federal line. Yeah.

Hmm. Anyway.

Any other questions before we move on to discussion?

So I also wanted to talk about the, this is again business related, but a lot of businesses have their lights on at night. So that is another thing I always watch and I always see why they have their lights on, right? So either they can do the automated thing where, you know, when people enter, it turns on.

Motion sensor.

Motion sensor. But otherwise, why they have it on, right? Unless and until you have solar and it's operating on solar.

My understanding is that I think there's some requirements that offices have to keep some lights on.

Yeah, I think it's like a mix of fire.

But everybody has all lights on. Like, have you seen? You should see.

Yeah, I walk through Main Street, you know, and when I pass by, like, the photo shops, I see offices. I mean, yeah. It's...

So that is another thing I think about. So the gas thing, is it dead or is it going to come again back? The natural gas for restaurants...

The ban on natural gas for new infrastructure. Is that what you're talking about?

For the businesses.

Yeah.

For the businesses, they went back because of mud cleaning.

Yeah. Yeah. Anyone can install gas lines. We do have a reach code for energy efficiency score, but that's slightly different. They can meet that score through a number of different ways, including electric appliances, but it doesn't restrict if they install gas lines at all.

Do we have statistics on this also? How many businesses are compliant? Can we show that somewhere saying that? Because for climate action also, we might need that information.

we have statistics if there's development recent development right but we're not going door to door to see if what type of water heater people have but it's not but then we are saying that the only new for only new businesses we are seeing whether they have they are meeting that energy efficiency yeah not for the old viewers correct existing buildings no okay Sometimes should we start the existing buildings? So that's a huge, huge project right now. So the state has passed AB 802, which is energy benchmarking. That's what we had the presentation on a while ago. So buildings over 50,000 square feet have to report how efficient their buildings are. And this is all existing buildings. And they... last week just released a plan on improving the performance of those buildings. So now they have a baseline for how efficient they are. And they're saying, you need to create a standard that it has to be 10% more efficient in the five years and then 50% more efficient in 10 years after that. So they're creating, they don't have those thresholds yet. That was just an example. Um, but that's the state strategy right now and the main strategy people are pushing for existing buildings. Oh, so does that answer your question? Yes. Okay.

So in the next few months or next year, our strategy, we are looking for strategies. So the one I'm asking her, she's a Gen Z or whatever. Oh, yeah. But I, like, if we can have a program on Instagram, right? Like, people sometimes how it goes viral. Yeah. Yeah. Like, this new generation people.

Who is in charge of our Instagram, by the way? Sorry, let's just all talk. Our city manager's office. We can't have our own social media pages for just environmental.

Okay. Okay. So there is not much we can do with it.

For social media? We have to ask and get a label for everything.

Yeah, like we can show them a draft and then if they approve it, we'll have a page type of deal. Okay. How long would that take? Can we try?

Yes, it depends.

Okay. Okay. Just entertaining that. Yeah.

Meaning if we want to do outreach, that's the best, right? Social media. Social media right now. Like you have a contest of some kind where people do, how sustainable is my house, right? Some small thing, not like, say, count how many LEDs you have in your house. So they do all these kinds of things. I am not into that a lot, but kids used to do all these kinds of challenges, right? So some kind of challenges if we do, people can, I'm not sure. I can write that down.

I also don't know if how, please advise if businesses are more engaged with challenges like that. Because to me, that's more of a residential or youth

Meaning that will give them publicity. Yeah. Right. So it's a publicity aspect, right? For example. It could be a mix of both.

We could do like a treasure, I don't know, I'm just like thinking out loud, like a treasure hunt, you know, hit up these three businesses, ask about these questions, right? Kind of like a bingo, treasure map bingo. Like so many legal things.

So many legal things there. Yeah, but I agree that, like, on Earth Day, you can do a treasure hunt, saying that find the three businesses which are using the most sustainable stuff.

I remember last year, there was, like, a Halloween thing, and, like, they would have to go door-to-door to each store, and then... I mean, I know it's not as... It's not really a contest, but, like, they would ask about, and if they answered the question right or spun a wheel, they would get candy. Oh, yeah.

It's like that ice bucket challenge, right? People used to do that and post it on the internet. On the ALS. Yes. So something similar to that is Jack.

Yeah, his hand is up.

Jack, go ahead. No, his hand is up.

Jack, do you want to share your comments?

Yes.

Sorry. If you have a comment, we've got to go to public comment first.

I you were asking for you were asking for things about what business would would way to encourage businesses. Is that correct?

Yes, but we're still on the question period. So if you have a question like what we're doing right now.

OK, so I do not have a question. So I'm going to lower my hand right now.

then it is okay with the commissioners if we're done with questions, then let's move on to the discussion.

Public comment.

Are there any public comments received for this item?

We have no speakers shared.

Thank you so much. All right, let's move on to discussion then.

Great. Go ahead, Denny.

Okay, so when I, as a budding... hobby business person, I start looking at stuff like restaurants and other businesses when I approach their buildings and what's inside. And one of the things you see on a lot of buildings are little stickers saying, you know, top, you know, best of this or I am, I don't know what they, I can't even remember right now. But the thing is, if we have a a sticker sort of thing that would say, I'm a green Cupertino green business. And that'd be, you know, make something that would be, you know, advantageous. But also, another thing is, as a software engineer, sometimes we would spend inordinate amount of time solving these problems that I thought would need to be solved, which were really not the main, they're just nits. So sometimes you need to look at the whole, all the range of things that we want them to change and say, what are the more important things and, and not harp on, not bury people with a million different things. That was, so that's my suggestion is to narrow down the big requirements and we, and when the big requirements get nailed, then we could open up to more of the little, the, um, tertiary arguments, requirements or whatever. I don't know if any of that made sense, but, um,

It does. So this year we can ask them to shut down lights every day when they go out, right? Have the bare minimum lights possible. And then we also have the, what is the plastic thingy, right? We have where they have to use, not use the plastic. The foodware ordinance? Yeah. So that one we can see, people can go and see this business compliance. And I know that we can report it. So that is another thing we can do.

But Sonali, one of the issues about the lights is, I would be asking, if they're using super efficient lighting, is it really using up that much energy versus the security they have of having their place lit up so i and i don't know the quick answer to that maybe

So Jack, are you saying, so transportation is by far our greatest greenhouse gas emissions. Are you trying to say that we should focus on promoting EV chargers at businesses or rebates for EV chargers at businesses where we're trying to hit the biggest, make the biggest impact?

Well, probably so. I mean, basically, if we're trying to get our numbers down, If we focus on these, I mean, yes, there's going to be some low-lying fruit that's really small, and we can nail it. But generally, if we're trying to get our numbers down, we need to hit the big hitters. But we also have to look at the big hitters and say, is it even feasible for us? Are we going to hit the, you know, are we going to, will Sacramento destroy, you know, prevent us from doing it or whatever? but I think you go for the big bucks and then you get your percentages down and then we could say, okay, we dropped this thing, our usage by 10% and maybe we just hit one element.

Jack, I'm curious. Let's say you had two minutes to talk to those big bucks or the top whatever businesses that are using the most energy In those two minutes, how would you make your statement? What would you say to them? Like, you have your soapbox, you have two minutes, and they will absorb what you say. What would you give them? What would you say to kind of empower them?

Well, first of all, yeah, first of all, I want them to save money. So I'll be talking about money, how much, and I would be talking about all the benefits that are benefiting them. I've gone from being a tree hugger as a teenager in early 20 to realizing you can't talk about saving the world. You have to talk about saving their business. And if getting transportation for their employees and getting those EV things in the parking lot to attract their employees, I would sell it like that. You're going to get better employees. You're going to get healthier employees because we're not having as much... stuff in the air, and we're going to save money because we're going to do this efficiently. Does that make sense, Connie?

Yeah. I mean, you have more sales experience than me, so for me, I go to the experts.

Well, be aware being older doesn't necessarily mean having good experience. Okay.

So when we say transportation, are we measuring the vehicles going through Cupertino? Yes. And we are saying the gas emission. So we are saying if it is about the vehicles going through Cupertino, how can we control? Right in Cupertino, we have, like we said, we are second in Bay Area to have most EV cars. First is Fremont. So then... So we are doing our part, but what vehicles are passing through Cupertino? How are we going to control what kind of emission they will get?

Yeah. So a lot of that was addressed in the transportation plan that was just adopted. And that did a very thorough analysis of how traffic was flowing, how long cars were idling at different lights, how to reduce accidents, how many lanes in order to reduce emissions, and then, of course, improving bike safety. So I think improving bike safety was a big focus for that, which is why we've done a lot of our class four bike lanes, which will significantly cut emissions.

So here is the thing. See, the biggest offices in Cupertino is Apple. So mostly people are coming to Apple are coming from outside. So they are not going to ride a bike unless they are living in Cupertino or somewhere else. I am not sure how this is going to help.

I wrote a bite to the other side of 101 multiple times a week. Not every day of the week, but multiple times a week for several different companies. But the biggest issue is it's just dangerous and we're making it better, but it's hard for people who are not fanatic and I'm sort of a fanatic but I'm just saying but people do want to if you give people good riding routes and safety then they will more people will ride

There is another issue to it, which I had faced. Because even for doing carpooling, when I had kids, I had kids, but they were younger. And they had a lot of activity. I had to pick them up from school. I cannot even go carpool because then I had to have my own schedule. So I had to ride my own car. So it was very hard for even doing carpooling at that point. Now it's fine because now they are grown up and they, but now everybody has their own car. So that is another issue. So anyway, but how do you measure that then? How do you measure in Cooperate Eco-Type? Did they actually wait and did a survey on each light?

Yeah, you can see traffic flows. A lot of times they use cell phone data so they can see how many people are pinging to the closest towers. Okay.

Well, I have a lot of thoughts. You have to forgive me. I'm trying not to think as a WC manager. I'm trying to think as a commissioner here. There's a lot of good ideas, and I want to answer staff's question about large businesses versus small businesses. I think Connie's question for Jack was a smart one about, like, oh, how would you pitch this to businesses? You've got the small, medium-sized businesses. You also have the large businesses. The large businesses care a lot more about the PR, making themselves look like a community partner in the community. The best way to engage them is probably through the Covigno Chamber. through their board. The board is made up of really kind of like board members are mostly the big names. If you want to engage the small and medium-sized businesses, I'm a small business owner myself, and unfortunately, it's very hard to engage these populations. There's a million things to do. There's a lot of regulations, and there's very little staff. The best way, I would say, to be respectful of staff's time is probably partnering with the economic development team. I also know that they have a very, very small team over in economic development. But having said that, aside from the team and having Jack as our rep on the Economic Development Committee, there's probably some connections that staff and partnered with Jack to leverage to pass some of the resources. The idea or the challenge of partnering with the PIO and obtaining approval to post on the city's social media, I completely understand it. But I think, you know, a challenge or some fun campaign idea would be great to start off. or even a small video or reel series talking about how the Waze Warrior program is doing.

I agree. If they are going to take time to approve it, then the Waze Warrior program will be done and then they will approve the reel.

Yeah, it may take some time, but then it's nice. People love seeing these 20, 25 seconds reels talking about people's stories, what the warriors are learning and doing. But My final point here is how do you really get the businesses to care aside from money? The other part is the relationships. In the business world, it's all about leveraging relationships and having those relationships. So the best way actually is to do presentations. Make yourself a partner in partnership with the economic development team. And over time, as you get to know these people, these big players of Apple or other big companies, they will actually slowly care. and want to look good. So it was like, thank you.

Also the big companies are, they do move, but they don't around, but they really don't like to move around. Whereas a small business, if it's successful, has to move. So I'm not, if I'm a small businessman, I will loathe to invest in infrastructure because I know I'm gonna just be leaving it behind in a few years. So I guess my elevator speech to the small business person would definitely be different for the large employer. It's complicated. You have to do your homework on who you're talking to.

But the economic development team and your connections at the economic development committee should give you a good sense of who you should be talking to, who you can talk to.

That's correct. And they've also sent us out to the businesses when we're giving them the amnesty program. And so I had to go to a number of businesses to tell them they were, you know, we have this amnesty program and that they noticed that they hadn't been paying or everything. And it was a good opportunity for me to chat people up because, I mean, usually I don't talk very much. You guys know that. But anyway. Awesome.

Wait, what? Tell me more.

Yeah. Anyway, that is how it's done, is you going out and making contact and talking folks.

I think, Jack, you mentioned that you're going out to speak with businesses. Like, that is so rare. Like, rarely any cities in California will actually take the time to visit every business. So I think the relationships that you're building, that is such a bonus.

Well, hopefully this was not just a one-time deal. We'll see how things go.

Otherwise, I know it's hard for the staff to go, right? You can send a Google form. You can create like a form and see what, like, and they just tell them, pester them that they have to fill it, whatever information you need. And if you think that, okay, these people are not, then you can kind of filter them and see who are not very good or who are, and then just visit those people to get an idea. So...

I think to Connie's point about the SEO, I feel like that's at least worth a discussion with the PIO's office to see if there's anything that we could do to get our pages to pop up more. I think that's a fair estimate.

Yeah, I agree. They definitely spike up when we do booths. Any time we do booths? Yeah, absolutely. But then it's not maintained. So how do we keep their engagement up? How do we make them come back? Updates aren't enough.

See, people normally, if you ask, not very interested in updates. We said you can enroll and we can send email. We are not going to send now, right? Whatever happens.

The newsletter, the green newsletter. We don't have any more planned. Yeah.

So we are not going to send that. Otherwise, that is a way to kind of keeping it up, right, with the people. Because unless and until there is some project going on, people are not very interested. Yeah.

How involved are we with, like, Second Harvest, food banks, and food drives?

We definitely have relationships with Second Harvest and West Valley Community Services.

Have you done anything with them or –

Pre-COVID, we did partner with them to track food recovery. Now that's all done kind of at the county level for 1383. And it's required by the state to do that food collection. So that's all tracked and reported in the Cal Recycle Annual Report.

Because, correct me if I'm wrong, a lot of the Second Harvest, the work they do around this area, a lot of them have to be residents of Santa Clara County or, you know, to pick up those items. Is that right? Probably. I don't know. Okay.

Yeah. I have a question for the group. So I love the distinguish between large and small businesses. We also listed, I believe it was HOAs and contractors. And if you have any thoughts specifically, HOAs is going to be a big one for us with the new water regulations to ask them to stop watering their grass. It's like telling them to stop drinking. And if we have specific methods of engaging with HOAs.

It can be an invitational thing, right? We have so much material right now. We have prepared so much material. You can sort through it and just whatever is needed for their purpose. You can do one invitational stuff. Whichever has... I don't know how many places we have HOA thinking. What percentage of HOA makes up

I don't know. I don't know how many HOAs we have. Yeah. If you have contacts at HOAs, I would love it.

So the PIO's office has not had one. Interesting.

Yeah. So I'm like wondering how much we're targeting. So that one we, okay, I don't want to digress. We were planning, asking that when we were doing the regnet thingy. Because we wanted to see how many kids are coming from single family homes versus coming from rental places. Right.

So these are the con factors, right? Anyone you think that's of special importance for engagement, but those were the ones identified on the agenda item.

So this, I think, is beyond a sustainability thing. This is a public safety concern that a city does not have these HOA contacts.

They might. They might. But when I've asked, they haven't been able to provide that.

Got it. Because I feel like that may be a city manager's office endeavor to provide that with their council.

So I'll follow up. Can we ask the mayor and can we ask the mayor to ask city manager?

I could probably message someone right now. Yeah.

I think the staff can, because I'm just, that's an emergency management problem.

That is also, and you know how many single family homes in Cupertino are rented? Many of them. So even we don't have that data on how many are rented except, other than the actual owner living there.

Probably what right now, actually. There's a database that you can look through this stuff. But Yeah, I feel like this is a city manager's office discussion to have those HOAs.

I think for that topic, I think we can start from knowing which buildings are HOA buildings.

We do have the boundary lines of where the HOAs are, but I don't know that we have good contacts for them.

So the offices of HOA should be the contact, right? I mean, that should be, if you ask AGPT, probably they will, the list.

Do you think that block leaders would be involved in their HOAs a lot?

Some of them, I can ask, but I mean, we can ask there today, but like most of them are like, my house is on a lane, like the houses. So it's between two streets. Okay. So all of them are single family.

But you can still have a single-family HOA.

Only like Seven Springs has. So Seven Springs has a very small HOA. I think it was like $50-ish, not more than that. Otherwise, actually, if you have probably the one next to the Memorial Park, the new one might have more. But like 50 ish.

Yeah. Seven Springs. I just, yeah. Is that in Cupertino? Because everybody there has a lawn. If you, if most of the rest of the areas I go through are, they're all going away from lawns, but Southern Springs is, is pretty lush.

It's not every in residential homes. Don't need to remove it. It's the HOA common areas. Yeah. Yeah. All right.

So now, can I make a comment now? I have to make a comment. Yeah. So I'm going to this pottery class in Cupertino. Pottery? Oh, okay. So much water wasting. I'm not sure if there is anything. For the pottery itself? No, when you wash everything. You have to wash, at least use one whole, two buckets of water. So she said that they have where they actually because there is lot of clay in it so they have where they do strain the clay but I am not sure how efficient it is and I don't know because this was built probably in 1950, 60, 70 sometime I don't know if it was that efficient or not.

I wonder if that could be considered like gray water afterwards. What depends on what the part is. I don't know what the material, the clay.

It is clay supposed to be okay. What kind of clay? There are multiple types of clay there.

But they are supposed to be. If it's clean enough, then they can, like you said, filter it on.

Correct.

So this is gray water.

I'm not sure. Because this is like an old facility. I'm not sure what they have done to upgrade it.

Like, if Potter uses that much water, can you imagine how much AI infrastructure in the business? That's where my head goes. It's like, oh, I'm sure you saw. Yeah. That's a lot of water.

Well, doesn't the San Jose Water Company basically handle that by raising the rates the more water they use?

Yeah, they have tiered usage rates.

Yeah. So, I mean, for... I know that when we do wonderful things like forget we left the sprinkler on for days, we get punished pretty harshly financially. Are we talking about those people in this town that don't care about the money?

But my water probably tripled in the last 10 years. That's what I think. Yeah. Actually, my electricity bill, every month it is 350 dollars. I don't even know what to do. I don't even know what I'm doing wrong because my house is efficient. Just built right now. Everything is efficient. except for like, we don't have solar, but we put everything in gas, and we are waiting for the gas equipment to break. Can I visit one day?

So do we know whether or not it's the residents that are using up a lot of water, or whether or not it's businesses? Because everything I know about water usage is residential, because that's the world I've lived in. But if you're talking about industrial, of course, I don't even know if Cupertino has industrial users that would use a lot of water.

Apple is a big campus. But they are pretty efficient. So I believe they are doing their part.

Apple's on the recycled water.

Yeah. You know, we don't have any data centers, and I'm not sure the restaurants are wasting that much water.

Yeah, restaurants have to use water to shelf their items.

Okay, I go to this hairstylist. They use so much water. Okay.

I feel like they have to.

And they use all this coloring that they do. They use all this material. I always feel not sustainable. Right?

Well, let me try to bring everybody back to the discussion here. There's some interesting stats I'll share with staff offline since it's on the laptop. But other final recommendations before we wrap up for staff. What does staff feel like we have?

I felt like this was a great brainstorm. Thank you for all of your input.

Any other final recommendations?

Nope. I'll have all my recommendations after it's too late.

All right. Thank you so much, everyone. We have one more item before we adjourn, which is the future agenda setting, upcoming draft agenda items. Staff will bring it up on the screen.

So our next meeting, we will have the Waste Warrior update, probably. I don't have it handy. I can't. So did you see the dates? Is there any date? Some may. Yeah, we can pick one.

Everybody pick one.

So we have the next October agenda is going to be pretty full. And then starting in January, we'll come up with a new 2027 work plan. So at that point, like if you want to start brainstorming now on what we want to talk about during the first meeting, or if there's other projects that you want to make sure get talked about in the next year.

So is there a way you can list what you're working on right now? Fine, as staff? What you are, I mean, all of you, yeah.

Like our entire team or just what I'm working on?

Just not the whole detail, just like topic ones.

I have given that to our new employees, so I do have an overview of what our entire department does.

Yes, that would be great.

Okay. Is there a second? You want to know?

I was expecting the best answer. Okay.

Yeah, you're gatekeeping, Tori. What's up?

Okay.

My face is like, oh, we do 500 things. Okay. Yeah. I got it. So you can share with us?

Yeah, we can. Everything we do is public. Okay. It's just a matter of how to compile it for you.

Right, right.

Gotcha. Cool.

Yeah, I would like to know, too.

Overview of environmental and sustainability programs, projects.

That works. Okay. For your team with a vision. Oh.

Um, had Gwankar moved and Phuong was second.

Second, third, fourth.

How many employees are under?

How many what? What's your team size? It depends on who you count. So in fact, waste is. One, Stormwater is three. Then we have an admin and then myself and Jasmine, who's under me working on the climate action side. And then we just got approved for another part-time intern. And then we have an AmeriCorps fellow and Ursula. So it's not very many of us. Eight, depending on how you count it.

Small team, big dream.

But what we look at actually bleeds across other commissions. So we as commissioners need to be sort of aware of what the other commissions are doing as well.

Are there any other recommendations or any other direction that staff needs to see from them? No? Okay. All right, then. Well, before we adjourn, I have one final announcement that I should have given at the Commission report. So a date is finalized for this year's Commissioner Dinner. It's Wednesday, October 28th at Quinlan, time TBD, but at least we have a date.

Awesome.

And with that, we can adjourn at 4.58 p.m.