Common Council - Regular Meeting

Yeah. Happy holiday. We're blaming it on real problematic. Which one?

This is pretty long. I'm not Liam wrote about Don't like

moving myself forward.

I keep getting targeting. Sometimes I think it's We'll see. We have no Is it too many already? Everything everyone is saying is being picked up.

That's a whole another level. I guess you guys are in a way that's getting a lot of text. I'm just telling stories about it. The hour of 6 o'clock, having come and gone 5 minutes ago, I will call to order the common council meeting of Tuesday, December 16th, 2025, and ask the clerk to please call the role.

Thank you. Alder Veier here. Alder is present. Alder Vidver here. Alder Vidiver is present. Alder Duncan present. Duncan is present. Alder Evers here. Also, I'll call I do see Alder Figo Cole is is here. Well, thank you. Alder Glenn here. Alder Glenn is present. Alder Goajan here. Go Rajan is present. Alder Yugare here. Is present. Alder Harrington McKenna. I'm here. Mckenni is present. Alan Kella. I'm here. Kell is present. Alder Knox here. Knox is present. Alder Madison here. Madison is present. Alder Martinez Rutherford present. Alder Martinez Rutherford is present. Alder Matthews here. Alder Matthews is present. Alder mayor

here. Alder mayor is present. Alder O'Brien here. Alder O'Brien is present. Alder Ohich present. Is present. Alder Pritchette here. Pritchette is present. Alder Tishell is excused. Madam mayor wave a quorum.

Thank you. Uh all right. So just since I don't know if all of us have been in this room. Uh little primmer on the mics. If it is red the mic is not on. If it is green the mic is on. You have to open and close your mic yourself. There is no central control. So, it is up to you to remember to do it before you speak and to remember to turn it off after you're done. Uh please do pay attention to that during the course of the evening. Um I will say even though it is a very brief meeting that we are here to do the business of the people of the city of Madison. I ask that we do so with grace and kindness and that we refrain from using any profanity in our remarks. Um, are there any disclosures or recusals on tonight's agenda? Seeing none, then we have one item. Item one, legisar 91175, the 2026 2027 appointment of election inspectors. On item one, President Vidar move to adopt.

Is there a second? Second. Seconded to adopt item one. Are there any questions for staff on item one? Seeing no questions for staff. Is there any discussion on item one? Seeing no discussion on item one, it has been moved and seconded. Is there any objection to recording a unanimous vote in favor of item one? Seeing no objection, item one is adopted with a unanimous vote. Alder Viere, it is your turn. I move to adjurnn. Is there a second? Second.

Moved and seconded to adjurnn. Is there any objection to recording unanimous vote in favor? Seeing no objection, we stand adjourned and we will stand in formal while I turn the chair over to President Vidver for the rest of your evening. Thank you all. Mayor, was that our shortest meeting on record? Yeah. Is that the record? Possibly. I think Congratulations everybody. We ended the last one with a unanimous vote and this one just sorted. We're on a roll. I know. Does this fall into our I'm sorry about that.

Doesn't I think you're right. I would We're going to count anyway. Have a merry Christmas, Mary. Or happy holidays, Mary. Thank you. You all, too. Yeah. Oh, thank you for that, Mayor. I just wanted to say

All right. Uh, so I will call to order the discussion of the common council of December 16th, 2025. I don't believe that we need to call the role um because it is just a discussion. So um I am going to ask that our present I'm going to ask that our presenters come to wherever they are going to present from apparently there and tell us about all of the ways the city works to help protect our lakes. There's a couple spots over here too. I have lots of questions for streets. I'll make sure I was like, "Let me go."

You just need to turn the mic on when you're ready to go.

Yes.

A good question. Okay. And I'll just say that folks because I don't have the same technology as in chambers. Um, so in the room, uh, you'll need to actually you'll need to actually raise your hands if you're in the room so that I know that you have a question. And on Zoom, when you raise your hand, I'm going to do my best to call you in the order that you raise your hand. But don't keep me to that. So with that, take it away.

All right. Can you hear me? Okay. Or do I need to be closer? Okay, great. Closer. Just around to you like that. Okay. Is this better a little bit? No. Just got to talk louder. Let's see. Oops. I got Okay. Thank you. All right. One more time. Better. Okay. Oh yeah.

All right. Thank you. Sorry about that. Um I'm Janice Schmidt. I'm principal storm water engineer in the engineering division. Um I'm here with Greg Fes, deputy state engineer, Troy Rines, street superintendent, and Lisa Lashinger, the Are you officially

assistant? You're assistant park superintendent. So um tonight we're going to give you a presentation about keeping our lakes healthy. Um, so there's a lot of issues around the the water quality. Um, people are very hyper sensitive to that, especially in the Madison area. Um, because it's a resource that people love and enjoy. So, tonight we're going to talk about keeping our lakes healthy. Uh, I'll talk about um the impairments. What is a what is a water and lake impairment? Um, common types of pollution, the Yahara watershed and the Rock River uh river basin and some of the regulations. Then I'm going to pass it off to the rest of the team and they're going to talk to you about what each different agency does um and then then our partnerships with our community uh leaders. Okay. So um we've probably mostly seen pictures like this, the algae blooms, um sediment plumes in the water. So you see big uh especially after heavy rains um you'll see that sometimes. Um so the waters around Madison are impaired. So what does that mean? Um the Clean Water Act section 303D list uh lists waters that are they consider impaired which do not meet water quality standards due to pollution. So statewide there's about not quite 1500 impaired waters. So all this information is available on the DNR website. Um, so and then of of those waters, there's about 671 that are under restoration and then 38 that have obtained their standards. Um, I'm going to go over this uh and then Greg is going to take it um later in the presentation. But what are some common types of pollution? So we have gross pollutants, total phosphorus, total suspended solids, and then a whole slew of other

ones like there's chloride, there's PCBs, mercury, arsenic, bacteria. So there's a lot of different types of water pollution. So common sources of those pollutions could be garbage or litter. You know, you see like pop cans floating and stuff. um fertilizers, sewage or animal waste, sediment and erosion, agriculture runoff, just different kinds of organic matter, and then you know a slew of chemicals and pharmaceuticals. Um so these are just some factoids about about you know clean water in general. So um did you know that one gallon of oil can pollute over a million gallons of drinking water? So that's pretty shocking. Um only one teaspoon of salt uh can pollute over five gallons of of fresh water. Um and then approximately 56% of the total annual total phosphorus load to the lakes usually occurs in about one month in the fall. So all these pollutants we have uh agricultural um uh urban runoff, we have sediment and construction runoff. All those things contribute to the lakes's health. Um this is just another thing I pulled off the DNR website. Um for instance, in Dayne County, they have listed impaired waters um with the the the water type listed as lake. So, these are all the lakes in Dane County that are impaired. Um, and there's a couple things to note here that, you know, some some of these are listed multiple times. That's because they have mult multiple pollutants in them. Um, but one thing to note in here is that total phosphorus comes up in almost every single one of these. Um, and that causes elgo growth, um, weeds, utrofication. So, there's a lot of issues with total phosphorus.

Um, you'll also note in the in the status code that some of these are listed at on the 303D list. So that means that they're impaired. Um, and some of them have TMDL approved next to them. So we'll get into that in a little bit later. So where does our water come from? So we're all part of the Yahara River wershed. Um, so the wershed uh extends north of Dayne County. It goes uh south to Rock County, includes the Madison area lakes. Um, and I take that back. The southwest side of Madison does not drain into this watershed. So, there's a couple things to take away. Oops. Sorry. There's a couple takeaways from this graphic. So, the the red arrows kind of show how water drains into the Madison area, uh, chain of lakes. Um if you'll notice the southwest side of Madison does not actually drain into the lakes. So that drains um uh to to the west southwest into the Sugar River wershed. Much of the upper reaches of the wershed are actually agricultural. So you can see in the legend anything that's yellow that indicates agricultural land which makes sense. Um, also the last thing that I wanted to point out is that there's a large amount of area that's actually outside of City of Madison that that contributes to the to the Yahara River wershed. And we'll talk about that in a little bit. So the Yahara River wershed, which is us right here, is just part of the larger Rock River basin. And you can see how big the basin is actually on the map of Wisconsin there. So the Rock River basin is in a TMDL. So a TMDL means total maximum daily load of

any specific pollutant um to a water body. Uh um that's the load that you can you can provide to the water body while you're still u meeting your wild qual quality standards. So, TMDLs are used as planning tools. So, you can estimate how much pollutants you're adding to the water while still meeting the standards um and kind of help you figure out how to make improvements or, you know, um maybe regulations and whatnot. It's used as a planning tool. So, there's 36 of these specific TMDLs currently in Wisconsin. So if you look how big a Rock River is, um there's uh we're just one of 36. So the Rock River TMDL has uh specific uh they did report and they have broken out this the specific pollutants that are included in that TMDL. So again, the total amount that you can put into the water. So the Rock River uh TMDL requires capture of total phosphorus and total suspended solids. So this is just a little snip out of that report. On the left you can see a graph that uh the annual distribution of total phosphorus. On the right is the one with annual distribution of total suspended solid. So you can see that agriculture plays a large role in this. Um, but as you recall from the map of the Rock River TMDL, it's pretty big and a lot of those areas are actually uh rural. So, there's a lot of regulations around this. Um, we are required to follow these. Um, we also want to do things that are right for the environment. So, some of this, um, is just a hierarchy and it gets really hard to explain, but I'll do my best. So clean the clean water act

federal level EPA they work in conjunction with states to create TMDLs for water quality. So the clean water act kind of is the big umbrella DNR um works with municipalities and the and the permites on the requirements. So in this chart um there's a note about Wisconsin DNR and the WPDES permit. So, WPDEES stands for Wisconsin Pollutant Discharge Elimination System. It's the permit that we are required as a municipality to have. It's a 5-year permit. Um, lot of requirements in there that we have to follow and then report back on every year. City Madison area has that in partnership with um their their local partners. So, it's a municipal area. So, there's other other entities involved. Um Madison Metropolitan Sewer District also has one of these WPDES permits. They have it separately from the city of Madison. It's for industrial discharge. So they have an adaptive management program in place. It's called Yahar Winds and Greg's going to talk about this in detail uh later. So um the Madison area has local governments in our in our general permit. So there's um quite a few city and villages that we work with and partner with. What we also can enforce as the city of Madison is our Madison general ordinances that kind of are regulator regulations around erosion control and water quality. Um over on this side, Madison Metropolitan Sewage District, they have their Yahara winds program and and um Yahara Winds um a lot of a lot of their their goal is to to reduce the total phosphorus. So the city of Madison is part of this group um

and our part of the of that is to um provide payment so that they can implement their Yahar winds adaptive management program. So who are our partners? We have a ton of different partners here. Um, Yahara Winds again is Madison Sewage District. They partner with a bunch of agriculture producers. So, the farm pride farms. They work with the county and uh federal agencies like DNR or USGS. Um, they also partner with Clean Lakes Alliance and Friends groups and university researchers. So, there's there's a big group of people who are involved in that. Um and that's one branch of that flowchart I showed you before. So the MAM swap partners are that that's the city uh municipality group. So that is um 22 different co-permites that are covered under one larger group for the Madison metropolitan area. So the takeaways here um it's a big issue. It's complicated and we have a lot of regulations. There's also a lot of people involved. Um, and with that, I'm gonna take a break um, and see if there's any questions before I pass it over to Charlie. I do have one. Um, you mentioned for it's pretty obvious why the Madison Sewage District has a discharge permit, but what is the Madison area discharge permit? What is that? So the um so the Madison permit is called the MS4 permit. So it's a municipal separate storm sewer system. That's S4. Um so that's part of the we're the co one of 22 co-permites that that are required to uh report out of what we're doing for our standards. Um there's you know requirements that we have to meet every year. Um so there's a lot of things that go on with that

permit. So that's that's the one that the city and the municipalities around here have to do.

Alderfield, thank you. Um, are there maximum levels of pollutants that are laid out in our permit? And if so, have we ever exceeded them? You want to take that one, Greg?

Sure. Um, so for our WPDEES discharge permit, we don't have a maximum. So again, this is a little complicated. There's two permits that kind of overlap each other. You know, in a vend diagram, there's there's shared ground in the middle, but they are separate. So there's two parts. So for our our MS4 permit that Janet was referring to, we don't have a pound total. What we have is a requirement to remove 40% total suspended solids from the city compared to no controls. Okay? So, you model the city once as if we didn't do anything. Then you model it again with all the stuff we've done and you see how close you are to 40% using, you know, uh, some software tools. This gets a little complicated, uh, which I will go into a little bit more later, but Act 10, for those of you who can roll back the clock 15 years now, um, Act 10 prohibited the DNR from enforcing 40% and only allowed them to enforce 20%. But since we are part of the TMDL, the TMDL came in and over promulgated above act 10. So there there gets what it essentially creates is a little hole in the donut which I will describe later.

And a quick followup and if we're if I'm getting ahead to your presentation, please tell me and I'll wait. But um do we come close to 40 or how close are we to 40? We we are close but we are not there. Okay. Thanks. Alder Evers. Yeah, Janet, thanks for the information. Could you back up about four or five slides? There were some acronyms that were used regarding some of the pollutants. Uh maybe which I'm sorry, not that far. Uh,

no, not that one. The next one maybe. Going too fast. Yeah. What's WWTF stand for? That what? Wastewater treatment facility. Okay. Yeah. I just it's helpful if you explain what acronyms are because guys like me just other feel dumb asking but I think it's important to ask. Very thank you. Okay. Uh Alder Okavovich.

Thank you uh President. Um on this slide, do we have one a similar report just for the Yahara um the AR drainage area? That that data exists, but I don't have it in the this slide was taken out of the TMDL. Um and while that data does exist, it's not in a nice neat pigraph uh in the report. You would have to make your own. Uh okay. Okay. Thank you.

I I can just say in general round numbers it's pretty if you if you're looking at the right hand side TSS which is what Janet and I deal with more often than not the agriculture is about somewhere between the high 60s and the and the low7s depending on how you uh how you do the math but it's never much different from that. um for Lake Mandota and then everything that that gets a little murkier as you go down through the chain of lakes. But if you just talk about Mandota, that pie changes a little bit and and agriculture is reduced to say the mid to upper 60s.

Okay. Thank you. So I just press down here to get to Okay. All right. Can you all hear me? Okay. All right. So, uh again, Charlie Roine, streets and urban forestry. Um I don't know much but this will be easier to understand than anything engineering has I promise. Um so uh the streets division's primary um uh as it comes to this is going to be dealing with leaf collection um sweeping streets which blends with leaf collection and then of course our snow and ice management. So we try and kind of take that in order of the season. So, street sweeping um during the bulk of the season, which is going to be uh uh we'll we'll talk about spring cleanup later, but from about April through around mid November, we have nine street sweepers that go out. We have a tent sweeper that's a different type of deal that just does bike paths. Uh the the sweepers go out. Um, we shifted about 7 years ago to four 10-hour days, but we offset the operator. So, we're actually sweeping 10 hours a day, 5 days a week. That was a 23% increase in street sweeping and tonnage with like I don't know like a 1 and a.5% increase in cost. So, that's been a a big win for us. Um, and again, you're welcome to read the slides. I I try not to. Um, but we also I believe we got the slide in here. Um, we take advantage of the clean Let me back up. We swept this year just under 5,000 tons of material off the streets. Um, and so

that does not include leaves. Um, leaves are uh significantly higher and we'll talk about that in a moment, but about 5,000 tons. And also that's a little bit light for us. We didn't have any real major summer storms this year to bring debris out either from trees or getting blown into the roadways or anything like that. So, that's actually a fairly light year for us. Um, the clean street, clean lake program is one that's uh really important to the streets division. Some of you that have been around a little while know about 6 years ago or so, we expanded that both by geographic footprint and made it year round. Um, as it relates to sweeping, again, that was the original reason for it. Um, it focuses primarily on those city streets that are they're going to drain directly to the lakes. Um, and then part of the expansion was finishing that up, but then also focusing on those residential areas, particularly ismas, near east, near west that are heavily parked uh on on street curb parking. A lot of what we do in in my division, we really have to be able to get to the curb uh to be effective at all. And so we really use those those fourhour periods during the week um during the non- snow season for sweeping and during the snow season for um plowing back uh to the curb. Um so here we got the the not quite 5,000 tons this year. We're probably 6 to 700 tons lighter than than a typical year. Um leaf collection. Again, I won't read the slide, but I'm going to anticipate some questions um on leaf collection. So, um, uh, I'm going to say five six years ago, we switched how we do leaf collection, um, in the streets division. Um, for those that around were around prior to that, essentially what the streets division did was we had um handdrawn maps with colors that we drew on that

had that was like black for we've already been and you missed us and then like yellow for hey, we're in your general area and then like blue or something for hey, you're up next, but no promise of when we were where and going to be where. And we got flooded routinely with emails and phone calls with people upset cuz we we missed them or they missed us or when are you coming and I don't understand and what's going on. And so we switched a few things of how we do leaf collection. Probably the most relevant that the residents see would be we went to a scheduled collection process. So, um, now a month or more in advance, you can look up your address online and it'll give you your three setout dates for leaf collection. Now, Streets has always collected leaves up until about the week of before Christmas if weather allows. Um, and that didn't change from the old process, which I was a part of for my first couple years with streets, or this process from the last five or six. Also important to note that the tonnage of leaves we get can vary a little bit from year to year. Dry fall versus wet fall. Heavy leaves way more. Um but we collect the exact same amount of weight of tonnage of leaves. Um with this way we do it versus the old way. We're just way more effective and efficient with it. God bless you. and um and we get I can't even quantify the fewer calls we get from residents on when are you coming, why did I get missed? Um and so it has been a much better system from a resident perspective and from a collection perspective. Now, um, this year, uh, we got the largest snowfall in November since at least 1938. 11.7 in officially fell. Um,

we've got more snow between that and December 10th than we had all of last year. And then, of course, we had 15 days where we didn't even hit 30°. We were running somewhere between 10 and 30° below our average for the first two weeks of December. So, of course, what that did was the people who had the last set out of the year on November 30th, who were really happy to have that as their setout date until they weren't. Um, didn't get their last guaranteed collection. Um, now that being said, up through the week of Thanksgiving, we were actually a little bit ahead of pace. We actually, a few alders know that we were collecting from that November 30th, the week of Thanksgiving, getting ahead. we were actually in a very strong position. We had collected the same amount of tonnage of leaves as we have the past couple years, you know, year to date. And then we had, you know, winter arrive, you know, fast and furious. And so, um, whether this process or the old process, we have always been pushed to do leaf collection in December. Always. And we always do if we can. Unfortunately, if you've been in the upper Midwest for any amount of time, bestlaid plans get laid low by the weather sometimes. And so, um, that's where we're at now. There's a lot of leaves to to to pick up. Um, it's not No one's happy about it. We sure aren't. Um, but any thought that, hey, if we were just doing it the old way, I can promise you it would be the exact same problem, it might be distributed a little different, but there would have been a lot of people very upset that they didn't have leaves collected after Thanksgiving. So the go forward then what we're currently working on um is to make some adjustments, some minor tweaks and how we um

set jobs in the spring. We're working with our labor partners so we can be in a better position uh so that if March is friendly, we can add some leaf collection in March, which typically we would not do. We would typically what we've been doing is a a round of collection in April and then a round of collection in May. But given the large amount of leaves that are out there, again, we have a plan. We will see what the weather does in March and early April. But if if it is cooperative, our intention is to go out and start picking away at that. Um it won't look exactly the same because the terraces will be soft. We can't short hall the parks and do some of the things we do to be efficient, but it's important to us to get out and get that moving in March if we have the opportunity. So, um once we get a better feel if the weather's going to allow for that, we'll certainly get word out. You all know or have gotten emails or talked to Brian Johnson. Um he's an effective uh communicator and so it is our hope to be able to do that, but really we won't be able to commit to that even till maybe a few days in advance. Um, our intention is to start with anybody who had a November 30th setout date and then work, you know, from there. So, um, maybe that heads off a few questions. And so, then there's where we are now, which is the the winter time. Um, so, uh, this past winter, of course, as you're all aware, was a relatively uh, light winter. Um, however, that can be um a little when it comes to putting down salt, it's really kind of funny. Before I came to streets, you wouldn't realize. So that inch and a half uh inch and 3/4 we got this last round that was super super wet. We put almost the amount same amount of salt on that as we did the 12 in we got on November 29th. How it falls dry, wet temperatures. It's really pretty incredible um how that works out. Um if you go back 10 or more

years ago, the streets division was putting down anywhere from 10 to 14,000 tons um on the streets uh on an annual basis. We've been flying somewhere between 6,500 and maybe nine in a bad winter for the last 10 or so. Um, we really walk a fine line here compared to a lot of communities both with our practices and policies, but also just trying to live the values of not just salt until you see bare pavement. Some of our residents appreciate that, some of them don't. Um, it can impact different streets a little bit differently for sure. These concerns aren't new. This policy has been in place since the late 70s. Just so you're all aware, this has been the way Madison has done it for a long time as far as what streets get salted, the salt routes, and which ones don't, and then if it is a salt route, how that impacts plowing operations versus residential streets and how that impacts plowing operations. Um, this is a map uh the of the area WMadison is in the green. uh we are gold and then the county is blue and you'll recognize that the county has it's part of the do state DOT system they're doing all your high volume highspeed roads and you'll also notice for a lot of our neighboring communities Middleton Fitchburg Sun Prairie they're doing a lot of their main roads as well plowing and and salting um so we have a network of that's just us a network uh in Madison of roughly 1,700 miles. Um about 5 6 years ago, we were assaulting about 870. We're down to about 820 right now. We did an audit um the years run together about 2020 on our salt route network to make sure it met our practices and policies. And so we took

about 25 miles off at that point. So, just so you're aware, about 25 miles is about one plow truck's worth. Um, and then, uh, when the metro redesign came through, that took out about another 25 to 30 m out. So, a salt route for the city of Madison, you're talking about our salt route uh, network mirrors the metro transit by about 85%. Um, so when they make a redesign, it can a lot of our streets are only salt routes because Metro runs them. But then also you're looking at um if there is uh hospitals, police, fire stations, uh connector, major connectors and and things of that nature to be a salt route. Um so when when we deploy that's 32 routes, that's 16 on each side of town. We'll typically put out one more truck on each side of town. They're going out on residential streets, the hilliest, curviest uh residential streets, and they'll put down some sand, maybe drop a plow. Um, and then they're also hitting the uh MPD lots. We've we take care of MPD during these events. Um, we do pre-treatment as conditions allow. Um, it is somewhat rare that conditions seem to be allowing recently, but those are those white pencil lines that you see. Um when we last year we started when we put those pencil line down uh a typical salt um application is going to be 300 lb. We we put on 200 lb after this and it's about a 30 lb savings. And then the idea with this is it will prevent some of that bonding from the snow to the pavement. And so in certain events when you can do this, it might prevent you from having to go out and put down one last round. Not always. Um, but there's there are some benefits to doing this when you can, but again, the conditions have to be right. Um, so

as I mentioned, the top left here, the route evaluations and reductions, I touched on that earlier. Um, on the bottom left is uh Phil Gabler from engineering. He'll he comes out and does some saltwise training for us. Allison Madison with Wisconsin Saltwise will come out and do some training for us for our operators and any new supervisors. And on the right side there, um, something we've really been emphasizing in the last seven or eight years is equipment calibration. That's both kind of old school calibration, but also on the bottom right there, uh, when I got to streets, one of the first things we did was put weight scales up for sand and salt. So that in combination with our GPS, um, we now know how much salt for an event or for a season that we put on a particular salt route in a particular watershed, um, and a well district. we can answer those questions. It also will then throw up a red flag if we think a route should when we run it should put out x amount of salt. If it's, you know, a degree out of that, it'll kind of red flag for us like, hey, something happened. Your equipment might be out of a calibration or you might have had an operator leaning on the smash button or something along those lines. But it gives us a indication that, hey, we need to look into why this, you know, jumped off the page and and came in either really heavy or really light. um and and efforts to make continuous improvement. You know, bluntly, we are unless there's going to be some massive technology someday breakthrough, we're we're very much in tweaking world. So, on the right side here is a pavement temperature monitor that that has been around since our grandfather's day, but this is not your grandfather's version. Um we've got about a half a dozen of these uh in Madison streets. And in some aspects, it's worked really well and others maybe not quite what we'd hoped. Um, the interesting part is it measures the pavement temperature, but it also is connected and so it is tying into a forecast and telling us in real time at

specific periods in the future what it expects our pavement temperature to be. Um, it will also then read if there is moisture. Uh the part that hasn't really hit the way we hoped was that it was supposed to be able to read our salinity in that moisture and then tie into your forecast and tell you, hey, the grip of your road based on the salinity in the moisture and the pavement temperatures were forecasting, you're fine. Or hey, you need to maybe go out and put a little more down. That part hasn't been so great. But what it has worked better than we thought is what you can do is you can set it so that if it's got at a certain pavement temperature, it reads moisture and it's predicting it to drop below a certain level. It will send an alert to your phone and wake you up or whatever to say, "Hey, you might need to check out what's going on um before you get behind the eightball and and fall behind." So, good and bad. I mean, not every new thing works perfectly, but um it's been interesting. My hope is in the future it'll be better on the salinity side as far as measuring grip. Um on the left is a little more more low tech. Um the uh that's a plow blade. Obviously it's got 12 1 ft sections underneath that trip independently. Trip uh those blades tripping isn't all that new. We tried something akin to this my first years in streets but they were like three-foot sections. One thing that we that is different in city streets versus county highways and interstates is we have a lot of imperfections in our road, right? We have manhole covers. We have the metal plates that water puts out or whoever that's, you know, digging the street put out. Our streets are wonky and wavy. And and so what this does is it trips a 1-ft section rather than maybe the whole plow or a 4ft section. And so what that does is allows the plow to sit a little lower and cut better. As you can imagine, it's also quite a bit more expensive. We deployed this last year and we really didn't get any snow

to try it. Um, so far this year, we've had some. And so, uh, we're very much still kind of testing it, seeing if the juice is worth the squeeze on it. But really, it's just to point out that we are constantly seeing what is out there that seems like makes sense to try um, in Madison to see if we can make improvements. And then back to the spring, I would tell you um having been in streets eight years, nothing makes you happier than when our street sweepers that go to Milwaukee for repairs in the winter come back in February. It just warms your heart because you know spring and spring cleanup is around the corner. Um in March once the weather breaks, we'll run 16 hours a day on two shifts. Um, and that is really focused on getting that sand and all the other gunk that has been sitting in the streets um, all winter up. Uh, we do it in March just as soon as the weather breaks. Try and beat kind of the spring rains. We really focus on the residential streets in this period of time again because we don't salt them and we sand them depending on the winter you can get quite a bit buildup on those residential streets. Um, we'll typically go around three or four times, then pull them off and go to our regular sweeping schedule, which is what I started with. So, are we taking questions as we go? Okay. Did I answer them all?

No. All right. I didn't think I did. Other mayor,

thank you. Um, have you experimented with different uh formulations of salt and things that you put out? Thought I had read something about beet juice or something once. So they're um predating me um the city uh did experiment with like some beet juice and different formulations of salt. My understanding is it didn't go very well. Um I will say that one thing we brought in uh two winters ago um is magnesium chloride. We've got enough to salt the city twice. And what magnesium chloride will allow you to do is salt at a much lower temperature. Uh those of you, you may recall, was it two or three winters ago now, we had that big snowfall and the temperatures just dropped like a rock after and then like eight or nine days never hit above 101°. And so while we got the plow, you know, really extremely well done because for eight or nine days we couldn't salt. Sanding on the salt routes was a bluntly a joke. we we put down more sand in that week to 8 days than we typically do an entire winter. And so the idea was while we magnesium chloride comes with its own drawbacks, cost being one, but certainly it's harder on infrastructure, it's basically was to break glass in case of emergency. So you know what happened there will happen again at some point. And so rather than try to sand our way out of it for eight, nine days, um the idea is like that last run of salt or kind of when the event's done, we could go out with that magnesium chloride and at least get our main roads to at least to where like there's two tracks and the intersections are clear versus what we had, you know, that couple of winters ago. Um there are certainly communities out there that do a lot of different things with formulations. Um there's pros and cons to all of it. Um, it's extremely expensive to do it that way.

Um, and bluntly, I don't think it would lead us to using less salt. It might actually lead us to using more in certain circumstances. And I think that if we were going to ever explore, and I'm not recommending it, salting more of the city, that would be make more sense to explore. But with the way we do it, I think with the the rock salt, sand, and then with this magn magnesium chloride in our back pocket, we're in pretty good shape. And so the Sorry, just follow up. The the usual salt is sodium chloride, just standard. Yep. And um do either of those or does the medium chloride have the same impact to our drinking water and lakes chemically?

Uh well, it's not good for it. No salt is bad. So the biggest drawback as I understand on mag chloride is it is is harder on your on metals and it is harder on like the concrete and some of that that infrastructure. So I think that's why we would have we'd be really want to be mindful if we were going to switch off rock salt which isn't good for those things either. My understanding is this stuff is worse. Um and that's why for us it is really just about having it in our back pocket in case in case we need it. We wouldn't want to switch to it. There's no environmental benefit as I understand it and switching to magnesium chloride. Thank you. I have a question. Go ahead.

Are there benefits to I want to circle back to leaf collection? Sure.

During the course of the winter, they usually put out uh like sand p salt sand piles for for residents to come and pick up. Would it be uh um beneficial to perhaps put out some bins for leaf collection at some of these parks for people who are very very impatient about having their leaves picked up and then you know at least they have a source and because if the drop off sites closed down and now they'reounding you because the leaves aren't picked up uh would it as I Would that help if there was a site whereby they could go and deposit those leaves?

Yeah, I appreciate the question. The drop off sites are still available. If people can get them collected, they can bring them to the drop off sites and we'll collect. We're not running the same hours in the summer. In the winter time, we scale the hours back. It's Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, like 7:30 to 2:30. We don't have the evenings or the weekends, but we we do still have have hours there.

Mhm. Um, and to be honest with you, I haven't I haven't explored with parks. So, so those of you who don't know, in the fall, one of the big improvements we've made to our own efficiencies is parks allows us to use, I think, four of their park locations scattered around the city. And residents and some condo associations do take their leaves there, which is fine. Um, but then we we make an effort to get that cleaned up and put away so when spring breaks they're not dealing with a pile of leaf mess that we haven't been able to get, you know, over the course of the winter. So, you know, roundabout, to answer your question, we'd have to talk to parks and see if they're open to that. I don't I don't know. Um, basically what's the conversation nationally with people in your position and cities across the northern Midwest and the northern climate parts of North America including Canada. Are there new technologies, new thoughts about trying to reduce salt application? I guess what I'm saying is can we hope for or expect similar reductions in the future given salt's negative impact on our drinking water and clearly from the presentation earlier from Janet its negative impact on our lakes. Um, so this past, well, it was two springs ago, March, uh, March, April of 2024, the public works association every spring will do a kind of a winter snow and ice conference. And I would, and I typically go once every 2 or 3 years cuz stuff just doesn't change that quickly. There was nothing there that jumped off the page of of some new advancement that was coming. um honestly for us to use less salt. It's a matter of taking roads

off the salt route network like we did a few years ago. Um and there there's no magic doesn't seem to be any magic pill out there that that's going to make it better. Part of the idea of bringing the mag chloride in honestly was just the thought of rather than try and rock salt a be Jesus out of an event we can you know kind of come in on the backside and use mag chloride. Um, but there's nothing big. And and in fact, Alder Evers, I would say probably the opposite. I mean, when I talk to colleagues either in Wisconsin or in other places, they can't imagine doing it the way we do. Is that right? Can't imagine it. Um,

they're using more, you think, on a salt city. Yeah. Yeah. I mean just just from a policy perspective like to be clear in the last 10 or 11 years where we're using significantly less salt that wasn't totally policy driven that was um largely driven by my predecessor and and assistant Steve Schultz who just like we're just going to walk this right

edge a lot closer and it became ingrained as part of our culture. that wasn't a real policy shift and taking 50 mi out of the salt route network certainly makes a difference but not a massive one. And so like uh we had a a meeting uh was it last summer where a couple of our neighboring communities were in there that happened to salt residentials and we talked a little bit about it and they were like yeah we could never do what you guys do. Not even just from a there there's the fallout of that and then there's also the cost

like anybody who thinks that we are saving money by doing it the way we do it does not understand how municipal uh salt and winter winter works. We we do not save money. We spend money to live our value in this

realm. Maybe explain that briefly for those who might be watching and and let me ask some questions that might help you respond. When you say that we're not saving money by cutting back on our salt rusts, does that mean we're plowing more often or is it equally expensive or more expensive to say apply sand as opposed to salt? So, um rock salt is cheap and so uh I'll give you an example. So, the last of the the events we've had that stacked up that you know about 15 16 in. If we could have gone out one time, plowed out the residentials, dropped salt, they melt off, and you guys are on bare pavement, we're done. But we've been working um until the last 3 or 4 days. We've had people on overtime and on nights going back. Um, some of you might remember on December 10th, we went out and basically did another citywide plow because the those streets fluffed up enough that we went out and we grabbed people from parks and engineering and streets and we went out and plowed it again. Well, if we had salted it, we wouldn't have had to do that. If we had salted it, we wouldn't have people on tonight. we wouldn't had people in Thursday last week going through because it was fluffing up because it got just warm enough going out in area sanding and plowing back. It would all be gone. And so that is something that the city of Madison, I would say, puts its resources where its mouth is when it comes to living a a virtue of like we are we live over top of our drinking water and we care about the lakes. And so rather than take look, I would sleep easier at night. I know Roger would if we just turned the salt on, ran at water, and went home. Uh we would all

sleep easier, but that's not how Madison wants to do this. Um, and so staff time, overtime, equipment costs way over exceed 90 lbs a ton of rock salt versus if we could just lay that down one time on a residential street and be done. So I I mean, I hope that answers the why it would be cheaper. So like that's what I say. Anybody who thinks that we don't salt residentials cuz we're trying to save money, boy, it couldn't be further from the truth. Well, last question and I'll I'll let others pepper you with questions they may have. Still, I think this is really important because I I'm sure you get a lot of criticism about this, you know, the way things are done. Not that many people who are thanking you for the good job that you all are doing. Isn't part of the story though that we need to learn to drive on streets that are not clean, clear pavement? We need to learn during wintertime to be more cautious when we get in our cars and deal with the fact they're going to be snowy and icy.

Isn't that something that we just need to accept living in Madison? And this idea of having a clear pavement is kind of silly.

Yeah. I don't think you have to go much further north here in Wisconsin or even in Michigan where I came up where people had snow tires, had winter cars, had had an expectation like in the winter, you're often times just going to be inconvenienced and have to allow more time to travel around. Now, I don't know that in cities much like we're really good at telling residents some of the hard news sometimes. Um, I know it's tough at at my standpoint and there's plenty of times myself or Brian would love to tell people like you needed to leave earlier. Um, right like like I know that you have a time schedule from everything but winter doesn't always cooperate. Um, so yes, the answer is yes. Um but people have expectations and um you know and I think the other thing is because like a couple things don't help us because we have so many people come and go right they come from different climates with different expectations or maybe they they cut through communities that salt everything and so they see them get clear at different periods of time. They assume that we are doing something wrong or have made mistakes. And I will tell you 90 plus% of the snow and ice complaints we get, people are complaining about the service level, but they don't know it. They think we've made a mistake, but actually what they're griping about is, I disagree with your service level that led to this condition. Um, and then they're not always in a position to hear, um, you know, maybe don't take the hill out of your neighborhood. maybe go out the other side where it's flat and drive around. I don't want to always you don't appreciate the constructive thought always.

Well, thank you. Thanks for your answers, Alder Glenn. This is my first winter of being an alder. I just want to say that up front. Congratulations. You're off to a fine start. Last winter would have been better.

Um, so question. So, I'm over on the north side in 18 and um I heard you say about like bus routes and then I just heard you say you just went back out cuz that was going to be my question is so like on I live on school road and it's still like a lot I'm know why but would love to ask you it gets compacted and because of that the lift and then you have to go back out would be the answer.

Yes. So, uh, yesterday, today, tomorrow, um, because the temperatures are going to be favorable. So, what we'll do is we'll send, um, we call them, you know, districts. So, basically the trash districts, right? There's there's five of those on each side of town. So, 10 in total. And we'll put like a couple of people in trucks with sand in each of those districts. And what they will do is then they will go out onto our nonsalt route roads and look for where people have moved out and they can plow it to the curb. They'll look for spots that we know get compacted either because we've got reporter problems or like our trash truck drivers and recycling, they tell us too. They don't they're driving on the same streets.

Um tell us it's bad. And so we go out and we hit those areas, plow them off, um sand them and just keep, you know, picking away at it. Um, I would say these last two weeks have been probably the most frustrating couple weeks we've had in a while because we had so much snow and then temperatures that just dropped out so cold so long we weren't getting any of that release or delamination to plow off. And now we're finally getting it over the last couple days. And that's where, you know, I'm mentioning if we and I'm not suggesting we should, but if we just salted it, it would be a lot cheaper because we wouldn't be doing any of that. But doing it the way we are again is more responsible for the environment, more frustrating for some of our residents.

Okay. And then the second question, big park around me. Big one. Warner, you city does the sidewalks around the park? Yes.

Yes. And then what is the rule for how quickly sidewalks? It's after street. So after the 24hour of fall, what's the rule? So, um the the rule is 24 hours after the snow stops. And so, typically what building inspection will do is they'll wait uh the the city responsible sidewalks are done by streets, parks, and engineering. And so, typically building inspection will wait until they get the all clear that the city has gotten their responsibilities done and then BI will go out and start enforcing any complaints they get that um any private sidewalk responsibilities. So now that doesn't necessarily mean like a a path that cuts through a park has to be cleared, right?

But the but the sidewalks would all have to be have to be done. And I would say

90 95% of the time the city hits that mark. Sometimes the exceptions might be in the last couple of years there have been a couple of times where um we've had those larger snow events and we've asked like engineering or parks to help us get streets done and so they've pulled some resources to help there and so maybe the sidewalks got done in 28 hours instead of 24. But that's how it works. So each of those three agencies have an assigned geographical footprint in the city for non streets clearing which would include your bike paths, uh sidewalks, nonBRT bus stops.

Okay. Thank you. And last question. So just to be clear, there will not be any leaf pickup this year. No, I think we're done. I think we're done with leaves this year. I mean, it's not funny for the people that are calling. I know it's frustrating, but I hate like Yeah, we hate it. Um, this isn't anything that we want, but that's why we are trying to put together I'm sorry, we are putting together uh the ability to go out and and get some in March and early April in a way we never have before and wouldn't normally consider. That being said, the weather's going to have to cooperate because we understand them that they're going to come. You're going to come in March or April.

We'll tell them that now. We don't know. We're putting together a plan that if the weather will allow it, we are going to do it. But we don't know for sure if the weather will allow it. Anybody who's been there, they can go drop it off still. Drop the drop off sites. They're open reduced hours in the winter, but but they are they are there. So, I appreciate all you do. Sure. Thank you. Thanks. All the river.

Thank you, President. And thank you, Charlie. Keeping with the topic of keeping the leaves out of the lakes, I wanted to give you the opportunity to answer a question I know you've answered many, many times over the years, as has Brian Johnson, and that is why we don't have any vacuum leaf trucks. Um, you might be aware that apparently Verona recently switched to the vacuum trucks and this just past fall. And so I heard a little chatter that yeah uh they thought that if we had similar vacuum trucks, uh we would have been more efficient and picked up more leaves before the Thanksgiving weekend snow event hit us.

So why don't you share with our viewers and any colleagues here that have never heard the response from you or Brian why we don't have those vacuum trucks?

Sure. Uh there's a few reasons. Vacuum trucks are great. Um but they are very slow. Um, and uh, they they don't have much capacity. They have to be driven distances to be dumped. They're they're a very expensive piece of equipment in the order of 300 plus thousands a year and they do that one thing. Um, I can tell you in a previous municipality I worked at, they had a fleet of those things that set the airport uh, parked for nine and a half months out of the year. Um, so in Madison the and then also a lot of communities that do the the leaf vax only do one maybe two rounds a year because that's all they can get around for. Um, we're collecting about 20,000 tons of leaves every year. Um when you do the math on what a capacity for a leaf vacuum is, it's unfathomable the the size of the fleet we would have to have of leaf vacuums to collect um that much leaves. To put that in perspective, that's more tonnage that we collect in our recycling for a whole year. We collect in leaves in about 8 weeks. So it is fast. It is furious. Um, I can tell you that uh for those of you who don't know my history, I was in parks before I was in streets and a resident of Madison. And you just see this mess of elbows and equipment coming down the street and the way we do leaf collection, you're like, "Boy, those leaf facts sure look good. I can't believe this is the way they do it." Um, and then when you get on the inside and start to understand why we do it the way we do it, what we have is a lot of people and a lot of equipment and 20,000 tons of leaves to get up. And so that equipment that we use for other things, those people who do other things all year round are actually it is by far the most efficient way to get the most amount of leaves up the quickest is the way we do it versus leafing. If I had a much smaller crew and could only get

around once a year, we'd probably have a different, you know, conversation. Um, but again, that is an extremely expensive piece of equipment that has one real use that is extremely slow. Now, it's beautiful when it's done. There's no doubt of that. But I would also say that with the with the changes we made in leaf collection, an issue we used to have that drove people crazy, including our our engineers, was our leaf collection crews would get way out ahead of the street sweeper. And so you'd have all these shredded leaves going down the street um from where we had swept them up and got them into the rear loader and it looked terrible. And it might be 3, four, 5 days before the sweeper caught up. Well, since we've made the change to sweeping 10-hour days, those leaf uh trails of of shredded leaves are never on that street for more than a day and are often swept up the same day cuz the leaf crews are working 8 hours. The sweeper, which moves slower, is going 10. So, we really in the last 5 years haven't even been getting the complaints we used to get on a regular basis of these shredded leaves all the way up the street cuz our sweeper comes and and collects them. So, I appreciate the question. If I thought that was the best way to do it, I would be advocating in the capital budget. I would be advocating that this is the right way to go. I'm convicted hardcore that the way we do it, while not the prettiest and most elegant way, is by far the most efficient use of our resources and allows us to collect 20,000 tons of leaves in about 8 weeks. And you just can't do that without vacuum or I'm sorry, with vacuums.

Thanks very much for the thorough explanation, Charlie. And thanks to you and all of your team members for what all you do. Thank you. Yep. A lot of good people. Alder Knox. Yeah. Can you hear me? Yes, we can. Thanks. Well, I I guess my question is, excuse my ignorance, but when you collect the leaves, what happens to them then? Where do they go? What do you do with it?

So, uh, we have a a contract. Um, in fact, next year that switches over to uh Dne County. Uh, we play we pay a flat rate. Um, I the storm water utility uh covers the line share of that now. Um, and those are composted at a private facility that we haul to. So, the way we used to do it was our rear loaders would take them from wherever we collected them and truck them all the way out to roughly the deforest area, which is tough. Um what we started doing about five or six years ago, Alder Knox, there's a four or five parks in the city now. We those rear loaders drop them in those parks. They pile up and we come get them with semi-truckss. And so we are able to collect the leaves out of the residential areas much much faster and then we we haul them out to that deforest area in semi-truckss um instead of with the same equipment we're trying to load the streets out in. So um that's where they go and that's how we get them there. And that that process changed about 5 years ago. So they are they are composted.

Okay. So the other question so that's fine. I know where I have that I have a lot of trees. So we move the leaves up to the front that you guys pick up, but I kind of compost them in a quarter of my yard in the back. Is that appropriate to do?

Sure. Yeah. Um, in my former life, I was a uh relatively high level turf grass manager. Um, leaves are lawns don't mind leaves if they're chopped up so long as the grass can still get sunlight in there. So, yeah, if you've got a heavily treated area, it's you probably can't mulch them all, but you could certainly mulch a percentage of them and then put the rest out to the curb or get them to the drop off site. But, uh, leaf mulch is a great fertilizer. Okay. Thank you. All right, I have a question. So, during leaf pickup season, of course, we're all about leaves. I've never had so many leaf collections in the middle of December.

Um, so you mentioned that like the sweepers are out 10 hours a day and the leaf collections are out 8 hours a day, but during the leaf collection season, like is that all those staff are doing is leaf collection during that 8week period?

So, right. So we have a number of uh in the streets division we call them facets that go out for different times of the year for October and November some of those slow down like for example uh we do all the median mowing in the city now so that's something that wraps up right as leaves are ramping up so those folks go in are dedicated solely to leaves we get typically a couple seasonals or so from parks that parks is done because their season's wrapping up they come over um and then we have some other work facets that don't go out or don't go out in the veracity and so those are added on to leaf collection. So at our peak we'll have about 12 leaf collection crews out on each side of town and so that can eb and flow a little bit every day.

Every day. Yeah. Monday through Friday. And then we will occasionally work um a Saturday here or there if we fall behind our schedule or if things are particularly full like we had expected this time on that November 30 collection to work that first Saturday in December. And well, I didn't that didn't work out, but that had been our intention. But so we do not do we do not fail to do more leaf pickup due to cost. It's that we literally have every single staff member that we can doing leaf pickup during the period that we can. It's that we have a compressed period of time have such a small in which leaves fall and then the snowflies.

Right. I I I've certainly seen some things out there online or whatever. I I don't I don't know what I would do if I had 10 more people. I wouldn't have equipment to put them in or if I had the equipment to put them in, it would sit 10 months out of the year, right? So, um again, I think some of that is born out of this idea that because we're doing it on a schedule now, we're doing less. That's why I wanted to make the point we are collecting the same amount of leaves now as we did before. The difference is our residents know when they're coming. The one thing we're having a hard time getting people to understand is just because we're kind of guaranteeing three collections doesn't mean we stop. We're still going to collect leaves into December if the weather allows. But they're assuming because we're trying to guarantee those three, those will be the only three. Like, no, it is good work for us if December is quiet to continue collecting leaves. Now, although we won't necessarily send 12 crews out on each side of town, like we'll moderate that based on how many we think we need to get the job done. Um, but yeah, that's I I wouldn't if we had more people and more equipment for what, for 8 weeks. Um, again, we're we're on it. We were in good shape this year until we got the largest November storm since 1938 and then had 14 days where we didn't see 30 degrees to melt anything off. So I don't think that's if I'd had 10 more people and five more trucks, we still would have had the same problem with the weather.

Alder Evers, thanks. Uh, back to ice and snow and salt real quick. Um, never thought I'd be glad to hear that. Yeah,

enough about leaves. Um, actually, you know, it'd be helpful if Matt Tucker was here. You mentioned building inspection earlier, and I guess, um, and we can leave this out there, and maybe Matt can respond separately, or maybe you can speak on his behalf. I wonder if we feel like our saltwise policy is effective right now because I see a lot of evidence of oversolding in commercial parking lots and commercial businesses. No amount of matter of private complaints seem to get the kind of penalties and fines and and you know the proper incentive structure so these applicators or these you know these businesses will start using less salt. I frequently see, you know, half inch inch, 2 inch piles of salt on these commercial parking lots and, you know, maybe they are intent on doing this cuz they were afraid of lawsuits and and it's just the norm. But what can we do in a to assert our saltwise policies more effectively? A combination of stick and carrots, incentives, education, and also fines. when people violate our rules.

Yeah, I appreciate the question. That's probably better for Matt Tucker and some combination perhaps even with the attorney's office what we are are not allowed to do from the state level as well. I know that I can say that the statewise saltwise has been pushing for you know what they call tort reform or lawsuit reform. So to remove some of the risk from the businesses, you know, their kind of old saying is salt is cheap and lawsuits are expensive. Um, and so I think until some of that concern is alleviated from businesses, they're still going to push to have salt put out. I mean, I remember a handful of years ago I almost slipped and fell on the salt. Yes. Yes.

Um, and if I was a lesser athlete, I'd have gone down, but I I pulled it pulled it out. Um, so and I know that they've had legislation to the governor's desk to do that and the uh there's powerful lobbies and all that get involved. So, thank you. Thanks, Alder Knox. Is your hand still up from before or do you have another question? I'm going to guess that his hand is still up from before. All right, seeing no further questions, we'll move on to the next presenter. Thank you.

Good evening everybody. I'm Lisa Lashinger, assistant park superintendent. Um I as as Janet mentioned at the beginning, uh we all are different partners in this in this um effort to love our lakes as a community. And so I'm going to talk a little bit from a parks perspective of our management practices that help to protect the lakes, but also how we work to connect people with the lakes. So um our parks are critical, we see it as parks being critical green infrastructure. So we have about 290 parks. Some of those include uh the little park lits at the end of streets uh where so where the street dead ends there's a little green space. We consider that a from an inventory perspective. Many of those but up right against the lake and have wonderful lake views. We have over 5,700 acres of land that we manage as the parks division. Of that about 1,000 acres as wetland and we have 21 conservation parks that have about 2,000 acres of land that's managed in its natural state. Um and then we have within our general parks we have about 400 acres of managed meadows. Um and then botanical gardens we have various rain gardens and storm water infrastructure such as ponds um throughout our golf courses and our parks. So, um, again, parks serve as critical green infrastructure when it comes to storm water management and slowing down the flow and filtering that storm water as it comes down from from the sky. So, and across the the landscape and all of the per pvious imperous surfaces. Um, and so we have about 17 and 12 miles of shoreline within the park system that we manage as well. Um, so I want to talk a little bit about our from our land management plan that we we update every 5 years or so.

We do have a section that talks specifically about wetlands and waterfronts and and our goals related to managing those areas. So, we want to prevent shoreline erosion, um really reduce runoff of storm water, regulate um the movement of geese and water fowl, especially away from areas frequently used by humans to reduce that conflict. We want to protect um vulnerable species that uh live in the water areas and then also um create safe spaces where the community can connect with the water. Uh we do have landscape buffers along all of our water edges. Uh we try to maintain a 10 to 15 foot buffer strip of native landscaping um along our shorelines in our various parks. And we also I want to touch briefly on the integrated pest management approach that we take to managing geese especially at those heavily used waterfronts where we might have more of that user conflict. Um the goal is never to completely it would be impossible to try to manage all goose interactions but we want to try to make sure we don't have large populations of geese hanging out where people want to hang out um at beaches especially. Um so we do further from shore we we also play a role similar to what Charlie had talked about with leaf management. Uh and again he's the turf expert as well. So, uh, we do wherever possible and throughout the majority of the park system, we mulch our grass clip or we mulch both our grass clippings but also our leaf clippings and return them to the soil wherever possible. Um, but in areas that are really heavily wooded such as the Forest Hill Cemetery, we have a lot of oaks there and we have a ton of leaves that collect in there. So, we actually go in and do a modified version of leaf collection compared to

what streets does. Um, so we do balance our active recreation areas with the natural landscape. So we have turf that's cut every week, every 7 to 10 days so that we can use those spaces for active recreation. That still plays a vital role in filtering the water and slowing it down the rain flow. Um, but then where we can, we've incorporated natural areas. And so this graph on the the slide shows how we've increased the number of acres. It shows the number of acres of um natural landscape and managed meadow areas that we've added to the park system in the last uh four years. So you all adopted our I'm moving on to how we work to connect people with our lakes. Uh so one of the most important things we can do to protect the lakes is make sure that our community loves them and sees the value in them and so the more we can physically connect them with the spaces and get that that helps us to protect them as a community. So are you all adopted our park and open space plan um that that will be our 25 to 2030 basically five-year strategic plan and the one of those uh 12 recommendations that we have within our park and open space plan is to improve public access to lakes and waterways. And so I'm going to touch a little bit on each of the five actions that we're already doing. Sorry, four actions that we're already doing uh related to this specific recommendation. Um this this the slide on the to the right the map shows where we have parks that touch waterways. Every the the really light colored green is the shoreline obviously. Um but we have 55 sorry 56

parks within the system that have shoreline access and again 17 1/2 acine within our park system. We have 12 public beaches that we maintain on a seasonal basis and we have 10 public boat launches. Um, and then we also install yearround seasonal peers that people can use to access the lakes for a variety of reasons. Um, so one of the most popular ways for people to access lakes is via water watercraft. So we do have canoe and kayak storage racks throughout our park system. In 2024, we had um those of those we had 441 spaces that we rented out for people to use. So, it's easy access for uh people to get their watercraft into the water. Um we did issue around just shy of 7,000 permits uh for people to use their boats in to be able to use their boats in the lake. Uh we do have mooring a mooring field at Marshall Park. Um and then we have various agreements that really help to connect both private property owners as well as commercial entities um to be able to better access the lakes. So that can range from peer installation companies that come out in the spring and in the fall to install private peers for residents who border the lakes. um but also heavy duty construction permits for those contractors who are doing shoreline restoration work within our park throughout the park and open space plan update process. We did a number uh we did a significant amount of community outreach and a common theme we we asked people what they like to use the parks for or their top f. So from that we found that the top five activity

sorry accessing the water um for activities involving the lakes was one of the top five activities. So that ranges from using it for boating, fishing, ice skating um all the way down to ice boating and lots of other fun things that people do using the water. Um so we do collaborate with a number of partners uh in connecting people with the lakes. We we work with Dne County Public H sorry public health of Madison and Dayne County. They do daily water quality testing at our beaches uh when they're open. So our beaches are open from Memorial Day to Labor Day every year. Um we also work with Dayne County's land and watershed unit to they harvest uh they conduct the harvesting operations on the lakes. So their primary objective is flood mitigation. But then when that's all handled, they do um prioritize navigation and recreational uses. So they will often come in and clean up our beach uh the seaweeds that are near beaches um as you can see in this image here. Um and then Clean Lakes Alliance is here as well. They we often partner with Clean Lakes Alliance for uh volunteer opportunities. They help clean up the beaches as well um as a as well as a number of other activities. And then um we do have contractual partners that uh offer recreational activities that are water-based um such as MSCR. They offer pontoon rides. Um so I'm going to talk a little bit about the creative placemaking opportunities uh mostly provided through partners. Um so Madison Boats and Rudabga of they they offer um rentals for watercraft uh for anybody to come and use. And then MSCR as I mentioned

they do pontoon rides. Uh they also do various camps for youth throughout the summer. And then there's other partners that we use that we we work with that connect people with the water. Um and then we also work with through various permits to um provide other placemaking opportunities such as um permitting the Mad City Ski Team. If you've ever been able to watch them off the off of Law Park, they're pretty incredible. Um as well as some other groups such as the Yacht Club, the rowing club, um and W as well as UW's rowing club. Um, and then we do permit special events such as the riatas and Iron Man, which you can see in the photo here. Um, and then we are we wrapped up the community engagement um, and design process for the Madison Lakeway project. We're moving on to preparing construction documents, but that was a public a very a process that involved quite a bit of public engagement and um will continue to involve public engagement as we reimagine the waterfront for the community. So, with that, I'm happy to answer any questions that you might have. Um, I'm not sure if you can answer this question, but it seemed like you were the only one who might be able to. Um, I know we're focusing a lot on the, um, kinds of pollution that cause like the bacterial overgrowth and the blue green algae that has obviously gotten like progressively worse. But um is there anything we can do or anything we are doing about the zebra muscles that did not used to be here but we do have in our lakes now? We do have educational signage at our boat launches encouraging people to make sure their water watercraft are cleaned off uh when

they exit the water just to make sure they aren't transporting those invasive species from lake to lake. Um, we've partnered with other um, community organizations. I think at at we're working on a boat cleaning station at Marshall Park. We've had one there, but I think we're working to invest in a a heated uh, power washer system. I don't think it's been installed yet. But that's those are the types of things that we're doing. Is there anything we can do for the areas that have them already now or is that kind of like a DNR thing or is it or it's just too late? That's I would say more so a question for the DNR.

They just are so sharp you guys. It's bad.

I appreciate Go ahead. So you mentioned um you have alliances for those who come and clean up like clean up. So there's no there's no group within your group that specializes. I don't want to use the word specializes, but they actually do clean, you know, picking up debris and stuff like that, especially plastic. Um,

I'm not so in the water. So I I should touch on um generally we manage everything that's from the shoreline in and the lake the like Dne County generally manages the water surface. Um we do as staff and through organized volunteer projects conduct cleanup of the park system picking trash, debris, litter and those things. Um on the beaches we do um clean those throughout the season. So I'm not sure exactly which areas that your um questions.

I I had no idea that this was part of this was for the for for the county and part of it for the city.

Mhm. But you because you're telling me that you are primarily responsible for the beaches and like the shoreline, but you're saying that the county is responsible for the surface. Correct. Yes. And so um there's we're responsible for making sure the shoreline is in good stable condition. We the parks division partners with engineering. engineering actually does all the planning related to shoreline stabilization work, but when it comes to maintenance, that is a a combination of staff and volunteers and other community partners that clean up the shoreline in. So tell me what what what what you think about and going back to Alder Matthew's question about the blue and green algae who's primarily responsible for I mean I know weather and how dry it is and the deposition of poop and stuff like that can cause it but if you had to single out one thing that uh is a pause for some beaches being closed down. Who's the responsible party? Well, I would say um that

Greg actually covered the contaminants and or no, Janet covered the contaminants in in one of those those pie charts that she had early on. So, I can go back. A lot of it is related. Say it out loud.

Oh, who I think there's plenty of research to point to where those source contaminants are from. It's a variety of agricultural as well as some urban contaminants that lead to the problems that we're facing today. And it's going to take a number of partners to solve the problem. And I don't know that it does a lot of good to do it. It is important to understand where those sources come from. M

um but understanding that owning it and addressing it is the most important part of it. And I know that the Clean Lakes Alliance does a lot to partner and collaborate with various stakeholders that can help to make a meaningful difference in in that area. So if you find out you know that agriculture is is the culprit uh how are you and what do you do to go and trace back to find out you know what's the source? I am not the one that's best suited to answer that. I think that um engineering has shown the the source points of contaminants um various um regulating agencies have way to track uh where those contaminants are coming from. Um but I'm from a parks perspective that's the best I can share with you.

Thank you Alder. I would really encourage you to read through the clean lakes alliance state of the lakes report because that's pretty comprehensive. Okay. All right. Do we have one more presentation? Oh, sorry. Alder River, go ahead.

Thank you, Council President. Thank you, Lisa. Appreciate your presentation. I I had a curiosity question about the parks division's approach to the use of rip wrap in that 17 1/2 miles of um shoreline that you say that you maintain. Uh I was you know impressed one of your first slides was about the the fact that our policy is to use landscape buffers to the greatest extent possible along our park shorelines. So what is our approach to the use of rip wrap? Are we able to use it in as a sustainable a way as possible and and use it with in combination with landscaping and the use of that rip wrap? Um we do work very closely with the engineering folks to design any shoreline renovation or restoration projects that we're doing. We do try to balance something that's going to be resilient and hold up to the the ice shelves at the shorelines as well as creating spaces for people to access the water from the lake. So there might be some spaces where we put in like flat large flat stones where people can get use as kind of a stepping stone to get down to the water. Um BB Clark comes to mind as one of those areas. Um we have a lot of really old rip wrap along the shoreline. So we we just do our best to maintain that and as we're able to res really re redesign that we do. Um but it it's not an all or nothing. We all we try to as much as possible use a combination and plant that those landscape buffers even when we have the rip wrap shoreline. So we might have the rip rip wrap shoreline at the water's edge and then from there we'll have about a 10ft buffer of natural or 15t buffer of natural planting depending on how the park space is used and how big it is.

To to clarify, is it your own landscape architects that make these designs or is it engineering division staff that designs the the shorelines? Generally, our planners work with the engineering team, but it's usually somebody from engineering that does the actual design of the the area that touches the water, actual shoreline. Yeah. But it really depends on the project. Like the the lakeway project has been led by our our landscape architect Mike Sturm with the consultants. So, that's a big recent example of something that wasn't entirely driven by the engineering team. Okay. Thank you very much, Lisa. You're welcome. And

as I said to Charlie, thanks for all that your division does as well for us. Yes. Thank you, Alder Matthews. Go ahead. Um, I have one more question. Sorry, Lisa.

Sorry. Um, you had mentioned the MSCR camps. Um, and I was just wondering uh uh if you had any information on how the MSCR camps have been impacted with not having lifeguards at the beaches. Um, cuz I know when I used to be one of those lifeguards, we would have camps come pretty often and coming to the beaches free for them. Um, but I don't know if they but and then like we would guard for them when they were there. Um, so I just wonder if you have any information on if they're still able to, you know, if they've figured out a way to safely still go to the beaches or if they're going other places or um I don't have any use information on how camps come and use the beaches. I know that there are various groups that might um come out and use the watercraft. So they have a in Oland Park, I know they have a trailer of kayaks that they take out with C counselors and they're fully responsible for the safety of the youth. We don't have we haven't had um consistent lifeguarding at the beaches in a number of years. Um and even leading up to I believe it was 2020 or so when the funding for lifeguards at the beaches was removed from our budget. um we we had begun to reduce services up to that point. So I think we were only guarding a couple of the most frequently used beaches or most heavily used beaches. So it certainly has an impact, but we also partner with MSCR at the pool to prep to have and other groups to bring youth to the pool. And if affordability is the issue, we do have various scholarships that we can offer through the parks foundation.

So we we definitely try to make sure people are aware of that.

Okay, now we'll move on to our next presenter and we can still continue to take, you know, if questions continue to come up, you can ask them at the end for other presenters.

Okay, can everybody hear me? This is coming off. Okay. All right. Excellent. Um, okay. So, my name is Greg Freeze. I'm going to talk a bit about the details that Janet went into a little bit. Um, for background, um, I was hired originally the odd 35 years ago to get the city's first storm water permit. So, this stuff is burned in my brain, uh, for good or bad. Um, and I will try and explain acronyms that I use cuz again, they're just there now. Um, the stormwater utility, just to put the world in perspective, everybody here except maybe Alder River. Um, the stormwater utility has always been a thing, right? But it was actually created during my tenure. We created the storm water utility in uh 2000. Prior to that, all the funding that uh Charlie referenced for leaf collection, street sweeping, all that stuff, all the stuff that we do for capital repair, uh water quality, that all came out of the general tax uh revenue back until 2000. The utility is by utility standards relatively young, about 25 years old at this point. So, um requirements. So, we talked Jana talked a little bit about things that are really confusing. TMDL um MS4 permits, WPDES permits. So on the bottom here is kind of how we have to think about this internally. Okay. The blue is what we are required to do by our WPDES, Wisconsin pollution discharge elimination per uh system permit, which is called an MS4, municipal separate storm sewer system permit. And there's the blue. We have to get to 40% TSS reduction compared to doing nothing. Okay, that is the requirement. As I

mentioned, Act 10 overrides that, but then the TMDL came back and put it right back in, but through another method. The little red bar is where we are right now. We're at about 37% TSS removal of the entire city. Now, Janet, to put another spin on this, Janet talked about, well, the southwest side of the city doesn't go to the Rock River. That's right. It doesn't. So, but the MS4 covers the entire city. So, for the 40% we have to do the entire city, but for the TMDL, we only have to do the part of the city that goes to the Rock River. So, we basically have to keep two sets of books um is what it amounts to. And to make life a little more complicated, the books don't all use the same accounting standards. So the TMDL which is for the green part. Okay. How much more total suspended solids do we have to remove? They use slightly different standards. The rules are different because the EPA sets forth the TMDL standards while the MS4 permit is set forth by the DNR. Now you don't have to remember any of that except to remember that it's really complicated. So, here's something that I do want to that I do want to tell you uh because this is this puts the world in a little bit of perspective for you. The top bar of this graph of this uh visual here represents or is meant to represent all the different types of pollution that people think of when they think of storm water. from floatables, right? Cans, debris, plastics, all the way down to silts and sands, most of which you actually can't see

when it goes into the water. What you see at the end of pipes uh discharging like if you go out uh we and this is pretty common, we have a pipe that discharges into the lake and you walk to the lake and you will be able to see a pile of sand. That's not total suspended solids the way we think about it. That's Charlie's street sand. It's all Charlie's fault. So, I'm kidding, of course. But the yellow part at the very end is what is considered total suspended solids. And the important part about the graphic is if you look at what Charlie has access to, broom sweepers. Even if although we do have a couple vacuums now, but they're a smaller part of our fleet. Most of our fleet is broom mechanical sweepers. And you can see the arrow on the top. And then if you project that down and look at how little overlaps with the yellow, that's a soil distribution curve. Actually, that is the only part of what we are regulated under that Charlie can actually impact. even if his sweepers are doing the best job they can, they simply can't pick up particles that that we are regulated by. So when I tell you that for a TMDL, we have to remove about 82% of total percent suspended solids compared to no controls. What that really means is we have to remove the three micron particle from the water before it discharges. Great, Greg. How big is a three micron particle? The diameter of your hair is about 70. Okay, so think about how small the 3 micron particle is. To really geek you out, that is as small a particle as

will settle out of a water column if left absolutely alone. Okay, it is that small. Okay, so we have our work cut out for us here to to do that. Um, and so how do we do that? For the most part, we're really close to 40%. And the way we do that is with ponds, catch basins, which I'm going to show you some pictures of, screen devices, street sweeping, uh, vacuum sweepers can impact a little bit more of the of that soil part of that soil curve. infiltration practices remove a 100% of it, right? Because any water that you infiltrate, all the pollutants and all the sediment go with it, but they are relatively high maintenance. They because all those pollutants tend to clog the the the thing that you're infiltrating into. Um you can do coagulant treatment devices. We've played with that. Uh that's an actual uh you add chemicals. alum typically aluminum sulfate is one of the chemicals that allows you to flock material out of the water column and settle it more efficiently. And then uh leaf collection which I'm going to talk on um is actually kind of a special thing because that's really phosphorus and not total suspended solids. So that's a slightly different thing. Um so I've mentioned this already. uh ponds can get up to that 80 82% if they're really designed well. Infiltration practices do really well, but they are high maintenance. So, this is just kind of to tell you, and Janet used this slide before, water pollution means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. The world that we live in mostly on a daily basis is two kinds. Regulatory agencies talk about total

suspended solids and they mean a very specific thing, a very small particulate size. Residents that we get calls from are are concerned about gross pollutants, floatables, um, and they are concerned about sand that they can see. Okay, those are those are two ends of the spectrum. Um, and the the the floatables and the sand are easier for us to get at than the small particles. Um then you know you're there's a lot of other urban pollutants chloride which you know Charlie talked extensively about um there is no so everybody understands this there is no treatment for chloride. None. Once you put anything sodium chloride, magnesium chloride, calcium chloride, anything with that chloride ion at the end. Okay. Once the chloride gets into the into the world, it's going somewhere. It is not trapped. Most of our pollutants are trapped or tie themselves to soil particles and we can settle them out. Okay, that is not true for chloride. Chloride, that chloride ion moves and it will move through the soil column eventually. That's just what happens. So the only way to control chloride is to not use it. There's simply no other answer. And it's any chloride. So Charlie talked about magnesium chloride. It doesn't matter if it's got the chloride ion. And somebody had asked about beet uh product before. Uh what's that saying? There's no free lunch. Uh beet product uh doesn't have the chloride ion, but it does have a oxygen demand. So in our part of the world that's not great because if you wash it off while the lakes are frozen that oxygen demand is uh met by using up oxygen underneath the

ice depleting the oxygen for the animals that are that are alive underneath there. So anyway, a lot of complicated things, but on that bottom circle, all the rest of those other than chloride, PCBs, mercury, arsenic, uh zinc, cadmium, uh all the the the stuff that is uh that is part of us, right? These are all partic. This is what we do as humans. They tend to part they tend to tie themselves to particles which is why we talk almost exclusively in storm water about controlling total suspended solids because all the other stuff comes with them. It's it it's that's how that works. Um so we do have a bunch of these devices around. They are very effective. Uh these are some pictures of screen devices we have. They are extremely efficient at at collecting particles um and gross pollutants. Uh we do use a bunch of these around the city. The one you see there is the biggest one on the left hand side. Uh that's actually behind the culvers on the belt line uh right there by uh what is it? Steinhoffles. Um and uh that that pit that you see there, you see how big that that ladder is that's sitting in there. after a uh after if that's empty before a fall, it will be full of leaves after a fall. There's no way around it. No matter how good everybody is, that will be completely full. For scale, the length of that thing in photo is about 36 ft long and about 6 ft wide and about 6 ft deep. So, um okay, we we talked about this uh a bit. sweepers on the right, ponds, we use those in new developments, anything post about 1983, those are pretty efficient at at collecting stuff. The green vector you see on there, uh Charlie doesn't use

them to pick up leaves, but we use them to pick up uh stuff out of catch basins and those screen structures that I talked about. And they're and uh we'll talk in another slide, I think, about how effective all that stuff is. Um, this is total phosphorus. So, the the the bad part about leaves and phosphorus and and Janet mentioned about 56% of the phosphorus off of the city of Madison happens in the fall and it happens because of what what is referred to as leaf tea. So the water that washes through the leaves if we don't get them off the street or if residents don't rake them out of the street is is uh full of phosphorus and it's dissolved phosphorus and on top on top of that it tends to be ortho phosphate which is a really bioavailable form of phosphorus. So for us in this in the urban landscape, our biggest part now we're a relatively smart small part of that piraphph that that Janet showed earlier right when you compare us to agriculture but of our portion of the pigraph about 56% of it comes off in about a month 3 weeks four weeks depends on this was a really late year anyway because we went from 60° to zero in like one week. So there are trees that are still holding on to their leaves. So um that's a you know that's a problem. We have uh Charlie has cooperated with with the engineering and USGS on a on a leaf study for boy seven years or more. Um and I'll talk a little bit about that because leaf sweeping um matters. Um I I'll just go to this part. What what Charlie does right now. We kind of bookend this. If we do nothing and let

all the leaves just go into the lake, that's about 56% of our phosphorous load off the city of Madison. The remaining part of that is mostly from spring uh bud drop from the trees. It it is almost almost all of our phosphorus is associated with tree drop uh one way or another. Either bud drop in the spring or leaf drop in the fall. If you took them all off and we did this study, okay? And when I say we, I mean the USGS. They literally before every single rain event went out with leaf blowers and blew the streets clean and then collected water samples after a rain event. Okay? Pretending that Charlie could snap his fingers and sweep the entire city in 5 minutes before a rain event. Right? We're just trying to bookend this. Get a sense of what is possible. And if you did that, you could actually remove about 80% of the le 80% of the phosphorus that is available in the fall, which is really pretty impressive. Okay, but how do you implement that? The only way to do that is to get residents to to basically rake the rake their public streets into the terrace where Charlie can collect them. What we do right now uh gets about 40% of the available phosphorus. Okay? And that is probably about the best we can do. um in in terms of that, you know, we as a city could potentially do better by mobilizing the citizens and getting them to do more, but we as public works taking that next step to do go from 40 to say 60 or 80 is is is ver is is a vertical curve, right? you Charlie would need double triple the the staff to be able to do that and double triple the equipment to be able to be more to to get leaves off faster because it's not the leaves in the street that it's a problem. The

leaves in the street only become a problem when it rains. So, it's all about getting the leaves out before it rains. How do you know when it's going to rain, right? You know, it's very variable. So you really would have to you would have to depend uh to go better than we are. You really have to depend on the citizenry. Um okay, what else do I want to talk about? Chlorides. We've talked about that at length. We don't need to go into that um any anymore. Um we also work with the county. We do a lot of stuff here to to address illicit discharges um throughout the throughout the the uh the city. Actually, they've expanded that to all of Dane County now recently. But, um, we get a lot of these complaints every year. They come to uh, city engineering, they come to other departments, but eventually they usually get to us. We work with Dane County and and our engineering operations crews. When you when you see these, so if you do see somebody uh, dumping concrete or a real common one is uh, carpet cleaners will empty their uh, their carpet cleaning water into a storm sewer. Great. It's just easier, right? Um, if you see that, you can contact city engineering. We will get a vector out and and try and vector that pipe up before the water gets downstream to a water body. Um, Dane County will also follow up with uh tickets and they will charge them for our time for going to clean that up. Um the the most common uh these are just our complaints, but uh concrete is probably one of the most common. We get we do still get a lot of people complaining about people changing their oil and just letting it run out into the street. Um so um so I I do want to touch this a little bit. I probably should have touched on this with my first slide. So, I'm just going

to go back for a second just to talk about the green part of this because if you remember on Janet's slide, they kind of differentiated the two different tracks, right? Our MS4 track and uh and then the TMDL track. All the stuff that that is above that 40%. for the for the area in the TMDL zone. City of Madison buys those um buys that total suspended solids and total phosphorus from Madison Met sewer district via Yahara Winds. Okay, so I'm now I'm going to flip back and and kind of tell you why. Um so for the Oh, I didn't know I had this. I forgot I had the same thing here. That's why it was here. So, so that green part, it's really inefficient for us to try and try and get to 80% cuz we have to get to 80% for that entire area of the city in the TMDL. The downtown areas, you got to you got to kind of put the world in perspective. Charlie sweepers and catch basins can only get about 18% of TSS. Okay, roughly a little bit more if we are really good. Okay, the modern storm water treatment did not start until the 80s. So, anything developed in the city of Madison prior to the 80s effectively has almost no storm water treatment except for a few catch basins and street sweeping. So, to go back in and try and retrofit, anybody remember what I said can only get to 80% ponds. It's the only device we have that can get that and they take up a lot of land. So I don't see us, you know, tearing down downtown buildings to put up ponds, right? It's just not cost-effective. No one wants to do that. So the way we do this is we buy credits

from farmers. So in that piraphph, if you go back, remember egg was between 60 and 80% depending on where you when you where you uh where you measure it. What we do is Yahara Winds does is we we get a farmer to put a a practice on their field that reduces phosphorous runoff and total suspended solids runoff and then we take credit for it by paying for it. Basically, it's it's a form of trading although it's uh it it I don't want to get into the difference. The easiest way to think of it is I am trading a farmer to to remove a pound of phosphorus so I don't have to and I am paying them to do that. The other win for the city of Madison and anybody is you don't have to pay attention to this. But what I can tell you in a in a slide here or in a couple words is for me to remove a pound of phosphorus from an urban environment costs at least $500 a pound. probably more um the more of it I want to remove. Agriculture is somewhere between $30 and $100 a pound. So it's effectively an order of magnitude cheaper to do uh to do that. Okay. Um so that is how we get that remaining um that remaining 40 to 80%. Right now, we have that little hole in the donut I talked about. That is that 3% to get us up to 40% that we still have to get within our borders. Um, and the payment to Madison Met and Yahara Winds for that is about $500,000 a year out of the operating budget in case you're in case you're inclined to look. That's where that is found. So, um, this is just telling you what what practices they do on crop land and the relative costs there. And you can see the really

expensive ones uh for agriculture are about $100 a pound where uh again for urban it's 500 and up. So this is just again a little blow up of that to to put the world in in perspective. Sweeping has limitations. Uh so the the area of the city of Madison that was developed prior to the 80s really is limited in terms of what we can do. Sweeping and and catch basins are about it. Um so some of the things we have continued to do uh over the years now we have on the far west not far west side near west side near very close to Glenway golf course we have a watershed study with the USGS to uh study the effects of distributed green infrastructure where we uh have been putting in rain gardens on people's properties that have been willing in the terrace we put in pvious pavement um to see if we can reduce the discharge Um uh if we reduce the volume of discharge, we reduce the pollutants, right? That's that that's the beauty of infiltration, but um the the results of this are are pretty we're not done. We got a couple years to go yet, but uh the results are pretty clear. Doing this in the public right ofway is really expensive capital and it's really expensive for Charlie or somebody because pvious pavement has to be vacuumed really intensely to stay open. If it if it if it isn't uh if it isn't vacuumed with our vacuum sweepers, it will clog. And the other problem is we also can't salt it because we don't want to encourage salt to go um to go down into the groundwater. and we don't want to sand it because if we sand it, we clog it. So, it's more effective to uh do infiltration practices on private property. And actually, the budget this

year, Janet, included uh a uh a grant program uh to it's $500 $500, I believe. Yeah, $500 uh to give residents $500 credit if they build a rain garden on their own private property. So, um, that is a much more effective use of of you still get infiltration. It's still distributed green infrastructure. It's just not as expensive and it's a lot easier to maintain. Um, let's see. We have a bunch of public works projects that are coming up. Um, we have some big wet ponds. Uh, big wet ponds. That's kind of a double. Yeah. We have big ponds, detention basins going in on the far west side on the Hurling property which is out on Mineral Point Road near South Point. Uh the Marty farm property uh uh at Elver Park as part of the relocation of Raymond Road. There's going to be a very big detention and flood control basin put there. Westtown Pond is going to be rebuilt. Um that area goes actually to Spring Harbor and that will help uh flooding in that area uh by detaining the water further upstream. We're going to we're going to expand the Westtown uh basin that's been there since the 70s. Um and um I don't I don't I think that's we continue to pursue our rain garden program. We look at with street reconstructions. We look at putting in terrace rain gardens with every street reconstruction project we we do. That project's been going on since boy it's been a long time. Uh I want to say 95. So, it's it's pretty mature program at this point. Um, and I I do want to touch on everybody's touched on this, but we have a number of of partners the um that we work with. Um, Ripple Effects is the uh public outreach part of our MAM

swap group. We work with Yahara Winds, Yahara Pride Farms, Clean Lakes Alliance. um uh Yahara Pride, uh Dne County works with uh the Yahara Winds Group to get practices installed on agricultural land. So there's there's just a whole bunch of other people. We do uh storm straight stenciling. I think we have a picture of that here. Uh that is part um of uh ripple effects, which is our municipal permit. And um and I think the uh there's plant dane they give out they give out rain garden plants. Um and I I think that's probably all I really wanted to touch on. Did I miss Jan? Did I miss anything? Okay. Um, oh, on Saltwise, I should mention we're we're kind of a contributing the leading member really of SaltWise, which is a statewide uh salt reduction program. That's really I don't want to say owned by City of Madison, but we are certainly uh one of the major contributors. So, um I think that's it. Well, I did mention Clean Lakes Alliance, but they obviously have their Renew the Blue um that we are we are partners on. Um and that just uh James is here and so is Paul. Uh that just kicked off about a month ago. I did I missed that meeting because I had a conflict but uh but that is that process uh has started and um and that's I think that's it. I think kept that hopefully not too painful. So any questions? Okay, I'll start. Um I know that there were some efforts around doing um pilots of some semi-permeable surfaces um for both for pavement and for sidewalk but haven't seen those implemented widely. Were those

experiments not successful? Um the so uh Janet actually when she was with parks did uh down at Central Park did our first pvious concrete poured in place. There's about I don't know must be 1,000 ft of it down there um by Central Park and that has held up very well. But uh poured in place pvious concrete has kind of um left the building as a uh as a practice. Uh WMadison uh installed a number of parking lots on campus trying to do that and they all ate themselves in about three years and they have since torn them all out. Uh we experimented on that that near west uh distributed green infrastructure study with they offer pre-cast uh concrete sidewalks. uh those actually work better um but the company that made them stopped doing so. So um that has you know there was some possibilities. We also have uh tried our own poured in place concrete in the street. Not a big not a big fan. The best stuff that we have found is a product called

drain. Pave drain. Thank you. Um, which is a uh uh uh kind of like a uh what am I trying to say? PA paper stones like you would use on on your back patio and they have holes in the corners. The uh difficulty using them in anything other than a like a parking lane um is they have a very rough texture like you would expect. So you can't use them for sidewalk or anything like that. And uh porous asphalt has also kind of ended its experiment. Um, it does not hold up to traffic at all. All right. Somebody had a hand up. Alter Matthews, was you? Go ahead.

Um, we mentioned that the leaves in the street are only a problem when it rains. Um, what about when like if there's all the leaves in the street or around the street potentially right now, does the snow melting is that too low of like a volume to really impact or like be that bad?

Yeah. No, that'll take all the phosphorus out of the leaves as well. So, by the time because of this is no one's fault, right, other than the weather, the fact that we live here, right? the um by the time Charlie's able to collect those, the phosphorus that is associated with them will be gone. Now, I still want the leaves collected because it still clogs all my inlets and then results in our operations crews having to respond to clogged inlets, flooded streets, that type of thing. So, it's still in everybody's best interest to get them out of here. It's just that we aren't able to address the phosphorous part of it. So, Thank you, Alder Okovich.

Uh, thank you, President. Um, I'm was wondering for like the um I'm forgetting the name of it, the pro but the program where we encourage people to mulch their leaves um on their lawn collecting.

Does the phosphorus from that infiltrate or does it run off? So, that's uh generally referred to, I think, as leave your leaves, which is actually um what I do. I just mulch them up. And as long as you blow them back onto your yard um and your yard is in relatively good condition, even if it rains, usually our fall rains are slower, you know, soaker kind of rains. So, that that phosphorus is just going to regrow back into your lawn for the most part. So that is still a very good use of of leaves if you can manage that. Uh if you don't if your tree density is not too much to to to cause you to to not be able to mulch them. Okay. Thank you

Bridgetette. Go ahead.

Question. You mentioned uh that the West Hound Pine was put in in the 70s. If I'm not mistaken, it must have been around 76 thereabouts. somewhere in there. At any rate, the question is this. The flooding that we had in uh 2018 201819 uh it's my understanding that that uh that inlet had not been cleaned for years and years and years. You also mentioned other retention ponds that are being put in. One is right off Excelsia Drive. So my question is knowing then that uh the retention ponds is one way for us to kind of stop some of the stuff that would actually get into the lakes. Have is there a maintenance plan? Okay, for these retention ponds that would minimize flooding long term instead of looking at cleaning them. And I think I it was cited that they clean them every 30 years.

So there's a couple we there were we're were um we are talking about two kind of different things from a maintenance perspective. Um cleaning the grate the outlet structure uh from our ponds that happens pretty routinely. Um, we inspect our ponds at a minimum once every four years, but we're there usually more often than that. And if we have a critical grade, we have what's called in our operations group a great list that we know can clog and those are on pre-cleaning list. So if we are expecting a large event, um, they go out and pre-clean those grates to prevent flooding. Now, I will say on that particular event, didn't matter if you pre-cleaned. The event was so intense on the on the west side especially um that in a thunderstorm environment, what happens is you knock debris down off of trees during an event and that event is car then the water carries it and of course it carries it to the outlet and it clogs the outlet. The outlet could have been completely open during the event and it could be clogged 20 minutes into the event. What I think you're referring to with regard to the 30 years is actually cleaning out the sediment that has been collected in the pond. So, our ponds are designed um with um with normally the the depth is about 7 ft. And when that when it collects enough sediment to get less than 3 ft deep um under our permit with the DNR, it requires dredging. And in fact, we we just dredged uh two ponds on the on the west side. Actually, we're just finishing one. Strickers Pond uh for Bay

is being dredged right now. Uh Waxford pond was dredged um two years ago and uh we rebuilt um a pond in the uh Old Sock Trails Business Park Excelsier Drive that you referenced. Um but that was rebuilt um to increase flood storage, flood capacity. We had a grant from FEMA to do that. So the the maintenance you're talking about are are kind of two different things. The dredging uh happens on average about every 30 years, but the cleaning of the grates happens whenever needed. The reason why I ask is because I lived in West Morland for 30 years. Mhm.

And I know it was the community that went out and cleaned especially after a rainfall. And so the whole notion then about maintenance, that's why I'm asking about a maintenance plan, especially after a rainfall, a severe torrential rain, that's when you see much of that debris fall.

Yeah, I totally agree. And so I think Charlie mentioned this, after a big rainfall, streets would typically go out and they would if it's a I guess it all depends how big, but um a lot of that falls on the street, right? And and we still try to hit neighborhoods every 24 odd days, Charlie, in the summer. Is that about right?

Yeah. Um so the the hope is that Charlie would sweep up a bunch of that before the next rain washes it all down to the great. But we do we engineering where we know we have grates that are at what what we refer to as enclosed depressions. So the only way out of that particular area is the inlet itself.

We will we have that great list. We will go before and after storm events and clean those out with our crews. That I've seen that list. It's probably 70 80 grates deep now or more. Um so they dispatch crews to do that both pre and posttorm events. Now that doesn't mean every great in the city gets cleaned. We don't I mean we have a lot of grates. Um but we do clean the critical ones uh in it before and after storm events.

Alder, go ahead. Thank you, Council President. Thank you, Greg. I can't believe I'm asking another question about vacuums, but you've mentioned at least a couple of times in your portion of the presentation tonight the vacuum sweepers, and Charlie mentioned that he has two types of sweepers. streets. Can you andor Charlie speak to the efficacy of these vacuum sweepers and why isn't if they're so wonderful, why isn't the entire fleet these vacuum sweepers or a greater percentage of our fleet? You want you want me to try? You're welcome.

So, the uh generally speaking, and Charlie, stop me if I get this wrong. The our mechanical sweepers are incredibly uh robust, durable. They plow through the sand piles, especially in in the the spring cleanup that Charlie is trying to do. Vacuum sweepers um don't handle piles of sand, which you have in the spring, very well. They they they do great at picking up small particles, assuming that they are not in big piles. And so what vacuum sweepers do really well is come right it in a perfect world I would have Charlie go through with a with a mechanical and follow right behind it with a vacuum sweeper and that would be great. Uh but Janet just bought a vacuum sweeper. What are they running this these these days?

Yes. But uh do you remember? I I know we just bought one or something. Yeah, we're three plus now. Yeah. 300 or so. Yeah. So, um, we it's just not from a feasibility perspective, you'd like to have both, a fleet of both. Um, but it's just a huge capital expense. Um, there might be maintenance issues with them as well. Uh, I don't know about that part, Charlie.

Yeah, they do okay. They're not quite as robust. They move slower. Um, they, to Greg's point, they do a much better job collecting up the fines. A lot of the things you won't notice as well. the sweep the more mechanical sweepers do a much better job collecting the stuff you do see if you want to kind of you know draw that line. They'll both sweep it up. Um but yeah, I guess in a perfect world you would have a um almost like a step cut, right? You you'd have the mechanical sweeper first and then the vacuum sweeper behind, but that would be $600,000 a sweeper plus two operators running down the street. So, um, like for example, when we're doing storm debris, like if we get a storm like in May or June and the trees are looking to drop buds anyway, I mean those mechanical sweepers do a much better job getting the bulk of that material up. Um, but of course, like Greg was saying, they won't get all the the the fine material up quite as well. So, for example, um we put our typically we'll put our vacuum sweeper on the newer sections of the city where the trees aren't as tall and robust and don't put as much stuff in the street because um there's not as much of that larger material from the trees um on the street. And that's where the vacuums excel um is that finer material. So,

well, you anticipated my followup question about when where where and how do you deploy the scarce vacuum sweepers that Janet has purchased generously for you on behalf of all the storm water utility rate payers. But in any event, uh so how many do we have? We have nine sweepers in total plus one that's bike path only. That's kind of a different Yeah. You mentioned earlier of the nine, how many are the vacuum? Couple of them. It rotates a little bit depending on if they're rotating in and out, but any given time it's a we've got a couple vacuums. And you say that they're mostly used on the periphery of the city then?

Mostly. Yes. Occasionally we might swing one um downtown if it's been um if it's been a slow summer as far as storm and we're trying to get that finer material up. You know, there there's the balancing act of where is the sweeper mechanical or vacuum best and heavily treated areas. Typically, we don't use the vacuum sweeper. Again, with the exception of once in a while in the summer, if we've had a long run of quiet weather, we might swing a vacuum in recognizing there's not a lot of heavy material to get. And so it's an opportunity to swing it through the CSCL areas um to get some of the fine material up. So um it's something we're aware of and you know move around, but as a general practice they spend a lot of times where um we're not having the heaviest amount of material on the street.

I see. Yeah. I would have just assumed that they would be used primarily in CSCS CL areas, but you're saying that we downtown we would see them very frequently though. Did I get that right? You went to see the vacuum sweep as often as you will mechanical.

Okay. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you both very much. A second topic I wanted to ask you um Greg about and Janet is the I think we're about at the 5y year anniversary of the really I thought historic or monumental modifications to chapter 37. And I maybe just based on the sheer number of meetings that you two of you attended that I that I that I sat in on um through those storm water um medicine general ordinance revisions could could one or both of you share your perspective as we heard the 5year anniversary or thereabouts as to the effectiveness of those revisions or they were the two of you had anticipated. that I'll just share anecdotally that before then I could count on one hand the number of green roofs proposed in new downtown developments and now they're the exception to the rule every developer downtown is providing at least some sort of green roof to meet and you know my constituents often are like oh great wow we're so impressed you're providing these sustainable features I'm like no they're required by ordinance otherwise I'm afraid they wouldn't be doing it I hate to say so could the two of you speak to chapter 37. And I know most of my colleagues probably weren't here 5 years ago to enjoy all that.

Yeah, that's a word. Sure. Um, so, uh, I'll start. Uh, so what, uh, what Alder is referring to, chapter 37 is our storm water control ordinance. um as a result of the the big storm uh August 20th, 2018 uh that you referenced, Alder, um we did revamp our ordinance. So, um a couple big things about that that we changed. Um prior to that, um the big one is we only had uh 100year detention. um meaning a new development was required to detain the 100red-year storm com to the same level uh to release at the same rate as it did pre-development that moved up to 200. the the changes um with that affected green roofs is the way the old ordinance used to work and in fact every ordinance statewide with the exception of Milwaukee um and that's because they have a combined sewer system is if you had a parking lot the easiest example would have been Don Miller downtown right if you can remember back when East Washington had a 10 acre car lot on it which you know nowadays seems imp Really? You're kidding me. Yeah. No. Right. That was 10 years ago roughly. Um, if you would have changed that to a building use, you went from one hard surface pavement to another hard surface roof. You would have been required, you were actually cleaning up the water by changing use, right? Going from a a parking lot to a rooftop is just simply a much cleaner use. So, you wouldn't have had any requirements. Now you have both detention requirements slowing the water down. Um but you also have volume reduction requirements um we are the only community in the state other than

Milwaukee that has that um for redevelopment. And what it has led to quite intentionally uh as as referred to is we were trying to drive people to green roofs um in the downtown area. And um and the only the the only thing that has not worked well about that is that we didn't do it 10 years before we did it. Um green roofs have all kinds of uh benefits beyond storm water. Um but um but they are expensive to build, right? Uh initial cost is higher depending on what you build somewhere between, you know, two to three times higher. Um and uh but that has worked really well. We do have a a great number almost all new what I would call core redevelopments have a green roof as you mentioned now you wish to add anything Janet

are you as happy and excited as Greg seems to be the number you know the statistics I think I don't I don't have them memorized that we do have them but I don't have them memorized um I'm I'm pretty sure we have them in a different presentation that we've given, but I don't I don't have those memorized. Bottom line, it's my the goals that the two of you and others had set out for 5 years ago, it's met your expectations 5 years later. Is that fair to say or? Yeah, I would say. Yeah,

I think it's actually Yeah. I mean, implementation of it, I think, worked better than I think we expected, I would say. Um, we did find some issues as we're working through them. um did a couple small revisions, but for the most part, it's I think the what we set out to do has been implemented well and even though there's a little bit of angst uh launching it, it's it's mostly been embraced u by folks and you know, it's working. So, well, great. Well, thanks to both of you and thanks to all your colleagues in engineering division. Thanks, President. Al Mayor,

thank you. Uh you spoke to the inefficacy of uh permeable roadway surfaces um especially to how they could get clogged up which never occurred to me but makes a lot of sense. Uh is durability a factor too? Is that why UW removed excuse me

there's there are parking lots? Yeah, the durability of poured in place pvious concrete um has been dismal. Um with the exception of the the sidewalk we did down by uh down by the uh Central Park. Um and I would really what I would really say what I've learned from doing that is uh pouring pvious concrete uh in place is an art form, not a science. Right? the the temperature changes throughout the day. The moisture content of the subgrade changes as as the sun comes up and the heat changes. The workability of that concrete because it is very very low moisture um moves throughout the day. We happen to have I know because I I saw part of that for that contract that Janet did with parks um we had Hamburgg contractors and I happen to know Chris Hamburgg he was committed to making this work right. He took a personal interest in this as the owner of the company and he really made an effort to make this work. I'm not putting any any but I I'm just saying that was a herculean effort to get that cuz he was committed. Um on the UW campus I can't say anything about how they did it. I wasn't part of those. But I can say that everyone they've put in turned from pvious concrete to gravel um in over the course of about 3 years. that just turned into a gravel parking lot. The concrete couldn't hold up and then they tore it out and put back in asphalt. So, that part of of it has not been uh successful. All the with that one exception, all the the concrete pvious concrete products I have seen that have been successful are manufactured in a controlled environment and then brought to the site. It allow um including the pre-cast sidewalk company that stopped

making the product. It allows you to cure the concrete in a very controlled environment to get the exact physical properties you want to and then you just bring it to the site. So, so it still is good for pedestrian use because that's less wear and tear but it's apart from the actual pouring of it is difficult. Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. Thank you. It also I will say generally it has kind of a popcorn. If you took pop like a popcorn ball that is the texture you get with it and uh and a lot of people don't like it on a sidewalk application cuz they want to either roller skate or even bike if you uh or or a scooter. The texture on small wheels doesn't doesn't you know it feels like it's broken up concrete is what it feels like. Thank you. I see no other questions in the queue. So that's the end of our presentations. Right. That's it. Thank you.

Thank you all for doing this. This was incredibly helpful and again this is a discussion so we will adjourn. Happy holidays everybody.