Homeless Issues Committee - Regular Meeting

With that, I will call the executive committee to order. Lisa, please call the roll.

All right. Chabla?

Chabla here.

Fetcher?

Here.

Freeze?

Here.

Supervisor Postler?

Postler here.

Supervisor Welsh? Welsh here. Supervisor Yang, is she absent from the exec meeting?

I'm guessing so. She's going to be absent from the committee in the hall.

And Chair Miles?

Miles here.

We've got a quorum.

So with that, we shall proceed to consideration of minutes. We have before us the committee meeting minutes of June 4th. Is there a motion? Move approval. All right. Moved by Freeze. Any discussion, questions, corrections on meeting minutes? Hearing none, all in favor of approval, say aye. Aye. Aye. Both say no. The minutes are approved. We're on to referrals of resolutions and ordinance amendments. We only have one item before us tonight, and that being Resolution 54, County Executive Appointments. Is that a motion?

So moved approval.

Moved by Welsh. Any discussion, questions on the executive appointments? All right. So on the recommendation of approval, all in favor say aye. Aye. Opposed say no. Motion carries. So that takes us to our next meeting. Our next month, it's a one board meeting month, so July 16th. So that's when the next executive committee will be. We have registrants to speak.

Yeah, we have one registrant to speak on action.

Aye. So you're speaking on items not on the agenda. You have up to five minutes to address the committee. Welcome.

Okay, hey. Yes, I sent an email. I'm Steve Books. I live over by Monona Bay, kind of by pick and save. But I take walks a lot down around Monona Bay and see things down there. So yes, I'm bringing up this issue. It was in Tuesday's paper. about the lake weeds along the eastern edge of Lake Monona. And I don't know, that was a confusing article saying the North Shore. Nah, it's not really the North Shore. It's kind of east end of Lake Monona along the shore at right where, well, Buckeye Road comes out, between Buckeye Road and Cottage Grove Road, that area of the lake. south of Ulbricht Park and north of San Diego, is that what he said? Yeah, okay, right there. Okay, well, right there, there's a long time ago, there was a catch basin built. But since that time, I'm not sure if it's been maintained too much. And I think that it gets overrun. And anyway, the lakeweeds, I think, are a county problem. We've been dealing with them in Monona Bay this year. And I did talk with Lakes and Watershed Intercommittee last month a little bit and talked about this. I think it's really an issue that needs to be brought up and something needs to be done. And as far as that area, I think you would need an access down to the lake somehow. And I don't know if you can work with the city of Monona or whoever, I guess the San Damiago property, maybe get a lake access there somehow for a machine. And I'm bringing that up because... There's a built up sediment down there. And I think one way to get it out is to do what they did at Bernie's Beach this spring when the water was really low. For some reason, the water was really low this spring. And I'm talking the last week of March, the first week of April. the shoreline down at the beach was like 100 feet out. It was the first time I'd ever seen it that low. So we contacted the city of Madison, and they came down with some kind of tracked vehicle. It might have been a bobcat, but they scooped out about six inches of sediment, and hopefully that will help with the weed growth this year. But on top of that, we've been collecting the weeds and the city has i think the last two years provided a dumpster down there and so we're uh getting the weeds out of the lake and putting them into the dumpster once a week we have a group that goes down there but um it's an ongoing issue with the weeds and i know the harvesters are out today i was glad to see three harvest harvesters out out on monona bay So anyway, this picture that was in Tuesday's paper, that reminds me of if you've ever been out to Yellowstone National Park and seen those hot, hot pools. Well, that's kind of what it kind of looks like to me. But in a gross way. I mean, that's real nature out at Yellowstone. But that's really an issue in Yellowstone. I don't know, somehow I hope there's collaboration with City of Monona, City of Madison, and I've been working with John Weichelt. He's a volunteer coordinator with Madison Parks, and he's been really helpful with providing our group on Mondays to collect the weeds and get them out of there, which I think helps for the blue-green algae. And I think the earlier you get that stuff out of the lake, the better. And the storm sewers don't help either because they need to be two-stage.

Steve, you have 30 seconds.

How many?

30.

Okay, I know it goes fast. Okay, well, thanks. So I think, you know, budgetary issues, if possible... to long range plan to make the storm sewers better, that you can clean them out to prevent some of this stuff going in. And I know down in our area, Monona Bay, there are raccoons living in the storm sewers, and it rains, and then you have problems with E. coli due to the wildlife, and the raccoons don't help. So stuff like that goes on with nature. We're never gonna, I don't think we're ever gonna get rid of ducks and other natural resources of stuff you don't want in the lake, but that goes on and maybe we can ask the whole chunk even now to what they would do. Okay, thanks. Any questions?

Can we provide any feedback on that or can we only ask questions of the speaker?

And ask questions, I was going to actually for the. Community members give some background, but if you want to do some of that. Yeah, I was going to just get a former chair of universe. Yeah.

Yeah. So go ahead and think it. Am I allowed to do that now?

Well, first, let's see if we have any questions for Steve and then we can just. Provide information to committee members. It's not discussion or debate. Any questions for Steve? Thank you, Steve.

Okay, so I before joining finance, I've spent, I think my last four terms on inner. And so the county actually spends millions and millions investing and removing legacy phosphorus, there's the legacy sediment removal program where we're going through and scooping and disposing of phosphorus that's in a lot of the watersheds and the creeks, there's nutrient management plans that we work with farmers on. There's conservation practices like cover crops, putting, setting up fences so the cows aren't doing their business in the streams and the creeks. There's little roofs that we put over areas where cows are going to the bathroom. The one issue that we, and you know, we do other things like we buy land and the the the lake mendota watershed so we can try to prevent that phosphorus from from actually entering one of the big problems we've been having lately is we get these freezes in the in october and when the ground freezes and when there's winter spreading and manure happening you get all of that progress that you've taken. You just have like this frozen ground that has manure on it. And then you get all this rain that comes down and that basically can take away months, if not years of progress that you're having. And what we've seen lately, like this year was a, I'd say a perfect storm of things that were bad is we had heavy rain coming in and then we had still water and lots of sunshine. And when that happens, that's a big, recipe for all this happening now. In the last few years, we've had more drought conditions and we've had the drought conditions. We're not getting as many inputs coming into the watershed. And that gives you generally cleaner water. Like we saw that in the O'Hara River. We saw that around Lake Monona. And we've also, we have been getting our aquatic plant harvesters out, which you can go to the Land and Water website. You can see the location of where those are. But we had a lot of inclement weather over the last, a few weeks and so they haven't they weren't as able to get them out there as aggressively um so as the county's spending a lot of money on this this is also like a big problem we have because we have these two big inputs to the problem one is we are the second largest i think maybe we're the largest of the second largest county in terms of dairy in the entire state and we have a lot of cow manure and then we also have a lot of urban inputs to this as well as we don't have as many pervious services with all the development that's happening. We have leaves and urban inputs that are creating the problem as well. So I think this is probably something we're going to see over, it's going to be a 10 to 20 year problem. I do think there's has to, a lot of credit has to go into the ideas that have been happening and partnering with organizations like Clean Lakes Alliance and some of the other partners out there to do what we can. But I think, unfortunately, some years we're just going to have conditions like this. So I think we have to keep at it and we're going to have to be mindful of how climate change is going to affect our progress as well. So we have these different weather patterns in the spring and the fall that are undoing some of the progress we have. So we have to be more mindful of that. But the one good piece of news is through work, the work of the Land Conservation Committee, they give out tens of thousands of grants to farmers who are doing practices. And when we do things like some things, like when we're doing cover crops now, we pay a premium for those leases. And we've also been doing things like doing permanent easements. So you take a piece of farmland, you say, we're going to put a cover crop here. and then that's an easement. So no matter what happens in the lineage of that property, there's always going to be that on there. And that's also good for the farmers because they have this unproductive land near the water, and then it gets money to put cover crops there, and that will help hold back some of the sediment that's coming. So I think we have a lot of good ideas, but we also have a really big problem that comes with it. And unfortunately, it rears its head, and when it does, it does it in certain ways. areas like this. There are a couple of factual inaccuracies in the article that I think are worth correcting. So hopefully some of what I just said did that. But I also think if you go to inner meetings, they kind of get into this, they dive into it, and maybe Lakes and Watershed Commission probably does the same. So I think those quarterly meetings where you have inner lakes and watershed commission and the land conservation committee. Maybe they can put it on their agenda to give like a little bit more of a formal update of what's creating the conditions this year and how those might be affected by weather patterns or whatever we're doing downstream down the road.

So I would just add a couple things. One, yeah, I think the county's been making steady, slow but steady progress over the years. But it is cyclical and weather dependent. So like you mentioned, we've had a couple years of drought conditions, which means we're not getting the nutrient loading in the water that promotes the algae growth. But then with the water clarity, you get more weed growth. So that creates more demand to get the weed harvesters out there. But then when we have the more rainy times, that's when you get... both egg runoff and urban runoff that washes nutrients into the chain. So that's when you're going to see those algal blooms. Just a little bit about the role for the county, pointing to that article and to There's another constituent that has contacted Supervisor Mayeron, Chair of ENER as well on the same subject. And just to provide all of you some clarity about the role of the county in the way of lake management. Supervisor Chavala talked about some of our conservation and prevention efforts, you know, the cover crops, so forth, to help farmers during their rotations when they're taking stuff, doing a rotation or two out of crop, that there's something there to... keep the soil there when it rains so we're preventing sediment and nutrient loading into the lakes but additionally for the weed harvesters and so forth our role there is to keep the navigation channels open that's that's the primary function of the weed harvesters it's not we're not going around The shoreline and clearing weeds for individual property owners, that's their responsibility. Unfortunately, the weed harvesters cannot capture 100% of the weeds that are cut. There's about 80% of it. That means there's 20%. of that debris that's floating in the water, in addition to prop chop from boat traffic and so forth. And the wind, unfortunately, blows that into the shorelines. then it you know um there isn't a lot of especially around some of those bays and so forth there's not a lot of water movement and unfortunately it sort of rots and gets smelly and um but um you know there are some places in the city where the city has done some uh work helping shoreline property owners um but over the years and the county has not participated in that that our role is the navigation channels flow control to prevent flooding and high storm events and so forth so all right any questions about that any of that right so any other public comment All right, then. I'm ready for a motion to adjourn. Anyone? Moved by Welsh to adjourn. All in favor, say aye. Aye. Opposed? We are adjourned.