Environmental Services Division - Regular Meeting

Alright. We'll go ahead and get started. You can yeah. Thanks, Sue. Okay. So we'll get started for today's environmental sustainability board meeting. It is August 21, and we'll start with a call to order and roll call. So it'll start with us in in here, and then we can go online. So, Sue, do you wanna start?

Sue Barnes. Shannon Blair.

Keller Romero. Joe. Rebecca? Can you all hear us? Oops.

Sorry.

Oh, the video is still

there. Can

you hear us?

I don't think you started the video.

There we go.

Can you all hear us? Can you drive? Sure.

We can hear you now.

Okay. I can I can hear you now?

Okay. K. We're gonna start over with everything. So okay. So we'll call call the meeting, to order, and then we'll start with roll call. So Sue? Sue Barnes. Shannon Blair. Keller Romero. Joe.

Joe Chandler.

And Rebecca.

Rebecca Paley Williams.

Alright. And we are missing Jelle Dehaven, but I believe she said she joined online. So, hopefully, she will be hopping on at some point. Alright. We will go ahead and move on to agenda item number two, which is 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. Do we have any public comment in chambers? Doesn't look like it. Do we

have anything online? Chair, there's no public online.

Okay. Thank you. Alright. So we will move on to agenda item number three, which is approval of agenda for today's meeting, August 21. Do we have a motion to approve the agenda, do we need to make any changes at all?

I move that we approve this evening's agenda as written. Alright. We second.

Second? Okay. Let's do a a verbal yes. So we'll start with Sue.

Yes.

Yes. Yes. Those online?

Yes.

Okay.

Alright. So agenda for today's meeting approved. We can move on to item number four, which is approval of minutes from our 07/17/2025 meeting. Do we have a motion to approve?

I move that we approve the ESB meeting minutes from the meeting of Thursday, 07/17/2025.

Anyone second?

I second.

Alright. K. We'll do a verbal yes again.

Yes. Yes. Yes.

That was online?

Yes.

Yes. Awesome. Thank you, guys. Okay. We can move on to item number five, which is board business, and we will start with welcoming our newly appointed environmental sustainability board members. So thank you, Kella, for joining us. Do you wanna say anything? Introduce yourself? Say anything? Sure. Just thanks for having me, and I look forward to collaborating. Thank you. Awesome. Well, we're very excited to have you. And if you have questions about anything or wanna know how like, why we're doing certain things in the meeting, just feel free to let us know.

So, and we we did have, another person that council appointed, but unfortunately or also kind of cool, they got into a PhD program at UNM. So they are not going to be on the board anymore. So that's awesome for them. We still have an open position. So if anyone knows of anybody, please have them apply online.

The application is on the boards and commission website. So and I think it's you know, the sooner, the better that we can get that filled. So, yeah, please talk to anybody that you know. Alright. Let's move on to the next item, which is the bicycle working group report by Herman Geppert Kleinrath. And let's see here, Herman. Herman will provide an update on

the transportation

bicycle transportation board bicycle working group. Thanks, Herman.

Hello. Good evening, and thank you for having me. So I'm presenting on the report we wrote and and submitted, and I also did a presentation for the transportation board on this topic. And this whole project was kicked off a while ago, basically, with the with the transportation board asking us how we can increase ridership. And then I think since cycling is one of the greenest and most sustainable modes of transport you can have in a city, It fits very well with the environmental sustainability board.

Venice. There are hardly any cars in Venice, but you can use a car in Venice. This happened before. And this is the intersection Trinity Trinity and Canon Road, hardly any boats. And we we are working on concepts here.

But, basically, infrastructure makes usability. So if you don't build the right infrastructure for a mode of transport, don't be surprised if if this mode of transport is not widely used. And for increasing ridership, you have to provide proper infrastructure, and the infrastructure has to be safe. More importantly, feel safe for the riders, be continuous so you don't have interruptions through construction sites, cars being parked on the bike path, and so on. Or an an interruption could also be a dangerous intersection that that people don't wanna ride through.

It has to be com comprehensive. In this case, this means that you're connecting locations of interest. So home, work, and third places as they're usually called. So the pub, the park, the grocery store. And it should be intuitive.

So if the infrastructure is easy to follow and you don't have to think where I'm supposed to go and where should I be in this intersection, the more likely it is for riders that are not very routined to use the infrastructure. So this is also a very important point in designing infrastructure. I we introduced the concept of level of traffic stress, and I like it because it's it's intuitive. And it has been shown to hold true over all kinds of cities and all kinds of countries on all continents. And, basically, if you have high levels of traffic stress, so low quality of infrastructure, no separated bike lanes but maybe painted bike lanes, and a stressful riding experience, you can attract like four to seven, but less than 10% of people are willing to ride a bike.

And you will get risk takers, fast cyclists, mostly young white men. And Los Alamos currently has 2.64% of ridership according to the last League of American Cyclists report. And I I talked to people and they said, basically, ridership was so low that it was just very difficult to assess how many people are actually riding. And this means we are having a high level of traffic stress in Los Alamos. We're not going to attract women, elderly, children, minorities.

And so this is just a gauge of where we're at. And studies have also shown that if you build very beautiful, safe, separated bike lanes, people who don't consider themselves cyclists or didn't think of cycling as a mode of transport are going to use it because if it's attractive, if if it's nice, people will enjoy riding. And it has been shown even in The US that you can get up to 50% of commuters to ride by bike as long as the distance is less than I think in this study, it was like four miles. And another thing to look at is the Vision Zero. This is a systematic approach that came from Northern European countries with the with the goal to have no fatal accidents, so no traffic fatalities.

And there are some some guidelines that they use, like a system that is only safe if nobody makes mistakes is not a safe system because everybody makes mistakes. So but you can have intersection design and engineering controls that reduce the likelihood of of people making mistakes. And if people making make mistakes, you can design the system so that the outcomes of accidents are benign. And the design of intersection can be made that accidents are unlikely by splitting up decision making in smaller, more digestible portions. And the last thing is control vehicle speed.

There is a very strong correlation between how severe an accident outcome is compared to to car speed because cars store a lot a lot of energy because they are heavy, because they are hard. It's so if you have an accident with a slow going car, you're more likely to survive than with a fast going car. So and we can apply some of this of those principles for bicycle infrastructure. And one of the most important aspects are intersection. Almost all the accidents happen at intersection.

And the most dangerous situation for cyclists are when the car is turning and doesn't see the cyclist. This is mostly because the cyclist fits very nicely in the blind spot of the car, and usually that's where bike lanes are. So the width and degree of separation should be adjusted to the traffic volume and speed. So if you have a lot of fast going cars, you also want to separate the cyclists more because it makes it feel safer and people are more likely to ride. We talked about it has to be continuous.

So if you if you have one spot that is so scary that you want to avoid it, you're not going to to ride your bike through this spot. If this is an intersection like Canyon And Diamond that you easily cannot avoid, you're not going to ride your bike. So this is important. We already said it's should be easy to follow and an intuitive design and road markings, color coatings are all things that showed good success all over the world. And comfortable, convenient, and beautiful.

People like to use nice infrastructure. And if riding your bike is very uncomfortable, you're not going to choose it as your everyday mode of transport. So this is also an aspect that that should be considered in designing bicycle infrastructure. For the most part, we recommend using the guides being put out by the National Association of City Transport Officials or NACTO. And they have an urban design guide.

And then they have a special guide for don't give up at the intersection, so specific for intersection design. And they have a design for all ages and abilities. And we pulled most of our information from those three guides. And in general, bike paths should be as wide as possible, as smooth as possible, and as high of a degree of separation as possible wherever you can afford to build that and have the space and it's allowable. And there is some guidance on on bike separation, and and basically the this is coming from the guide for deciding for all ages and abilities.

And with this guide, it they also have shown that the recommendations we have here for intersection design and so on do help pedestrians and differently abled people. And this goes from from wheelchair to somebody pushing a stroller. So as a father, I've been there and I had trouble pushing a stroller in Los Alamos, and I know that Los Alamos is working on improving the infrastructure. But intersection design is also an important part of that. Bike path width and the recommendation here is that gathers grades and are are not counted to the width of the bike path and that you have to have a shy distance.

You have to have a shy distance from a pole or a traffic sign and so on because people don't like to ride close to a hard vertical object. So so you have to take this into account. And, also, the bike path should be kept clean because gravel can make people slip on their bike and fall, so do potholes. And the picture a is going down from Konoko Hill towards the golf course, at which point the bike path basically gets six inches wide. And that's difficult to hit with a bicycle tire.

It's just at this point, you basically don't have any bicycle inter infrastructure, and this is at a point where car drivers go fast and there is a lot of traffic. And so those are are things that make the basic infrastructure not continuous. Intersections. So we have a lot of intersection described in the report with locations to put them. And intersection are of critical importance because this is usually where you have the highest level of traffic stress, where the need for good infrastructure is more critical than just having a straight bike path next to the road.

And this is an example from the Don't Give Up at the Intersection guide, and I I just want to walk you through what the what the ideas behind here is. So you have a queuing area for cars that is a little bit setback. This allows car drivers to see cyclists that are queuing to cross the intersection, and it also gives cyclists and pedestrians a head start. We have separated crossings for pedestrians for the bike path and the road, which splits up crossing the road and makes it easier for people who are not as fast or or have difficulty taking in all the information from the whole intersection. So at this point, the pedestrian only has to look to the left to see if a bike is coming, cross the bike lane, then waits for the cars.

Another few things here are there is a waiting zone for motorized vehicles, and this allows cars to stop for pedestrians when they're right turning and other cars to pass behind them. And there is a psychological effect that has been proven in in a study where if car drivers feel like they're blocking the intersection, they are less likely to yield to pedestrians and cyclists because they feel pressure to leave the intersection. And this simple design takes away this pressure, and car drivers are more likely to yield for pedestrians and cyclists. Another thing here is this corner island, and this is to to control speed. By changing the radius of the corner, you can change how fast car drivers are going through the intersection.

And the orange area is a mountable portion of this corner island. This now allows trucks, buses, heavy vehicles to mount the corner island at slow speed and still make the turn. So and there are recommendations on the size and height and and so on for this. And as I said, we we made a a recommendation of of where we think this type of intersection should be built. This intersection takes up a lot of space, so there are also versions of this that are smaller that could be used used at at smaller intersections without needing too much space.

But, basically, similar design principles hold true. So you have again a waiting area for cyclists that's in front of the cars. You have some corner hardening to control the car speed, but you don't have as many waiting areas as in the other design. And you can also control the speed by having centerline hardening, which forces cars to make the tighter turn and it also makes the road feel a bit narrower, and this also slows cars down turning. There's also it has been shown that that if a car goes 25 miles an hour, it's basically 90% unlikely to stop for a pedestrian and doesn't yield.

So controlling car speed is also part of the the equation here. And here we have a design for a side street, and it basically works again with the same principles. But here we have a raised pedestrian and cyclist crossing. And, again, here is a bit of space for the car driver to wait for the pedestrians and cyclists to cross. The raised the raised pedestrian crossing has, again, a psychological effect because if you are walking and you're stepping down onto the road, you're now entering the space of the car.

If the car has to go up to the level of the pedestrian and cyclist, psychologically, car driver is now entering the pedestrian space. And again, this results in car drivers being more likely to yield for pedestrians and cyclists. So this is just a way to to enforce traffic laws without like, in a very subtle way. We also have a recommendation for roundabouts. And, basically, again, same principles.

We have queuing areas and refuge areas for pedestrians and cyclists. You control speed by the angle that cars are entering the roundabout and how sharp this is and by the partly mountable Center Island. And you have waiting areas for the car to let pedestrians and cyclists cross, and then you have another wait waiting area for cars entering the roundabout. And what you do by having those waiting areas, you again split up decisions. First, the car driver only has to look for pedestrians and cyclists, then he goes on to the next stage at which point the car driver only has to look to the left if a car is coming or not.

If no car is coming, go. And so by by focusing attention on a single problem at the time, you're reducing the likelihood for drivers making mistakes. We also have recommendations of of where and how such infrastructure could be implemented. We've been purposefully vague in the designs because there is a lot a lot of detail on how wide roads have to be, what the corner radii have to be, and and so on. And we lack the expertise of of deciding that.

It's just basically throwing ideas out of how this could be accomplished. Another thing is speed control. So if you have a very wide straight road, people are going to go fast. And there are studies that have shown that speed limits, signed speed limits, do little to affect driver speed. Most drivers go the speed that feels right, not what's signed.

And if I'm going 35 on on diamond, I'm usually the slowest car. And if you want to enforce speed limits, there are, again, more subtle and more effective ways to do it. One is, for example, speed tables. Again, this could be combined with pedestrian crossings. In the transportation board meeting, there was a discussion on speed tables are difficult because it makes snow plowing more difficult, but there are other options.

So center islands or having the roads zigzag a little bit by having parking on the right for for one block and parking on the left for the next block or something like that, just makes the street look like you should be going slower. And another thing that was very effective, and this was, I think, Ontario, Canada, I put it in the report, they basically just put a pile in the middle that you can drive over. So so if you have an emergency vehicle or something, you can just plow through it. But it reduced the drive average driver speed by five miles an hour, something like that. But just having this thing that's not really an obstacle because you're not supposed to drive on the on the center line anyways.

And a big discussion point in the bicycle working group was central avenues. So this went from reducing traffic speed by having speed tables and and raised crossings to a one way road or to filter or block through traffic. So for example, you could make something like shown on the bottom left where, for example, for on the intersection of 15th Street and and Central, where cars going to the west can only turn left there and cars going to the east also only can turn left. So you you still can access everything by car, but you you make through traffic unattractive. So you reduce traffic basically to source traffic.

And another option is completely pedestrianizing Central Avenue for a section maybe from from Oppenheimer to 15th Street or or something like that. But because this is such an important space for the Los Alamos community, we think there should be trials. There should be some public input, maybe a a survey of some kind. And arguably, every time we have a parade, we test pedestrianizing Central. And this is the only time I see a ton of people in on Central Avenue.

So just if you make it attractive enough by, for example, having a parade, people will still find a way to go there. But a lot of those recommendations or suggestions can be trialed. It's easy to block one road and put up a one way sign. It's easy to put some mode filtering up for a month in summer and test how this works out for for the general public and and get input. And the last thing I want to talk about is education.

So it is a good idea to have educational material, and it should be easy, understandable, and preferably without the need for literacy. So if you can make everything in nice comics and without a lot of need for for somebody being able to read what's what's in there, it will be more effective. And this should be up to date. For example, this year, New Mexico adopted the Idaho stop. So now red lights are like stop signs for cyclists, and stop signs are like yield signs for cyclists.

And the Idaho stop showed in multiple studies a drastic reduction in accidents with cyclists, and, basically, they linked it to the shorter amount of time a cyclist spends in an intersection, the less likely it is for the cyclist to have an accident. And if the cyclist doesn't have to come to a full stop, they go through the intersection more quickly. And since a cyclist doesn't have any blind spot, it's also unlikely for a cyclist to overlook things. It's much easier to overlook things when you have an a pillar and the rear mirror and the phone rings, things like that. And the educational material should target all road users.

It's not just that cyclists learn what they are supposed to do. It's also good for car drivers and pedestrians to know what rules and rights the other participants have because then I can anticipate their actions. If I know what they're supposed to do, I'm I have a better feel what they're going to do. And this is it. Any questions?

Thanks, Harman. I have questions. Anyone else want to start? Okay. So you you guys presented this to the transportation board. Right?

Yes.

What was the feedback that you got?

Mostly very positive. Again, there are a lot of suggestions in there and and money and Yeah. Is a problem. We also we we basically recommend in the report to to update with with every roadwork project to update the bicycle infrastructure. With this, the the bicycle infrastructure will grow over time, will become continuous and and comprehensive.

Yeah. But this will only show effect once you get to a certain point of of comprehensiveness, and and that's why we also recommend to to redesign basically, all the intersections, Diamond, Trinity, Diamond, Canyon, and Walnut and somewhere you have a lot of traffic and basically no other way to to go through here to prioritize. Another comment was cyclists are going too fast, and we should install speed bumps for cyclists. There are multiple reasons why this is not a great idea. One is it will push the fast cyclists onto the road.

Right.

And the cyclists we have now are the highly confident risk taking young strong man. Yeah. So that that's kind of and Los Alamos is it's not holds as true as well because we have a very, very sporty and active community, so you get a little bit more diversity. But studies have shown if you build more cycling infrastructure, people will slow down because they don't feel the need to go as fast as the cars are. So cyclists in a stressful situation try to reduce the relative speed between cars and cyclists.

That's why everybody in The US has basically a a race bike to commute and the helmet and all the gear. And if you look to The Netherlands, they're wearing suits and no helmets. Yeah. And the another point was that ebikes are too fast, and there is no regulation on ebikes. And, no, there is not.

In Europe, this was was basically German enforced rules on how e bikes should work. So you only can have pedal assist, and you can only have pedal assist up to 25 kilometers an hour, which basically means that that e bikes mostly support the the onset and uphill. But once you're riding in the flat, you're you're basically have no support anymore. But in The Netherlands, it also has shown that the average cyclist commuting in The Netherlands goes 12 kilometers an hour. That's seven miles, eight miles. Something

like that. Yeah.

The average e biker in The Netherlands goes 13 kilometers an hour, so half a mile faster. The reason being because they don't feel the need. But the study has also shown that most cyclists are are willing to go, like, kilometers for commute. And with the e bike, this stretch to, I think, eight kilometers. So the e bike was more seen as enabling longer commute distance than speeding up cyclists.

And another aspect is because there are so many bikes in The Netherlands, it's hard to go fast on the on the bike Right. Infrastructure. So that's another another point here. There's also a study I I forgot. There is an ad that that basically looked for the happiest drivers in the world, and they have shown that the happiest drivers in the world are the Dutch.

And the reason being because there is not as much traffic because if 50% of people are cycling, traffic congestion is much less of a problem. And if you design intersections so they are easy to handle and less stressful, that just makes for a more relaxing drive. So so the the those designs improve traffic for all participants, basically.

Yeah.

Okay. Anyone else have questions?

Yeah. I do. So one of the things I just wanted to point out which is very cool, we've been I've certainly heard that the community is concerned about speeding and it sounds like many of these things that we might implement for biking and pedestrian safety would reduce the speeding issue as well, which is huge. So I think that's a terrific observation and one that we should be sure is on the top of people's minds. Let's see. As a cyclist, I'm surprised to hear that you got people saying that other cyclists are running are riding too fast. I have never had that problem.

This was a comment from a transportation board member that he was driving in his car and the cyclist was going faster than him.

Oh, okay. Sometimes I do that too. It's not hard. Yeah.

I mean, when the traffic is backed up, it's easy. It's Yeah. Also easy to go fast down Konoko Hill. Yeah. But, again, if I go downhill, I'm I'm going 25, 30 miles an hour. My wife does not because she feels uncomfortable going so fast. Right. So the more cyclists you get onto the bikes, the less likely you you have a cyclist that's going fast because you will attract a different Mhmm. Customer, basically.

Right.

The fast riders are already out there, so

Yeah. None of them have tried to run me off the road yet, so and I that's what surprises me. So one of the things it's so I totally I'm glad to hear you being interested in intersections like Canyon and Diamond because that is I I don't go through that intersection. I ride the sidewalks, basically. And it's my understanding that riding on sidewalks is actually legal here.

Riding on sidewalks is legal. The there there are problems with that because you're you're more likely to be missed as a cyclist on a sidewalk because people tend not to look there. And if you have large volumes of cyclists and pedestrians, you have a lot of conflict.

Sure. Sure. That is not not ideal. But I I I find that I often do tell people who are timid about cycling downtown because they don't want to deal with the intersections that, you know, if there's not a bunch of kids on the sidewalks, I ride on the sidewalks just so I don't know if that's an interim measure that you would want to encourage or not because it's going to be a long time before that intersection gets rebuilt for for bikes.

I so a lot of the times I'm riding my cargo bike. My wife is riding with a trailer. The sidewalk is is a no go at this point. And I I tell people you're allowed to ride the sidewalks, but I also tell them you have to be aware that that you it's easier to be overlooked and and that you have conflicts. Also, like, you should yield to pedestrians. You're entering their space. And I I see it as a Band Aid.

Yeah. That that that was my thought also. But it's it it it is something that is easier to implement at this time and might be a way to get more people cycling in the meantime.

This is also education again.

Right. Right.

The the lab sent out an email this week or last week where they explicitly said, you are allowed to ride on the on the sidewalk. And people then approached me. I didn't know that. And I was like

Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Whenever I tell somebody that, they're surprised.

Yeah.

And so so

I was I was so surprised that I actually went to the Los Alamos police station and asked whether this is true or not because somebody told me, and I was like, I I better check.

Well, I'm glad to hear it from you from the police. Let's see. So I guess the big question here is, how is this going forward? How do we make the space for these things?

And what support do you need from us, too?

Well well, yeah, there's that too. But just just the basic question of how how could we implement this in this county given limited roads and all the things.

This was a question that also come came from the transportation board. And this question always surprises me because I come from a medieval European city. I I feel like every road in Los Alamos is wide enough to have the nicest bike lanes. And talking to Eric Olubari, he said there is actually no need for Diamond And Trinity to have two lanes each direction because the the lanes are not the issue. The issues are the intersections.

The intersections are the bottleneck, and widening the roads doesn't really help with getting more traffic through. And so so it's a multi layered thing. So with the more people ride public transport and the more people ride bikes, the less need you have for for this amount of of car infrastructure. I do believe that we have plenty of space. It's just if you if you ride along Diamond, there is a a wide enough bike path for almost all the way.

It's just that the degree of separation is bad. Right. And it's not continuous because you have those portions where it's just too narrow. And and some of those things can be fixed, and and some of those are just basically decisions on on is there a need for so much road? Does the road need to be so wide?

An example in in Austria, it's common if you have two lane roads per direction that you make one narrow for cars and one a bit wider for trucks and heavy traffic. And I don't know if this could be implemented in in in Los Alamos, but there are ideas and things like that out there. Yeah. Always have the feeling there is plenty of space.

I'm I'm I'm encouraged by that. I I hope there aren't, you know Yeah. Stupid rules from the state or whatever about how wide traffic lanes have to be that dictate what we do.

Another discussion we had was basically this was polarized in the discussion because people said, we need to have central because it eases traffic for commuters going through Los Alamos.

And,

again, the bottleneck is is not trinity between Omega Bridge and and the roundabout. It's the roundabout and after. Because every time you have an intersection, it slows down traffic. And the other people said, actually, I don't want to have 10,000 people just going through Los Alamos without stopping. That that's what we have

to track route for. So

there is an argument being made for Right. Both, I guess. The question is what kind of community do we want to have. If we want to have a a community that has more alternative modes of transport being used, I think the path forward is to recommend implementing as much as possible from the report. And the transportation board opted for not recommending right away, but a discussion and and basically filter through what they think they should recommend and what they think they should not recommend.

We also in the in the report, we tried to to give peer reviewed research for for every claim that's in there and give an argument why this design is chosen and what makes it attractive. So to to have a bit of a deeper understanding of of the the arguments.

Yeah. Excellent. Yeah, also it comes to mind that we are bringing more and more people into the to live in our community, but we're pushing and building and so forth and just putting more people single people driving in single cars on the roads is not really sustainable or pleasant for anyone. So having more options more pleasant options for non motorized transport is a wonderful idea. And the only other question I had is about bike racks. Did you guys discuss the bike rack situation in Los Alamos?

We did to some degree. Most people who are on the the bicycle boards are unfortunately the the people who are already riding because they're interested and and and so on. And they were like, you can park a bicycle basically everywhere. And we yeah. We I I left it out purposefully.

Okay. I I I will say that it's can be challenging to park in some places. So

My I would argue there is no proper bicycle parking anywhere in in Los Alamos. But I I had a differing opinion to to everybody else in the in the working group.

Great. Well, you very much for this. This is

very cool. Any other questions for Herman?

I do, if there's not any.

Yeah. Go ahead.

So did you say you're going back to T board to discuss possible recommendations?

So the T board wants to to have a discussion, and and it was unclear to me from the meeting how this will materialize. But

Okay. Thank you, Herman.

And I I guess I'll ask what Shannon was gonna ask, which is is there anything that the environmental sustainability board can do to support this or to help it move forward?

County council likes recommendations from the boards. And I think that's a good way to to put the board's weight behind this. But I also, like, a discussion on it and and maybe make a differentiated recommendation if you feel the need to. But some form of recommendation would be helpful. And the chair of the transportation board asked me what would be my dream, and my dream would be that we implement everything tomorrow.

I'm I'm aware that this is going to take maybe decades to to to build, but we have to start somewhere.

Awesome. Thank you, Herman. Thanks for coming back and giving us this presentation.

Always a pleasure. Alright.

So next item on the agenda is to discuss and draft our annual ESB update to county council. And just as a reminder, we do this every year. So this year, we're doing it on October 21. And we try to keep it to about ten minutes in length, and it should focus on our accomplishments for the past year and describe the proposed work program for the upcoming year and then list some of the top priorities of our board and some of the challenges. And and Helka and I will be giving the update at the October 21 meeting.

Right.

Alright.

Okay. Okay. So I just made a draft version of our last year's presentation. So I made some edits just to, give you all something to start building on, but there's still lots of material that needs to be revised. Like Shannon said, it really should focus on what we accomplished and what we're intending to do and then any challenges we are having at this moment.

So about ten minutes. Shannon, our chair, will give the update, and, the the whole board is invited to attend that meeting. It'll be in White Rock. It's a work session meeting. It's the the other place our council meets is at Fire Station 3.

There's a big count like a big meeting room there. So okay. So first up, you might have seen an invitation for me to take a new group photo next month right before our meeting. So we'll meet here about 05:15, and Leslie Buckland will take our photo. It literally takes, like, five minutes.

So we'll take our photo, and then we'll get started with the meeting. So I'll be we'll be able to replace this. This is standard. This comes cookie cutter out of, copy and paste out of the municipal code, our county's municipal code, just what's the purpose of our board, how we were authorized, and then I've updated our teams in our working group. So if I missed something, we can revise that. Do you think

that because we've we've now had Los Alamos Sustainability Alliance, not zero waste Los Alamos for a while now. Do you think we can take that formerly zero wasteless almost out, or do you think we need to leave it in there? I don't know. It's been, two years, hasn't

it? Yes.

Okay. I think we should. Yeah. So If people haven't caught on by now.

Yeah. And I don't mean to, like, go through everything tonight, but since this is the first time we're doing this, together, it's maybe a little helpful. But also the intent tonight is to think about it and think what we what's missing, what we should include. So we'll make some revisions tonight. Yeah. Go back home, do some homework, and then you can submit those to me as you've reviewed this. And then we'll incorporate and then bring it back to our September meeting and then finalize.

Okay. Sounds good. So k. So keep my mouth shut.

No. If there's anything that's, like, standing out, right, like, if you think if you just think of it, we can just throw it in there. Okay. So ESP accomplishments. I just added some big ones, like, right, the climate action marketing and engagement services.

So and then, you know, Sue's working on that, our fleet conversion study and community EV charging plan, and then our single use plastic research that you are doing. So those are some really high level work that you are doing and you might wanna dive into one of those a little bit more. Right? And give what our recommend I don't know. I don't think we're giving our recommendation at that meeting, but you can get a sense, you know, if you had questions, that's a good opportunity for us to hear back from counsel and, you know, kinda let them guide how those processes are going if you had any.

Okay. And then events, I just looked at what we've done this year. I think most of these are accurate. If if any of you have better photos, please feel free to share. I looked at our presentations just for this year. I I left out if they were, you know, not really, like I don't know. Like a yeah. So I left I think yeah. Okay. We'll leave it at that.

If you wanna add other things, you're welcome to. And then what the alliance is doing, I didn't really update that, but it's kind of similar. And this was Sue and Kakyang making pick me fruit signs at Farmer's Market, which is really fun. Bee City accomplishments, I didn't update anything here either. And then I I changed the wording here to proposed work plan.

Like, what are our plan what are we gonna do next? So I'm not sure if it needs to be proposed work plan or if we just say, like, what's next or something more general, like what we're working on now or what's coming up because we're still at this weird October, November, December point before Yeah. Next year. What our priorities are? I don't think I touched this very much.

And then challenges, I don't think I touched that very much either. And then what would the county council like help with? And then questions. So this is in a nutshell. This can all be updated, revised, simplified, focused, honed in on a different area. So, you know, it's really an opportunity for us to share with counsel all the great things that the board has been working on all year. So Okay. We wanna do that in

the best way. So you're gonna send this out to everybody. Sure. When when do you want comments or feedback by?

Probably, maybe, you know, I'll send a date Okay. Before our meeting so I have time to incorporate everything. And then we'll still have an opportunity to revise during our meeting and see everybody's, you know, feedback.

So

Awesome. Sounds good. Any questions about anything that we just talked about?

No? No.

Let me

see if there's anyone online. It's a

no. K. Alright. Well, thanks, Anhalka.

You're welcome.

Alright. So next item on the agenda is rewiring America recap on becoming a certified electric coach.

And that's me. Give me one second. K. Let me give myself a note. K.

I can read this. K. So Angelica was selected to participate in the rewiring America's energy coach program. The purpose of the class was to educate participants about the benefits of electrification, and in turn, this information can be shared with community members looking to electrify their homes. In the short four week program, she learned the basics of heat pumps, whole home electrification, and weatherization basics.

I'm just trying to do the view. Where's the one where you only see your oh, here we go. Okay. Alright. Well, I'm really excited to share with you all what I learned, giving you an overview of rewiring America's energy coach program. So to be a certified, right, very fancy, a certified energy coach, you have to give do a capstone project. And this is my capstone project sharing with members of the community what I learned and how they can electrify. And let's see. So I'm gonna go from there. So what are you gonna learn tonight?

So I'm gonna give you an introduction, share with you what I learned, my electrification story, a typical electrification pathway, and some resources. So, what is rewiring America's energy coach certification program? It's an immersive cohort based learning experience, for experts who are ready to help their peers and their communities do the work to actually electrify. So I highly recommend if any of you are interested in becoming a electric coach to visit Rewiring America. I think the the next cohort's coming up.

It's four weeks. It's really an amazing program. There's there were 600 people that applied and, like, over 200 were selected. So it's pretty amazing. So what did I learn? So okay. This was all new to me. I will say that, and I'm by no means an expert, but I definitely feel like I have more information and knowledge than I did before. So how do you determine your electricity budget? So you in order to do this, you should identify how many amps you have and you can find this on your outdoor meter.

Here's a picture of my meter and CL stands for continuous line power and the 200 is the number of amps you have. So I have 200 amps, 240 volts at my home and the amps are what you would consider to be your electricity budget. Panels, electricity panels have changed as as time has, you know, through through the ages. Older homes nineteen sixties to nineteen eighties have, 100 amp panels typically. Homes built after nineteen eighties to today have about 200 amps and that's generally the new standard but there are estimations that newer homes will need 300 to 400 amp panels.

So a panel upgrade can be really costly ranging up to $20,000 for that upgrade. But what we found or what some experts have found and those that are curious to DIY, it may be possible to electrify your home on 100 amps. And there's lots of resources out there if you Google 100 amp electrification or watt diet, it'll share with you how you might be able to achieve that electrification without, you know, without having to upgrade your panel. So how? It takes finesse, takes energy monitors and splitters, a big component of it is reducing your heating, oops, and, cooling loads with weatherization.

So sticking to like a level one slower charger instead of a level two or anything faster, and then pairing, high electric demand items like your dryer or your heat pump water heater with other 240 volt items. So you can do this by using like an auto switch or a split circuit or sharing the charge. So a good resource here is the Redwood Energy Watt Diet Calculator. So they shared with us information about building science. So I'm gonna stick this is my basic version.

So thermodynamics, heat, you know, is trying to move into cold areas and temperature is always trying to equalize. So that means in our home, the warm air is trying to escape our home or vice versa. Right? So a big part of of why we need to weatherize our home is because of leakage. There's air escaping your home through windows and doors and actually any place where two materials meet.

So I thought that was really interesting. Infiltration, when air invades a home, we have the same type of thing happening except in reverse. And then, so homes built in 2012 or newer typically will outperform older ones even with lots of weatherization. So even a modest effort to weatherize your home will lower your energy use by 12 to 18% by air sealing and adding insulation. So I really love this example, it's about sweaters and like the evolution of the insulation and air sealing in your home.

So you could have this really nice warm chunky sweater but there's holes in it all over, right? And air can infiltrate or leak through your sweater. You could see at the bottom of it, it's wide open, the neck is pretty open, the sleeves are open. But as technology has evolved, so have our building codes and our insulation standards and the technology is like equivalent to you know, putting a nice warm hood and like a cinched waist and you're really trapping that air and sealing it into your home. So we wanna we wanna we wanna implement these same techniques into our home.

So how can we tell like how much our how much energy our home is using or how much leakage or infiltration that we're seeing? So energy audits are one way to do this. They're not necessary, but they're very telling. So to find an auditor, you can visit ResNet or BPI. And they will typically one one way to do this is a blower door test.

So this is it blows 50 pascals of of air and this is similar to blowing like 20 miles per hour at all walls in your home at one time. So the this measures the air changes per hour, how much air is moving through your home in an hour, and the lower the number, the better. So this was a surprise to me. So they said use caution in doing blower door tests because it'll actually stir up vermiculite and the asbestos in your older homes. So we don't want we don't want that.

Right? But leakage estimates could be 10 to 50% of your heat load. So you could really just be burning money by heating up your home. Alright, there's another fancy method to calculate your heat loss is through or your heat load through calculating your manual J. So this will help you to determine the size of a heating system you need in your home.

So it's more in-depth than a blower test. It accounts for like the size of your windows, the number of occupants, your ceiling height, and this helps determine how much heat that needs to be added for comfort and what that energy load would be. So again, analogy is the cup. Right? So heat goes or yeah.

He goes from hot to cold and the the old coffee cup, right, was latest and greatest. You could take your coffee with you everywhere, it would get cold fast. That heat is escaping pretty quickly through the top and the sides and the bottom and all around. And then as technology has evolved, you know, in comparison to our homes, we started to add more insulation. You have double panel walls, stainless steel, a cap on top to lock in that heat.

So this is no different than how our homes the technology in our homes has also evolved to stop the leakage and air seal. So interesting enough, when you think of electrification, weatherization is actually the goal of your home. That's number one. So we want to stop that leakage and stop the infiltration. A great place to start is in your attic.

There's lots of energy that's just wasted out through your ceiling and then the next best place to go is your basement. So again, you're really trying to put a cap on, put a seal on it. So when you're starting to insulate your home or thinking about it, want to look for reputable sources of insulation. There's different types, fiberglass, cellulose, spray foam, blown insulation. I even seen denim where they shred up denim and use that as insulation.

That insulation they recommended as good for DIY and noted to stay away from spray foam with hydrofluorocarbons. And if you're looking at carbon impacts of this, they all have carbon impacts. You can look at the ones that have the least carbon impacts if that's something you want to dive more into. So our values are important in terms of adding insulation to your home and they're additives. Can add a layer, layer, layer, layer and add them up to increase your performance.

They recommended covering joists and making sure that you don't cover your soffit vents. Also, noted that energy travels through wood too, so uncovered joists conducts heat in and out and acts as a thermal bridge. And what's recommended for a northern climate is r 49. I don't know how north they went. So a lot of these folks were out in Boston, East Coast.

Alright. DIY weatherization. So in the attic, if the if it's air sealed, ask add crossbat insulation. In the basements, you seal the gaps with spray foam inside your home, you could caulk around your windows, your trim, your baseboards, outlets, you could use those little like protectors that you would for infants or toddlers, Those will reduce the infiltration. Tape off where the duct meets the vent.

And then for doors, install weather stripping and and sweeps and then you can also add insulated curtains and blinds. So they did say slow your roll on windows, weatherization is first. So if you do if replacing your windows proceed if the sills are filling, they're foggy, probably if they're single paned and or if it's part of a bigger renovation or addition. And then the u factor is you wanna look for this number when you're purchasing windows. It's how well it resists the loss of air conditioned air.

So low the lower the numbers, the better. And the takeaway here is air sealing and insulations like peanut butter and jelly. You wanna do those too. And then attics and basements are more most important to insulate and air seal and DIY is your friend. Heat pumps.

So this is an easy what they consider to be an easy solution. There are two in one heater and air conditioner. They're three to five times more efficient than electric resistance equivalents. And then 86% of American households can save with medium efficiency heat pumps. And cold climate heat pumps are ready now.

So oftentimes people think, oh, I live in the cold and and they won't work. Well, they're ready. And I can tell you I have one and it it works pretty well. A solid a solid heat kelk can help you pick your equipment and I put lots of heat calculations resources in the resources page. So heat pumps are really good any place where electricity is cheap and your current heating or AC unit is at the end of its life.

So if you know that, you know, your heating or your cooling unit, your swamp cooler, you're thinking about getting a new one, that's the time to really consider a heat pump or when you want to add air conditioning. I know the temperature is changing up here and people are looking for a way to cool off, a heat pump might be something good to consider. So there's mini splits options, they're flexible options, you can have a single unit if that's where you want to start or you can add multi zone units. If your home is ducted, they can tie right into those current ducts and take advantage of those. Let's see.

Each what's really a cool benefit of those is each zone can have its own temperature. So say you're in your office all day and you want it to be 70 and your partner is in another room and they want it colder, you can do that. It's pretty neat. Or you have a room you don't use, you could turn it off and not you know, needlessly warm or cool a room. So there's two different types of heat pumps, there's standard and cold climate and the tip here is to set it and forget it to avoid the larger spikes of electricity use.

So here's my story. What's so I built my home in 2023. So I oriented my house so that most of my windows are south facing to really to provide abundant sunlight and natural light that would warm my home and provide like a really bright, ambiance and this helps to reduce my heating costs and my energy costs at my home. So there's no natural gas service in my area. The alternative would have had to have been propane, and it's just too expensive.

So my home is fully electric with high performing weatherization. Right? The r factors are high, the u factors are high, the appliances are all high efficiency. So the equipment I selected was a high it's actually a hybrid heat pump water heater to heat my water and what's really cool about that is it has different functions. So like it could be on energy mode, it could be on heat pump mode, or like right now something having an issue with the thermostat, I have to replace it.

So in that case, I can just change it to pure electricity. So it works really, really well. Say for example, I'm having guests and I need a high replenishment of hot water, you could turn on like the high demand and electricity mode so it uses both the heat pump and electricity. So it's really a really cool feature. I have an electric stove.

I didn't choose induction. It was just a little out of my budget but I chose electric. I have the multi zone ductless mini splits and then I have a high efficiency washer and dryer, and then the the it's all LED lighting. So I think one of my, like, wow, this was worth it moments wasn't when I can walk into my home at the end of, like, a winter day. You leave work late.

You get home at six, 06:30, and your home should be cold. You haven't heated it really all day, and I walk in and it's really comfortable. It's a really comfortable temperature. I might need a light sweater and then, you know, get things going. So my electricity bill ranges between a 105 to $200 per month, and that's at point it's about 10¢ per kilowatt hour.

And if you add taxes, it's about 16¢. So those are like the fees and the surcharges. I just added it all up. So I do have a high efficiency wood burning stove that I use to heat during winter months and you can see the spike here this past winter when I didn't use my wood stove because I was having problems with it. You could see the spike in my my utility bill there and my heat pumps, they they kept us warm so they can they functioned in in our cold climate.

So I think what's really cool is my dad seeing my heat pumps and the mini splits and everything like that. He wanted the mini splits so he replaced his furnace with a heat pump and you know, mini splits to heat and cool his home and then his brother seen his mini splits and then wanted mini splits. So it's kinda cool how it's just like, know, the story goes on. So it's really important to share your story and you know, learn from others and share with people how you're doing these, you know, how you're doing these retrofits and these upgrades and how much money it can save you and, you know, it's pretty cool that the technology had just keeps evolving from the paper cup to the, you know, the Yeti cup and the old sweater to the nice like, the technology is there to meet our needs, and it's cleaner and it's oftentimes cost saving so uncomfortable. So the electrification pathway is one, understand what your energy baseline is.

How much energy do you need for your home? You could do that by all those cool things. Right? The blower door test, the manual j, the Abby has a thermal camera in her in the library of things, and you can see where the thermal loss is in your home. That's pretty cool. You can check that out at library of things at the library. And then you wanna increase the performance of your home and reduce your energy load. Right? So you can do that by weatherizing, doing what you can. Right?

Caulking your windows and adding the the, you know, insulated mini blinds or curtains and then before it dies, electrify. Right? You don't wanna be replacing your heat pump, your water heater, you know, because at the last second because you're gonna most often just replace it like for like because it's just easy. You need hot water. So think about it.

You know, if you've been in your home ten, fifteen years, start thinking about a plan of, okay. What can I do when this is at end of life? Am I gonna you know, what do I wanna replace it with? So start doing some of that. Watch YouTube videos, talk to your friends, talk to me, visit rewiring America, there is a ton of resources.

And then you know when you start adding new loads, right, say you wanted an EV charger or you wanted a heat pump or an induction stove, if you're on that 100 amp, you know, how are you gonna manage those new loads? And then some green power that we might consider. We're all aware of solar and batteries. So I just wanted to make you aware of some of the tax credits and rebates that are still available, and I'll go through these. I wanna go through them because they're important.

So the clean vehicle credit, which provides $750 to purchase a new EV. The cool thing about this is you can transfer the credit to a dealer, and that'll convert it to an upfront discount. So it'll basically take the $7,500 off the sale of the vehicle, and that expires at the September. There is a used EV credit as well. It's a $4,000 credit.

You have to buy the car from a dealership to get the credit, and the same rule applies. You can transfer that credit to the dealer, and then, you know, it's basically an upfront discount. So the 30% tax credit for residential efficiency and electrification upgrades up to $3,200 per year. So heat pumps and the hybrid, I think I spelled that wrong. I'm sorry.

Hybrid heat pump water heater like the one I have will qualify for $2,000 per year and that also includes credits for insulation, weatherization, doors and windows, panel upgrades, and energy audits. So the install this is different because the installations must be made before December 30. The 30% tax credit for the purchase and installation of solar panels, geothermal heat pumps, battery storage, and more. So the expenditures, that means equipment that is installed and ready to be placed in service must be made before December 31. So there is a caution that, you know, you just make sure that these are still gonna apply and that you will get your you know, you will get the credit as as stated.

So 30% tax credit for home UV chargers up to a thousand per charger limited to households in rural or low income census tracts. And I think Rewiring America has that, like, to see if you qualify based on rural areas. And then the chargers must be placed in service before June 30 next year. So the rebates are what vary from state to state. So you would have to go check out MNerd's site for more information.

Those are being run through our state office. Let's see. So these are resources that they shared with us during this cohort coursework, and I haven't I know of a few, but rewiring America itself, they have a they have a tax credit resource hub coming soon. They have a savings calculator and an electrification planner. Like, where do you start?

It'll help guide you through that. There's an electric home show on YouTube. Efficiency Maine has a calculator. There's a cool calc for single family homes, a watt diet calculator, Volt's podcast, New York Times wire cutter, Electrify Portland, Green Home Institute, Thermentor, circuit breakers, like the list goes on. If you guys Google any of these if you have interest.

And with that I'll stand for questions.

Awesome. Thank you, Anhaka. Anhaka. Sue, do you have a question? Of course.

We should

start us off.

Yeah, I've been aware of this program for a little while, it's exciting that you took it. And so thank you for the presentation. Now I know what it was about. Do you see value in having other members of the community take this training? Is there an avenue that you can foresee we could use this training to help the community electrify further if some others of us took the training?

I do see a benefit. I would say if you had the time and the the interest to take the course, it's free and it's I mean, we get asked all the time these questions at booths, you know, once you start talking and it's good to have a little bit of insight and understanding to to what they're asking.

Yeah. Yeah. I guess I was thinking more generally, you now have a certification. And is there a way to more officially make this kind of information or this kind of service available to members of our community, not just questions at booths, but as a way to take this information and this official certification and say, We can help you electrify because we have this training and this knowledge. Then I'm asking so what I'm looking for is what do you think that might look like or is that something we could consider doing?

Yeah, I think it would be fun and worthwhile to offer like a webinar series or a series, you know, where we focus on maybe the individual components, weatherization, and then heat pumps and kind of the way they broke it up in in the the course and, you know, invite the community and who's interested may come.

We did have one of those for the for heat pumps, and it was really well attended. And the nature center at the nature center, and they'd be I think they'd be happy to do more of them. We did have a lot of it was a great evening. Was on the panel. It was fun. Lots of good Yeah.

So it doesn't hurt to repeat those types of things.

Cool. Thanks, Sue. Anyone else have any questions? No? Alright. Thanks, Angelica.

You're welcome. Thank you all for listening. Now I can submit my capstone.

Alright. So we'll go ahead and move on to reports, item number six, and I'll start with the chair report. I don't think I really have much. I'm happy we have new members, so thank you again. Trying to think. Yeah. We can move on from that. And we'll go to board of public utilities. So Sue attended the August 6 meeting, and then I attended for most of last night, and then Helica can fill in the gaps. So, Sue, do you wanna start? Yeah. You wanna go?

Yeah. So the the work session on the sixth covered some administrative things. And the main thing I think of interest to us was an update on our two hydroelectric facilities. So just by way of background, because I'm not sure everyone on the board knows about our hydroelectric facilities that the county has. These are two facilities that were built on the Rio Chama at Elvado Lake and Abiquiu Lake in the late 1980s.

And they've been supplying us with carbon free electricity ever since. We also get some other carbon free hydropower from the Western Area Power Association or WAPA, and that comes from some of the big hydro projects out West. And I can't name them for you, but we get some amount of, again, carbon free hydropower from them. Both of these power plants are run on the Rio Tchama and they're just whatever amount of water comes through them, through the lakes, through the dam system on the Riochama. So the maximum that we can get from those is about 26 megawatts total.

Both of them are still in pretty good shape. There's ongoing equipment and maintenance improvements being made. They plan to keep them going. One of the big challenges in recent years is that they're working on the dam at Elvato Lake And in order to work on a dam, have to drain all the water out of the lake. And so that of course impairs the flow through the turbines to generate electricity.

We're currently only getting two megawatts from that dam, from that facility. And that's just on the weekends because they let water through so people can kayak and whatnot on the Rio Tchama. And final repairs on that dam will take several years. The big challenge for both of these is drought and loss of snowpack, and that comes from less precipitation and also higher temperatures because we get most of the Rio Chabo water from snowpack. Last year, last winter snowpack was about 46% of normal, and total precipitation for the last year is only about 76% of the average.

So production from these, again, about two megawatts from Alvaro and about 1.3 megawatts from Abiquiu. Not a lot of our electricity comes from there, but it is carbon free electricity. They do plan to keep it going and it was interesting to learn about it. Occasionally they do tours and if you're ever up around those facilities, apparently you can just knock on the door and if someone's available they will show you around and they delight to do that. So that was that was basically it from that meeting that pertains to our interests.

Okay. Thanks, Sue. So last night's BPU meeting was a normal meeting. I was only able to stay for, I guess, maybe an hour and a half or two hours. And they most of well, the entire time that I was there was discussing, like, the strategic planning for the Department of Public Utilities, and there was conversations about the mission, vision, and value statements.

So DPU has those statements already, and they were just revising them and got some feedback from the board, and then they're gonna come back in September and make any edits, I guess, and then vote on it. I I do wanna note too, those are not just applicable to the board of public utilities, but the department of public utilities. That's basically how they work is under those things. So just kind of interesting, I guess. And then and then I left.

So I don't know if you wanna add anything else, Angelica.

I'm trying to think what else. No. I I mean, I think that's the gist of it.

Okay. Sounds good. Okay. So we'll move on to transportation board. We are vacant in that position. So if we have any new members who maybe are interested in that, Maybe we can add that to next month's agenda to talk about liaisons because we have a couple. And parks and rec board, I have not been able to go the last couple times, so maybe that's something else that we can consider. I was out of town last week. So alright. Health counsel, Jill, do you have any updates for us?

Yes. The working group that's been in play kinda putting together the nuts and bolts around needs for a central location or a couple of central locations for social services has completed their task, and there will be a presentation to the board at the September meeting, which is first Thursday at 12:00. Public is welcome. I think it's I think it's a really strong proposal, and, hopefully, now if we pass it as a board, then it'll go on to, I guess, to utilities maybe or public. I don't know where it's going.

But, anyway, a lot of hiring of architects and all that kind of stuff to get to some answers. So that has been the primary focus of the health council over the last couple of months.

Sounds good. Thanks, Jill. Counselor Rin, do you have a update for us? I do. Awesome.

Oh, Herman was here

last time.

Thank you, chair. We the council met. We had a work session on Tuesday evening, the nineteenth. We had a presentation on the electrification study, which was very interesting. Some of the items they touched on were the assets, the electrification scenarios, the age of the DPU lines in White Rock, and the efficient load growth.

And they did say it would be July at the earliest for the slow rollout of the time of use and demand rates. So I wanted to pass that along. The local and small business engagement working group gave their report. That group includes myself, counselors Dave Reger, and Randall Reidy. During the August 5 county council meeting, council passed a motion six to one to move forward with the retail LEDA program.

So we've been focusing on this and other issues that impact the small business community. Our report included information that we gathered on what other communities are doing with retail LEDA, a summary of commercial vacancy rates, available land, and some items that we would like to see the county consider further. Let's see. I'm sorry that Herman left because we also had a presentation about the Canyon Rim Trail feasibility. And they are looking at extending that to the medical center or the Omega Bridge and just the feasibility of doing it.

There's there's a lot to it. But like he said, you you have to start somewhere. And so they're they're looking at different ways they could continue along the Canyon Rim or if it could go up onto Trinity and continue all the way down to Diamond. And they were looking at different designs of that, as Herman mentioned. So there is nothing budgeted yet for any continuation, planning, design, buying land, anything. So they're just looking at the possibilities. So do you have any questions about any of that?

K. No questions.

Okay. Thank you for the cake.

Thank you.

It's delicious.

Alright. Inclusivity task force, Kukyoung.

So I think this is

just a. Oh, good.

Hi. For those who don't know, the inclusivity task force was a nine member task force appointed by the council. And within the task force, we have several working groups, and I'll just list what they are. The working groups are accessibility, economic equity, LGPD BDQ plus, BIPOC and cultural being one, and then justice. And I am each of the working group has a chair and up to four task force members.

And then we go out to the community to recruit other members for the working groups. So my working group is the accessibility working group, and I have 15 members in the group representing a wide range of of the the public. And our mission is to study the accessibility of all the county programs and facility and events. So we have field trips. We go and visit the senior centers, the library.

And yesterday, we visit the, we visited the demo garden to see how the demo garden can can be, modified or made accessible to different, disabled people. And it was very interesting because things like, you know, tactile map, for example. So we would like most county building to have a tactile map so that a blind person and vision impaired person can feel and know what the the setup of this building is. So things like that. So within my accessibility working group, we have also focus group.

The focus group work work on specific area of accessibility, their mobility, sight, hearing, the neurodivergent, and we have one for the open space and trail. And each of this working group will have several members. Also, we we extend to the public so that we have a big bigger group than just with with the working group. So each of the focus group is is now getting started to gather data. And I have if you haven't seen this,

we

have actually, this is recyclable. You use it use a QR code and pass it on to a friend. So this is really recyclable survey card. I'll give it to one person here who didn't have it. So each of the focus group will, at the end of our mission, come out with what we call the three low growing fruits.

These are items that can be accomplished with low cost with high impact. So two of the focus group already have done their work and and given us the the three low lying foods. So the other focus groups still working on it. So what we plan to do is to continue to get data. And and and by the November, we would sit together and prepare a final report to be presented to the county council by February, which is the the length of our service. Any question?

Thank you, Kokim.

Okay. I'll give you one of these. You know?

Thank you. Appreciate it.

All right. We can move on to working groups and steering committee updates. Do we have a LASA update?

Sure. We met in August a couple weeks ago, last week. Our September sustainability newsletter will be focusing on bears, because it's that time of the year. One project that we're working on is to put together sustainability welcome kits of information for new residents. The idea is to how do we get new residents off on the right foot with all the information and resources that they need to get up to speed on sustainability things in Los Alamos.

And so this would be things like information on trash recycling and composting, bears and wildlife, Atomic City Transit, bike routes, water and energy conservation, some of our local sustainability groups, the B City and Seed Library and so forth. We welcome other ideas for content. And especially what we need to figure out is how to get this information into the hands of new residents. So when people have their own home and turn on their own utilities, they have to come here to the municipal building to do that, and we can give the information to them at that time. But we don't really have a way yet to contact renters.

There's no association or anything like that. So if anybody has ideas either to add to this welcome kit or and or information about how we contact people that are coming in to rent, not not coming and setting up their own utilities, we would welcome that.

Oh. Oh, I'm sorry.

Go ahead. Yes, Joe.

We're in

a conversation. My bad. Oh. I was just gonna say most renters pay their own utilities. Okay. And and so that's probably the easiest way to get in there.

Okay. Great. Great to know. Then maybe we won't be missing as many people as as we had feared.

Also, if, like, for the apartments, last time I moved into an apartment, I got a little welcome kit from my apartment complex. So maybe you could talk to the management folks and see if they could include something. Yeah. Perfect. That would be perfect.

Thank you. I'm glad I brought it up. So we do have a Environmental Services does have a table coming up at Bear Fest on Saturday. As far as I know, I'm the only volunteer, so I think it's gonna be me and Josh. If anyone else could volunteer, that would be wonderful.

It should be a lovely day and a lovely event. I think it goes from ten to two. And the other other interesting development, we we when when Ryan Raymaker left the peak, he was our liaison to to the Sustainability Alliance. But now Britton Don Harle, who is, also also the BCITI coordinator, is is is also has been hired as a peak educator. And so we will now have a liaison to the Nature Center for the Sustainability Alliance, which is tremendous because the Nature Center people are always open to helping us do sustainability education.

And so it's been really helpful to have somebody that's liaison there. So let's see. The only other thing that I'll mention is that there's going to be on September 21 at SALA, The Rotary Club, in conjunction with Citizens Climate Lobby, are going to have sort of a climate change event from twelve to three It's going to it's sponsored by Rotary. It's going to include a movie called Purple Mountains from the Protect Our Winters People group. And then there'll be tables with climate change and environmental related information from Citizens Climate Lobby.

I think Abby Hayward is also going to have a table on electrification, and there should be other groups as well. So that's September 21 at for a free film at the SALA from twelve to three

Cool. Thanks, Sue. Alright. Do we have a update on the education and outreach working group?

I'll just say, I just listed our climate marketing and engagement services. I thought of it to be under this category, but we did select a vendor. The next step for that will be it'll go with our attorney's office, and then they'll start negotiating before we're able to officially award. So just wanna thank Sue for serving on that group and giving her analysis and expert feedback, and it's great

to have you on that. Thanks, Sue. Alright. Community wide EV study working group. Any updates on that?

You don't have you can pass your

hand on. Has been going to more of those than than I have, but and things are certainly going along.

Yeah. I mean, we're working on develop I the consultant is working on developing heat maps of where EV chargers should be. There's a lot of a lot of considerations for where they should go based on population and estimated EV demand, and they're aligning them with our feeders and what the energy loads will be there. And there's a lot of thought that's going into that along with how they are estimating the community to adopt EVs into the future. So they're working on those components.

But just at a high level, our draft will be ready in October. So this will you know, the board will get an opportunity to see it, to read it, provide comments. We'll invite the public to attend and provide comments, and we'll also be having a special community meeting to gather comments on that, and it'll either be on the twentieth or the twenty third, I think. So they'll present to the ESB, to council, to BPU, and then

a special community meeting. So Sounds good. Thank you.

Welcome.

Alright. For the plastic bag free research group, we don't really have any updates, but we should hopefully be prepared to give another presentation next month.

I had a question, possibly a suggestion. Yes. Is your group interested in getting information on how much plastic bag pollution there is in Los Alamos County? Is that something you're collect trying to collect?

Yeah. So I I meant to email doctor or director Styron, and I have not done that yet, to see if, like, they're spending money cleaning stuff up, I guess. And then we did also talk to Josh at the eco station and get confirmation about what Angelica was saying that it's, like, about 17% gets is contaminated, but there's no way to determine if that's you know, what is the contamination? Is it a pizza box or is it a plastic bag? Like, it's just a whole number.

That's what's going through our recycling stream to yeah. Yeah. So what I was wondering about was, are you interested in the number of plastic bags in our local environment, in our canyons, in

our Yeah,

think so.

So there's an opportunity coming up for that. And I've spoken with Josh Levings at the Eco Station. We have Clean Up LA Day coming.

JESSICA Oh, that's a great idea.

JESSICA JEAN: People will be going out into the community and picking up trash. And you could collect that and do some sort of audit. He said he might even be able to do that or have staff do that. I also thought you might be able to get AI to do it. Just take pictures of your of what gets collected and ask AI what it is. It's okay, good at that stuff. At any rate, that's a he said that was totally feasible. I forget what day Clean Up LA is. It's Saturday, September

yeah. Twentieth.

Yeah, let me see. Yeah. And so that's a way really to see how much of the trash that's out in our environments is plastic bags versus all the other things.

Yeah. That's a great idea. That is, like, right that's, like, the weekend right after our next sustainability meeting, but that's okay. We should still I think we should still try and get that information. Cool. Thank you, Sue. Alright. I don't think we have anybody here for a b city update. No. It's like the Kokan

last No. Britain is not able to attend. I saw her this morning.

Alright. So we'll move on to staff reports. K.

Okay. So our August sustainability newsletter, thanks to Eloise Shepherd, who was our student intern, was focused on creating a native landscape, xeriscaping, and water conservation using gray water systems. So our subscribers, although small, has continued to grow. We have, 90 in comparison with, 85 last month, so keep sharing. The EV charging charging infrastructure.

So I think I let you all council approved installing six new level two EV chargers here in our municipal building parking lot. We're working on permitting right now and working on permitting, and then we'll have a schedule for when we can start work, but that'll depend on the lead time of ordering equipment. But we are we're we've already, you know, rolled up our sleeves to start working on that. The plan will be to place them facing Irish Street in in alignment with the Level 3 that's out front. And then when they're all installed and up and running, we will we will, I guess, eliminate the ones that are in the center median.

So and recycle those. So we also applied for an NMDOT DC fast charging grant, and we officially were notified that we received that award. So the project will install two DC fast chargers at Mesa Public Library. We're starting to plan for that. So the next step for that is it'll go to council for acceptance of the award or of the grant.

And then you already heard about the EV charging study, education outreach. The next project now that climate marketing and engagement services is pretty much wrapped up will be to start working on developing scope of work for energy audits that we can perform on residential households. We're still trying to move forward the municipal food composting program. So working through some of those alternative ideas. So and then events, so volunteers needed for if you'd like to help Josh, but thank you for all the volunteers at Farmers Market with Sue and Cook Young, I think, and Josh and I.

So our next opportunity to volunteer is farmer's market on September 11, and then cleanup will stay on September 20. So normally, we pick another day during the week, like, for a lunch hour to clean up an area. So you'll see you'll see an email come out from me. I always I like Canyon Room Trail because I know we're gonna find trash, and it's like a level surface. It's pretty safe.

If you're wearing kind of dress clothes, you're not gonna have to be climbing a ravine or something unless you want to. So and then I always like to share our sustainability report image. Let me see. Where is it? Oh, I guess I closed it, but it's in your agenda packet.

It's on the last page. So in July, the ECO station diverted 32% material, which is a lot. Even though it's a lot, it was down from the year before, so you could see the year over year averages. And just a reminder that we are hauling waste to Valencia Landfill, which is further than the Rio Rancho Landfill. So I think it's a 120 miles one way. So it's quite the haul, and it's very expensive. So, yeah, with that, that's all I have, Cher.

Thank you, Anne Halka.

You're welcome.

Alright. Let's see here. So next item is preview of upcoming agenda items. So I think next month, we will we will finish out our council update presentation and then hopefully have an update on the plastic bag fee research group. And as always, if you have suggestions for anything you want on the agenda, please let us know. And with that, I think we can end today's meeting. Thanks, everyone.