Environmental Services Division - Regular Meeting

Alright. We'll go ahead and call today's meeting to order. So the Environmental Sustainability Board meeting, and today is July 17 at 05:30. So let's do roll call. We can start with Sue.

Sue Barnes, present.

Shannon Blur, present.

Herman Gippard, Gleinreth, present.

Rebecca Haley Williams, present.

Joe, if you want to go next.

Joe Chandler, present and almost there.

And then Jill Dehaven is not here tonight. Alright. Do we have any public comment? Just a reminder that this section of the agenda is reserved for comments from the public on items that are not otherwise included in this agenda. There's no one in the room.

If you have any public comment, can you please raise your hand? There's no public comment at this time.

Great. Thank you, Anhulka. Alright. So next item on the agenda, item three, approval of today's agenda. Anyone wanna make a motion? Do we need to change anything? Think agenda's first. Agenda.

Yeah. I move that we approve the tonight's agenda as written.

Do I second?

I second.

Alright. Let's do verbal confirmation since Joe doesn't have his camera on. So, Sue, do wanna

Yay. Okay. Yay.

Yay. Yay.

Yay. Okay.

Alright. Next item on the agenda, item number four, approval of minutes from our 05/15/2025 meeting. Reminder, we did not meet last month, so jumping back to May. Do we have a motion to approve?

I move that the Environmental Sustainability Board approves the minutes of May 15 as presented.

I second. Okay.

I yay.

Yay.

Yay.

Yay.

Yay. K.

Thanks, everyone. Alright. So next item on the agenda, board business. And we're gonna start with a presentation called Planetary Health, an overview by Heidi Rogers. And I have maybe let's see. Hold on. Oh, thank you. Sorry. I can introduce you. I just didn't turn to the page quick enough.

Yeah. That's cool. Okay.

So Heidi Rogers, an associate professor and registered nurse at the University of New Mexico, will present an overview on planetary health. She previously served on the Los Alamos Resilience Energy and Sustainability Task Force, so LARES, as well as the Environmental Sustainability Board. Thank you, Heidi.

Yeah. Thank you for having me, and it's nice to see you and to see some of the community folks here tonight. I wasn't sure what to present on, so I brought you sort of the intro presentation on planetary health, what I've been spending my time thinking about. And I'll talk to you about that work and what the planetary health community is working on. And then I will be very happy to come back and address anything specific if you all are interested.

Next slide. So as we all know, humanity has we've gotten bigger on the planet. We've got 8,000,000,000 people. We've made amazing gains during this time. Our lifespan is longer.

Our health is better. Our public health infrastructure is better. Just since the 1800s, where you can see from just these slides, the one on the bottom, our life expectancy has dramatically increased from 30 to 70, from the 1800s to 2021. And you'll see in the top slide, our global child mortality has dropped dramatically. So there's so many cool and amazing things that are going on with the health and well-being of humans on the planet.

Next slide. But at the same time that these gains have been made in our health and our population has grown, our expenditures have grown, you can look at this slide and see how so many things have shifted just in the last seventy five years in terms of transportation, population, energy use, fertilizer consumption, stuff that we all think about paper production, plastic production, which I know is a little bit of tonight's agenda. So you'll see that just sort of putting into place historical perspective, sort of where we are with our human health and well-being and where we are with our impact on the planet. Next slide. And so just another slide, just kind of looking at what is called the Great Acceleration, what has been happening in so many different places just so many different areas, like our stratospheric ozone and our marine fish capture, our domesticated land use, where we're taking land and putting people and buildings on it.

Next slide. Methane emissions. So while human health and well-being has improved over time, our ecological health and well-being has dramatically declined. Next slide. There is, an Stockholm Resilience Center. Is anybody familiar with the planetary boundaries? Is this something you guys have kind of heard about a little bit? Yeah. Okay. Like wobbling heads.

Yeah. So I'm a nurse, so this was all kind of new to me. But I'll tell you what I know. So the Stockholm Resilience Center has been studying how does the earth actually work as an entire ecosystem. What are all the inner plays for the way that the earth maintains life?

And there's actually a really interesting, It was made a while ago. But there's a David Attenborough movie on Netflix called Breaking Boundaries that kind of explains how this science works and how people are studying it and what these planetary boundaries are. Climate change is one of them. I think that's the one that folks are most familiar with. But there's biogeochemical flows. There's novel entities, which is plastics and chemicals. There's ozone depletion. There's land system changes. These are the areas of you think about as a human, all of our organs and how they function together. This is sort of like how the ecosystem of the earth works.

These are the boundaries. These are the ways that the or that's how I think about it the earth's ecosystem, the planet's ecosystem works. You'll notice in this slide that they have it set for what are the safe operating spaces, the green area in the circle. When I started doing this work with you all, frankly, and giving this lecture, My first slide deck has three boundaries crossed, and now we've got six. And I have not been doing this work all that long.

But safe operating space is really the idea of, what do we need to as humans, we're causing some dramatic impacts. What do we need to bring into rightsizing to move back into safe operating space? So planetary health is talking about those kinds of issues, but it's also talking about a couple of other things that all how this all interacts with human health and well-being and obviously all of our environments and ecosystems. So the six boundary areas that we've crossed are listed there. So we've crossed safe operating space for climate change, for biosphere integrity, for land system changes, certainly for biogeochemical cycles and freshwater, but also novel entities, which is something that I've been spending a lot of time on this year, which are chemicals, fertilizers, pesticides, plastics, those kinds of things.

Next slide. So when we think about what we're worried about, going forward in the world and sort of what the environmental sustainability board has spent some of your time on, it is climate change, but it's also everything else. Next slide. Yeah, just a slide on climate change. Next slide.

Okay. So as a nurse and a health care professional and an educator of health care professionals, I want to understand what are the health impacts of climate change as one of the many areas of planetary health that are impacting our health. So climate change is causing I think we all know this but climate change is causing weather pattern changes, more intense storms, more flooding, extreme heat, shifts in vector borne illness because different environments are changing. So we're ending up with more mosquito borne illness here in New Mexico. We're going to start having more dust borne illness here because things are drying out so much and those kinds of things.

It turns out extreme heat impacts not just how we feel and also actually interesting what our levels of violence are. So it turns out that we have more incidents of violence on high heat days than in hotter areas than in cooler areas. But it's also impacting our cardiovascular health, our neurologic health, and our cognitive health. So all of these things are really interrelated. So I could not debunk, I guess.

I could explain this slide for the rest of the time I have with you. But I'll just let you know that I spend all my time kind of thinking about this stuff and then teaching it to nurses and other health care professionals. Next slide. So, I think we all know this. The distribution of how greenhouse gases emissions that are contributing to climate change this is also true for some of the other global pollutants and novel chemical entities are disproportionately coming from some countries more than other countries.

So this is just a slide looking at a little bit more than a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions are coming from the EU, Russia, Ukraine, Turkey. The other quarter is coming from The US. There's quite a bit coming from China and India, less so from some of the other countries. Next slide. But you'll see here so the slide on the left, just in a different way, you can see the darker colors on the map of all of our land masses and our human population masses.

You'll see that the darker colors are where more carbon is getting produced or emitted. And you'll see on the map on the right, the darker colors are people that are being mostly more adversely impacted. So you'd see that there's a difference fairly significantly on who is emitting and actually who is suffering from these emissions. So the reason that we like to or I like to use this slide, especially as an educator, is we have a I think, for me and the work that I'm doing in The US, we have more of a burden to try to address what's going on in the world because we have been contributing more to the damage that's happening. Next slide.

Thanks. So it's climate change and it's everything else. Next slide. So these changes to our environment, the ones that we're talking about, are really impacting our health from all of these different ways. I talked a little bit about heat stroke.

We have increased cardiovascular disease. It turns out that people who live in environments with more PM 2.5 pollution, which is the particle pollution that comes from wildfires and certain other kinds of combustion, have higher incidence of heart attacks. It turns out that we have more of a chance of having a heart attack on a heat day, on a day that's got more air pollution. So we think about air pollution and respiratory illness. But actually, pollution impacts the whole cardiovascular system.

I think everyone and I know we've had these conversations about the mental health impacts of environmental degradation and climate change. It turns out losing nature makes us sad. Worrying about the future makes us sad. Thinking about global climate change and forced migration makes us sad. But it actually turns out that air pollution actually causes depression.

So it's not just about the perception. It's about the chemicals that are going into our body that impact our microbiome, that impact our cognitive systems, our neurologic systems, so all of the different systems that are involved in mental health. So those are really interesting. There's some new research that's just starting to come out of the University of New Mexico around the impacts of microplastics on kidney disease. And so that's interesting.

Have a lot of plastic in our lives. Plastic is very convenient and useful. And when it breaks down, it ends up in our water and food supplies. It goes into our bodies. It sticks in our kidneys.

It sticks in our brains. And we're just now discovering what that looks like. So when we are thinking about a lot of us focus on climate change and being so worried about climate change, but actually, we need to be worried about all of the things that we're doing to the environment and just sort of re remembering that our health and well-being is interconnected with the health and well-being of our environment. Next slide. So the Planetary Health Alliance and the Planetary Health Community is talking about these as ecological determinants of health.

Has anybody heard the term social determinants of health? Right? Got some nods? Social determinants of health. It turns out poverty impacts your health. It turns out access to transportation and health care impacts your health. Those are the social determinants. There's structural determinants, how we build out infrastructure that determine our health. There are political and commercial and spiritual determinants of health. And outside the edges of it, there's these planetary scale ecological determinants of health.

And it's all stacked together and very intricately connected. So all of these things resource scarcity impacts our health, how biodiversity how we're losing biodiversity plants and animals and insects is impacting our health, the degradation of our water supplies, loss of our arable land for food growth, etcetera. Next slide. So this is a framework. So planetary health and the planetary health community, we talk about planetary health as a field, but we also talk about it as a movement.

It's a community that's coming together across all disciplines, all disciplines, to think through how these planetary scale boundaries and ecosystems are impacting our ecosystems as humans and what our responsibilities as humans are to mitigate the adverse impacts of the pollution that we have already created and that we're continuing to create so that we can work together to improve not only our health and well-being, but the health and well-being of what I call a lot of people call the more than human world plants and animals. So as a field and as a framework, if you look at this slide so I'll just kind of tease it out a little bit. On the right, the red circle are the health impacts. Nutritional diseases, infectious diseases. Non communicable diseases means things like diabetes, cancer, cardiovascular disease, stuff that's not transmitted between people.

Direct injuries, our reproductive health and certainly, we're doing a lot of research and studies on novel chemical entities and the impacts on our endocrine system. There's a lot of chemicals that are endocrine disruptors. And then our mental health. So those are sort of the catch of health impacts. And then if you look at where the Earth is, that's what I've been talking about those planetary boundaries, those places where the sort of globally stuff is shifting and it's impacting each other.

It's impacting sort of I keep saying the same thing over and over again. But it's intertwined. And then we think about, what can we do? And that's why I'm here. The ESB, the county of Los Alamos, the community that is here, we can use this framework to think about where's the work need to actually happen. Right? So we can look at the underlying drivers. What are our culture, our values, our behaviors? Our consumption is certainly impacting this. How we live in community, how many people we are, technology, how we use it, how we mine it, those kinds of things.

So those are the underlying drivers. I think for us in health, the thing that we talk about as the biggest underlying driver is this idea that humans are separate from the rest of the world. And it actually turns out I know you're all going to be like, oh yeah, no, duh. It turns out we are part of nature. And our health and well-being is intertwined with the health and well-being of all of our ecosystems. And when we really, really hold that in, right? Like, in some cultures, we've forgotten that. We think, oh, our health and well-being is mine, right? Like, mine individually. But it's actually in context of all of these relationships.

And when we start to realize that our health and well-being is intertwined with the health and well-being of all of nature, would we think differently about how we're making decisions on what we're building, what we're using, how we test it, where it ends up, those kinds of things. So proximate causes are just the explanation of how the environmental changes lead to the health impacts. And then there's these modifying factors. And that's really where a lot of the work is besides looking at the underlying drivers and thinking about how do we shift our values and our culture and our behavior to align with what we need going forward in the future, what are the things that we can do? And infrastructure, social cohesion, how we build governance that's shared and collaborative and cares for all.

Those kinds of things are stuff that we are talking about in the planetary health community. Next slide. Thanks. So we've gotten to the point now, actually, that our human health and well-being is actually starting to decline. So we had made a lot of progress up. And now we're starting to see life expectancy go down, infant and child mortality go up. So we've hit a point where what we've been doing to the environment is now actually bending the curve of how we're doing as humans in our health on the planet. Keep going. Slide. Thanks.

So in 2015 and I'm just going to say here, the health care professional community was a little late to the environmental game by decades, right? So in 2015, a bunch of really smart health and public health people came together with some really smart environmental people and said, hey, let's start talking about the health impacts of environmental damage. And the health community sort of showed up. It's actually cool and exciting because it's a new field for us, but just, like, lovingly recognizing, like, it's an old field for the environmental folks who've been working in the in in environmental, sciences all these times. Keep going.

Next slide. So the planetary health community and actually, Joanna Macy and a lot of the environmental justice community are talking about what's called the Great Transition. The first couple slides were about something called the great acceleration. Let's build. Let's grow.

Let's innovate. And now we need to right size what we're doing as humans on the planet. And what is it that we're trying to do? Well, everything, everywhere, all at once is probably the approach that we have to take. But we really do need to be thinking about how we're producing and consuming our food and our products, how we're thinking about energy, how we're coming together to manage our natural landscapes, how we're constructing and living in our cities.

And, you know, and these are the this is the work of the future. This is This is your work going to college in environmental studies, right? This is what's next. We need to rethink how we've been living. We need to re examine the systems that we have been taking for granted for us, for me. We need to rethink about how do we do health care systems. I feel like that was a good sign. We just heard lightning and thunder really loud. Next slide. Great transition.

Ta kong. All right. So rich landscape of solutions are really about innovation and technology, policy and law, private sector work, movement building, new narratives, social justice, those kinds of things. No one is left aside in this movement. This is a movement for educators, for legislators, for scientists, for transportation specialists.

It's for farmers. This is a movement and a community for all of us. Next slide. Yeah. And just a pretty picture. Hope yep. And then go ahead. You can so the planetary health framework is something that I've been working from. And so I'll give you some information about that. It's a way of thinking like, all right, how do we get to this great transition?

Next slide. So first, the planetary health communities come together with people from around the world. It's actually a global movement, a very robust global community now. And they came up with this Sao Paulo because it happened in Sao Paulo Declaration on Planetary Health that actually gave guidance to all these sectors I was just mentioning. So there's guidance for governments. There's guidance for farmers. There's agriculture folks. There's guidance for scientists, businesses, health care providers. Next slide. And in Malaysia, last year, the planetary health community came up with a roadmap and action plan.

And that's actually available publicly. It's something that I'm working on very specifically on the education curriculum part of this action plan. But it's how do we move forward with measuring what these impacts are? And then what like, if we do something innovative to try to make things better, how do we measure that? So how do we measure our outcomes?

How do we think about what's the governance of the future that we need start to bring ourselves as humans into balance, into relationship that's long term more sustainable with each other and with the natural world. So yeah, something to look at. Next slide. And then there's this planetary health education framework. So I spend all my time on this.

And and what you're looking at on the left let me just take a little sip of water. So I'm an educator kind of by nature, actually. But what you're looking at is a side slice of a interconnected twine or rope. Right? So ropes have a center, and then they've got little strands that kind of connect it.

So this is, if you think about that, and then you look at what the framework looks like, in the middle, in the purple, is interconnection within nature. So that idea that I've been talking about, that we're not separate, but that we're actually interconnected. And that our health and well-being, like I've said a couple times, is intricately interconnected with the health and well-being of all of the with nature. And then we teach from what are humans doing on the planet that are adversely impacting health, which I showed you a few slides on. We think about that equity and justice piece that some people are polluting and other people are feeling the disadvantages disproportionately.

We use systems thinking and complexity as the toolkit to think about the solutions. And where we're going is in movement building and systems change. So how do we reorganize ourselves in a way that is more inclusive of everyone being able to flourish and nature being able to also flourish. And then when we talk about planetary health, people are like, that's really big. Can we talk about issues specifically here?

And if you look at the framework, it's it's got a big name. Like, the term planet, yes, is very big. But it's actually really about what's local, what do we need locally. So this is a framework that's applied locally, even though it has this big name. And those planetary boundaries feel really big. Everything sort of comes down to what we can touch and what we can do in our own communities here in Los Alamos and in New Mexico. And so it's thinking about what are the local learning priorities? What are our local environmental conditions? What are our local parameters and systems that we're working with, and how can we shift those? And then we move out to the global, bigger scale things.

Next slide. So the Planetary Health Alliance is a place where each of us individually in our own professions can join. It's a really neat community. It's it's a community of collaboration and brainstorming and figuring out ways to innovate. And so it's becoming more of a community for me, especially as I continue to worry and worry more and more about our environment and our health and pollution and floods and all of those things.

It's a community that's very creative and energizing. And we're learning a lot from each other and each other's innovations. Next slide. And so there's organizational members across the globe. And so you can see where we're starting to expand to.

I will say you guys probably already know this but it's really hard to schedule a meeting across the globe. So I have a lot of 5AM meetings and 11PM meetings here. And I have friends now, these new friends, that come in. I've got one person that shows up for a meeting very consistently at 02:00 in the morning who's in medical school in Africa and comes to a meeting that we have. And they get dressed.

And they look like it's the day there. We're like, it's really 2AM. They're like, I go to bed early. And then I wake up, get dressed, talk to you guys, and go back to bed. So it's interesting to collaborate across the globe. But it's actually really fun and energizing, and it's a lot of young people, which is very cool. So I'm one of the older gray hairs in this group. It's yeah, keeps me young. Next slide. All right.

And these are some new work that's starting to happen. We have campus ambassadors. So for the college students out there, there's a program where you can bring planetary health to your school. There's tool kits. There's often some funding and support. There's definitely a community of students that are working around the world. But you can see here that the yellow stripes and the blue are all the new places for this Planetary Health Campus Ambassadors. When I talk about the community being young, the community is really young. And it's very fun. Next slide.

All right. And that's the information about the Planetary Health Alliance. Thank you for letting me give you a very broad overview about what I've been thinking about and what we've been working on at UNM. Some of the work that I'm doing at UNM, just in the College of Nursing, is around disaster preparedness, health impacts of climate change. But the University of New Mexico is also doing a we've got a new center called Accelerating Resilience Innovations in Dry Lands that has a the idea is that we will be working in partnership with communities to think about what are the very specific innovations and resilience things that we need to do here in New Mexico and our very specific communities here.

So that's new work that we're doing at the university. And I think that's it. Thank you. Awesome. I it timed it perfectly. Do you want me to do questions?

Yeah. I think so. Yeah.

Can we questions? Yeah, for sure.

Anyone have questions? I feel like we probably have a lot. So Yeah. Start with Rebecca.

Hi, Rebecca.

Hi. Thank you so much. That was such an interesting presentation. On the last slides with the countries that have joined, I guess what's involved in kind of outreach? I think one thing that stood out to me was New Zealand not being involved. Husband's a New Zealander

and lived over there Oh, good. So you guys

just going surprised of all the countries not involved. And just curious how countries go about getting involved.

Yeah. No, I have no idea, frankly. Thanks for the good question. But I think you and your husband should figure that one out. So I'm just going to put that back to you. Join the Planetary Health Alliance and then send some information to your friends in New Zealand and anybody that you know that's in school. They do conferences every year around the world. And then they have hubs, regional hubs. There's six regional hubs that align with the World Health Organization regions that are just getting started, right? But the regional hubs are really trying to reach out.

And think about very specifically, people are busy. There's a lot of stuff going on. Frankly, the term planetary health is kind of a I've had conversations where people are like, well, we've got to solve problems right here. And I'm like, This is actually a really innovative way to think about how we solve problems here. Right? Like, this community is innovating together. And there are arid regions around the world. There's you know? And we can learn a lot from each other. So, you know, the power of Zoom that we get to connect. Yeah. So, I don't know. Yeah.

No. That's interesting, though, that, you know, the country generally takes all these matters very seriously. Yeah. Yeah. I'd be eager to see

if we Good. Could I'm looking forward to giving this talk next year and seeing New Zealand there. And I'll be like, I know the person that got that started.

Sounds good. All right. Who's next? Herman?

Yes. You talked about a road map for communities.

Yeah.

Do you have any details on that or how to to get information on that?

Or should

I be an individual member trying to pull that? Or do you have a

Yeah. So it's all free and up there on the Planetary Health Alliance website. So the roadmap is published. It was crowdsourced by people in 70 countries over the course of a couple of years to think about, Okay, let's do this, and we'll do that, and this is where we're going. Because sometimes people like to have a strategic plan.

It's very broad. I'm in charge of one very small I'm not in charge of it completely, but I'm facilitating the group around the world that is responsible for one very small part of the roadmap plan. And that's the Planetary Health Alliance Education Curriculum document. And they said, can you build a curriculum on how to teach planetary health for all ages, from early childhood through PhD, all professions that is meaningful for all cultures and regions? And

then

they were like, Oh, Heidi could do that. So, the answer to that question is no, but we're really giving it a good shot. And then we'll have to crowdsource it. We put something out there. And so that's what's nice about the Planetary Health Alliance is, Herman, you are going to look at the roadmap and then you're going to think about because I'm giving this back to you you're going to think about, like, how does the ESB start to or you, as an individual scientist in your work, start to get involved in that.

What is it that you need to do the work that you're interested in doing? And then you can contribute to that community as well. So it's really it's kind of like Wikipedia. I mean, it's not at all, but I think of it as Wikipedia. It's like it's crowdsourced information that we're trying to share from around the world. I don't know

if that

was a good answer. Thank you.

I love that you keep asking questions and I keep giving you jobs.

No one's gonna ask any more questions. Right.

Do either of you have questions? Okay.

Alright. So one of the things that you brought up was, you know, looking at kind of gosh. How do I say this? Let's say cardiovascular disease. Yeah. Right? How do you, in research, control for, you know, comorbidities or whatever else there is versus environmental. Right? Can you talk on, like, what's that approach and how does what does that look like? Because I I really don't know Yeah. How you would tease that out.

Yeah. No. And it's hard. Right? Like, there's science, there's statistics, there's epidemiology. There's a lot that we know on all of the various risks of cardiovascular disease. And I'll just stop and say, I have a doctorate in nursing, but it's in nursing leadership. So I don't think of myself as a researcher. But I do like to read research and think about and I teach this. How do we read research and think about what we're translating that into?

But you can control for a lot of things and then look at exposures to ground level ozone and PM two point five. And you can look at number of emergency room visits on a heat day versus a non heat day in the same population. So I think when you think about you all, or many of us here in Los Alamos are scientists. So when we look at science, we're always, like, I think, you know, just kind of tightening the story over time. Like, does this work? Okay. This looks like a connection. Now we've got more information. Okay, now we've got another connection. I mean, science isn't it doesn't stop, right?

Like, understanding doesn't stop. It's an ongoing it's a practice, I think. And so, yeah, I mean, there's ways to control for things. But certainly, when you think about what are the mechanisms of action for inflammation from exposures to certain things, and you combine those mechanisms of action with the organ systems that are particularly vulnerable, I think a little bit of it is that. But good question.

And I'm happy to bring a researcher on carniv like, if you all are really interested in something, you know, specific, I'd be happy to connect someone to come and talk with you individually or, you know, I've

ever had in. Sure. No. It's cool. Was just looking at, like, your ecological determinants of hell Yeah. Versus the paradigms that have been lifted up for the social determinants of hell. Yeah. And I'm wondering how you tease those out, how you mesh those together, or honestly, how you use either framework in terms of the actual driving policy or the actual driving research because, I mean, that's what's hard science should be skeptical. Yeah. Right? And so as you ask these questions, you test the hypothesis, and then it fails or, you know, you you never quite prove it, you just fail to disprove it a lot of times.

Yeah. Yeah. No, I think, I think, yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think you're right.

And then you're asking questions about, like, how do you make these decisions? And I think, you know, what's amazing about working in an international community, and a lot of this community are not scientists, right? And then a big part of this community are scientists. So thinking about what are the policy implications or the practices for where this science is is its own sort of, like, creative, thoughtful, locally, you know, locally I don't know what the word would be, like, locally resonant innovations. Right?

Like, one policy that's gonna work for one community is not gonna work for another community. I think we all know that from the work that we've done here in Los Alamos. So we look at, oh, this community is doing this thing. And then we bring it here. We're like, here's this great idea.

And in Los Alamos, we need to do something a little bit different. So I think we have to think thoughtfully about all of those things and that that's a practice. And then how do we communicate together around how sure is this science? What makes sense? And at the same time, we also need to be thinking about what can we do to slow down our pollution, to slow down our land degradation, to improve the quality of our nature.

And environmental sciences know a lot about how to build back health and ecosystems. And we know that ecosystems, being healthy, you know, just sort of, I think, intuitively, is important for all of us. How do we balance that with where we're living and what we need? You know, those are the difficult, you know, those are the tricky things that pull us apart, I think, a lot of times. But we actually, if we can come together and have those conversations and really think about what do we need here, what do we care about here, and that's a good start.

And so, I think this idea of governance is a really interesting one because we live in a democracy and it's very participatory. We have to participate in that. And it's also hard. Right? And then we work with scientists from all these different fields. How do we and then we don't speak all the same languages in science. How do we bring all that together? That was probably a really long answer for that. But it's a great question, and it's exactly what we need to be thinking about.

I got one last one. Sorry.

I don't

want to hog the time. But there's a ton of organizations in the spaces that are evolving and always changing. What separates this from the other ones? Right? Because you've got UN. You've got other orgs like follow-up. You've got SASB. So it's like

Yeah.

What makes this one rise to the top or what's really kind of the differentiating factor where we need to pay attention to this versus the other one? Because right now you see policy recommendations from 15 different things come in for a particular area. And how do we say this is the right one? Or what's your insight about?

Yeah. And I don't think that you stack them on top of each other and say one is better than the other. The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals are really guidelines for a lot of the things that we think about in terms of the social determinants of health, very specifically. But also about food and clean water and access to what we know we need. Like, we know we need food that's healthy.

We know we need water. We know that we need air that doesn't have a lot of pollution in it. So, the SDGs guide those lights. This The Planetary Health Framework, very specifically, is bringing in this planetary boundary research and that sensibility into of infusing through everything else. So, I think of planetary health as a lens through which we work.

So, it's it's a community. It's a it's a crowdsourced community. But it's, I think you can look, you can use planetary health as a lens through which you do everything that you're thinking about doing. This idea that, you know, just thinking about it from I mean, and it's very specific, you know, because the core of it is about our health. Right? So, you know, it's my health is intertwined with your health, and our health is intertwined with the health of our environments and our ecosystems. And then moving from that sensibility into what we're, know, kind of what we're trying to do together to make the world a better place and to help people.

You.

Yeah, sure. Thanks. Good questions.

Sue, do you have any questions?

Just one. Bringing it back locally. I'm just recalling that during the CAP process and afterwards, there was public comment and a small amount of discussion about preparedness in Los Alamos for the effects of climate change as part of resilience. And I don't know that we have discussed it much since, and I don't know that there is a whole lot in the cap about it. And so you mentioned the program at UNM that was working on this to some extent, and I'm wondering if that would be a good resource for us to turn to for guidance on what else we should be doing to be resilient in health space with climate change effects in New Mexico?

Other resources you can think of?

I think we've seen in just the last two weeks how important infrastructure for disaster notification is, right, and how important understanding what our risks are and recognizing that patterns in weather are shifting, right, and that wildfire I mean, as a community, I think Los Alamos, it is in the fiber of everyone's being, the fires that we've experienced here. And I moved here after the fires, but I learned so much from just talking to people that I felt like I understood what it is a little bit to be in a community with wildfire disaster. Right? And I know when other communities had wildfires that this community responded to those people. Here's how to manage this.

Here's how to move through this stuff. So I think disaster resilience is thinking about what are all the possible futures. Right? So it's using our imagination. It's a collaboration between all of the different folks. Right? So health care professionals need to understand what are the health problems of the disasters that will happen in Los Alamos. Right? We're trying to teach that at UNM. There's a lot of resources on those specific things.

And so that's just bringing a toolkit and education to the health professional community here. But I think about working in the county and how county operations need to be resilient and how do we think about that. And then what's the communication with the community, right? Like, how does the community need to understand what the disasters are so that they know, oh, it's raining really hard. I'm in a flood zone. I need to turn on my radio and check. Right? Like, am I at risk for And then it's also policy and funding. So it's all the things. But I think you're right.

Think you're right. The caps light on really disaster resilience, and there should be a disaster resilience plan. And I think there needs to be a citizen task force to the county council on building a disaster resilience plan. And I am guessing that you'll go ahead and do that because you

asked I mean, a that's already, I feel like that's a place where the county actually has stuck well in hand together with the lab because we've been around this bush a few times. It's a real big priority. And so I actually feel pretty good about our preparedness for disasters like wildfire. I was thinking more about sort of day to day awareness in our medical community, in our mental health community, in our practitioners about the effects of climate change, of heat. We're getting more

heat here. No. Ongoing drought is a slowly unfolding disaster, right? So when we think about disasters, you're right. Here, we think about wildfires. But thank you for bringing that back to me. Drought ongoing is a slowly unfolding disaster. As our soils are drying out, we are going to our food patterns are going to where we can grow food is going to shift, where our water we're going to end up with, potentially, food and water quality and water quantity issues. We're definitely going to end up with infectious disease problems that we haven't seen before. And extreme heat is one of those other things, right?

What does extreme heat do and how do we get prepared for that? And yeah. So, yeah. How does you know, and there's like the animal pieces. Like animals then are bringing some you know, animal populations are shifting. How do we think about that? So as climate's changing, we need to think about all of the ways that it's impacting the environment. And then we also need to think about because I gave a talk on planetary health. So it's climate change. It's everything else.

The everything else is as our water supplies get like the toxins, different metals and things that are in our water are going to shift as we're using We can't rely on surface water anymore, and we're relying more on groundwater. And then we need to be thinking about and looking at what are in the various water supplies. As we have more runoff into river supplies, we get cyanobacteria and blue green algae in our water reservoirs. How do we manage that? Those kinds of things.

Stuff to think about. But definitely stuff I'm interested in spending time on, too. So we can do that together. Thank

you.

I was so good at being on time, and now we've, like, blown through it. Does anybody have any other questions?

I have, like, a comment. I don't know if it's a question, and I don't know if it's a comment. But, so the secretary of energy published an article in The Economist on the fourteenth. I don't know if you saw it.

I didn't.

He said that, quote, climate change is a byproduct of progress, not an as as essential crisis. Mhmm. And I I just I feel like that's very timely with what you've presented to us. Mhmm. And this, like, narrative of the new administration that, like, we have to unleash American energy, and it's gonna we're gonna bring new jobs back, and we're gonna lift people out of poverty. Yeah. And I feel like if you kind of pull that string, they're saying that, or they're suggesting that Mhmm. Renewable energy does the opposite. It puts people into poverty. It takes jobs away.

It's not gonna allow the country to flourish. And I just I have a major issue with that. Mhmm. And I I feel like this framework kind of, like, really directly pushes back on the narrative that they are trying to push on to people.

Yeah. No. And I think that kinda goes back to how do we really start to talk to each other and trust each other, right, as communities? Every community is going to have a different solution for what we need for energy and water and food and housing and health system and education system infrastructure. And, when we all you know, when you sit down to actually talk to someone, there's a lot of similarities.

But then there's all these narratives that are floating around that are kind of, for lack of a better word and I don't want to point this to anyone, but just sort of like ignoring the truth or the lived experiences of the people that are there. Right? It's ignoring that and then running a narrative that may not necessarily really be true. And that might be the existential crisis. Right? I mean, climate change is a byproduct of what we have done. That's what the first couple and all of the planetary boundaries, right? We built stuff. We moved things. We made cities.

We did all sorts of things. But actually, turns out that we kind of overdid it. And now we've got to do something about the overdue. And then what's the right way? And I think the right way is figuring it out for, in our communities, what we really need and what's our responsibility. So thinking about, you know, is what we're doing here, is it adversely impacting other communities? We have a responsibility for that and sort of that that idea.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah. I mean, that's the stuff that's energizing for me about the planetary health community is people aren't going we're not like, oh, we got to work all day, then we got to go fight this thing all night. It's like, let's just take this lens and use it as a way that we're doing the work that we are doing. Use this as a lens for how we live in family, how we live in community, how we live in and our responsibility for being in governance. Like, I showed up for ESB for a couple of years.

You all are showing up. This is democracy right here. It's a privilege that we have an opportunity to really come together and think about what the problems are, listen to people, and try to come up with ideas. And then test them. Be the scientist, like, did it work or not? You know?

-Cool. Any other questions? -I think you

all know how to find me.

-Thank you so

much. -Yeah, no. It was great. Thank you. And I'm sorry. I'm gonna go. But big love to the ESB and the work that you guys are doing.

Alright. Let's see. Our next agenda item is another presentation. Do we want to take a quick bio break? Yes.

Yes? Okay. Alright. Let's take a five minute break, and we'll come back at 06:31. All right.

We're all back, so we're going to go ahead and reconvene. So we're moving on to the next agenda item, which is the plastic bag working group update, and I'll just read this background real quick. So during the 01/14/2025 Los Alamos County Council meeting, they requested the ESB to, quote, evaluate single use plastic bags to include factors such as ability to recycle and other alternatives and cost to county to recycle and engagement to include local businesses and other interested parties. So the ESB adopted this initiative in their 2025 work plan and since then have formed a working group consisting of Chair Shannon Blair, so myself, and members Herman Geppert Kleinrath and Rebecca Paley Williams. The working group has spent the last couple months researching and interviewing other municipalities that have adopted a plastic bag ordinance, and we're gonna provide an update today.

Do we wanna stay seated? Okay. Alright. Cool. Okay. So here's a bunch of pictures of plastic bags. Most of them are from our very own soup barns, And I appreciate this is not relevant, but I appreciated the her email said the bags of Los Alamos, like it was like a like an art installation. I thought it was funny. Okay. Next slide.

So this is just the motion. Again, I don't think I'm gonna reread it because we just read it. So you can go to the next slide. Okay. So just a brief overview of previous efforts in the county for some sort of plastic bag fee or ban, as noted by counsel.

So I actually pulled this directly from the motion what was included in the motion with counsel. So the effort began in 2025 2015 with a citizen petition to ban single use plastic bags and also include a 10¢ fee on paper bags. So the the council held public meetings and surveys, and at that point, 80 opposed the ban and 72% opposed reducing distribution. I will note I have there was not any information that I could find on how many people took the survey. So if it was statistically significant, I'm not sure.

But at that point, counsel recommended that ESB move to do more like education instead of actually implementing a fee. And then this was brought up again in 2019, but that petition was a little broader and included banning plastic bags, straws, and Styrofoam. Then county council formed a subcommittee. And then by the 2021 fiscal year budget process, council's actions focused on education campaigns, funding washable utensils for schools, a and feasibility study for food composting. But there wasn't any sort of plastic bag ban fee implemented. So next slide.

So some recent studies have actually come out about that have specifically looked at plastic bag bans and kind of their impact. And these are just some interesting facts from that. So plastic debris constitutes the majority of marine litter worldwide. A lot of these studies did focus mostly on coastal areas because naturally bags will blow into waterways, waterways lead to oceans, and that's kind of the main focus. But it does take a thousand years for a plastic bag to degrade.

And rather than breaking down, they're photo degrading. So they're becoming microplastics that are, again, absorbing toxins and then it's kind of a continuation of the pollution. So it's not just the bag. It is the degradation of it as well. So recent studies have shown that the plastic bag policies, such as bans or fees, have led to a 25% to 47% decrease in plastic bags as a share of title items collected by litter cleanups relative to the areas without the policies and 30% to 37% reduction in entangled animals.

Next slide. Then there was efforts to look at a statewide ban, but we'll get to that in a bit. But just some more specific local facts are New Mexicans are using at least three thirty million single use plastic bags a year. So when we think about the effects on that magnitude. And they are also notoriously low for recycling rates and, again, caught by winds and transported to waterways.

And plastic bags are used for an average of twelve minutes and then again with a thousand years to break it down. So there's clearly a problem there that, you know, plastic bags are not great for the environment, think is

the conclusion on some of the facts.

So I tried to research CO two equivalencies and and decomposing for plastic bag compared to other materials. The research on that comes up with very broad bands for for each individual bag. This has to do with how thick is the single use plastic bag, how thick is the multiuse plastic bag, how are forested harvest forest harvested for paper bags? That makes a huge difference. How is the cotton produced?

Organic cotton is is has a higher environmental impact than nonorganic cotton. And the reason is that organic cotton just has lower yields. So you get more cotton per acre from nonorganic cotton, which reduces the environmental impact. I felt that was very interesting. But a mean estimate that I found for a single use plastic bag was 1.6 kilograms of c o two per plastic bag, which is equivalent to driving your car four miles.

And strong plastic bags reusable came out at 22 kilograms, so you need to reuse those 14 times. I would argue that I can fit about two to three times as much stuff into a thicker, bigger plastic bag than into a single use plastic bag, and this doesn't even include multi bagging, which I have to do for heavy items. So this cuts down the the need for reuse for strong plastic bags dramatically. And for cotton bags, that was very difficult because I found estimates from 50 reuses to up to 7,000 reuses. And the 7,000 comes from a Danish study that takes even production of chemicals and fertilizers and pesticides and fungicides for cotton production into account.

It's difficult to get a real life cycle analysis for those things. But the argument can be made that production is one part of the problem, and the bigger problem we're facing right now is how it impacts the environment. And this is where the the single use plastic bag fails compared to all other options because they decompose slowly. They are you need more. You use them less, and paper or cotton dissolves within a year, a few months.

While the single use plastic bag, we don't really understand where it's going. The Pacific plastic patch is smaller than we thought it would be. And the reason is not that there's less plastic in the ocean. The reason is we don't know where it's going. And so we don't really understand the impact of a plastic bag to begin with is what I found.

Do you want to do this, Rebecca, since you put it together?

Yeah. Mean, don't know if I need to read through all of It's kind of something that we can use as a reference. But I did look through all the different ordinances and the laws related to plastic bags within New Mexico and put together this chart. I think we can kinda see what it is. But, just to explain it, there's, you know, a section here so you can see which ones have instituted a mandatory bag fee, and kind of how they've addressed that, different exemptions that have been used, for for the bag bans, and, different exemptions that have been used from the bag fee.

So two different types of exemptions that have been commonly used and just the different jurisdictions that have implemented these in New Mexico.

And we'll get to it, but we did talk to Las Cruces, the city of Santa Fe, and the county of and Santa Fe County, too.

We can, yes, get through to

keep going. I think it's probably

not worth our time to read all the different exemptions.

Maybe we should split it up in different ways. So some cities had a fee on the bags and some tied it very specifically to use. Some did not very specifically tie it to use. Some were very specific with what constitutes a single use and a multi use plastic bag. Some were very loose with the definitions. And funny enough, feel like the the problems they ended up with were some were common, and we addressed it on on a later And and

Some were unique.

Some were unique. Yeah.

And, yeah, two, I think one thing that some entities did was really,

like,

very strictly defined how the the revenue from the fee could be used. So a lot of them were, like, directly related to what we think of as, like, environmental services or something, so, like, education. Some, I think, did not do that. But just, like, you know, something to think about as we talk about this.

So we're in the chart when it says environmental services fee. Those are ones that specifically called it out.

Okay, next slide.

So

New Mexico did have a proposed statewide ban. And it's not yet been enacted in New Mexico. But House Bill three ninety two, they proposed a statewide ban. And there was research done. And the proposal was kind of in line with what we're seeing the individual counties doing and cities, dollars $0.01 0.

And this one would be $03 going to the store and the remainder going to the municipality or county for those environmental services. So this was what was proposed at the state level. And they did do a fiscal impact report that estimated that the statewide plastic ban could save 3,800,000.0 per year for recycling processors. I found that was interesting. It looks like there's quite a bit of damage that happens when plastic bags get put into the recycling systems. There's quite a bit that happens when they get caught in machinery and it actually causes a lot of damage. So yeah, they can actually have an impact on how the fiscal impact.

And another thing about the ban, the statewide ban that was proposed, a couple of folks that we talked to felt like if more counties and cities in the state had enacted their own local fees, that it would be more likely that a statewide ban would get passed. So also something to think about how can we support the state in general with our locally, I guess. Okay. Next slide. So I mentioned that we talked to the city of Las Cruces, the city of Santa Fe, and Santa Fe County.

So just a couple lessons learned, I guess, that they kind of highlighted in those conversations. So everyone mentioned this, I think, ensuring that the fee or the ordinance is legally enforceable. So in our case, that would be if we choose to, like, continue going down this path or if counsel does, making sure that we're talking to the lawyers in the county and using appropriate language so that if a business is not, you know, adhering to the ordinance after however it's written, like, there's actually a way to make sure that they are enforced that we can enforce the ordinance. And some folks also recommended considering an enforceable fine for businesses. So I believe the city of Las Cruces, it was, $200, maybe.

Yeah. That sounds right. I have it in my notes, but, you know, just I think they also recommended making that fee a little bit higher. So it was, I don't know, a little bit more impactful, I guess. And then another lesson learned was ensuring that revenue from the fee can be used efficiently.

So I kind of I alluded to this a little bit, but in some cases, the way that the ordinance was written, the fees were, like, too detailed in the way that it could be used. So it could I think, as an example, the city of Las Cruces, it could only be used for educational outreach for plastic bag ban fee. So they can't use it for anything else. So they recommended, like, having a very clear but broadly defined use so that way we can use it for, you know, maybe we use it for education, but we can also use it for, like, I I don't know. Yeah.

Cleanup. Litter cleanup or something like that. So just making sure that we're not, like, pigeonholing ourselves into one use for it. And then I think everyone mentioned this, that the initial startup and collection sorry. The initial startup of collection and implementation of a fee working with, like, the local businesses and the big box stores is a lot of work.

A lot of people noted that it was really difficult to contact managers of businesses, especially, like, big box stores, or in our case, that'd be Smith's. I went to go talk to somebody at Smith's, and I think Herman did as well, and I really couldn't, like, find a manager to talk to, so, you know, I don't really know how that works at a big box store, but, you know, it is difficult to actually get ahold of the people who are decision makers, I guess. And then the other lesson learned was, like, ensuring that we do continued education for residents. Like, if we do a bunch of stuff year one and then we don't touch it, we're probably not really gonna have a huge impact to ensuring that we're not, like, using plastic bags if that's our goal. Do you guys wanna add anything?

No? Okay.

As you just said, we tried to estimate plastic bag use in Los Alamos. Very difficult to get a figure on that. What I got from Smith's White Rock is that they are using five cases of plastic bags per week with 500 bags per case, which would add up to a 130,000 bags per year. If we assume that Smith in Los Alamos has a similar use, that would mean 260,000 bags per year for the county, which would be way, way below the New Mexican average. So I think those are low ball estimates.

Smith and White Rock introduced a plastic bag fee. And according to the manager, the goal was to have customers use re reusable bags. And because there's logistics and workforce and there are actual costs to having free plastic bags at the store, and they try to use less plastic bags. There were customer complaints, and then the the national management stepped in and stopped the the plastic bag fee in White Rock. And there is no there was no discussion on any follow on projects or another round of of testing such a thing.

But I thought it was interesting that this was coming from Smith White Rock for financial reasons and was stopped by the overarching organization. So it seems like there is some interest from the from the stores themselves.

And those fees were going just to the corporation. Right. Not yet. Okay.

So our last slide, I think, is just, like, possible next steps. So we I think we the three of us and then Halka kind of felt like we haven't had any opportunities to get any community feedback or support on this. So we probably need to do more community engagement related to this question. So, you know, maybe we do some surveys for residents. We should also probably include surveys for businesses.

And we do have at least, like, two large businesses in town. I'm sure there's more that do not use plastic bags. So Natural Grocers and the Co op both already use cardboard boxes. So I think it would be worthwhile to kind of talk to them and see how that process works. You know, if you go to Costco or I don't know what Sam's Club does, but if you go to Costco, they don't use bags at all.

They just put everything either back into your cart or in a in a in a box that they use, like, from stocking. So I feel like the culture shift is kind of already there. Like, you know, people are people are aware of, like and they know how to use different tools, I guess, for their shopping needs. And then of course we can do general outreach and education. And we also talked to or we had a follow-up conversation with counsel Reidy, and he was the one who originally kind of suggested that counsel relook at this and then, you know, suggested that ESB take a look at this.

And he has stated that he would like to see a possible recommendation from ESB. So I don't know if we feel prepared. We can't do that tonight, obviously. But, like, you know, what what do we wanna do as a board as next steps? Do we wanna do some more engagement? Do we wanna come back to counsel and ask them to help us support doing more engagement? Do we need to do more research? Yeah.

There is one more slide. It's Sue's slide. Oh, sorry.

Forgot about that. Thank you.

Do you want to talk about

that now? Yeah, we can. Yeah.

Okay. So I spent some time yesterday, obviously not as much time as you all did, and so I But really appreciate the work that you've done on I wanted to get some feeling for the relative environmental problems with single use plastic bags versus other types of bags so that we could decide what would be an appropriate alternative if there are any. So what I was really looking for and what you're looking at here was a life cycle analysis for different types of bag materials and looking at things, not just greenhouse gas emissions, but as you can see for each of these different types, there are things like ozone depletion, water use, eutrophication, terrestrial acidification, and greenhouse gas emissions. This is taken from the Danish EPA study of 2018. It's similar to the results for some of these parameters.

Again, this is putting them all together, but from other studies looking that just looked at one thing, like greenhouse gas emissions, this seems to be in line with those. And it's a busy figure, but overall what struck me was thatso the baseline here is a single use plastic bag. In comparison to a single use plastic bag, how many times do you have to reuse a bag of these different materials in order to have an environmental impact as low as the standard single use plastic bag? And you'll see that there are blue bars to the right for pretty much every material for pretty much every parameter. So that surprised me.

I just wanted to be sure that people were thinking aboutbecause we're talking about trying to move people to using different types of bags potentially, different types of materials. We need to be sure that what we're trying to get them to do is better than what we're currently doing. To me, just looking across these things in general, it looks looks as though we would be wanting people to pick a very specific set of materials and bags to transition to. And that, to me, you can look at this and decide if that's true or not, a bag that is made of a recycled plastic material and that people use dozens of times, reuse dozens of times. Paper doesn't come out particularly well in terms of I mean, some of its bars are lower, but its reusability is considerably lower than most of the plastics.

And as we've already discussed, cotton is right out. So just in terms of us, if we're going to suggest that we that people use something different, we should have an idea of what the best different thing is. And I just wanted to put this in as the best piece of data that I could find that brought together a number of parameters for a number of different materials. So I just wanted to introduce that into the conversation.

Thank you. Yeah, thanks Sue. And I I think this is what Herman was. Yeah.

Yes. And I also found a lot of critics on this study, unfortunately, because once you go away from greenhouse gas use to secondary and tertiary effects, the arrow bars and uncertainties go up way dramatically. So people criticize that that this is a very pessimistic approach for for the for the alternative to single use plastic bag. So it's I would argue we have a a okay handle on the greenhouse gas emission.

Yeah.

And for everything else, it becomes thinner in terms of of how significant the results are, is what I got.

And I I mean, the study's from 2018, so I feel like a more recent if they were to do it more recently, they'd have something on here about microplastics and like, you know. Doctor. Possibly, yes.

I absolutely encourage you to take a look at I just wanted to be sure that we were looking at all of theor as many parameters as we could materials, terms in terms of impacts, and not just what I saw in the slides, which was basically greenhouse gas emissions. And there was also a very recent paper from last year that I can forward to you looking specifically at greenhouse gas emissions, and in that case they really found that these other choices were not as good as a single use plastic bag. So the other thing to keep in mind is things like paper bags, they do degrade more quickly but what they paper and cotton, any organic material that goes to the landfill degrades into methane. Right. And that is not good not good for the climate, not good for the environment.

So let add on the side, just a quick question. I mean, we've got multiple variables. And from the research you've done, do we know which one we want to optimize off of? Right? Like, is it more important to not have the microplastics?

And the pollution.

Or is it Yeah. The greenhouse gas? Because, I mean, it's just which things we wanna use? Because I I love this chart. It's brought up tons of stuff, but you see how they come at the top. And it's like, you know, is that the next step? Is to really kinda look at it and say, what's impactful? What do we wanna focus on?

So And how does

that tie into larger goals?

So the motion said and we had to relook at the motion multiple times while we were doing this because we kind of, like, went off on tangents, which I think is very easy to do. But yeah. Evaluate single plastic bags to include factors such as ability to recycle, other alternatives, and the cost to the county to recycle. So councilor Reidy did ask us, and we just we we ran out of time, frankly, to, like, look at, is there any cost to our recycling services directly from us for you know, if there's bags in the in the system? Or, like, is it costing the county money, basically?

Which I know we did have a figure or at least a a statistic on here that it was, like, statewide. So I don't know if, like, we can kind of, you know, do a little bit of math and figure out what that might cost us. I'm not sure if, like, we as a county are directly paying for that, but I would imagine that probably is rolled up into our services to our recycling servicer, like the the fee we pay them or the yeah. Does that kinda help? I mean,

we It's a good reframing, but, I mean, all of a sudden, this is switched from, like, which parameter to a cost minimization problem.

Well, it's not just a cost minimization problem, but, yes, I see what you're saying.

Right.

Yeah.

And, I mean, I'm I think this is actually the place where the board could help is if the county is focusing on a lot of the cost components, maybe that's our place to bring it back and be like, this is actually what dominates the this is what you should be thinking about and not necessarily the cost here because here's the stuff that's not baked into the cost that is the bigger picture you need to be looking at. And maybe that would help them on reframing it.

Yeah. I don't I mean, I

don't know. So right now, they're they're the way the last I heard, Friedman or Barco, our recycling processor, it does not recycle recycle plastic plastic bags. Bags.

Yeah. Yeah.

So when they remove them from the trash, we're being charged a fee for any contamination. I'm not sure what that fee is anymore.

Okay.

But that's that's the fee. Would know probably. Fee to the county. And the last we heard was we had a 17% contamination fee. So out of all the materials we're sending, which is roughly 1,500 tons a year, 17% of it is contaminated. We we don't know what percentage of that contamination is plastic bags. So but the other factor that we're not thinking of, like, if you're evaluating all the costs are the cost to embargo. You know, it's not a cost to our citizens, but it's a cost to them. It's know, the the equipment's down. They're not able to recycle as much material.

And sorry. I just remembered this too.

Councilor Reidy also asked us to look at or and we again, we ran out of time. But, like, is are we paying county staff employees to go clean up stuff too? And I also think that there is not to get, like, philosophical, but, like, there is a not a there's a cost to how things look. Right? Like, we don't as a as a citizen, I don't want my environment to be polluted with all the plastic bags. So, like, can we assign a a cost to that? Does that make sense? Yeah. So I

What's interesting on this is it's almost a time value of money thing because most people, I don't think they care about what they use to carry their goods in so long as they carry their goods. Right? Like, they want the ease and they want, like, I wanna unload my car in two trips instead of 30. And so, like, I think if we can come up and, like, understand, like, the demand side. Right? Like, what are the components that go into or what are all these uses? Because I think you Rebecca had a really good stat on, like, we only use the bag for, like, twelve minutes. Right? So it's like, what is that duration and what are the substitutes? And then, know, how would you work that in?

And you work a little bit on the supply chain. I think you could actually frame that really well. And most people most people that I know the plastic bag is like, get it from here, get it to there, then I save it and I use it to pick up my dog waste. Right? And so it's like, if I can find something that eliminates that or or easily subs in, then I think we solve the problem there on that.

And this is also, I think, where the survey comes in to Yes. To just gauge what are the values that the community wants to uphold. What I mean, again, you can care about the plastic bags that are blown behind Smiths into the Canyon or not. We don't know how the general population of of Los Alamos thinks about that. I use the the Canyon Rim Trail on a fairly regular basis. I don't like it. I would rather have no plastic bags flying in the trees there. And I I almost exclusively use reusable bags, And it's not a big deal. They just live in my car.

I think part of it too is the education component where it's like, we see the plastic bags and that annoys us, but it's the bigger threat, the microplastics.

Well, I think

And making that Yeah. Impact on people where it's like, look, you think this is bad? Just wait till you see what it's doing when it bioaccumulates. Right? And so and but that takes longer.

And I would argue that that we don't understand the impact of of microplastics on a global scale, on a on a human health scale very well. I've seen some studies that connect microplastic to Alzheimer's. It's it's a bit making a decision on on not well.

Yeah. We don't have the data to back it up.

We we don't we have some data of how reliable is it. We we're basically making a decision that is somewhat in the dark, and this will not be solved here now or in the next few years, I think. So

Can I ask a question just for clarification for the next steps of community engagement?

That's why

I put a question mark.

Because I'm

Okay. Just to make sure because I was on that call too, but the way I understood it was finish doing your research, you know, doing the evaluation of the financial analysis and talking to

Yeah. And I think I think we need to do that.

So finish that part Yeah. But then make the recommendation to counsel. And then based off what count your recommendation is to counsel, they would then say, okay. Go back and do community engagement and get buy in from Yeah. Or, you know, gauge the community.

I think I mean, maybe I maybe I'm thinking about this wrong, but I feel like in ESP, our recommendation can include, like, we would like to see a survey Yeah. With council support or whatever we decide.

But we

we The reason why we're doing it like that was because instead of beforehand is, like, what are we gonna ask? Do you wanna ban something? Do you wanna fee on something? Do you not? Like, we don't have a clear direction on what council would even support. So if or what the board would support. So if you say, just for hypothetical, you know, we wanna recommend a fee. K? So then we would recommend that to counsel, and then we would go back to the community and ask them a bunch of questions about a fee directly. Right.

First of yeah.

So we'd have a focus for the engagement. That was the thought. Yeah. Because this is gonna this is going to become it could become a heated conversation. So we wanna know what we're talking about before we just open the can of worms. So What were

you I Oh, go ahead, too.

You go.

Yeah. So I I have a couple of questions and a couple of observations. Just to clarify, you said that in notes, you said that when White Rock Smiths tried this, they stopped it. The notes made it sound like it just wasn't they decided it wasn't working in some way, And then but then you said a different thing about that management canceled it. So I'm confused.

So there were a few things. They were hoping that the plastic bag use would be reduced, but people don't care too much about 3¢ at the checkout. Mhmm. They are angry about having to pay more, but don't bring bags the next time.

It's not enough to change

their behavior. Exactly. And the complaints to to Smith basically brought in a higher level management and said we stopped that fee.

Okay.

And so so people didn't use less bags, which is in contrast to what we heard from from Santa Fe and Las Cruces where they found with the plastic bag fee or the the bag fee, they saw a reduction in in single use bag use, that didn't seem to have happened in in But why

so did. And I did I believe when we talked to Las Cruces, they said that it took a couple years too. So, you know, I it's possible we cut off this program too soon to actually see a reduction.

I also think though with that with white rockets, hard to compare that to how people would react to an ordinance enacted that had an services fee versus, you know, Smith's White Rock is getting 10¢ per bag right into the corporation and it's just another corporate fee for the the company rather than something that's going towards Yeah, the county. Doctor.

The county. I guess my question was in in the course of them doing this, I'd be interested in getting results from the other communities also, did it result in the behavior change that they were wanting to see? It sound like it did not.

In Smith and White Rock, it did not. Also, people complained that Los Alamos is not having a bag feed. Other communities, they they a decrease in single use bags was was seen, but it started slowly, and then Mhmm. Saw more and more reduction in in single bag use. And I would also argue it I don't think Smith and White Rock actually took statistics and

No.

I don't. It.

So from from what I got, it was more like they felt it didn't work. They're, like, little numbers to get back back up.

Okay. The other thing about Las Cruces, the way they implemented it was they off instead of offering this higher quality plastic bag, right, they had to switch to paper bags. So people had a very different material that they were using at the grocery store. So that also probably triggered them to start wanting to use more reusable bags. Took, like, five years, but they've seen a decrease in bag sales, I think, somewhere around 20%.

Yeah. I I think it's in the notes, but it was about that. Yeah.

So it was a little it was implemented differently.

Okay. My other question goes back to the original motion from counsel and whether or not that's been modified based on your recent discussions with Counselor Reidy. But there are at least in this initial motion, there are several things that we have not addressed yet that I would argue that we should address. So we have not looked at the ability to recycle single use plastic bags, what that might look like in this community, what's currently being done, what can be done. What pops to mind is that people ask me all the time when we have booths and just my friends and can I recycle this plastic bag?

How do I recycle this plastic bag? And we say things like, well, you can take it to Smith's, but we don't know what happens to it. And just don't put it in your blue bin. And that is an inadequate answer. We have people in this community are wildly enthusiastic about recycling.

If there was an actual way to recycle these things, could we promote that as an alternative to going this fee route and just get people, the 90% of people that recycle everything else, to recycle their plastic bags? So unless Counselor Reides has said that he's no longer interested in that, I think we should research that. I think we don't know the cost to having these in our waste stream at this time. I think we that was another thing that was requested. Needs more research.

We could do a waste and recycling streams audit. We could ask Barco if they know about our level of contamination specifically and costs associated to plastic bag contamination. We could determine the cost to haul these things to landfill, but we would have to keep in mind that a lot of people use single use plastic bags in place of purchasing virgin plastic bags to put their trash in because we're required to do that in a roll cart. So we need to keep in mind that even though we're, you know, potentially paying to have them hauled to the Valencia County Landfill, they're substituting for some other bag. Or maybe they're not.

Maybe people are just wadding them up and throwing them in their trash. We don't know. Second, and then after we have that kind of information, revisit together with whether or not we have alternatives that are environmentally more sound than the current use and a program that is likely to change behavior in a way that we would like it to be changed for whatever reason, then engaging with community would be seems appropriate. And but at this time, I think it would really, if at all possible, try to have further discussion with Smiths up here to find out if they are at all interested in doing anything about this changing their bag policy going forward because, again, we don't know.

Right. Yeah. So that was one thing that we had floated was, like, just thinking about, okay, we only really have, like, one main grocery store in town. The other ones don't use bags. So, like, do we just maybe have a conversation with Smiths and ask them? And I don't know. Like, maybe that's maybe that's the easiest thing to do.

It may not be the easiest thing to do. You've already run into what we've run into over the years in terms of, you know, not being able to It get to used to be they had a policy about getting rid of plastic bags right on their website. It was part of their zero waste, zero hunger thing. And I haven't looked to see if they're still trying to do that or not. I don't think it's gone.

I think I looked.

I don't know. You know, that all got sort of interrupted with COVID and stuff. Also But to say that you're absolutely right. Smith is the main purveyor of placing plastic bags in the community. If we can get themif they're planning to do something, then that's most of our problem taken care of.

Okay. So I think all of those things you mentioned were on the list of what we need to research next. Yes. This was just an update tonight. Yeah.

Okay. Good. I'm glad because I don't I think going to the community with this without carrying out the research that we were actually asked to do, because there's nothing in here actually about a bag fee, would be premature.

Prepared to

do that. Just ran out of time to do everything that we was asked to do. Okay. So I do think well, in the interest of time, I think we should, like, close this conversation up. But I think that it would be helpful if we had, like, a deadline for when we wanted to see the next kind of final update, I guess, from the from us.

So do we think like, do we wanna aim for August? Do we wanna aim for September? You guys are doing the work. How long does it take

to get this kind of information?

I mean, this took us a long time.

Yeah, I don't know that outreach to other communities, if that was the that seems like it was pretty time consuming. Don't know that you need to do more than that other than I would be interested to know how places like California who have been doing this for many, many years, what results they have seen.

So I think, Rebecca, didn't you look at others other cities too in your

Yeah, I didn't include it in the

but we

didn't send out. Well, wouldn't be like

I would have to put

it into the chart instead.

Okay.

Yeah. Or even some of the programs that have been there were a couple in here, maybe Silver City or something that's been going for ten years to know what the results actually are of doing this. What changes? Do they see the kind of results that we would want to see if we do something? Or does it make no difference? Or do people just buy a lot of, you know, buy a lot of bags anyway or buy a lot of paper bags, which really isn't solving the problem.

Okay. So I guess working group, do it feel like I mean, Herman, of course, will be just a community member moving forward. No.

He can still serve on the working group.

Well, but as a community member. Right. Yeah. Yeah.

You're still a community member.

Like, do you think a month? I think two months.

Yeah. I I have family coming from New Zealand for almost a month.

Okay. Very busy.

Okay. I'm gonna be a little bit.

So why don't we plan on giving an update in September then? Is that okay. And if you get pushback from council, let us know, and we can reevaluate.

K. Cool. Do we need to take public comment?

We I suppose. I can.

Know if we do or not. There's anyone online that was Yeah.

You're not making a motion, so you might need to take public comment.

Okay. Alright. Sounds good. Well, we'll we'll plan on revisiting this in September. And in the meantime too, if, like, you guys have comments or questions or you're like, oh, I found this really crazy article. Like, please send it to us. There's so much information, and it's it's kind of a lot and overwhelming. All right. So thanks, everybody, for participating in that conversation. All right.

So next agenda item is reports. So I'll start with my chair report. And I have a certificate for Herman for all of his hard work on the on ESB. So thank you so much, Herman. Yeah. For Daz, how long were you vice chair for two year two years? Okay. Well, thank you for for taking on that additional role and leading the work on the bicycle working group as well and your work with the plastic bag.

I will have an update on the next week next month.

Yes. Awesome. And I'm gonna steal Joe's quote, but the other day in the interview with Joe, he said that you make really you're you're great to have because you make, like, really quick and fast back of the napkin calculations, and I could not agree with that more. We're definitely gonna miss that. I always appreciate when you when you bring in information related to that. So thank you so much for your your service, Herman.

I enjoyed it.

Good. Good. Okay. I don't I think I really have anything else. The only thing that I was wondering, is the EV survey still open?

It's open till the '20 the month.

First. Right?

Thirty first.

Oh, the thirty first. Okay. So if we haven't if you all haven't taken the EV survey, please do so. The website is lacnm.com/evsurvey, so it's really easy to remember. Yeah. I think that's it. So we'll move on to Board of Public Utilities. So Sue's gonna Sue's attended the most recent meetings, so she's gonna start, and then I'll fill in, if need be, with previous meetings if those weren't followed up on.

Doctor. Yeah. So this covers Board of Public Utilities meetings from May, June, and July. And they have done a lot of things. So major things having to do with electric supply. The Foxtail Flat Solar and storage project near Farmington is on the cusp of starting construction. They're awaiting some approval from the Bureau of Indian Affairs. They've ordered materials. They've planned a road, and it looks like it will happen. And that will be a major amount of electrical power for the community, so much so that they're goingthey're also going to have to have a business plan for selling the excess.

So this is a really, really good, big project for carbon free energy. A new electric coordination agreement with Llano should be in place by late August. This is the power pool agreement that tells us how we're sharing power with the lab, we've been having this for decades. We have to have another one. They're also looking at, in terms of baseload power, possibly through u amps, four megawatts of baseload power from an advanced geothermal unit in Utah, and they're awaiting transmission lines.

Apparently the power is ready or nearly so, but getting the power here is the hard part, which is true for a lot of power projects. As far as natural gas goes, there's currently a usage pattern study that's going on to try and understand how people in the community are using natural gas, which types of appliances and so forth. And there's also going to be a survey come out in the August bill insert in your utilities bill, so look for that. They've started work on installing the new natural gas lines and meters for Elk Ridge, and that should be done in ninety days. For water, the Jemez Mountain Fire Protection Project, aka the new water line up the ski hill, has started.

And this will include a water line and a tank for fire, snow making and drinking, plus an electrical line. And some parts are proceeding quite well and for some other parts of the project they're awaiting some funding from FEMA, which is being very slow. In terms of water supply, we lost a well three years ago to the chromium plume, and so the county has become a bit concerned about water supply. They're looking at putting a new well into White Rock, possibly an overlook park, in order to tap our San Juan Chama surface water rights. But overall, our county use for water is declining, which is a good thing.

But on the other hand, Llano is possiblyis thinking about using a lot of a lot more water for computer cooling, but it remains to be seen whether or not that will actually happen. As far as funding goes, one of the things that was discussed that's interesting to all of us is how did the big beautiful tax bill change the electricity landscape? In terms of us, basically solar and wind projects are not in favor anymore and need to be underway by 07/01/2026 in order to be able to get federal tax credits and so forth. Nuclear and geothermal, however, are still in favor, and those are still what they were under the previous administrations. And they're looking into possibly having some nuclear projects that are on DOE land get better deal for development than elsewhere.

So maybe some development in small modular projects that might come online in 2028 to 2030. Battery storage is still in favor, but only if the batteries contain metals that are not from countries of concern, like Iran and so forth. And just a reminder to all of you who may be looking at making purchases and taking advantage of tax credits, the tax credits for EVs end on September 30 of this year. Home electrification project credits ended on December 31. But the EV tax credit is still on untiloh, EV charger credit is what I meant to sayis still on until June 2020 '6.

So make those upgrades today. The big focus of the BPU in this last period was finalizing the big electrification study done by Burns and MacDonald, which outlines how Los Alamos can fully electrify by 2055. And it included load projections, infrastructure upgrade needs, fiscal feasibility, and ways to boost community adoption of electric appliances and EVs. And they did some of this work, the EV component, in collaboration with our Stantec consultants. The bottom line is we can do it.

We can fully electrify the community by 2025 without major cost incursions. Most of the costs will actually stem from replacing our existing aging infrastructure, which is work we have to do anyway in order to keep the lights on. But the study will help DPU in planning upgrades. And to fully electrify, the capital projects that will be needed will be a new substation at Eastgate and improvements in the White Rock substation. Both of those would be capital projects that would require long term loans, just like the White Rock Wastewater Reclamation Plant did.

Costs for these things should be offset by increased electricity sales by people adopting using more electricity. Also advised on how to best implement the time of use and demand charge peak and modest staffing increases. And that's it. Except for what Shannon has to add.

Thanks Sue. So I went to the June 25 meeting, then I think I'm going to the next one after this. I'll only add two things. So Clay Mosley gave a presentation on, like, the our wastewater system. And bear with me because this is, like, a little bit of a stretch.

But they've had across the country, I think maybe even across the world, and this has impacted Los Alamos, people have been putting things in their drains that they are or flushing them down the toilet that they're not supposed to. And I feel like that is kind of tied to like zero waste, right, recycling, making sure that we are disposing of things properly. So I if you get the DPU inserts, either by via email like I do or maybe you get it in your mailbox, the I think the July 1 had tips for, like, you know, what you should and should not be putting down your drain. So wipes, if they're flushable, just throw them in the trash. So I would take a look at that.

And then, you know, as we do, like, community outreach events, that might be something that we can help with. So and then I'll just say one more thing. At the meeting I went to, they talked about the quarterly utility report, which I didn't know was a thing. But it's on the website. It's really interesting. Take a look at it. They have them going back a couple years too, so just of interest. Cool. Okay. Sorry.

Can I forgot to say one thing during the chairs report? So we we did do interviews to fill all of our vacant positions and the positions whose terms are coming up, so myself and Joe. And I believe that goes to council next week.

Twenty ninth?

Okay. So the following week. But, hopefully, everybody will be approved by the August meeting. Mhmm. We should have a full board by August. So okay.

Herman. So last month, the transportation board did not meet because of fourth of July.

That happened last year.

Yeah. Basically, the the problem is that everybody's traveling the week of July 4. And yeah. And the meeting before that is long ago, and I forgot my notes, but there were two presentations. One was on the Los Alamos Airport.

Yeah. And basically, the challenges they are facing and and how to to engage with community, both Los Alamos and general aviation community. Some issues they talked about was aviation is expensive. The pilots are aging, and Los Alamos is a particularly difficult airport to to access because you can only fly in and out from one direction. There is the zone over over the lab that you cannot fly into.

There are drafts and rotors, and it's generally just difficult. Flying is expensive, but they also alluded to other things that the airport is important for because we're supporting the the medical helicopter. We're supporting firefighting operations. And, of course, the lab has interest in in the airport to some degree. And they also there is this this pilot project with with the building there that they try to make us a queen and and zero use.

So but, yeah, the the airport is expensive, and and they have some some ideas how to engage with community and and how to improve the service. The second presentation was on the Canyon Rim Trail that should be connected with the urban trail. And there were issues with easements and getting land. And then the other problem is that this is difficult terrain, and and they have to to get a prebuilt pedestrian bridge. They have to do some rock work.

They have to cut down some trees, so they are evaluating. They are doing a a feasibility study right now, and and they gave an update on that. Basically, just estimating the work and and what needs to be done to get this project done. But they are making progress, and and I feel like things are looking up there. But yeah. Cool. That that's it.

Thanks, Harman. Okay. Parks and Rec board. I did not go to last week's meeting, but I did pull up the agenda. Looks like they had a presentation on adopt the adopted trail program proposal, so it might potentially be interesting. And then the Mesa Public Library outdoor classroom presentation and discussion. So if you're interested in either of those things. When I looked this afternoon, the recording hadn't been posted yet, but I'm sure it will be soon.

Yes. One of the things I thought was coming up in July but perhaps is not is the artificial turf study and recommendation. We've had a couple of comments from the public with environmental concerns about that. And I had some back and forth with Angelica, and it seemed as though they did a study and then were going to come up with some sort of plan. Do you have any have you heard anything about when that plan might be available that we could have a look at?

I can look into it. I haven't heard anything. And on the agenda, there's nothing listed for next meeting. Okay. So, Angelica and I can look into that.

Yeah, think it would be good to keep our eyes open for that plan to come out so that we can be good. Sounds like there may be some considerable environmental issues. We're worried about plastic bags, but they're talking about rolling out Yeah.

How much

are microplastics? Tons of microplastics on our field. So maybe we should look into it. Thank you.

Yeah. Thanks, Sue. Okay. So health counsel, Jill's not here, and I don't believe that she sent in a update. Counselor Herman is also not here. So we will move on to our inclusivity task force, and I think Kokyoung is online. Kokyang oh,

she was connecting.

Okay. Can you hear me now?

Yes.

Okay. So, our task force gave a midterm report to the council last month and, request them to extend our term of service to from November until February because there's still more work to be done, and, and it was approved.

Awesome. That's it. Cool. Thanks, Kokyung.

Mhmm.

Alright. So we'll move on to working groups and steering committees. Do we have a Los Alamos Sustainability Alliance update? You bet.

This is for June and July highlights. We had some great outreach events in June at the Farmers Market, at Science Fest, and at Pride Fest, all focused on EV surveys and on trash and recycling education. Unfortunately, Eloise has just left, but she is an intern back this summer and she is helping with our sustainability newsletter and managing the volunteer Los Alamos page. She's already posted a Bear Fest opportunity for volunteers, so please sign up to help with that if you can. And just subscribe to Volunteer Los Alamos for the Sustainability Alliance, you'll find out about all the volunteer opportunities.

Abby Hayward, the water and conservation officer for utilities, is researching the odd and even watering rule to see if that's actually working or not in terms of reducing landscape watering or evening it out at any rate. She's adding appliance brush kits to the library of things, and she reports that there have been some very popular tours of the county's water wells and water production infrastructure. So popular that the three tours that they scheduled filled up in two hours. So but they hope to schedule some more if you would really, really like to see our water wells. And but there are still spaces open in if you would like to tour the water reclamation facility in White Rock, is pretty interesting.

We're in the process of developing sustainability welcome kits for new residents, the idea being to have information to give to people as they arrive and are setting up their new habits in town, getting them off on the right foot with respect to recycling and water and energy conservation and climate change and all the things. And so ideas for content and distribution methods are appreciated. Planning is underway for a national day of action on August 23, and also we're going to do something it sounds there was a meeting about that today at the rodeo parade on August 2 to support our national parks. And so you can contact Danielle Duran if you'd like to be involved in this. She's the point of contact for organizing these of action now.

The high school Eco Club is losing its student leaders to graduation, but also its teacher adviser, Ms. Who's retiring, unfortunately, so we'll see what we have in the fall for an eco club. The green page is back in the Daily Post. Check the print edition every Thursday last Thursday of each month, thanks to Kristen Lasky, And she welcomes content ideas for that page as well. I hope you all get a chance to see that last month.

Bear carts are being added in White Rock because there's now a bear in Pajarito Acres. And we'll be having a farmer's market table on August 14, I believe, and we're looking for volunteers for that, right? For August 14 for the farmer's market.

Oh yes.

And are we having a table at Rodeo Fest on August 2? No.

No, not at this time.

Okay. So that frees you all up to participate in the rodeo parade and table for the national day of action for the national parks. That's it.

Awesome. Thank you, Sue. Do you have an update for Education and Outreach Working Group? Do you want me to go again? I don't have we can also I mean, it's

Oh, it's okay.

It's almost eight. If we want to go quick, too.

There's not a lot to update. We're just on the cusp of selecting a vendor. We've got a couple of very good candidates. And we sent back clarifying questions to them. So when we get those answers back we'll reconvene and make a decision,

I think.

It's looking good.

All right. Do we

have any updates for the community wide EV study working group? Yeah. I'll give an update. So we did site visits. We hosted site visits last Thursday and Friday looking at potential county properties that we could add EV infrastructure.

We just examined what was the capacity on their breakers and transformers, looked at the locations to see good fits for both so in some places, just fleet charging, like down at PCS or other places we looked at, you know, fleet and community charging. So yeah. And the survey is open till the end of the month. Awesome. And as far as I know, we're still on track to present the draft in October. K.

Alright. We will skip our plastic bag fee research group because we just gave an update on that. Do we have a a B City update?

Yes. We do have someone from Bee City here.

Can you hear me? Yes. Okay. Yes. So I wanted to make sure I was here to update you on our backyard pollinator garden program. That's our big program for the year. It is fully underway. So we've I've actually got almost 800 plants that are gonna be distributed to 45 residential households in the county over the next couple of days. And as I was listening to Heidi's presentation, I was thinking about how this fits into potentially helping our community be a little bit healthier too. Studies show that if you garden, you have less depression, so maybe that offsets some of the air pollution you get in other places.

But we're pretty excited about the program and that there will be this new group of 45 residences, so that brings us up to about 100 properties over this year and last year that have received plant kits for this program. And lots and lots of plants, which is good for the whole community. Awesome. That's my update.

Thank you. Alright. So we'll move on to staff report in Helica. Okay. Let's see.

Sorry. I had it open. Where did it go? Okay. So let's see.

So I just wanted to mention our sustainability newsletter, and we had a special editorial from Sue Barnes, and she was highlighting her experience. Her love of her EV was really charming. And then also we had a highlight on the county's new all electric golf fleet that was it just arrived, I think, a couple weeks ago now. And, also, the newsletter, the subscribers are continuing to grow each month. So we we grew about nine members nine readers this past month.

EV charging infrastructure, we county council did approve the construction of our or approved the task order so we can begin construction for six new level two EV chargers here out front of the municipal building. We had to make an upgrade update to some of the electrical designs. So once we finalize that, I'll have a better date for you of when we might be able to start. But we're thinking in the next couple of weeks. We also received unofficial notice that we were awarded an NMDOT DC fast charging grant.

So it's for two DC fast chargers with a minimum of a 150 kilowatt output per port, and those will be placed at Mesa Public Library. And let's see. Let's see. Fleet conversion, I already gave an update about that. Sue gave an update about education and outreach.

Once we're done wrapping up education and outreach and construction starts with this project, then we'll be able to move on to start developing the scope of work for providing energy audits for our residential our residents here in Los Alamos. So if you're interested in helping with that, let me know. And then just thanks to all of our volunteers at Farmers Market and Science Festival. A few of you made it out there, so thank you so much. And then we'll be, yeah, we'll be at Farmers Market August 14.

And then we're also going to be maintaining and weeding our demo garden down in White Rock right by the visitor center. So we'll send something out about that. It's on volunteerlosalamos.org. And then like I always do, I share just our sustainability report. So it looks like in June, high diversion rate, 34%, largely in part to keeping all those yard trimmings out of the landfill, which is really important.

Like Sue said, it turns into methane, so we wanna keep that out. And there's lots of compost and mulch available if you need any for your landscaping. Let's see. Recycle, slight increase, and trash was a little bit lower than last year. Looks like we sent we diverted eight trucks of recycle and 12 trucks of yard trimmings from the landfill.

Okay. And then just for your reference, and I won't go into it today, but I did give an update to council last week on July 8. Just what the things we're working on. I think I told you that. And then just for your information, these are where the new EV chargers will be placed. These the middle ones right here in the center median will be removed and eliminated. And then so we'll add basically, move these three here. Of course, replace them with new ones and then add an additional three. They will be ADA compliant as well. So let's see.

And this is a dashboard. I hadn't shown you these things yet, but working on being onboarded. But this will be the dashboard of how our climate action plan and the metrics that things that we're working on will be displayed for both staff and the public to view. This is an example of Milwaukee's and this is the ClearPath. ClearPath two point o, so it's a tool we use to inventory our greenhouse gas inventory and all the data, but they've made some upgrades, and we'll be able to start using this tool soon.

So, hopefully, we'll have an update for you next month about about that. These are all the climate action items that we're working on this year. And one in particular just because Heidi talked a lot about it was, you know, conducting a vulnerability assessment. Even though our emergency response has a vulnerability assessment, theirs doesn't really focus on climate specific vulnerabilities or risks. So we'll definitely be working on that and and integrating those other aspects.

And these are a few of few of you all at volunteer events. So I gave them us a little update on your plastic bag research. They're very interested in in your work with that. So the next update will be in October, and that'll coincide with your your annual update. So at our next meeting, we need to start drafting that, and then we can approve it in September. You know, of course, you can still make final updates to it, but it'll be ready for October presentation to counsel. So that's my update.

Thank you, Anhalka. You're welcome. Alright. So item number eight, preview of upcoming agenda items. Sounds like next month, we will definitely look at the October presentation. I don't know if we have anything else on the agenda. And then the

We have Herman's

presentation. Herman's presentation. Thank you. On on the the bicycle working group. Awesome. Alright. Cool. I think we can end today's meeting. Thanks, everybody.