Common Council - Regular Meeting

I am very excited to call to order the common council discussion on the topic of sustainability. This is not a situation in which we need quorum. Um I will note that we have a majority of uh alders online. Um and so I will work to get your hands online as best as I can. Um, but thankfully we are in this chamber and it's a lot easier than in the other space. So I am going to let Jessica take it away.

Thank you, President Vidver. Um, I'm Jessica Price. I am the sustainability and resilience manager here at the city of Madison. Um, I lead our small but mighty sustainability and resilience team and we're really excited to be joined here today by several of our colleagues to share the 2025 um, implementation report for the city of Madison sustainability plan and provide some presentations that talk about the highlights of what we've accomplished since it was adopted in late 2024. So, we cover a little bit more than 2025. Consider it a bonus. So, I'll go ahead and share my screen and hope that it works right. Okay. All right.

We got to switch.

Oh, great. Thank you. Okay. So, just a little bit of background about the sustainability and resilience team. We are really kind of the shepherds of the sustainability plan. Our mission is to make the Madison community more environmentally sustainable and resilient for current and future Madisonians. And so to achieve this mission, we do a lot of collaborating. We work across city agencies and with the Madison community to develop and implement policies and programs that advance the city's energy, climate, and sustainability goals. Um in 2024, um the common council adopted the sustainability plan. It was the first time our plan. We Madison has a very long history of having sustainability plans. It's been a priority um in our community for a long time. But in 2024, we adopted the most recent plan um that had kind of been sitting on a shelf for a little while. The last one had been adopted in 2011. So we were well overdue for an updated plan that captures our current work and our future ambitions. So this plan um includes 24 goals across eight categories. Those categories include quality affordable housing, resilient city design and infrastructure, renewable energy and decarbonization, sustainable transportation, clean abundant water, zero waste, healthy ecosystems, and a vibrant green economy. So, you can see that this covers a lot of if not all the elements of a sustainable city. It's also where our climate and energy goals live. So, Madison doesn't have a separate climate action plan. It is embedded in our sustainability plan. This plan was developed through uh a really rigorous community engagement process that included a communitywide survey that had more than 16,000 responses. Um it was offered in multiple languages. Um there were two popup events and then seven focus groups um including one internal focus group with city staff and um and elected officials

and additional focus groups with different um folks across the community. I'm going to move this so I can see a little better. Yeah. So you can see um we led uh this was took place in 20 mostly in 2023 and it helped us um improve and make our plan um more specific and attainable for our community. Um there's two main components to the plan. Within each of these sort of sections or chapters we have both goals and actions. So the goals are really what we focus on at the high level. They are ambitious yet attainable achievements that make Madison a more green and resilient place to live and work today and tomorrow. And so each goal is then accompanied by a set of actions. And those actions are the policies and programs and projects that together will help us accomplish that goal. And so the goals are really more of our goalpost where we're going. And our actions, we want those to be flexible. So as new opportunities, technologies and circumstances arise, we can adapt and pursue additional goals and actions or sorry additional actions in service of those goals. So we're going to be trying to like not just have this plan sitting on a shelf, but really make it adaptable and a living document that moves with us as we um as we progress. So we've been working on implementing this plan um pretty much since its adop adoption and it's it required and um and really seated a lot of outreach and collaboration across city agencies. And so one of the first things we started to do was say okay we've we have this plan and now how do we make sure that it's really something that guides the work and is informed by the work of all of our city agencies. So, one of the first things we did was form our sustainability champions team and started bringing those folks together. Um, and that team has really played a big role in helping us issue that report. So, I want to thank them at the top. Um, all of the city staff, and I'll

talk a little bit more about them in a minute, but all of the city staff that helped us get here, um, and help share the successes that they and their colleagues have been working really hard on. So, we have sustainability champions. We have over 40 individuals from about 15 or 16 different sort of agencies, departments and divisions at different levels. Um because you can imagine that those eight different um chapters really touch down on a lot of the work of the city. And so these are the folks that giving all of them a shout out today and some of them are here to present to you later. So the champions roles, they're dedicated driving pro progress on one or more of the plans goals within their agency. They serve as a point of contact for us on the sustainability team and a resource and expert for community questions. Um they track progress for our annual reporting. So they work within their agency to sort of say how are we moving along on these goals in the plan? Um are we working on the actions that are in the plan and are we doing something different and innovative? Um they're graciously presenting to our sustainable medicine committee about their affiliated goals. So, if you're ever curious um about how things are going and want to hear from those agencies, please do come to our SMC meetings um and they join our bianual and one-on-one meetings um with sustainability staff to help us get all of this done. So, this was from our first uh our first champions meeting. Uh thanks to Brook Botanical Gardens for hosting us. We're um excited to get to join there and really talk about some of the crossover and collaboration that's happening between agencies and between goals. I like to call this the cross-pollination that we have between um our different champions. And we really pulled together to create the implementation report. So we it's really intended as a document that shares success and quantitative qualitative updates on the progress toward each goal. Um, we gave each goal's 2025 status a score on a scale of

1 to five. So, one means that we haven't really started or recorded a lot of like completed progress on that goal. Um, but that doesn't mean that it's not important. It just might be nent or it might be very new. Um, stage two is an early planning stage. So, we've gotten a little progress. We're thinking about how we can get it done. We're doing some planning and maybe budgeting. Um, stage three is we've done some foundational work. we're working actively on that goal and we have some achievements to show for it. Stage four is significant activities are completed. So that means we're really going um full steam ahead. And stage five means we've really achieved some major milestones toward this goal this year. Um it's really on track. Some of our pro our goals are stuff we will get done and be like, "Yep, we're finished." And other goals are things that we as a city want to continue to do and that's ongoing and that might be in stage five. So this is an example of one of the pages in the report. So I just wanted to orient everyone who might have been going through this or intends to go through this of um what it looks like. So um we have our chapter renewable energy and decarbonization at the top. Our goals numbers and our statement of our goals um in each row and then that 25 uh 2025 status um is on the right. You can see it's numbered and it's colorcoded and it's a little kind of battery charge up bar. So we really wanted to make it clear at a glance what's going on. And I'm happy to say that most of our um our goals are either in that three status, so we're like moving on that goal and we're um we're moving along quite well. Number four is we've achieved some major milestones in that goal. So that's where most of our goals are. We have some that are like at that five stage, which means we're completing major milestones and we're like really um knocking it out of the park. And some of our goals are are a little bit earlier than that. Maybe we're still planning it. Maybe it's something we haven't started yet. And that's okay because this is a plan that's supposed to be taking us into the future. So, we didn't want a plan that just captured all the things we're doing right now, but we wanted a plan that captured some of the things we want to

do in the future. And out of 24 goals, it might be difficult for us to do all of them at the same time. We can do great things. We may not just be able to do it all at once. And so, today we have some highlight presentations um spread across our chapter. So, we want to have a representation of folks that might be interested in those different elements in the plan. Um, so from our zero waste section, we'll have an update on our farmers market food scraps collection with Brian Johnson. Um, I will give an update on our air quality monitoring project that fits under our resilient city design and infrastructure element. We have some healthy ecosystems updates from um Craig Clinky on the Madison um forestry planting. We have quality affordable housing updates on the efficiency navigator. I'll be back for that one. And we have a lot going on in renewable energy and decarbonization. So we'll hear about the building energy savings program from Greg May, the renewable energy um and efficiency work that our facilities team is doing. Um we actually have John Evans and not Brian Cooper. Sorry about that, John. And then um an update on decarbonizing the city's fleet with Rachel Darkin. So there's a lot going on. Um and I know hopefully um everyone got a copy of the plan in advance. So, we're happy to kind of take questions on anything we don't cover here, but really wanting to get some excitement about the highlights that we presented. Um, so, uh, where are we going after this? Skipping ahead, um, this summer we're going to be working with our champions to gather baseline data for our metrics reporting. So, not only are we giving these, um, annual implementation updates to kind of offer highlights about our accomplishments and track how we were doing um, in a given year, but we're also going to be measuring our progress. So each of our goals we wanted to make a smart goal. So it's time bound, it's quantitative, you can measure it. Um and we they're kind of compared to a baseline. So the first thing we need to be doing is make sure we have all of our baseline data um together. And then we'll be working on quantifying our progress every four or

five years or so um so that we are tracking that in a in a measurable way um and using our data. Um we're going to be meeting in our small groups to identify and pursue opportunities for coordination and collaboration. And then of course across our different work planning and budgeting um exercises across our different agencies, the sustainability plan will be feeding into those decisions um to make sure that we're aligning our priorities, our capacity, and our funding to implement the plan. So I'll pause there before we bring up Rachel to talk about sustainable fleet. And I'll queue up your presentation, Rachel. All right. Good evening everyone. My name is Rachel Darkin. I am the um now fleet superintendent for the fleet service division. Um and I'm going to be talking a little bit about um the work that we're doing to decarbonize um our fleet. Um, so I always like to start with a little overview of what who fleet is. So we uh we purchase, we maintain, we provide fueling and then we sell at end of life almost 1500 uh pieces of

equipment and vehicles for the city fleet. So this is essentially everything on city streets but uh not metro transit. Our team consists of 38 full-time staff. Uh we maintain and supply 12 fuel stations across the city. We work in three repair garages. Um, and we do this over two shifts and with two part-time apprentices. So, lots going on within our team. And again, I always like to start with this snapshot of our emissions work or emissions reduction work to date. Um, this graph is found on our website and it captures all of the cumulative CO2 pounds reduced by our efforts across our fleet division since 2018. And essentially um it does it does capture the carbon savings from our uh lead gold certified facility on Nusa Trail which we love. Um and we are really focusing on two separate prongs for our fleet. So that's um putting electric and hybrid vehicles into service and that's captured in the very light the the bright green color in the middle of the chart there. And then the use of bofuels in our in our large diesel fleet and so that's captured in the darker green color at the bottom of the chart. Um so these numbers I know they're very small on this graph. Um, just to pull out a few, last year with our hybrid and uh, fully electric vehicles, we saved about two million pounds of carbon dioxide. And then with our bofuels, we saved almost 3 million pounds of carbon dioxide from being emitted into our community. So, these really are having an impact. And I'm going to go into a little bit more of the details of how we're doing this next. So currently in our fleet we have um over 130 fully electric vehicles and um over 150 hybrid electric vehicles. A lot of these are are the light duty vehicles

that you see on the road, the passenger vehicles, our trusty Leafs and bolts. Um but then we also get into um some other applications like um uh UTV carts and um forklifts and of course the Pierce Voltera, the first um electric fire engine in North America and a few other heavy duty applications too. Um we have found that electric vehicles work extremely well in the light duty space. And so as we uh look at replacing our vehicles when they come end of life, we're always evaluating is this a place where an electric vehicle will fit? Is this a place where a hybrid vehicle will fit? And how can it how can it we work with our partners in engineering to make sure we have the charging infrastructure ready to go. Um and aside from the um sustainability benefits here, we also get some benefits in our operating budget. So I wanted to highlight that. Last year we saw an average um 50% reduction in our work order costs for our electric vehicles and our hybrid vehicles across the board. And then we have also seen um you know fuel savings uh our EVs for every 5,000 m driven uh save us 400 gallons of fuel. And then our hybrid vehicles save us over 200 gallons of fuel for every 5,000 m driven. So, every time a city employee checks out one of those vehicles in our pool or um does their work with with those electric vehicles, it's saving on our operating side as well. And of course, we have our electric vehicles in the heavy duty space that we are testing. Um this is Trash Gordon in the streets division and um we have two actually now three um waste trucks uh electric waste trucks in our fleet mostly within streets. We've also uh we're testing one in the parks division now and um we're finding where these

these pieces of equipment will fit best within our operations. Um it is definitely still a test at this point. Um the the state of the heavy duty EV technology in our in the um in the industry is just not quite where we need it in our cold weather climate, but it's getting there. So this test allows us to keep figuring out how it fits within our operations. Um, but the other side of it is that these uh these vehicles are more expensive upfront and they come with a a heavier lift in order to get the charging infrastructure installed in our city facilities. So, in the meantime, our our main strategy to have an impact on our on our sustainability goals is by using clean fuels. So, I'm going to go into a little bit of an overview of the clean fuels that we are using for our diesel fleet. Um, most of you have probably are very much uh aware of our biodiesel usage. Um, but we're also incorporating renewable diesel. So, biodiesel is a renewable fuel made from soybean oil, agricultural waste, and other waste oils. Um, renewable diesel is made from the same feed stock. the the place where they differ is really how they are produced. And um the process for creating biodiesel creates a fuel that u meets a specification separate from the petroleum diesel specification. Renewable diesel is chemically the same as petroleum diesel. So it meets that same ASM D975 specification. That's important for thinking about the pieces of equipment we can use the fuel in. Um both fuels on average will reduce emissions in our carbon footprint by around 75%. Um it changes based on the feed stock used um and the various life cycle costs associated with each of those feed stocks but on average we're

seeing um the the studies are showing around 75% reduction. Both fuels do have cold weather challenges which is something that um is a little bit of a misconception when we think about renewable diesel. Um, biodiesel will absolutely gel up the way that uh, petroleum diesel does, but just at slightly higher temperatures than we're used to as regular diesel. Renewable diesel does the same thing. Um, it does start to actually almost freeze solid when it gets stored near its cloud point. That cloud point is lower than biodeiesel. So, we have a wider range of temperatures that we can use renewable diesel within. But, it does still have some challenges that we need to be aware of when we put it into our operations. Um the key thing for me though is is going back to that um that specification which allows us to use each fuel in different pieces of equipment. Biodiesel is only compatible with our existing equipment within vehicles and also our fueling infrastructure in blends up to 20%. Renewable diesel however we can use 100% renewable diesel in all of our existing equipment. So that makes that uh the use of the renewable diesel much more flexible within our operations allows us to use it uh when when we have it available when the price is right uh without investing a ton of resources in upgrading our infrastructure. Um thinking through um the use of the the both fuels within our fleet. We've done a wide variety of testing over the last several years. um we have tested and used successfully a blend of B5 which is 5% biodeiesel B20 20% biodeiesel all the way up to B 100 in a in a pilot program and then on the flip side with with renewable diesel we've tested um 100% renewable diesel which is also known as R99 um R80B20 which gets some benefits of the biodeiesel um mixed

into that fuel and then also blends of R25 or R20. So smaller portions of renewable diesel mixed with petroleum diesel.

Yes. Um so the the difference between biodeiesel and renewable diesel really comes into its chemical structure. Um it's made from the same waste uh you know feed stocks but um the process to make them are different. So when you end up with renewable diesel, it's chemically the same as petroleum diesel, whereas biodiesel has a different chemical makeup, but they from the same waste oil.

Correct. Yep. Um so back in 2018, our former superintendent uh was very wise and introduced a blend a variety of biodeiesel blends into our fleet. Um, and starting in 2019, we've been operating under a a program of ordering B5 in the winter months and B20 in the summer months. Um, starting in 2022, we embarked on a 2-year B 100 pilot. So, we were able to test the use of 100% biodeiesel in about 18 pieces of equipment over a 2-year period. And that was very successful. We were able to run 100% biodeiesel in um subfreezing temperatures. And we also learned all of those limitations when it comes to the infrastructure that needs to um come along with the use of B100. Um using B100 meant adding equipment to each of those pieces of equipment, each of those trucks in order to actually run the fuel. And it would also require us upgrading all of our fuel sites, um putting in new tanks and things that were compatible with 100% biodeiesel. When you think about our size of our fleet on the heavy duty side of things, um it's over 500 pieces of equipment that span everything from fire engines to street sweepers to garbage trucks to you name it. And trying to work with a company to engineer the correct um add-on equipment to all of those different platforms becomes a really huge lift. So in 2024, we began testing renewable diesel in the fleet and we started with a a limited test in the summer of 2024. We only tested um R99 for about 2 months. And we wanted to make sure that a that it would work within our equipment and and b that there would be no operational impacts for the agencies using it in their fleets. And we heard crickets, which was amazing for us because that meant it was doing exactly what we needed the fuel to do.

So in 2025, we expanded um our test and started figuring out what would work well in those cold weather temperatures because again, renewable diesel reacts a little bit differently than biodeiesel and we need to be really careful when we get into temperatures below freezing. Um so we were really successful with R25 in the springtime months. So so like in March where there's a lot of shoulder um temperatures between cold and warm. Um, and then we've also tested R80B20 over the last summer. And now we're embarking on um an effort to really solidify what renewable diesel looks like in our fleet in our program going forward. Um, so this winter we've been able to test a blend of R20 as I mentioned before and this one has proven um, perfect for operating in those sub freezing temperatures. Um, we've gotten five loads of it now over over the course of this winter so far and it is able to um do everything that we need it to up to 0 degrees Fahrenheit. Um, so it seems as if this is going to be the backbone of our winter fuel program. Um, and then going forward, we'll be able to increase that percentage of renewable diesel in the warmer months and get more bang for our buck in that sense. And we're also looking at expanding the fuel sites that we are um delivering this fuel to and offering to across our fleet. And I will pause there. Questions for Rachel? You want to wait and have the questions at the end? Okay. All right. It it might it might be like uh ping ponging then. But

okay. Okay. Well, while you're getting ready, Brian, I just think that everybody is so happy with the streets response with this unusual March snow. We've been getting kudos. So, just thank you for the incredible work and especially the uh if folks didn't see the extra special um plow to get the um mom to the hospital to deliver. So, pretty pretty neat stuff happening in the city. There we go. Yeah. So, I hardly deserve any of the credit for the for the plow work that was done. That was all of our the staff. The assistant superintendent, Roger Cly, working like way harder longer hours than this and our staff did an amazing job. So, good job to all them. So, I just get to talk about it. So, I look great, but like it was really their hard work that did this. But I'm here to talk about our food scrap program here. So, if I can I made a mistake and I sent it as a PDF instead of a PowerPoint. So, excuse me as I try to slide through this thing. No, we'll be okay. Oh, how do I fix this? Yeah,

make this as painless as possible. There you go. And then if you hit the down.

Oh, okay. Gotcha. Thank you. Okay. So, the recently in like so late last year, the state of Wisconsin came out with this food waste evaluation report where they kind of try to quantify how much food waste goes to was the landfills around Wisconsin. And it's 900,000 tons of food waste goes into the landfills around the entire state. So about 20% of around all the waste that gets landfilled throughout the whole state is food waste and that's 652,000 tons of wasted food. So that's food that could be eaten or could be given to animals and that 270,000 tons of actual like food scraps. So you think like nutshells, orange peels, banana peels, stuff like that. So it's a lot. It's a lot of stuff. So if we kind of think of that in streets division terms. So if you think of that 20% number. So last year of the streets division we collected 44,423.61 tons of garbage from those tan collection carts in front of all of our homes. So using that 20% number which is a round number like it's a the number is like a little squishier. There was a 2020 waste sort that the Dane County landfill did. The number out of that sort was like 21.8% wasted food. So at 20% we'll use the round number those 8,884.72 tons of food just from the tan carts if all of that stuff. But that's the minimum number you think from just our city because here at the streets division we don't collect from everywhere in the city of Madison. Any place with a metal dumpster that's not in our collection universe. We don't pick up from the campus. We don't pick up from any big restaurant. You know, you think on if you go broader for the whole county, there's a lot more food waste there than just what's in those tan carts. So that nearly 9,000 tons,

that's the floor for what's going into the Dayne County landfill every single year. So it's a lot and it's been a lot for a long time. And we've known it's been a problem because we've been trying to figure this out since at least 2011. um and where we've tried one way or the other for alders have been here for a while. I saw Alder River's name on the list online. He probably certainly knows we've been trying to figure this out for a while. And so like why haven't we solved that? I have a separate very long presentation that I gave a college class about like all the times we've tried and failed and tried again. It really boils down to two things. It's contamination issues with the food scraps. And that's things like people forgetting twist ties on the things of parsley that they wanted to get rid of or like stickers or things that just flat out don't belong in the food scraps like plastic bags or clothes or like all sorts of stuff that winds up in the food like styrofoam. And also just lack of available processors. There's not really many places in Wisconsin period that want to take postconumer food scraps. options are really limited or had been for a really long time. So that's sort of the short answer as to why haven't we solved it yet, but we're making progress. So since 2022, here's how we've been trying to get our arms around this problem. These are the two um interns that have been working with um working with us. We try to been working with sustained day since 2022 to do some food scraps at our farmers at some neighborhood farmers markets. And these are two of the rockstar interns have been working with us like since then. We did a collection on Halloween. That's why they dressed up. They don't just do this like all the time. So that's Jeie is the avocado and Jennifer is the hippopotamus. And so the Anyway, so yeah, what we've been doing, we've been having food scraps at farmers markets, neighborhood farmers markets.

Idea is if we can get some drop offs in these neighborhood farmers markets, it's a little bit more convenient at these sites. It's make it more of a vibe because people go there. They're happy to be there. They're already there buying vegetables. It sort of fits the the situation. They're staffed by um sustained intern so we can because those neighborhood farmers markets are off hours from whenever the streets division could staff it. So it sort of fits there. Um we're able to really tightly control the materials that come in because um that's why we need them staffed so they can keep an eye out for all those produce stickers and twist ties and plastic bags. Um, also the material is really tightly controlled, too, because the material is going to an urban farmer in Fitsburg. It's Robert Pierce. Um, he actually runs the South Madison farmers market. So, if you ever go to the South Madison farmers market, you can buy some of the vegetables that the food scraps are helping grow. Um, there's Robert there in the gray t-shirt. You've probably seen Robert also like in newspapers and that. Robert's pretty known around here about um in the composting world um which I assume all of you travel in. So, but anyway, um the and so yeah, and and that's where the scraps are going. And but it's this farm, so it we're kind of limited on what we can take because it's a small onfarmm composting operation. So, it's not some big commercial um thing. So, we have to keep it pretty tight what we can what we can accept is basically what you can take in a backyard composting operation. But, we're still doing pretty good with what we can take. And so since 22 since we've had this farmers market program going, it began with a a grant from the USDA and a transition to being funded by the resource recovery special charge in the past two years where we started off in 2022 where the the red bar graph there is number of we calling them users but really might be more fair to call it deposits because we don't have a good handle of how many like repeat users but there's some irregular people that come every once in a while but it's you know where our number of people that show up

more people learn about about it week to week that keeps growing and the number of pounds also been going up every year too where last year we got 20 tons or 40,000 pounds of food scraps. Now that's about the equivalent in weight of a small herd of bison. That's what that's about. The little sticker there. Um it's um again 40 know 20 tons is great. It's not 9,000 tons but it's getting there. we're on the path considering that it's we're getting our arms around it slowly, right? We're taking it a bit of a time. Um, and also what happened last year, the other kind of piece of that puzzle that we're sort of missing where that contamination control is we're just watching it carefully, right? That's one of the how one of the things we're doing at those farmers market is watching the inputs. Um Dane County as one of the things they're doing is developing a sustainability campus as part of their landfill expansion and they they too want to tackle this food scraps problem. They also got a grant and they were able to station these um scrap stops around the county. Um there's three of these um year- round scrap stops. They they're not staffed. They're these unmanned or unstaffed kiosks. Basically, you have to pre-register to use them. And um there there three of them in Madison, one's in Bis Park. the little back parking lot kind of off Violet Park Drive. One is on the north side of Madison in Warner Park and the other one is at the um I think actually in the Landfill campus. Those are the three Madison sites, but they have others around the county. And they take the scraps from these sites and they take them to um the one big commercial composter in our area which is Purple Cow Organics um which they've been able to work with to set up some sort of bigger scale food scrap program to set this up. And so these kiosks are kind of a test. as like, well, can we make this work? Can we trust ourselves to have these sort of unstaffed things and follow these rules and do it right? And these kiosks are kind of working. You know, there's still some mistakes.

There's still twist ties, loads of rubber bands. We can't seem to figure out rubber bands, but like it's we're figuring it out. We're getting there, you know, and they've had pretty good youth. Those are numbers are just from the city of Madison kiosk. It doesn't count like the Fitchburg one and stuff like that in there. And so going on to this year, like our farmers market program, we're adding one more market. Um we're so we're going to be at the East Side Farmers Market, the West Community Market, and the South Madison Market again. Um we're also adding the Capitol View Market. That's on the east side off Cottage Grove Road up by the Metro Market there if you're familiar with that one. Um now the the Dayne County grant does end this year. So those kiosks might end, but like we're kind of figuring out like well how do we keep them going or what sort of we're finalizing a plan how to make that work. Um so um so I don't want to like speak into being here publicly what we're figuring out but we're getting there as to how that's going to work and and also just as we keep going how do we keep this momentum growing? How do we keep this? Because as we're watching this program grow, we don't want to keep ever lose this momentum. Because I think one of the other problems we had with our program is that we early on in 2011, we jumped to try to write to curbside pickup where we were and we weren't ready for it. We didn't have a lot of things established. We made a lot of mistakes early and we don't want to repeat them ever. So, we're just trying to we don't want to lose this momentum. We want to keep growing it. And how do we keep doing that and keep moving forward? But since I'm talking about food scraps, one last thing is that that's really the last consideration when it comes to food scraps because I mentioned early that a lot of the food that goes to the landfills of food that could be eaten. Um, so we can't forget about that step. Composting is like the end part of the spear as like you think of a waste hierarchy. They always they show it like an upside down triangle, right?

composting or recycling is always the point down here, but waste prevention is always up at the top. So, when it comes to like it's food waste prevention. So, if you have food you can use, finding some place that could use it either through donation or some other way to use the food, getting it to the hungry people that can eat it, please do that. Um, so we have some list of the food donation opportunities on the food scrap website as well. And the Dayne County um public health also has plenty of resources on their site, too. So, there we go. I try to be quick.

All right. So, we're still holding questions that I'm I'm like I'm gonna I'm gonna ask so many questions when we get there. So, just warning you. Okay. Then we'll one more and then questions the and then a break and then the next set. Is that the plan?

Thank you. All right. Okay, I'm back um to talk a little bit about our air quality monitoring project. This is a project that is um spearheaded by the sustainability and resilience team. um wanted to give a little bit of an overview start from the beginning about uh you know really when we think about air quality what do we mean when we say air quality and at its very basic level it's just describing how clean and healthy our air is to breathe um it's measured quant um it's measured officially by the department of natural resources here in Wisconsin they're the cognizant agency over air quality um and they're looking at six air pollutants that the environmental protection agency is the ones that we as a nation um should keep an eye on to determine how clean and healthy our air is. So they look at ozone, particulate matter, carbon monoxide, lead, sulfur dioxide, and nitrogen dioxide. These come in a couple different forms. So they can be gases or um they can be solids or particles. And so today we're going to narrow in on particulate matter. Um particulate matter is what we're looking at with our sensor network here in Madison. It's abbreviated as like PM. You'll often see like PM10 or PM2.5. And particulate matter is kind of what it sounds like. It's tiny pieces of dust and dirt and other materials that are so small they're suspended in the air and

we can breathe them in. So anything as small as PM10, that's 10 micrometers and smaller. Um that's pretty teeny tiny. And then the finest inhalable ones are PM2.5. So, that's the what the EPA or the DNR um or the health department are talking about when they're talking about particulate matter 2.5, PM 2.5. Um these particles are so small that when we breathe them in, they can enter our lungs and our bloodstream and they have very documented and understood impacts on our health. And so PM2.5, you can see on the illustration, um those particles are so small that they that that several of them can fit on a on a grain of pollen. And several of those grains of pollen can fit on a human hair. So it's teeny teeny tiny. But when they enter our bloodstream, when they enter our lungs, um they can have lots of different health impacts. So that respiratory, those breathing impacts in our lungs, it can lead to some effects that are like pretty common runny nose, um sore throat, coughing, but they can also cause longer term issues or aggravate longer term issues like asthma, bronchitis, and increase the risk of lung disease and cancers. Um when they enter our bloodstream, they can affect our heart health. So they can contribute to or worsen heart attack and stroke, um arrhythmias, irregular heartbeats or palpitations. and they increase the risk of heart disease. And then of course, we've probably all felt it when we've been outside on a really dusty day or a really smoky day. Um we can get um effects in our eyes, sore um sore eyes, stinging, redness, that kind of inflammation as well. But it comes from a lot of places. So particulate matter we might think of as and be worried about those humanmade sources of particulate matter, but there's also some natural sources of particulate matter, too. So we can have dust storms, wildfire, pollen, volcanoes. I'll show an illustration in a little bit of just when we have a big storm system coming through, it picks up

a lot of dust. Um, and then also we have these human sources burning fossil fuels in vehicles um and power plants and industrial facilities that does cause um the release of particulate matter. Um indust some industrial manufacturing processes and mining um construction activities and demolition that kick up a lot of dust. Um and agricultural activities like tilling um and harvesting crops. So there's a lot of different sources of particulate matter. Um, and usually not just one on a on a given day. And so anyone who's been sort of living in Madison for a little while has seen this pattern that is kind of becoming our summer norm of some bad air quality days in the summer when we have large air systems that are moving over the Midwest from the western United States and Canada when they are experiencing their wildfire season. These air masses can travel over really, really long distances and particulate matter is one of the main pollutants that they're carrying from one place to another. So, this was actually back in 2023. This is taken from the capital, the dome of the capital. Um, and so you can see on a good day, you can actually see the lake, you can see it on the street, but in our worst air quality days, that visibility is pretty bad. So, trust your eyes. If you're outside and it smells smoky and it looks smoky, it is smoky. So, protect yourself. and we'll talk a little bit about what that means. Um, but yeah, a lot of people are like, "Oh, I can't ever see air pollution around here." And that's not true on our worst air quality days. So, trust yourself. Um, we often talk and hear air quality talked about as the air quality index. Um, and it was developed to really make communicating about air quality um, and our health and when to take precautions easy. So um air quality is often measured in micrograms per milliliter cubed which is not a measurement that a lot of us are can visualize and think about every day. Um and so instead it takes that concentration of micrograms per

milliliter cubed um in the air and translates it to a scale from good to hazardous. And they've colorcoded it and they've assigned some numbers to make it easy to understand um at a glance. And so when our air quality is good, um, our air quality index or AQI is the green level. The AQI is between 0 and 50. Good day to be outside, no concerns. When you start getting at that moderate level up to 100, that's when folks that have um some cardiovascular conditions or some health risks um might start to feel um the effects of poor air quality. Unhealthy for sensitive groups means that's when those folks, those sensitive groups need to take precautions. unhealthy, very unhealthy, and hazardous are bad for everyone. So, that's when we all really need to be thinking about um what our activities look like that day, how to minimize our exposure um to poor air quality. And one of the things that we've learned in our project is a lot of folks don't think about themselves as a sensitive group. We don't think about ourselves as maybe we don't have any heart or lung conditions, maybe we don't have asthma, but if you're under five or over 65, you're considered a sensitive group. So, that's just something to keep in mind. There's a lot of ways that we and and conditions that might make us a little bit more sensitive to air quality. So, the DNR um Department of Natural Resources has been measuring and regulating air quality in Wisconsin for a long time. Um they have 36 regulatory grade sensors um statewide. And I like to call these the fancy schmancy sensors. These cost like tens of thousands of dollars a piece and um are collecting very precise scientific data about air quality and they're supposed to be ensuring that Wisconsin's air is meeting the national air quality standards. If you're not meeting the national air quality standards, you're required to take some action to clean up your air. Luckily, um Madison does meet the national air quality standards for particulate matters. So, we're good

there. Um spoiler alert. Um and they are also responsible for um alerting the public when air quality is bad. So they are the agency that is their responsibility. They also issue permits um when a a permit holder might need to be conducting some sort of activity that produces air pollution. So they're responsible for measuring and tracking and making sure that they're following all the safety guidelines. Um and they also collaborate with other partners like us to monitor and improve air quality. So we have started a local air quality sensor network. So um back in 2022 I think um there was a call from the EPA to say we want to see more local air quality monitoring out in the world. We want to see um local governments, state governments, nonprofit organizations, um other communities measuring air quality, raising awareness around the connection between air quality and our health. And so we were lucky um to have applied for and received um be selected for one of those grants. And so we've installed a communitywide network of air quality monitors to help provide up-to-date information on particulate matter across Madison. So, we have 65 solarp powered sensors. They're measuring those different particle sizes of particular matter. So, PM1, 2.5, and 10. Um, they upload, they're powered by a a solar panel. They upload their data over the cellular network. So, they're pretty standalone. You can kind of put them anywhere. And we've put them on city-owned infrastructure um around the community. And this is really meant to complement and add the data we're getting to the data that's collected by the DNR and help us answer some questions and understand some patterns um if there are patterns in um in our air quality. So these are the team. This is some folks from our partner organizations um which I'll list a little bit later. Um

and the department of natural resources when they're installing our sensors and you can see that these are the two places that we've colllocated sensors with those fancy schmancy DNR sensors. So we have our lowcost sensors that are just to help us understand patterns. We look colllocated with them with the DNR sensors so that we know we can look at our data and their data and make sure that we're collecting data that's quality. Um, so this is you can see lots of different equipment in these photos. I really like I really like to show them to folks, some smart people um on it. And so the data from our air quality network is now available online. And so we're still upgrading and customizing this um resource, but if you go to lovemyair wisconsin.com um lovemyair.wi um this is what you can see. So you can see the sensors um located around town collecting data and they translate that um that data um that's measured in micrograms per milliliter cubed into the air quality index so we know are we good are we not so good um and you can kind of zoom in and check it all out. If you click on one of these dots it's going to take you to the detailed information about um the the data that that sensor has been collecting. Um so we can see um the this sensor when I took the screenshot um you can see that air quality at the moment was looking pretty good and you can see the trend over the last few days and that orange part um when the air quality got into that like hazardous for sensitive groups um and then even hazardous for every unhealthy for everybody for a little bit um that is when we saw uh those rainstorms blowing through town. So, this was be not this last weather event we got this weekend, but two weeks ago when we saw or a week ago when we saw those rainstorms coming through, that weather system had picked up a lot of dust and particles as it was moving through and

our sensors picked that up. So, you can see it kind of ramps up for 6 hoursish or so as we're getting a lot of wind and rain. The rain happens. It literally cleans our air and our air quality goes back to normal. So, we can see this little bit of a of a of an event here. And this is an example of the kind of thing that's pretty normal. This is natural um variations in particulate matter and happens over a short period of time. So, this isn't something that we need to be like, oh no, this is really bad. Like, this is a normal a normal change, but you can kind of track what's going on there. And so, we're really interested in using this network to communicate about health, education, and resilience building. So really thinking through if we're sharing this data with our community and we're sharing it with regulatory agencies, how are we as a city thinking about air quality when we're doing things like land use planning and transportation planning, citing our green infrastructure, thinking about reducing our emissions and tracking changes over time. It's also a great way to communicate about and give people another resource to think and making the connections between air quality and health. Um this was at Wear Red Day. Uh the foundation for black women's wellness is one of our partners. They have a day every year where red day is focused on cardiovascular health and raising awareness and encouraging people to take action to monitor and improve their cardiovascular health. And this project is part of that work. Um so it's a great way um to get people thinking about air quality, thinking about how it affects us, thinking about how we maybe check air quality. I try to say check the air quality when you check the weather. Is it raining? How's the air quality? And that lets you know how much time you want to spend out that day. Do you want to take a raincoat? Do you want to take a mask? Um, it's a great kind of way to just incorporate it into your daily life. And so, I promise to shout out our partners. They have been integral to this work. They have been with us the whole way and have been doing an amazing job of communicating about this project, helping us design the network, informing and and getting the word out to the community. Um, so we've been working

with the Foundation for Black Women's Wellness, the Mung Institute, um, the University of Wisconsin Madison. We have some really great atmospheric and oceanic scientists working with us over there. Um, public health Madison Dane County. Um, and the Latino Health Council. Um, and of course we're funded by the EPA. And so that is it for air quality. And now questions. She's ready. And anyone the other presenters have a whole bunch. So, um, let's So, okay. I was like, who where where's the where's the raising of the hands back there? So, I have a whole bunch, but, um, I want to defer to my colleagues first. Okay, I'll start us off. All right, Rachel, I'm going to start with you. Okay. You didn't talk about buses and they were in the news a lot about our electric buses and the challenges we've had. So, can you talk to us a little bit about our buses?

Oh, okay. Sorry. Okay. Here we go.

I did not talk about our buses because we are not involved with our buses. is the fleet division does not manage the metrorransit buses. Um we are going to we we have had conversations with them about both biodeiesel and renewable diesel and we're continuing those conversations. Um but yes that is why I did not cover them. Fair. Um and then my other question was about the electric. Um so trash Gordon which is a great name. Um, do the drivers have to get any additional training on those vehicles? Um, I I have no idea. Are they like different in terms of how they have to get trained? Um, so my understanding is not too much. Um, and also kudos to to Brian for the the name for the trash truck and also Vin No Diesel because he helped lead the um the competition for those names. Um the the those trucks are actually Mac platforms which um we have other Mac trucks within the fleet too. So I think they operate fairly similarly. Um I no it's the same um same body on the on those trucks as well as the other platform. So um there's not really anything different. Um they do have to be plugged in every night though. Other questions for Rachel? I see somebody's hand and I gotta figure out whose it is. Alder Glenn, go ahead. I think it's Rachel because I just have to say I came in kind of late so I apologize. I But it might have been the next person. It was about the D's the fuel.

Yes. Go ahead.

Okay. Um what is the timeline for expanding um any of the reusable fuel? Is there a timeline into the fleet? Um there there we are actively working on expanding that. Now part of the um part of the issue comes to the availability of the fuel within the Midwest. um most of that fuel market is really on the west coast and also a little bit on the east coast. So we're smack dab in the middle here and don't have a lot of options about how to source that fuel. Um so we also are dealing with a a higher price per gallon for that fuel now as well. Um so we have worked with our finance partners to um build in a cushion in our operating budget for 2026 actually to support expanded use of that fuel but we are of course limited by our operating budget for fuel. Um and I would be remiss to point out the current fuel market and what is happening with the gas prices. Um we we are not locked in any sort of contract for the renewable diesel price. So um it is going up just like everything else and we have to make smart decisions with our budget. Um

the difference in gas and the cost.

Yes. Um it varies of course based on um the time and also the percentage of the fuel that we have blended into the petroleum diesel or with the biodeiesel. Um, I've seen anywhere from a dollar to $2 per gallon um as a premium over what the typical diesel would cost. Um, we are actively working with partners within the region to talk about our renewable diesel pilot and the successes we've seen to try to show how how well it works and build a coalition of of the of demand within our market so that um we have other options to source the fuel and hopefully bring that price down.

Yeah, it's a hard time right now to be talking about bringing anything down. Um, I think you touched on this a little bit, but just to get kind of say it out loud, do we run into with the cold weather with like the I think it's like the R20 fuel. Um, is there problems with that renewable?

So, that's why we go down to a smaller percentage blend renewable diesel. Yes. So, um, what happens with with straight renewable diesel is it, um, the paraffin wax freezes up at a much quicker pace than, um, even biodeiesel does or, um, petroleum diesel. Um, I'm not a chemist, so I'm not going to go into the details of that. I wouldn't understand if you did,

but um, but that is something that we're testing for every every time we get a new blend or like a new a new season because the the feed stock might change. our partner is actually testing um what's called the cloud point of the fuel and the specific blend we're ordering as well as the cold filter plug point. So um our most recent load of R20 tested at -4 degrees Fahrenheit for a cloud point. So that's when it starts to get hazy and those paraffin waxes are forming and and clumping. Um and then it had a cold filter plug point. So that's when essentially the fuel filter would get plugged with the gunk of the freezing, the jelling um at -18° F. So this is why I felt pretty comfortable um running that in temperatures down to 0 degrees Fahrenheit, which most of our winter isn't that bad, but sometimes it does get bad. So, um, the the program that I'm anticipating developing is going to be something along the lines of, you know, watching the forecast like we do anyway when we're looking at fuel deliveries. And, um, we would just pivot to normal winterized diesel fuel in those uh, when those forecasted temperatures dip down.

Okay. And then, yeah, I'm just interested. I mean, obviously, I think it's extra interesting even right now as we're all thinking of it. What is the alternative to things for gasoline? So yeah, that that was interesting. Thanks for the presentation. I appreciate it.

Of course. And then this might be like a combo question for Rachel and Brian. Um but once we get that sustainability campus, is there potential that we would have local production of biodiesel from that initiative? Okay. Wait, I have to figure out where you're sitting. There we go. Thank you.

No, the because like with the with with the sustainability campus, the focus really is more a matter of diverting as much waste as possible from the landfill. One of the the possible things that could be cited there, one one is the Dane County project for the most part like the sustainability team myself were kind of part of the process, but as far as like what gets cited there to be able to meet some goals or metrics as far as it comes like diverting waste from there. So one of the things that could in theory beside it there is something called an anorobic biodigestertor where food scraps could be diverted from the from the waist stream and then made like a bio gas or like a a renewable natural gas that could be used as vehicle fuel. But that's a whole other thing than the this renewable diesel thing. And there's other like I am now outside of my limited area of expertise about like the drawbacks of natural gas as a vehicle fuel and like I know there's horsepower drawbacks and things like that from what I understand and like there's other things that could be with that the um but the um them so but does what's the cost for that because biodigtors that's like a 20 $30 million investment in that. How do you make that value back over the course of the life of that kind of machinery, you know, like so it's seems unlikely for that, but um I know the county is exploring like what's the best way to do that so to manage our sort of waste production that we have as a community.

Um yeah, there I Brian is completely right. Um, also when it comes to natural gas vehicles, there's a reason I also didn't talk about those in my fleet um, presentation because um, there's like Brian said, there's a lot of different considerations when it comes to those types of vehicles. Um, it's a different fuel source, so there's different equipment. Um, we would have to have the the fueling infrastructure again as well. Um, there's also extra safety precautions that have to be um, put into place in order to actually maintain those vehicles. Um and currently we only have one portion of our building that could do that. So we have tested some natural gas vehicles but um we are looking more at electric vehicles, hybrid electric vehicles for those um gasoline alternatives and then um looking at clean fuels um that are more drop-in fuels ready to just put in our current equipment um until such time as the next technology, what be it electric vehicles or or something else um is able to meet our heavyduty equipment needs. Alder Glenn.

Yeah. About the food scrap one, I just had a couple questions about like future of expanding it and then like for just like cost purposes, what is the difference between collecting the food scraps in versus like landfill? Is there a big cost difference? Well, the I don't have the numbers in front of me to kind of go with that to landfill. Okay, cool. To to landfill food to the landfill in general, it's like I think 53 or $54 a ton for that. So, here in the Midwest in general, it's relatively inexpensive to landfill things in general. That's one of the things that why places on the coast tend to lead more on just waste diversion activities in general because their tipping fees is what is called in the industry tend to be very high and so they tend to you want to divert as much as possible just for the budgetary part of it. the in general like our food scrap program to divert the 20 tons of food scraps that we have. It's more expensive to d to our food scrap program or farmers market program is to do that but it's I think it's part of a broader process and a broader commitment to not landfill this valuable resource because we are composting that we are literally growing vegetables at this farm in the south in the south side of Madison with it. So there's I guess this depends on I mean there is more cost to it though. The I think it's around like $70,000 I believe is what the cost is for this budget year for the for farmers market that's we're going to have. So it's that's going to be more than the 48,000 tons I think we're going to shoot for this year. I mean obviously if we were just going to landfill it would be way cheaper but um what do we value as far

in the long run? In the long run though, right? I mean, how do you want to cost about like the the methane emissions that you're preventing about the um trying to think other other costs for that? But we got to

slowly build this program out because how much as we slowly try to normalize this behavior of diverting food scraps from the landfill. That's kind of what we're doing here now is start to slowly build this out to build more interest, build more knowledge about this. So whenever we can try to start growing this more to eventually get to some sort of curbside program again to pilot this once we're able to invest in what that infrastructure would be because to do curbside pickup is going to require trucks and people to do it and that's pretty expensive. So we got to make certain we're going to do it right before we make that leap. And we got to make certain the place to take it is ready for that once we get there because we don't want to jump into it and then uhoh it's too it's too dirty. They can't take it. And then where are we again? And we I we we know where that road leads. We don't want to be there again. So we just want to keep gathering string, make certain we're ready, make certain everybody's excited and we got we've done as much as we can with these drop offs and as much as and then make that investment and go forward there. And so we're just still slowly pushing this rock up the hill, I think.

Yeah. I just want to say I'm really interested in this. Uh I I've shared before, but I have a culinary degree and I've been involved with like Dane D local and in the food scene and Troy Gardens is over here with me and Reach and um Feed Kitchens and all of the things that has came out of there. And it it is uh the future and it is something that each person can do even at a small scale and make such a big impact let alone at a farmers market. I work I've worked with Robert Pier known Robert Pierce since I was a child and his work is we beg him for his soil and please don't say dirt say so everyone should know it is his soil. Um, but yes, this is all very interesting to me and I'm I'm excited to hear about it and appreciate your time.

Yeah, like you're absolutely right about you can do it yourself. I mean, for backyard composting, one of the things we have you can link we link to it from the food scrap page is like home composting guides that you can pick up from public libraries as well about how to do it, how to problem solve it. W Extension Day County has some classes you can take about how to build your own bins as well. of them. So, if you have the space and the and it composting relatively easy, um it's three parts brown, one parts green, a little bit of water, and some chicken wire and you're good to go. Um if you're if you got the time and the inclination, it's pretty simple to do if you're patient. And um yeah, Alder Matthews,

thank you. Um, I also had a question about the food scraps. Uh, you had mentioned there was a grant that or right there was funding for this that likely wouldn't be continuing, but you also mentioned right that it it was being run or at some capacity it was being run by volunteers and then right the scraps are being taken to a farm. Um, so I guess my question is how much of the pro like how much was that funding and are there ways to incorporate more volunteers or other ways to continue it without that funding?

Gotcha. Sorry I didn't make that clear. So the the whole the whole tick- tock of the the way the program began in 2022 the city received an FDA grant to start our farmers market program. I can't remember the exact dollar amount it was, but that started us off where we are like with our current iteration of the program. When that FDA grant ended after 2 years, that funding for our program moved to the resource recovery special charge and that's how we're funding it now. We are paying sustained dane to staff the farmers market sites. They hire what they call interns or they call them interns, but they're sustained dane seasonal employees basically. Um, they're the ones that actually staff the sites, monitor it, hand out educational information, haul the scraps from the market sites to Robert's farm where he does the composting. Also, Robert gets a small payment for doing the work as well. Um, Dane County got the same grant after us to establish their kiosk program. um they got a little bit more money than us. So, I don't know what they did better than us, but that's a that's a whole that's a different thing. But um and so they um they and so that's where they built those kiosks with the help of this children's museum. They bought a little truck and they started this kiosk thing also through the FDA. But that grant also ends I believe this June or I think June 1st is whenever that grant comes to a close for them. And so that's just a matter of continuing it on from there.

Okay. Thank you. Sorry for my I did I was speaking so quickly up there, Alder Matthews. I don't blame you for not keeping your eye. But so what I'm hearing is that our program we are that's funded. We're good there. And then it's just a question of how it can expand in the future.

Correct. Yeah. It's just like and then how do we keep growing it from here from going from farmers markets and the kiosk program that the county had has proved successful like do we as the city do we want to keep going something similar I mean the streets division we have our own year- round drop off sites does it make sense having year round food scraps there and us hauling it or do we find some version of this kiosk thing there's only so many places to put those big county structures Are there other options out there? But at what cost do we do that? Or does it make more sense to expand what food options that we can take at our farmers markets? Unfortunately, that means maybe not working with Robert anymore because he can't

take everything at the farm, but the Purple Cow Organics can't take more things at their site than what Robert can because they're bigger. Their piles get warmer. So, we'll see. you know that it's just a matter of finding our way forward what makes the most sense for what we can afford at the time and kind of keep growing interest and expanding the best we can as we grow. Great. Thank you so much. Alder you gear.

Thank you, President Vidver. Uh this is a question from the air quality uh presentation. Jessica, uh there's a note in there that you could foresee the use of the local air quality data in land use and transportation planning. immediately had a number of things come to mind, but I wonder if you could share what uh you thought those might be.

Sure. Um there's a some really good examples from around the country, and I don't want to speak for my colleagues on what any of them can do in their work specifically, but um for example, um some places are using air quality information to strategize where what routes they're going to use their electric buses for. So if you have areas that you know you might be seeing a lot more heavy traffic um you can strategically um dispatch that no to low carbon um transportation to those areas that might have um higher particulate matter than others. So you start to sort of lower that contribution um from your uh from your transportation as a as a city. Um, we are doing our fixed routes right now with with um with electric buses, which is awesome. So, I won't speak for Metro and how they're planning their routes because I know that's a science. Uh, that's one example of how we're using it for transportation. Um we're one of the things that we were asking when we started this project is it's it's part public information and uh and part um research to understand kind of what are um patterns of uh what what do we see when we're examining um particulate matter concentrations AC like overspace. So do we see um parts of some sensors in some areas that might have higher particulate matter than others? um we're not seeing that pattern here in Madison. So that's really good news. And so we have less of that kind of happening right now, but this allows us to monitor over time. And so if we are starting to see that, we can sort of start taking corrective actions. We know for in some places where they see again um particulate matter coming from roads and highways, you can use um like natural barriers like trees and um buffer zones to keep that that particulate matter might not travel that far into a neighborhood. And so if you

can use um those natural um kind of green infrastructure solutions to kind of catch that particulate matter before it travels, that's another way that you might start planning um your land use, your transportation sort of layout and um and patterns in those ways. So those are just kind of some examples of what we were what we could be thinking about. Um and then of course we know that there are just sort sort of some temporary sources of particulate matter. um for example, construction, demolition, um you know, any kind of new infrastructure. And so if we're we have our sensors across town, we can kind of see as we're moving along, do we are we seeing that happening if we know that there's one of those sources nearby from a temporary perspective. Um so there's some examples of what's happening in other cities and we're this is very new. So, we're sort of socializing this among our partners across agencies to say here's a new source of information and how can you use this um in your works. We're very curious to know um what our partners are are can do with this information and think about that too.

Um have we collected enough yet to be able to see if construction activity for instance is having a significant impact?

Good question. We have about a year of data. Um, but I will say that our sensors are kind of fixed points. So, if there happened to be something nearby, we might catch like we saw this storm uh lift our particulate matter concentration as it moved through town. So, we saw this in almost all of our sensors. Um, we might see that one sensor has an elevated level of particulate matter for a day or two and we could say what is happening there. but to understand what's going on like at a particular location in a particular site. Um that's typically the purview of the DNR. So like if they needed a permit for example, they would work with the DNR to get that permit and the DNR would monitor what's going on. Um so these lowcost sensors are typically not deployed in that same way because they're kind of fixed in space. But if you did happen to have, you know, there's a sensor at an intersection and then we're constructing a new building there, that might pick up what's happening at that location. I mean, what I'm thinking about, and we're this is potentially useful, is, you know, we're strategically looking at encouraging uh development, redevelopment in certain areas along corridors and so forth. the TOD overlay. Um, you've probably heard of encouraging certain kinds of development certain areas. And so if we look across the city, indeed we're finding that we're concentrating uh almost continuous construction activity in some very specific areas. It might be interesting to know because people do have concerns about uh whether it might be having sufficient impact on air quality to cause some health problems at least for the vulnerable population and it might say that we do need to pay more attention to mitigating uh approaches for that kind of construction activity.

Absolutely. We are working with scientists at UW in their atmospheric and oceanic sciences department um to analyze the data that we've collected so far. And so I can raise this with them. They have a couple of things they're looking at like distance from transportation, distance from the lake, correlations with weather, um you know, all of the different variables you might think about. And so I can raise this with them to see if that's something we can if this data would lend itself to looking at that. I think that's a really interesting question. Yes. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, President Alder Glenn. Thanks again, President. Um, last question, I think. Um, was there any kind of equity component in the decision to where the sensors would be placed?

Absolutely. Um, and thank you for asking. I didn't delve too far into um the background of how we deployed all of the sensors across the city. Um, but we had a couple of different layers of that decision-making. First, we had worked with EPA and said we were going to locate a sensor in all of our census tracks. So that the census tracks have approximately the same number of voters um in them. That's sort of how they're designed. And so if we place a sensor in each census track, then that sensor will kind of be represent the same number of people. So that was kind of our strategy for um for deploying things around. So, if you look at the map, you'll see like closer into downtown where we have a lot of density. We'll have more sensors there and and a little bit as we spread out and and the and the community is less dense. Um, we worked with our um community partners, so Latino Health Council, Foundation for Black Women's Wellness, the Mung Institute, and we had our own um openhouse as well. So, each of our partner organizations and the city um had an openhouse event that was open to anybody, but we had them around town. We had them at different times of day. we wanted to make them fun um where folks could come in, learn about the project and tell us where they're thinking about air quality in their neighborhoods. So, um when in their day would they be thinking about air quality or what decisions are they making that they would want to know about air quality? Um is it like near parks, near bus stops, near schools? Uh we had a whole list of kind of places that people were thinking about and people actually put little pins on a map to say where they're interesting in having a sensor. And then we had um a really amazing GIS specialist that helped us take all of these different kinds of qualitative data and find the city-owned light poles that best fit those characteristics. And so it was a great, you know, melding and braiding of science and um and qualitative lived experience from the community. And um the city has a boatload of light poles. So shout out to traffic engineering for maintaining all

of those and for their help in in deploying these sensors. So, they're the folks out there that are putting them on a poll if something goes wrong. They're the folks that check it out. Um, and they've been really fantastic partners um in making this network go. And um and so we we put them on the city light poles because it's locations that like we as a organization can access and have control over. So, we don't have to worry about someone like taking it down off their building or disappearing or something. So, we had some constraints, but we also collected a lot of data and information to make sure that we were putting them in places that were representative of neighborhoods across town and that were responsive to what people were interested in learning and where they wanted to know where the air quality was.

Thank you. Yes, thank you very much. And I agree with uh Audrey Gar of I think it could be interesting as we build and become you know plan for the future with those of us on like plan commission and thinking of what our city will look like in 5 10 years. This could be a really good um measurement that we could use. Thank you. Thank you president Alder Okovich. Yeah thank you president. Um I'm wondering I have two questions. One is the do we publish the air sensor data anywhere in our online portal?

We don't have it published in the online portal but we do have it available. So that's um it's not in a city data portal but it is in a NASA data portal. um which makes me feel really fancy for getting to say that but it is shared um it is shared through a NASA data portal if you wanted to sort of do a bulk download of all of that data and it's available online um for the for um on the love my air website.

Okay. Um and then my second question is have we looked at water sensors in like storm water locations at all? I know we have a whole team that work that measures water quality, but that is um I'm going to say literally not my department. Um and I don't want to misspeak for um for the storm water team, the storm water utility because they have a lot of um data and regulation that they have to match up as well. And so the short answer is yes. Um the slightly longer answer is I I don't know much about it. Thank you, Alder Matthews.

Thank you, President. Um, I have uh just one more question about the air sensors. Um, it kind of sounds like they're um currently being used as like a background like to just take in the general day-to-day. Um, but is there any potential in the future of having um, you know, a handful of sensors that can be moved around for specific um, events or time periods or things like that where there's maybe suspected to be more air pollution in a certain area?

The the short answer is yes, if we have enough money for doing something like that. And the the other answer is it's a little bit complicated to do um that kind of monitoring if you um depending on how you wanted to narrow down the air pollutant you're interested in. And so um you know we're looking at just a particulate matter. There are other types of air pollution out there that you might want to look at. Um and it's very kind of point source specific. So that's why we wanted to deploy sensors across um across the city. So we could see if we're measuring, you know, many different places, it becomes more representative of what's happening. Um the DNR has the two regulatory sensors. One is near the airport and one is um near West Campus. Those are the sensors that are collecting that kind of scientific data that helps us make regulatory decisions. So, while the air quality monitors that we're using to understand particulate matter are like a good source of information, they're not regulatory grade uh it's not collecting regulatory grade data. They're not those fancy schmancy sensors. And so we've spoken with the DNR to kind of understand what that process is and they've advised us that if there are particular um you know point sources or mobile sources that we're concerned about, they're the agency we should be working with um if we are thinking that there might be a a regulatory action necessary. Um but we could expand this network and have more sensors. um they're kind of designed to be um in one location rather than um like attached to a bicycle or attached to a a car or something like that and move around. Um but we we don't have additional budget right now for additional um hardware.

Okay, great. Thank you. All right, so I believe you had envisioned a break. Is that what I am to understand? I think maybe. Is that okay?

Yeah. So do you want five or 10 minutes? Can we do 10 minutes? 10 minute break. Okay. So, we will return at uh 7:37. All right. We are reconvening the common council discussion on sustainability as soon as we get screen sharing to work. Well, greetings everyone. Thanks for inviting me and giving forestry the opportunity to share what we've been up to in regards to tree planting. Uh forestry staff in general are pretty fortunate in that we get to work with trees. We got into the industry because we love trees and uh most of the people in our community find value in trees as well. Believe it or not, there are a few people out there that may disagree, but for the most part, we share a positive message that is pretty wellreceived. Uh before we talk specifically about some of our planting initiatives and what we're going to be up to this year and what we'll be up to in the future, I think it's important to talk about species diversity and why it's important in our urban forests. Many of you are probably aware of Dutch elm disease. Um it was around in the 60s and 70s and it killed thousands of elm trees across Madison and decimated our urban canopy. The loss transformed neighborhoods,

caused major aesthetic changes and prompted significant urban forest management changes, some controversial like DDT. More recently, in late 2013, Madison confirmed the presence of emerald ashbor on an asht tree on the north side. Prior to emerald ashbor or EAB, we had over 20,000 ash trees that made up our street tree population. Um, following the EAB plan that we had in 2012, we preemptively removed 10,000 of those that were either too small or in too poor condition to be treated. The remaining 10,000 or so have been treated once every three years since then to keep them free from the boar. And if we were to stop treatment, the remaining 10,000 would have to be removed. So, it's really not a matter of if, but when the next problem insect or disease uh will come and have negative impacts on our street tree population. Some of the most likely offenders are Asian longhorn beetle. Uh, it's currently found in South Carolina, Louisiana, Mississippi, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Maryland. It prefers maple trees, but can impact birch, elm, and ash as well. Uh, some DNR entomologists thought that it would be in Wisconsin by now, but we haven't found it yet. Uh, likely due to how slowly the in insect can travel. Uh, this one's been in the news the last few years. It's spotted lantern fly. It's currently in the New England area. It actually prefers tree of heaven, which is uh an invasive tree that we don't really want in Madison anyways, but it does uh feed on desirable species like walnut and maple. Hemlock will do um quite frankly just decimates native hemlock populations. It's currently found in the northeast down to Georgia and has had severe impacts in the Appalachian Mountains. So, we don't know what will be next, but

something will be next. So that's why we need to have a diverse and resilient urban forest. Many urban foresters have adopted what has been called the 102030 rule. The 102030 rule for tree planting is an urban forestry guideline for enhancing tree canopy resilience. It dictates that an urban forest should consist of no more than 10% of any species, 20% of any genus, or 30% of any family. This rule helps ensure that if a threat similar to Dutch elm disease or EAB arrives in the future um that we don't lose our entire tree population all at once. The purpose is to prevent a monoculture effect or over reliance on one type of tree can lead to a massive and sudden loss. It's generally intended as a guideline for citywide planning to foster a more resil resilient diverse and healthy urban forest. Uh, it's not many people in the audience tonight, but would anybody like to guess what is Madison's most common street tree? Maple is maple ash. All right, don't worry. Maple number one, green ash number two, and uh, locust at a close third. Uh, so if you grew up in Massen or traveled here as a kid, it was pretty common to see tree after tree or street after street of Norway maples. Norway maple and ash were two of the trees that foresters used to repopulate cities after Dutch elm disease came through and they were generally readily available by most nurseries. Unfortunately, we really didn't change our tree planting practices that much after DAD. Um, and we continue to plant with very little diversity.

And there's a tree of a street of, uh, Norway maple after Norway maple. So, uh, Madison Forestry planted 47 varieties of trees in 2025. Of those 47 we planted, fewer than 5% were maple, zero were ash, and we planted a modest number of locust varieties. Generally speaking, species planted has an inverse relationship to our current street tree population as we strive to diversify as much as possible. Our forest is growing over time. Uh we consistently plant over 2,000 trees per year. While tree removals have ebbed and flowed and then peaked in 2015 to 20 due to EAB, we still managed to p to plant more trees than we remove. The results of these dedicated and focused planting efforts has led to an increase in both the number of trees present in our community and the percent canopy coverage over time. Our most recent estimate indicates that Madison has approximately 30% canopy coverage. In 2025, we celebrated our 100,000th tree planting with our mayor. We planted a new horizon elm, which if you're not familiar with it, it is a Dutch elm disease resistant hybrid that was developed right here at WMadison. And while we certainly can be proud of some of the achievements that we've had over the years, um we can't certainly can't rest on our laurels. um urban forestry task force recommendations that were adopted in 2020 recommends that we have 40% canopy cover. So our plans for this year uh we're continue we're going to

continue to plant a wide variety of trees across species genus and family to replant sites where removal is necessary. We have 40 sites this uh spring in our downtown area, mostly in in Grace or raised planters. We'll continue to focus on new neighborhoods on the periphery of our city, particularly on the far west side. It's kind of hard to see, but those like gold poker chips, they're kind of really stacked on top of each other. So, we have quite a few uh in that South Point area of expansion. And we've been uh partnering with engineering the last couple years on amending planting sites. Uh oftentimes in these areas of new development, we're left with the poorest of poor quality soil, rocky construction debris and engineering. Um has formed a partnership with forestry where we can amend that those sites, take out the really poor quality soil and put in high quality top soil. or trees can't just sit there and, you know, linger along for a few years, but can actually thrive. In 2024, we tried what is called a a gravel bed. They allow us to purchase bare root trees at a reduced cost in the spring. We can install them in the spring, grow them out over the summer where they can grow a pretty healthy and robust root system, and then we can plant them in the fall. plans for the future? Well, uh, one of the funnest things that we get to do is the Arbor Day stuff. Every year we partner with typically two Madison Metropolitan uh, school district elementary schools to plant trees with fourth grade students. U, our goals are to educate the kids on the benefits of trees and introduce them to a potential career opportunity that

exists in their community. A new initiative that we hope to start this year is a partnership with Operation Fresh Start. Uh we hope to utilize some money that was set aside from the urban forestry task force to use towards workforce development and canopy expansion. So we're kind of uh checking the boxes off two of those urban forestry task force recommendations. Um, if it works out, OFS will create a new five-person crew to assist us with both tree planting and new tree establishment by performing much neededed tasks such as such as tree watering, adding mulch, removing planting support systems. And obviously we hope that this partnership will turn into a mutually beneficial long-term relationship that can benefit both Madison forestry uh Madison res residents and uh the programmatic goals that operation fresh start has. Uh just based on some of the conversation that we had here today, I was quickly writing down a few extra bonus things to talk about here at the end. Um, in regards to air quality, uh, the Forest Service developed a a program called IT Tree Eco. Um, it's a software program that allows us to estimate like the eco benefits of trees. And I just wrote down a few things quickly here in the last uh five minutes, but within the last year, just our street tree population, so the 100,000 trees that we have between the road and the sidewalk, uh pounds of carbon sequestered was uh 1,635 pounds. Carbon monoxide, uh 8,793 ounces. Ozone was close to 600,000 ounces. Nitrogen dioxide

127,000 ounces, sulfur dioxide 1,340 ounces, and that uh fine particulate the 2.5 micrometer um air pollutants was approximately 32,000 ounces. So, seems like obviously there's a lot of overlap between the things that we're all talking about tonight and that's obviously why that sustainability was formed and the coalition is made up of who we are. But yeah, that's that's what I have.

Thank you, Alder Madison. We are holding questions until the end of this set of presentations. So, I see your hand and we will call on you first when we complete these presentations. Those are some very heartbreaking trees we have. I'm excited to I I'm glad you ran the numbers. Okay, now we're going to switch gears a little bit um and talk about um building energy efficiency and decarbonization probably and renewable energy for the next three presentations. So, it's a a bit of a different flavor. Um, and I will start out by saying because I will slip up and use a really wonky word probably in in these presentations, decarbonization. Um, which is got a lot of too many letters. And really just wanted to break that down quick and say what that means um in the building context is to minimize and eventually phase out the use of fossil fuels in our buildings. And so it's those fossil fuels are a source of carbon emissions or climate pollution. And so to decarbonize those buildings just means that we're trying to reduce and eliminate the use of fossil fuels um in those buildings. So just in case you so you don't scratch your head if I slip up and use a really wonky term. Um but I wanted to share with you about uh a presentation about our efficiency navigator program.

Um this is a important program for helping Madison reach our energy and climate goals. Um so Madison adopted the ambitious goals of reaching 100% renewable energy and net zerocarbon emissions for city operations by 2030 and communitywide by 2050. Um so that really means us taking a look at where our emissions are coming from right now and developing a suite of strategies to help reduce those. Um a lot of what we're hearing about today can is part of that strategy. So, our urban forestry is absorbing CO2 from the atmosphere. Um, that's reducing our overall carbon footprint. Um, food scraps collection is keeping those food scraps out of the um out of the waist streams, out of the landfill, keeping them from producing methane, which is a really potent greenhouse gas. So, there's lots of different ways that we're working on reducing our emissions communitywide. Um so this uh chart shows sort of how our emissions uh were coming from different sectors across the across um Madison. And you can see the combination of those orange those two um the dark orange and the light orange colors are our um sorry our commercial energy use and our residential energy use. So 65% of our greenhouse gas emissions communitywide are coming from our buildings. And if you drill into that a little bit further, 20% of those emissions are coming from our residential buildings. So that's our small multif family buildings um and our single family homes. So that's what's kind of lumped into that category. Our like big multif family buildings are lumped into our commercial category. And that's probably more detail than you needed, but um we're really this program um efficiency navigator is really zeroing in on um those residential emissions. And so the program um is a partnership with local nonprofits sustain and elevate. And what it does is it provides free energy efficiency upgrades to

affordable multif family housing. Um the approach includes en giving them an energy audit. Um they handle the bids and uh getting the bids and proposals for the work, managing the contractors and providing the funding. Um, and what it does is it kind of is a whole home approach to making homes more energy efficient, more comfortable, and reducing energy bills for residents. And we have this side benefit that that's energy savings also translates to carbon reductions. And so to participate in the program, um, we have some eligibility requirements. So it's available to small multifamily rental properties with 15 units or less. All the units need to be renter occupied. So that means that um we don't have any owner occupied um units participating in the in the um in the program. The rents have to be affordable to households that make 80% of our area median income or less. And that's a bit of a sliding scale depending on how big your family is. Um and the building these buildings are not part of affordable housing subsidy programs. So they're not subsidized like section 8 housing or public housing. Um and the energy cost savings. These are places where the um tenants are paying their utility bills. And that's a really important part of um thinking about the program because the data, if you look at the data of how much your energy costs are compared to your income, um low to moderate income folks pay a end up paying a greater proportion of their income toward their energy costs. That's called our energy burden. So the higher your income, the less proportion you have to pay to cover your utility bills. whereas the lower your income, the higher proportion that goes up. And that's money that you could be using on other essential um essential needs. And so by reducing those energy bills, saving that energy, we're helping to address that energy burden and make people's housing more affordable. So we have some really cool accomplishments and impacts just for 2025. Um the next slide will kind of

give you the big picture of what we've been doing since the program started, but in 2025, um we worked in 60 homes um that had 90 residents. um uh 34 uh sorry um 60 homes, 90 residents. Um we include both efficient energy efficiency measures measures. So that's like improvements that reduce um energy use like we might um install more insulation in a home. So that's costs less um and takes less energy to heat and cool. It's more comfortable for folks. We might include windows. That's what this um this is to reduce those drafts um and to reduce the insula the uh improve the insulation provided by your windows. There's a whole list of measures that improvements to the building that reduce those energy bills. Um and we also include health and safety measures. So anytime we're in a home and we find um things like um mold um we're replacing um your fossil fuel burning or like your gas stove with an electric stove. We're eliminating sources of indoor air pollution that impact the health of the folks that live there, particularly respiratory health. Um, so those combination of measures in those 60 homes um meant that we reduce CO2 emissions by 40,000 kilograms. I know we're switching units on those guy on you guys, but 40,000 kilograms of CO2 just in um 2025. Um that is equivalent to traveling over 100,000 miles um in a car. So, if you got in your car, you drove 100,000 miles, this is the the climate pollution you would generate. And that's what we saved this program just last year. Um, one of our property owners said, quote, "The efficiency navigator is a real life is real life sustainability. It keeps our focus on allowing the building to stay affordable and residents and resilient for long-term residents. Um, another quote from you for you. This is a great program. The tenants are much better off than before. they are saving hundreds of dollars and I'd recommend

this program to anyone. Um, so we have lots of really great um, success stories um, satisfied um, and happy participants in the program. Um, and this really is one of the things that we heard. Like I said, this is about making the building more comfortable. Um, saving people money on their energy bills. One of the things we've also heard is it makes homes more quiet. Um, it makes homes um, have better indoor air quality. Um and there's lots of these co- benefits that we realize once we get them the kind of whole building approach of the program completed. So the program started in um 2022. So since then we've worked um with in 265 homes. We've completed 158 efficiency measures and 57 health and safety measures. Our um greenhouse gas emissions reduction is 121 uh,000 kilograms. And um there's a list of the different kinds of things that we're doing. So we're working on your HVAC, your heating, ventilation, and cooling. Um we're working on um reducing those um fossilfueled um uh appliances like your stove, your water heater, replacing those with electric appliances. That's an example of decarbonization. Um, and we're also doing a lot of building insulation and envelope improvements to make sure that um that the the building's winter coat is zipped up. Um, so one more quote, we have been very pleased with our experience participating in the efficiency navigator program and we believe it's an effective way of helping address the challenge of providing affordable housing in Madison. Um, this program has gotten such rave reviews and it's been so successful here in Madison that our neighbors in uh, Middleton and Fitchburg are also now starting efficiency navigator programs. We're really excited that this model um, is spreading um, across our community um, due to its success. I wanted to share a couple of building case studies um, without getting too far into the weeds. Um,

these are just some examples of what happens when we're working um, um, on these buildings. This is sort of every you might see a building like this in your neighborhood or down the street from you. Um and it and each of these has their it shows the program cost, the cost savings um to the tenants for energy bills, um the CO2 emissions reductions, and the types of improvements that they were um that were implemented there. And these are both kind of four-unit examples. And here's a couple of more. So the the first um the first two were four units. We have another um four-unit example and we have a two-unit example. Um and so we have been working on kind of fine-tuning the program and the getting optimizing the kind of investment um that is made for the energy savings and cost reductions from tenants that we get for the program. So we have some really exciting lessons learned. I will um I will I guess prequel or preview that we have a really cool um report about the program last uh the successes last year that is going up on the sustainability website very soon to be able to share with everybody. We just want to make sure that that document has all of its accessibility features so everybody can um enjoy it to its fullest. And so that was the efficiency navigator program and I'll turn it over to Greg who's going to talk about um a different building efficiency program we have in the sustainability team.

Perfect. So, hi everybody. I'm Greg May. I'm one of the sustainability program coordinators here with the city of Madison. I'm also the staff member who helps uh run the sustainable Madison committee. So, I'm seeing a lot of familiar names on here. It's nice to have folks here. and and I'm talking about the building energy savings program um which is the city's uh benchmarking and tune-up program for large commercial buildings. Um and it's one of the kind of cornerstone programs of the sustainability department. Um and so kind of before diving into a little bit of the program, we wanted to provide a little bit of background about why this program is so important and kind of how we got here. So, you know, Jessica just shared this graphic, but this is a breakdown of our 2022 communitywide emissions. uh here in Madison. So, just a breakdown of where our carbon emissions as a community are coming from. Um and you'll see, you know, here the the biggest portion of carbon emissions in our community are coming from our commercial buildings. Um so, commercial energy is kind of the lowest hanging fruit um and the biggest contributor in Madison uh to climate change. And so, I have this graphic here. We did some modeling of commercial buildings in Madison. A lot of information on here, so I'll walk you through it a little bit. Um on the very far left you can see the square footage of buildings. So that largest section is 250,000 square feet. Um and then they're kind of broken down into buckets. The next uh column here is the number. So the number of buildings in Madison that meet this criteria. So we have 13 buildings that are over 250,000 square feet in our community. Um the next is that kind of what percentage is that of our total buildings? So, you know, the buildings over again over uh 250,000 feet is is a pretty small percentage, just a quarter of 1%. And then on the very far right, you can see a breakdown of how much energy they're using. So, the total energy uses for each of these buckets and what percentage that makes up in our

community. And so the really big takeaway here um is that 14% of our commercial buildings are responsible for 66% of our commercial energy usage in Madison. So if you take those biggest categories starting with 25,000 square feet um up to our largest category again that represents just 14% of the buildings but if you think about all of the commercial energy usage and all of the emissions that are coming from our commercial sector they are responsible for twothirds of the emissions. So again commercial energy the biggest contributor to climate change in our community and these buildings are contributing quite a lot. They're kind of lowhanging fruit. Um they of course pro, you know, are an important play an important role in our community. Um but just kind of a great place that if we're thinking about where can we make change in buildings in our community, commercial buildings are a great place to start. Um for a sense of scale, I know we're just talking about square footage here, but those buildings on the top row are buildings that are about 50,000 square feet. Um and then these buildings on the bottom are buildings over a 100,000 square feet. So some of our larger office buildings or you could think of Target for instance and some of our larger commercial buildings also fit into that category. But just giving you a sense of scale when we talk about the various sizes and square feets in our of our commercial buildings. Also just to note kind of um where are our buildings using energy? I think people are always surprised to hear that actually about 50% of all of our buildings uh commercial building energy usage is coming from heating um and another 10% is for air conditioning. So about 60% of all of our commercial energy is just going to heating and cooling our buildings. Um and then you know our things that are plugged in our our uh electrical items and our lighting are are kind of a smaller portion of that. But you know heating and cooling is a huge portion of where our energy is coming from. So where does that lead us? So in 2023

the city uh passed the building energy savings program uh BESP as we call it. And this program um requires non-residential commercial buildings to do two things. First is that every year uh our commercial buildings need to measure and report their energy usage to the city. So the point of this program is that we're trying to create an environment where building owners know how their buildings are performing compared to their peers, which is kind of a a place where there's a lack of information. And so often building owners could see that perhaps they used, you know, if if you saw that you used 2% less energy than you did last year, you might think that you're have you're doing a great job. Um, and you may be, but if you found out that a comp a comparable building was using maybe 20% less energy than you, that is information you'd want to know. And so the point of this program is to kind of measure, have uh those building owners send us that information. Um, and we can help provide information back to building owners so that they understand how their buildings are doing compared to peers and can make adjustments from there. Um, and so that's every year we're having commercial buildings that are 25,000 square feet and larger participate in this program and we're going to give them a scorecard um that I will break down in a little bit, but just providing more information, creating an environment here in Madison where building owners know how their buildings are doing compared to their peers. The second part of the program is the building tune-ups program. Uh this is for buildings 50,000 square feet and larger. Um and they have to do this every four years. Um and part of this program, uh they kind of check and adjust their building's existing systems, make sure their lighting and HVAC is working as they intend. Um I think one of the really illuminating parts of this program that I hadn't been prepared for originally is just how many different ways a building can get away from you. Um, so we had uh, you know, a construction firm in town who was looking at their headquarters and they did a tuneup and you know, somebody came

in on a Wednesday uh, you know, they had a birthday party late and now the lights turn on every Wednesday till 8:00 p.m. even though nobody's there and you know, somebody came in on a Sunday to do some extra work and now the building is heating on Sundays even though nobody's occupied. Um, you know, and it's a cold environment here so your ventilation systems indoor and outdoor can freeze. Um, and so anyway, the the point of this program is to make sure that building owners and the buildings that they own are o are are operating as they intend because, you know, buildings are always kind of trying to get away from us in various different ways, shapes, and forms. Um, and we think that this program can help, you know, save 10 to 15% um, uh, energy for commercial buildings. So that's 10 to 15% reduction in carbon emissions, but also money saved from building owners that's not spent on energy. um and helping us just make Madison a more efficient uh place to be. Uh this program, I should note, is also drawing from a lot of different examples. Madison is not the first uh to do this. All of our neighboring states have programs and and Milwaukee is also launching one of theirs as well. So, benchmarking and tune-ups programs are becoming more and more common across the country and showing signs of success. Um this program has kind of doing a phased start. So, we started with our largest buildings in 2024. They had to participate in benchmarking. Last year, we added medium-sized buildings. Um, and then this year, we are working with our smallest buildings in our community to participate in the program. And we're also launching the first year of tune-ups. So, buildings over 100,000 square feet will have to do their first tuneups this year in 2026. So, it's a big year for the program. Uh, you know, we also have provide we heard feedback from the community. uh a lot of building owners are doing great work and so instead of doing a tuneup, you can also uh choose an alternative compliance pathway. We provided a number of different ways that building owners can show that their building is already meeting these standards or is doing a

great job and being a leader in our community. Um and so we kind of have provided a lot of different pathways for building owners to get into compliance uh here with the program. Just as some background for how last year went, we onboarded uh 200 new buildings. Um you know, we've increased assistance for new building owners. We started doing one-on-one sessions with building owners. We've we fielded probably a hundred phone calls at least from various building owners to kind of make sure that and helping people guide them through the process. We've adapted new guides. Um added infrastructure to our website. Um, we also had six city buildings also do the tune-ups as a pilot to see how that program is working. Um, and so we're always trying to constantly improve the program, make it easier and uh as uh painless for people to get into compliance as possible. And I also should shout out a number of partners who have been incredibly helpful. Uh, it has helped us build out a lot of stuff uh on this program. Our our consultants at Open Tech uh MG has has been a partner to provide you know uh data sharing for us. Um and building inspection has helped us with enforcement uh the attorney's office as well and the municipal court. So we've had a lot of different collaboration across a lot of different departments and a lot of people to thank for the success of this program. Um just for some some of the outcomes you can see the number of buildings that are covered uh is growing every year. Uh so last year we had about 386 buildings in Madison that participated in this program. They had a cumulative almost uh 60 million square feet and we had about a 92% compliance rate which is we're really proud of. It is comparable to our peer cities like Chicago and St. Paul and so um we're hoping to m uh continue that success into 2026. Again, this is the final year of benchmarking. So it's going to be all of the commercial buildings in Madison over uh 25,000

square feet. That's about 820 buildings. Um and so we've started this pro this program just launched. Our deadline for benchmarking is in June. Um we're already fielding phone calls, leading webinars, um and helping building owners kind of get through this process. Hoping to keep that compliance rate number just as high even though we've added a lot of buildings. Um and then kind of the last thing here's just a copy of some of the scorecards that we give to building owners who participate in this prog this process. So, if you're benchmarking, you're getting a highlight that's breaking down, you know, how many different properties are similar to yours in our community. How did you do? What is your rank in there? Um, and we're already seeing success from this. Uh, kind of we had somebody who was found out that they were the second most efficient office building and they demanded to know who the most efficient office building was so that they could beat them. Of course, this data is anonymized, so we couldn't share with them who that is, but it is driving competition in our community in, you know, healthy competition to get people to make their buildings more efficient. Um, but also this these scorecards we're providing to everybody who participates. It's giving you a breakdown on where you can save money, what improvements you could make, uh, what your energy base loads look like, how you're performing compared to your peers, um, and and just ways to generally improve it. So, we're really proud of of these as well to create an environment here in Madison where building owners have a much better understanding of how their buildings are operating compared to their peers and uh a pathway to make their buildings more efficient. And I believe Jessica Oh, just here's kind of a little bit of a breakdown of just the properties that participated in this year. Um we're hoping to kind of do some more data reporting on kind of how you know our how our communities are working, what are their averages, you know, their energy star averages, how their greenhouse gas emissions look like. So, we'll be doing some more reporting there. Um, and that's all that I have. Um, can I pass it back to you, Jessica, to get the next and final presentation up for for John.

Thank you so much, Greg. And up next, uh, we have John Evans who's gonna, um, talk about how all of this is getting applied in our city buildings as well. So, we're walking the walk. I'll just pull this up. Did I hear him last this evening?

Why? Wow. Okay.

I maybe we'll see. Jury jury's still out, right? Um well, good evening. Um thanks for sticking with us tonight and um being here. Um, I'm I'm very excited to be here and talk about the work that our our department and our and our group does for the city. Um, I was also really impressed to hear from all my uh fellow colleagues and all the updates and all the good work that's going on. Um, you know, we all sometimes we work in our silos, right? Daytoday we we're in we're into our business and we don't we don't look at that broader picture and know what forestry is doing or what streets doing from time to time. But thankfully um in our facilities group um which is housed in the engineering division um we get to work with a lot of basically all of our departments and divisions across the city um from water utility, library, fire department um everybody in the municipal building across the street. Maybe the municipal building was the top scoring benchmark. Okay, we got a little bit of maybe we got some work we probably have some work to do there and that's okay.

Yeah. So um our group consists of architects, engineers and construction managers primarily. Um we work under the city engineer uh Jim Wolf which is now under the department of public works which is headed by Charlie Romines. Um we also have um a group of maintenance workers um electricians, mechanics that work closely with us um both in the engineering division and also in other departments like parks, water utility, metro. They all have their own maintenance teams that we we collaborate with with with respect to facilities. So, we we wanted to start out tonight um our supervisor Brian um wanted to make sure we put a slide in here just talking about our accomplishments from last year. We thought that was important. And this is just a selection of a couple things that we've been working on. We work on anything from very small replace a furnace at a fire station all the way up to these large large facility projects you hear about in the news such as the public market. So our group was sort of tasked with getting the corn shell of the public market ready for the operator and tenants to to occupy uh later this year. So that was as we know a very long process to get from the planning all the way to design through design through COVID a pause and then into construction. But we're really we're very very very excited to see what the public market's going to become here um shortly um opening later this year. Um as as it says um on the slide, it was a lead certified uh facility achieved lead gold, which we're very excited about as well. Um then going more to like a interior buildout space, that would be the um uh the remodel on the in the middle there in the city county building in this building. Um there we touched multiple departments, assessor,

clerk, treasurer, missing a few. Um council office. Thank you, president. Um so some of those spaces hadn't been touched since 1960s. They really literally had original um components in them that had never been touched in this building. So bringing that those those spaces up to sort of a modern standard to give our give our fellow staff um high quality spaces to work in and and collaborate in. Um we're very very proud of that. Also um achieved a lead certification which I'll talk more about later. And then the the third project wanted to highlight on the right is a a solar electric uh solar PV project that we're very very proud of. Uh it's a very unique project. Um so back in 2022, uh we we collaborated with um uh Senator Tammy Baldwin's office on some um congressional congressional appropriation money. Um and that was awarded to the uh to the project um a 5050 sort of grant to install about um half a megawatt 500 kilowatts of solar capacity on um apartment buildings that are part of our um community development division low-income housing section 8 type housing. Um what's really unique about it that's not normally done in a commercial building is the the solar electric solar electricity is directly attributed to the tenant meters. So every tenant it's roughly I think 180 tenants get a get a portion of of that solar um directly taken off of their electric bill. So um normally you sort of have one kind of like the owner of the building has a house meter and all the solar in a multif family building goes through that and the tenants sort of get the benefit of it. In this case the tenants will get the

direct benefit and I I think as Jessica alluded to earlier low-income um residents pay a large portion of their utility bill for or a large portion of their income towards utilities. So we we really think we can have some very significant impact and we're looking forward to monitoring this project in the years to come and kind of see where the data is and you know see the see the direct impact for those tenants. So, getting into more specific about city facilities, we have a software um where we get about 1,200 MG Alliant electric and gas bills sort of every month. They get compiled into a software and it spits out charts and graphs and data, some of which you can grab off of our website if you're interested. Um, but this is basically just a pie chart that sort of visually shows all of our utility costs for the year. Vast majority of utility costs are electric. Um, little bit of gas, tiny little bit of steam. That little orange sliver of steam. Anybody know where that steam gets used? Top quiz. It does get used here. It's a Manona terrace actually. So this this graph does not include might be covered up but um this graph doesn't include the city county building because the county manages the utility bills here. Um so that steam comes from a like a central plant. This building and a couple other buildings receives steam. Um gas is roughly is it I think a little over a million thems utility bill. And then electricity is roughly 45 million kilowatt hours million kilowatt hours. Um so it's a big number. So of that 45 million kilowatt hours

roughly half is attributed to wells. So pumping our our municipal water, our waste water on the back end. um street lights, traffic lights, roughly half of that is is um kind of those base utilities, base services that that the city needs to to function. The other half is attributed to both large and small and everything in between facilities. Um and then the electricity is a mix of demand, which is sort of like how much power am I using at any given time and then sort of how much energy do I use over over a given period of time. So we're talking about $89 million of of cost here in total and roughly the city manages u around I think I have it on the slide here forgot the number 5 million roughly 5 million square feet of facilities so that has actually grown from it's grown about 20% over the past decade so we've added some parking ramps we've added some facilities some pretty significant facilities um So the city is growing um but we also are um being efficient with our resources as we grow. So this is another way of looking um basically that that pie chart would in any given year turn it into a into a a graph and kind of look at it year-over-year. So going back in the last decade or so while we've been adding facilities we've also been getting more efficient. So, as we add add square footage or add a new building or replace a building that's less efficient with a new building that's more efficient, we've been able to sort of manage our costs and sort of we've been roughly flat um over maybe the past five five 10 years. However, you'll notice in 2025 we did see a significant jump, significant increase

um that can be almost fully attributed to our uh bringing our electric buses into service. Not surprising, right? Um, not trying to I shouldn't even say it. Not trying to throw Metro under the bus. Not at all. Um, yeah, I know that's cheesy. But, um, what isn't shown here would be and what we would need Metro to provide the data. They are saving significant money on on maintenance, significant money on diesel. They have cut their emissions dramatically. We provide better service, quicker service. Um, so the costs there are very justified, but it it shows up in our electric bills. Um it's roughly 5 million kilowatt hours a year and then some gas use at their at their BRT um facility on Hansen Road as well. Um the things that Rachel talked about with respect to our light duty EVs um and everything that she talked about earlier tonight, that's a much smaller impact on our utility bills. Um roughly 200,000 kilowatt hours a year. Um so and again there those savings are offset with with um lower maintenance costs like she mentioned. Um and then obviously not using diesel lower emissions. Um I do want to touch on I guess the other the other thing related to cost is we do expect utility costs to rise significantly. they have been rising the last several years. Um especially natural gas costs. Um we talk to MG on a regular basis and say, "Hey, what are you guys projecting? What are you locking in for rates for next year?" Um typically they'll say, "Oh, add 10% a year." I think natural gas prices been a little bit of a surprise, but I I I would say more like 20 30% if if I was asked my opinion on it. Um, MG might say 10% and maybe they can get a good deal,

but I think we're going to have to really be prepared for some significant natural gas costs over the next couple years. And that's partially related to where we're at, you know, with politics these days, but also we we're exporting a lot of natural gas out of the country instead of keeping it here. And that's it's a supply and demand thing, right? So, what what I guess what can we do about it, right? I'm talking I don't want to I don't want to be negative about costs going up. Um, one of the most significant things we can do besides energy efficiency and replacing we have a piece of equipment that fails, we don't want to replace it and do business as usual, we want to find something that's more efficient um or decarbonized um so if it's if it's a gas boiler, we want to replace it with some sort of electric source heat, right? That's and also something that's more efficient. So find ways to reduce the energy use in the building. Uh whether it's air sealing, replacing windows, adding insulation or or replacing with more efficient equipment. But also a strategy we've been really successful um over the past decade or 15 years is implementing a solar electric systems like we did at Truax. So this is kind of a um a graph that illustrates that. Um so years going back roughly um roughly 20 years back to 2008 when we installed our first solar system. A tiny little system at a very high price. Uh and then you can sort of go today. You can install these very large systems for basically the same price as that tiny system um 20 years ago. So the the industry has changed, the technology has has changed for the better. Um there's economies of scale in in solar now. And um I think we've talked about this at council meetings before. We have our very own uh an in-house solar um training program that also installs

solar systems on on city facilities. Um we started that in 2016. It's called a green green power program. You can look it up on our website if you're not familiar with it. But um they they're installing roughly 50% of the solar capacity that we're putting onto city buildings. That that program is doing about about half of it per year. They did the entire Trux um solar system that I mentioned earlier and then the other half are done by contractors through public works project projects um either independently as a standalone solar install or as part of a larger um public works project. Um so it took roughly 10 years to get to the first megawatt of solar capacity uh between 2008 and I think we hit it in two 20 What year was it Jessica? 2020 2019 2020. Then within within three years we did our second megawatt and then within two years we did our third megawatt. So like we're starting we're getting to this point where the program is growing. The goal is to get to roughly 10 megawws um by the end of the decade or into the early 2030s. It's probably going to be more like like 2032 maybe instead of 2030. But um we set that goal back what what year did we do you remember what year we set that? It was before your time. I want to say we set the goal in like 2018. So we're like oh we got 10 years we can do that. But um so basically um we're sort of showing our projections here on the out years from 2026 on. um very significant um capacity installed by green power and and then off obviously contractor support too as well to meet meet that goal and I think I touched on most of this already um just have some summary points but um I guess one thing I want to say that I didn't mentioned was our our we have a

new you guys the common council worked on a new um resolution for for lead standards in our facilities. I'm I'm sure most of the council's familiar with that. Maybe some of the new members aren't if it was before their time. Um we're excited about that. Um I think it's really pushing the envelope. It's going to be very challenging for us. uh full disclosure like we're we didn't set sort of a bar where h business as usual. We wanted to sort of push the envelope a little bit so to speak and um extend you know make it more of a reach goal but we think it's very achievable too but there could be some costs associated with it on some of our capital projects um upcoming um but we'll keep you informed on that as those come up. Um along with those costs, decarbonization will have some some costs as well, some some um impacts on our on our utility bills. Um as we kind of go through this transition period and getting off of fossil fuels into into electric um you know there's right now gas is relatively inexpensive compared to electric, but we things are going to change as time goes on. So, we'll have to keep an eye on that, too, and really be um conscientious on on what types of systems we specify for our buildings. Um, and we really want to just continue the good work that our green power team is doing. Um, you'll see that funding through the energy improvements capital budget. Um, significant portion of that budget is for for that green power program. So, we're hoping to keep keep the momentum going there and and keep having that program do good things. Um, and I think that's all I have for this evening.

All right. I promised Elder Madison that she got to ask the first question because her hand was up after the Oh, my presentation.

It's been so long though, but thank you. Um I had a question or comment about the um about the trees which is surprising for me. Um so in short I never thought that I would be so interested in trees until this presentation. So thank you for that. Um, but I did want to ask, um, during this, not the winter storm, but the storm before the winter, the, um, snowstorm, I saw a couple posts where folks were mentioning a tree down and there was a comment about um, the tree being hollow or dead or something similar. So, I'm just curious, does the city provide education to homeowners or just folks with, you know, trees that may be aging or at risk of, I don't know, falling because of whatever condition they're in. I'm just curious.

Our influence ends at the end of the rideway. So, um, if a resident has concern about a tree that's in front of their house, in front of their neighbor's house, we can absolutely take a look at that and we will take a look at that and perform the appropriate remediation um, that's needed. When we get calls about trees on private property, we typically refer them to look at um to hire a certified arborist or to solicit like, you know, some quotes to see what um the the price may be, but we're unable to provide recommendations on private property.

Gotcha. And then my second question, you mentioned a program for um partnering with the schools. Um, the school in my district, Samberg Elementary, is adjacent to Samberg Woods. And I'm just curious if you're aware of any programming that involve the kids, I don't know, exploring what is sort of their neighbor at school, which is the the woods. I am not familiar personally and I don't want to speculate too much, but parks has a pretty large conservation area over there. I would suspect if there's a city partnership, it's probably with our parks conservation team, but again, I'm not certain.

And then my last one, you mentioned um hoping to partner with uh Operation Fresh Start. think the conservation area does partner with OFS, but I wanted to I missed something in that discussion you were saying when I heard the OFS part, but in in in what ways would you be partnering with OFS if that came to fruition? Right. So, parks has a contract with Operation Fresh Start Engineering has a a a contract with Operation Fresh Start. And a lot of what um OFS does for parks and engineering is invasive species removal,

which is important um for sure. But what what they would be doing with us is kind of the other end of that where they would be planting trees um helping to facilitate uh the needs that trees would need to grow. um when they're in those first couple years like making sure they have enough water, proper mulge, um removing some of the planting stakes and banding that we have around them. So hopefully between the work that they're doing in parks and engineering and the work that they'll hopefully be doing for us, they'll get a more well-rounded experience and they'll also get introduced to working within the city right away which brings um certain other difficulties and challenges and safety concerns versus working in a park or greenway.

Thank you. I did my service learning there when I was a student at MATC. So I love OFS. So thank you. And then my my last question is for the building I think it's building energy savings program. Well, it was the last maybe second to last presentation.

So my my question was as someone who likes to compete but for fun um the competitive part stuck out to me. So, I was also wondering whether or not um do you like is there a way to break it down by parts of the city that is trending um I guess in the lead for being on you know just in the lead like I would love to know which side of town is leading. That's not something I had considered yet, but it's Oh my god.

I love the idea. We certainly have uh you know, we one of the things that we've promised folks as part of this is that they're you know uh energy usage is anonymous. And so we want to make sure that people aren't you know, nobody wants to be shamed for how their building is performing. And so we we've made that promise to our community. But we could definitely probably we have all their addresses and so we could definitely do some sort of geographic breakdown. might be fun and actually useful information for us figuring out, you know, the age of buildings and building stocks and being strategic about where we deploy programs. So, I love the idea.

Yeah. But first, give me an opportunity to share more in if there's anything that alters can do to get the information out there in our district blogs, just in case we're not in the lead, I would like that information first. We will make sure that happens. Absolutely. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks, y'all. Okay, I'm going to start my questions and then Oh, Alder Guier, you're gonna save save them for me. Go ahead.

Thank you, President Vidor. And this is a question for Greg May, too, or couple of questions. Um, do you have some I or can you tell us some idea of the spread between our most efficient and our least efficient buildings? Uh it's it's pretty you you it's very surprising. Um you know we have some incredibly efficient buildings here really kind of renown you know nationleading buildings there some really incredible buildings uh office buildings that have geothermal and things that are doing some groundbreaking work that's really encouraging. And we have some buildings here that you know I I'm not I don't know the specifics of their buildings but they it I'm wondering if they even have windows. They might just have just open. It's so the energy usage on some of these the energy use intensity on some of these buildings is incredibly poor. Um and so really running the gambit from you know energy star scores which is kind of a breakdown on how you compare to nationally we have buildings that are 99th percentile and then we have some buildings that are certainly in the bottom 10%. So we're really running the gambit.

Okay. And then the other question is and this is sort of a competitive one too but uh you had noted that there are quite a few other municipalities, states that etc that have really gotten into the benchmarking program. Um how do we how do we stand up against uh the rest of the country?

It's so we're you still rolling the program out. This this year is going to be a big year as we kind of hit the final benchmarking numbers. So, um, you know, that's we're going to hit those 800 buildings that need to participate. So, we'll have a better understanding, you know, once we have everybody into the program, but, uh, last year was, you know, 92% compliance is comparable to our peers. Uh, I think St. Paul was somewhere around 91%, Chicago somewhere around 88% compliance for buildings. So, um, our 92% compliance is right in line with peers. It's we're very proud of that number. It took a lot of hard work, especially from I'll give a shout out to my uh colleague Alice who's took a lot of phone calls and helped a lot of building owners and churches and everybody who has to participate in the program helping them get in compliance. So, we're we're proud of where it is and we'll have a better answer for you at the end of this year when we have everybody in.

Thanks, Greg. And and I have one question for Craig about the trees. uh hear once in a while from constituents either saying we should be doing uh more about uh uh preserving remaining uh oak trees or little oak savannah that we have on public property and others saying it's not worth the effort and hear stories about oak wilt. I I didn't hear you mention that as one of our particular problems, but if you could just kind of comment on where we stand in oak preservation and the impacts of oak wilt.

We have an ordinance that prohibits pruning um during the oak growing season really when overland transmission is most prevalent. We're we're reaching that pretty soon in April and it's going to run pretty strongly through June and July. Um, but we as a city have taken it a step further and we say you really can't prune oaks from April through October unless you get a permit. And in order for us to grant the permit, there has to be a pretty legitimate reason why that the work can't wait. Um, it is preserving oak tree populations within our city important? Absolutely. Because many of the oak trees that we have are larger trees and larger trees provide a bigger punch as far as their impact positive impacts that they have on our community and the eco benefits. So with some of the new uh changes that we implemented at the beginning of the year, affectionately known as tree teeth, which revised some of our ordinances and um some of our DPW specifications. We have additional measures in place to try to protect those larger canopy trees.

Thank you. Thank you, President Ber.

Okay, I think we're going to my questions. All right. Um I'm going to start with um uh Jessica. So the navigator program, you talked about mold remediation. You did not talk about radon mitigation. Is that something that's included? um we are moving toward including radon detection and mitigation. Um it there's less of a connection between um efficiency upgrades and um and radon except when you seal things up you're not offging as much of that. So we um we have been partnering uh we've been learning from um the state and local health department about the resources and how that um usually goes. So, we're moving um more toward that. I'm not sure that we've done a radon mitigation yet. Um but it is something that is top of mind because we want to make sure that we're doing we're we're hitting all of the important upgrades that that home needs.

And so, if you move into adding radon mitigation, would that be covered by the navigator program? That's a great question. Um like I said, we haven't run into it yet. So, we haven't done one of those. Um we haven't done one of those systems. So, we'd have to kind of take that back to the team and talk about that um and make sure that it's like part of the um within the purview of the contractors that we typically work with and the work we've been doing so we can think what that looks like for radon mitigation. Just FYI, Milwaukee includes it in theirs. So, okay. Well, in the spirit of healthy competition,

we can and like I said, I don't think that we have done it before, but it has been part of the conversations that we've had because we know it's a problem in our area. And what is the funding source for the navigator program?

So we started the navigator program similar to um the food scraps programs that um that Brian was talking about. So we have braided lots of different funding for these programs. So so we started with a um a grant from um the public service commission's office of energy innovation um to really kick off the program. We've used um uh EECBG money, energy efficiency and conservation block grant funding. Um we've used a couple of other competitive grant funding sources that I won't name because I might get them wrong. Um and we're using city funding as well for the program. So to keep that stabilized over time because we do have um we don't get there's more need for this program and more interest in this program than we have funding for. So we do carry over our list of interested folks um from one year to the next and hopefully get um to their building. So we try to kind of smooth out the bumps in in that program so that we can offer a stable funding source over time.

And so for the city funding is that coming from capital? Yes, it is coming. Okay, great.

Um so this my question is how many additional units in the city might be eligible for the navigator program? That's uh something we've tried to wrap our hands around with some data analysis. Um so we when we look at our building stock, we have some data that tells us about the the possible condition of the building, but we don't always know the condition of the the buildings themselves. But when we start looking at our multif family buildings, our buildings that are um you know built before 1980 or um in the 70s, that's when our energy code kicked in in Wisconsin. And so before that, there were no kind of requirements under residential energy code. So buildings that were built before that time are typically less energy inefficient uh or less energy efficient. Um and of course like buildings age and the envelope um needs maintenance and things like that as time goes on. So some of the analysis we've done has looked at the age of the building um what we know from um from building permits. We've been looking at building um uh and uh narrowing that down to like sending out we've we've sent mailers to folks that we think would be um possible candidates. That's not the beall end all. Um, but our first mailing and Greg tell me if I'm way off, but it was close to 900 um, addresses that we that we sent a mail or two, and that's not a comprehensive um, all-inclusive scientific number. Um, but that's just narrowing it down based on some of the data we have. Um, so we know that the need is greater than that um, across the community. and and investing in this housing stock is um it sort of it's it's pays dividends all around it. You know, a building that we've already built is going to be a better climate solution um than constructing a new building. It's less expensive to um make these improvements and upgrades in existing buildings than it is to build a

new building. Um and it's going to of course be reducing energy waste um and and reducing the bills for those folks. So we really feel this is important strategy for maintaining the quality of our affordable housing. Agreed. Okay. My other question is for you. Um and it is around so I'm on water utility board and when well 12 came up that is being completely rebuilt. I said okay and is there solar automatically going on it? And they were kind of like I don't know that's facilities. And I was like that's not a really satisfying answer. They're like why why are we not integrated? So can you talk about when the city is building a new building like well 12? Why is it not part of the conversation to have that be a renewable energy source and just integrated into that building?

Yeah. Uh good news. Um we have talked to our utility and it's it's in the plan. Um I I think it goes back to some of the we talk about our silos, right? and and it's it's important for us all to know what our resources are citywide, right? Um we've worked we've worked over the years we've worked well with water utility, but they they also do a lot of things on their own too. Um and sometimes things get forgotten. Um that's probably that's probably the answer like they weren't thinking about it but there's enough um checks and balances in our I think in our collective kind of the professionals that are working around facilities that like hey you guys are doing a building we should get solar on that but you're right it should be more of a formal um it should be like automatic like we will put solar on it um 100%. Um, wells. Wells also are a little tricky because it's a huge energy user as you know being on the water water utility board. Um, and then it's a tiny little pump house, right? So there's not a huge roof,

but there's land. There's land for sure. Yep. And that's that's the trick there. Yep. So that's going to be an interesting project being with the belt line there and the all the rightway work and the high the high voltage lines and everything making all that that work. So all right, I am not seeing any additional Oh, Alder Yugare, go ahead.

Thank you, President Bid. I just want to build on that last uh question and answer a little bit and uh point out that I think one of the most important things we heard tonight, there weren't any questions about it before uh were Jessica's opening comments and description of the uh champions group and the way in which we're measuring performance. I think that uh we've got government entities, companies, um politicians across this country uh putting out very bold aspirational comments and setting goals and so forth and execution is something entirely separate. And uh I just want to uh really give credit to your team and to all of those champions because we have to over we have to have ways to overcome silos and all of the obstructions that are there. But uh I am quite impressed with the process that has been developed to hold ourselves accountable to hit these goals. I think we're seeing some of the results of making that possible and I'm looking forward to a time when we're going to see a whole bunch of fives in those regular reviews. Thank you. Thank you, President.

I think that was a beautiful way to end alder. So, I want to thank all the staff. I want to thank the alders uh most of whom are online tonight, but um thank everybody for attending and listening. And um you know the this is also a resource for the public to know what great work the city is doing to um meet our sustainability and resiliency goals. And I think that everyone who lives in Madison should really be proud of our city government and what we're doing to make our environment and our community better. So thank you all.