Climate Resilience Committee - Regular Meeting

City of Miami Climate Resilience Committee. It is April 30th, 2026. Thank you for joining us. All right, we have a packed agenda today. Very excited. Let's start with our first item roll call. From my right, please.

Good evening, Grant Musser.

Allison Weinstock. Sarai Perez.

Aaron DiMaio.

Rala Baghe.

Silvio Pupo.

Mayor Flores, Office of Resilience and Sustainability.

Sonia Brubaker, Chief Resilience Officer, City of Miami.

All right. And we will let Assistant City Attorney in a minute. So, all right, we'll move to item two, which is public comment. Would anyone from the public like to make a comment?

No at this time.

There's none submitted online either? All right.

Wait, I don't know if anyone here in the public wants to make a comment, but there's none online.

Okay, so we'll move to item three, approval of the minutes from the April 6th meeting. Do I have a motion to approve those minutes?

Move to approve.

And a second?

Second.

Second. All in favor?

Aye.

Aye. Any opposed or abstain? No. I believe it was unanimous. All right, so item four, we have three presentations this evening, and... Pretty full agenda so We have two presentations on some incredible local examples of Parks and resilience and urban urban development very excited to see these presentations this evening and I chose these tonight as a of a precursor to our discussion on on a budget recommendations last year we approved seven items the seventh of the of the items was about uh stormwater park uh retentions and um i'm going to request again that we all consider that same item maybe with some adjustments for this year's budget recommendation should we move to pass something related to that so i think it's great that we have some some awesome examples right here in our backyard and there's um This has been a concept for a while now, and these projects will hear about the history of getting them to this point in time. But even just today, I was forwarded an article about sponge cities. And a couple weeks ago, there was a very interesting event with the King and Queen of the Netherlands with Miami-Dade County talking about collaboration between the two areas and the shared challenges between the two areas. one of the focuses of the event was actually sponge parks. So it's a very relevant topic to today. And to also, if we look at the 2025 annual report that we passed in January, we started that with the background of our committee. And the first couple of paragraphs are all about the weather events with multiple paragraphs about the cloud bursts. So I think this is very timely and poignant, kind of continuing the work that we already did last year this evening with these great presentations. So our first presentation, Kennedy Parker, are you ready? Yeah? OK, great. Welcome.

You guys can see, if anyone can see. Oh, there we go. We got one. Well, good evening, everyone. My name is Ben Hutchins. I'm a landscape architect and principal with Architectonica Geo.

Super happy to be here.

Really admire what you all are doing. And yeah, just happy to be a part of this. So tonight, we'd like to share some of our work at Canopy Park. This was an interesting project. It was, in fact, a public-private partnership with the city of Miami Beach and our client, Terra Group. And the site, you know, they own a pretty large site, about five acres. And as of right, they were able to build mostly mid-rise developments. And, you know, in exchange, they worked with the city closely. And in exchange for the park for the city, which they own and operate today, the developer developed it. paid for everything, gave up the land, and then donated it to the city. And it became what it is today. And this is kind of pre-development. You can see, and this was laying vacant for a long time. I mean, I lived on Miami Beach in the area, and it was like constant eyesore. So it was nice to see that it got developed. It took a good while. And as you can see here, actually, the majority of the land, the property that they owned, became public park, which they donated since they were able to get more efficiency out of that smaller footprint, which is where the residential tower went. And I believe they were, by right, allowed to develop up to 10, 15 stories across the board, so you would have had multiple kind of mid-rise buildings, and now it's kind of an exchange for this larger tower with a smaller footprint. And here's kind of an overlay of the site plan in context. You can see the MacArthur here. They're still working on this pedestrian bridge. They found a lot of artifacts, I would say, underneath that they're still trying to work around. So that's happening. It's just taking more time than anticipated. And then I think what we really wanted to look at today was some of the more stormwater-oriented moves that took place. I mean, what was really cool about this site is that on the top corner, you can see City Lift Station. That was there since pre-development. And this was handling about 30-acre watershed in the area. So all the runoff from the right-of-ways were directed to this site. And unfortunately, a lot of the water ended up going into the bay. through this system. And what this project really did was capture that water before getting to the bay, making sure that that water got cleaned. And there was a lot of different layers, almost like a belt and suspenders approach to the stormwater here. You had city wells, which do the heavy lifting, because again, it's 30 acres, it's a ton of water. But also interconnected was this cistern, which is about 25,000 gallon tank, and that's used for irrigation for the park. And also this kind of swale that kind of wraps the whole perimeter and kind of gives it a little bit of an identity and also starts to expose some of the stormwater features for the public to see. Here on the, you can actually see the cistern and then the swale kind of during construction. And this is during construction also. You can see the swell coming into place. We had some large trees that we relocated on site. You can see some dewatering happening for the sales center that was for the tower and also the cistern kind of in the middle there. And this is just a model kind of illustrating how that resiliency swell. And this is sitting kind of above a lot of those wells. and the drainage network. And if anything were to back up, it would fill up the swale. To my knowledge, the swale hasn't filled up. I think those kind of intentional, it was like the last line of defense for some of the stormwater. And of course, if the roads were to flood, you could imagine they might make their way, to a high degree, they might make their way into the swale. Here's kind of a cross section through there. So I kind of just pulled together a lot of graphics that we accrued over time. the trees i mean it's called canopy park so we really wanted to have a nice healthy tree canopy as we know that can contribute a lot to offsetting urban heat island storing water holding water carbon sequestration so this is kind of a layout showing you know how many trees we have but also their anticipated growth over about a 10-year time frame and We used a tool called iTree tools to help generate some data regarding carbon and water storage. Here's kind of an aerial of the built park. And these are just some photos, and you can see the swale kind of there, and we have these little bridge moments that happen as kind of gateway features into the park. Used a lot of native plant material. It's pretty biodiverse. There's a lot of different species that we used. More images. And we had the city played a major role in making some good demands for the park. One of which was requiring specimen trees. So you can see this ficus here. The criteria was it had to be 24 inches in diameter. So we have a Approximately seven of these throughout. And there is an art component. And a better kind of shot of the swale and some of the walkways. And there's a really cool playground too. I don't know if you guys have seen it. There's an elephant that was made by a group called Monstrum out of Europe. Really fantastic playground designers. And that's what we have. Any questions or thoughts?

Thoughts are, it's incredible. I've been there a few times and I really enjoy it. Thank you so much for the great presentation. Besides just doing stormwater management, I think also it's really important to highlight what Ben was talking about of the development capacity that was on the site and how it was adjusted to allow for this park to be built. The floor area was tilted upward, allowing for a tower in exchange for these stormwater benefits, which is very similar to what we passed last year with the flora proposal, adjusting canopy right on a much smaller scale, as well as with the green roof that we did in 2020. Or, again, incentive based climate resilience. So Also, when we look at what just passed earlier this year with the Resilience Trust Fund for Edgewater, again, adjusting development capacity in a specific neighborhood for contextual specific interventions. And so this park just kind of showcases a number of unique features from development capacity to innovative infrastructure that I hope we can try to proffer with our budget recommendations, more solutions like this. It's great that we have this type of expertise in our community, and we get to benefit from this type of infrastructure. I did have one comment, not necessarily per se about this, but more in general. Are there any best practices or innovative things? You guys are working around the world on so many projects. What's on the boards now? Where are you going from here? What kind of innovative things are you doing? How are you pushing the envelope? And, you know, as far as also like trees being on site, you know, the conversation around trees is happening a lot at the moment here in the city of Miami. How are you, you know, are there any things you're seeing as far as moving trees on site, managing around trees, development capacity, techniques like what you showed here?

Yeah, I mean, there's so many. There's so many ways you can make a positive impact, but I think it's really the layering and really trying to, overall, you're really trying to reduce runoff. You're trying to reduce impervious areas. And I think, we have a project, I wish I would have brought it today, it's at University of Miami, and it's a lakeside village project. And what's really cool about that is, you know, you have green roof, which helps, right? There's almost no impermeable moment on the project in a weird way, like the pathways and stuff. But, like, you have the green roofs, then you have nearly every rooftop is planted. So that at least slows things down. And then we slow it down at the green roofs, and then we coordinate with the plumbing engineer, and they send it to ground-level bioretention. So we have rain gardens at ground level. So that is like a belt and suspenders approach, at least from a landscape architecture perspective. and what we can provide. And so hardly any of that runoff that hits the roof or the stormwater that hits the roof makes it to the gray infrastructure or the conventional stormwater system. So I think it's just depending on the site and it's so complicated, right? Cause there's so many, every project's different and you have Silva cells and you have all kinds of things that can help hold water, but it's really like, depending on the project, depending on its opportunities, What are the opportunities that can help alleviate pressure on the conventional systems and slow things down? I mean, that's really what you want to do, slow it down so everything's not racing together and pushing on capacity, you know?

I read that it was called resist, delay, store, discharge. It was like the sequence. And if you have a chance and maybe you could have some, you know...

documents on on that project that you could share with us at a time for sure any other any other things that come to mind later and you could share with miriam yeah we can provide like a list with everybody be happy to do that and i just want to use this as an opportunity to to talk a little bit about the first layer in the city the requiring the first layer to be paved all across the board sorry this is just something that like really kind of I think it's really problematic, particularly in our urban core.

Can you describe first layer?

So first layer is about 10 feet in from the property line. We're required to pave everything up to a building. And I understand the intent is that it activates, you have active frontage, and then pedestrians can go up to a building and engage in the storefront or that sort of thing. The problem is... these storefronts are now built four or five feet sometimes above street level. So there is a wall there effectively. In a city like Miami, given what we're talking about with resiliency and the botanical potential for this city to look like Singapore or have that kind of green identity, I think it's just a missed opportunity a little bit. And it's just something that we should really look at and more specificity to Again, encourage natural percolation. It's something so simple, but it's something I think we can improve.

First layer being, again, a zoning term when you're designing a building, the area between the property line and the facade.

Yeah, yeah. So there's a first layer. There's a second layer. And, yeah, we're just – we're being – you know, directed to pave pretty much that whole front.

The paving extends essentially from the curb to the property line, and then property line to facade, and there may be swale interventions, but you think there should be a little more?

I think so. I think we could do a better job. Mr.

Chair, so that is a requirement right now? There's no other option if you come up with a creative option?

There's no planting option. Yeah.

There's no planting options.

That's part of Miami 21s.

No, I understand. Yeah. It's Miami. Now we're in 2026, so maybe we need to revisit that.

That's a great idea. No, because these little things all over the place, like if everyone does a little bit, these little bits accumulate to a lot.

Mm-hmm.

You all designed the streetscape standards for Wynwood. Are there any adjustments to the question that Arella asked related to Wynwood?

Wynwood's unique because it's a 50-foot right-of-way. There's not a whole lot to work with there. It's pretty tough to... Everyone wants to build to their limit line, and then you have barely enough room for sidewalk and have street trees. So what we tried to do there was have a permeable streetscape along that verge. So that's something that we're encouraging, but there's not a whole lot of room there to work. But certainly in a T6 zone in our area here downtown, I think we could...

It would be great maybe if you don't know, like either now or if we followed up, if there were certain specific aspects of that code that you thought should be.

I'll hit you up after this. For sure, for sure. I'll get you that and then some of the BMPs, best management practices that we were talking about before. You guys agree? Yeah.

If you're going to speak, I got to invite you to the mic. But maybe we do it during a presentation. Is that cool? OK. Any other questions or comments?

I was just curious. Thank you so much for the presentation. But I was just curious, like a little bit of the conversations and processes that had to take place so that the developer was able to build above the story limit.

The city of Miami Beach was amazing. I mean, they were like, they worked so hard together. Between the developer who works at Tail Off and the city as well, they were in constant communication. And I'm not just saying that, this is a fact. And that was just witnessing that process. And also the community. I mean, you have a very engaged community on West Avenue. So they were informing the program. The city was really pushing for this stormwater piece. And then the developer understood, frankly, and really made it happen. So I think there was a lot of discussions, a lot of back and forth negotiating. And it took time, but they did a fantastic job. I mean, it's a great example of what could be done.

Thank you. That developer, David Martin, he's done a lot of innovative work. Also, for instance, we saw last year, I believe it was 2025, the Jungle Island project with Bjarke Ingels' group, where it had the whole jungle trail with all the different kind of recreation of different native environments, which was quite impressive. And he actually just launched a documentary that I went to last week called The Future We Build, I believe. And during either the documentary or in the panel After, he mentioned exactly what you just said of when Ben said that he heard from the community what they were looking for, David said that that was one of the things he did. When he brings ideas, he tries to hear what the community wants and then pivots, and it seems like that worked pretty successfully here. Well, thanks so much. Thank you. This was amazing. Thank you all. I appreciate the insights on the other ideas. Thanks so much for joining us. My pleasure.

Thank you.

All right, we have, our second presentation is Bayshore Park, a model for climate resilient public spaces in coastal cities. Very excited for you all to be here. Thank you for coming.

While we're setting up, We want to jump in on what Ben was talking about. I'll introduce myself. This is Adriana Savino, Savino Miller Design Studio. I'm Barry Miller. This is Kelly Hitzing, our parks lead. Patty Matamoros is here with me today.

Just a little closer to the mic.

Did you get Kelly? Kelly Hitzing is our parks lead, Adriana Savino, Barry Miller with Savino Miller Design Studio, and Patty Matamoros is our resilience lead. So we're really thrilled to be here today in front of you all to talk about our project. I do want to follow up on what Ben said, though, if I could, if I may. uh we've been sending in amendments to miami 21 code the urban design folks grant matthew everyone there to try to get that first layer amended try to get building setbacks further set back by the time you have the curb and you have the required pedestrian public zone which is expanding over the years. It used to be three feet, now it's six and a half. By the time you do all these things and put in all the infrastructure, you have no more room for street trees, cafes, everything else. So the sacrifice in the Canopy Park project that the developer did, by what the city did, they give them a basically a trade of TDR. They let them go up higher, okay, to allow for the land. That's all we're doing in a very, asking for in a very minuscule scale, push the buildings back five feet, 10 more feet, and you'll completely change your streetscape. You'll allow more pervious spaces, permeable area, allow more street trees, and you can completely change the character of a city. So we are all for that, and I just want to get that in before we start the presentation. Underground is another one.

That doesn't show up for them.

Let me make this big.

Give us one second, guys.

Are you guys seeing two? No, they're just seeing the big one.

Thank you for inviting us. Again, my name is Adriana Sabino and we are super excited to show you our work in regards to this park and in general our approach to this type of project. As we all know, South Florida's urban metropolitan region has historically being tied to the water due to its location between the Atlantic Ocean and Biscayne Bay. South Florida's economy has depended traditionally on water for sustenance, tourism, recreation, and transportation. I'm kind of giving you a little bit of background, so where we started from. And you can see this is a Miami Beach original. It was a mangrove forest. And then little by little, we started carving and changing the ecology. And in general, we transformed our land use development models, having historically neglected our natural systems impacting surrounding water bodies and aquifers and the land that we inhabit. You know, of course, introduction of cars and streets, et cetera. Our design approach in general today is designing cities and projects as urban ecosystems, indicating complex interactions between human and natural systems, emphasizing material cycles, energy flows, and feedback loops, the importance of policy and planning in shaping sustainable urban ecosystems. Barry?

So we're Miami Beach residents. We've been in this fight. Activism is another thing we can talk about. For some time now, and we all know about the effects of sea level rise. We presented this to the chief engineer back about 11, 12 years ago. The drawings on the left, I think it was from a UM study or FIU, sea level rise in the next 100 years or 80 years at the time. one, two, three, four feet, and the resultant king tides, et cetera, and the street flooding. We all know about that.

This is the context of where our project was at the time and the situation that was happening.

So the traditional gray infrastructure engineering approach was, we call it pumps and pipes, gray infrastructure, bringing in first flush water from the streets and collecting that and dumping it into the bay or nearest canal, et cetera. So that's the image and the diagram on the left. On the right, you have more of a best practices model, collecting things off the street, off of properties, and moving it into a green space, et cetera. So that's more of the green infrastructure approach that we wanted to adopt. So... Shortly after we were talking with the city, in 2014 and 15, you may remember this, some of you guys, Henry Brisseno at FIU came out and busted the city on the plume that was coming out from the Sunset Harbor area. Now, I'll say the city of Miami Beach was way ahead of its time. It really deserves a lot of credit in the street-raising strategy. They recognized that long ago, and we've worked on a few projects for that. But there was an essential issue. They were doing it fast and without too much forethought and without the green infrastructure approach. And it was polluting water out in Biscayne Bay. And they sent, remember the Herald?

Oh, yeah.

The Herald had these pictures of the plume going out, wiping out the seagrass beds. And it was a big, big problem. And these articles came out on the city. The city, of course, was shocked and surprised, and they said, well, we've got to change the way we do things, we asked them. So our approach on the project, Bayshore Park, was to use three thrusts of how we're going to bring this park together. The main was to provide stormwater storage and improve the water quality, both inside the area, the site itself, and the canal, John Collins Canal, the historic canal, all the way out to Biscayne Bay, as well as enhance the community's cultural ecological habitat and reflect cultural historical memory, and all engaged by the surrounding community around it. So this essentially is just a diagram, quick diagram of the strategy. You see the park there at the middle where the arrows are going to. The big idea and the whole thing was to take this street raising project, which has yet to be implemented. And this is central South Bayshore neighborhood, right above Dave Boulevard, Miami Beach High, that area right there. and to fuse the two projects. We're gonna do the park project and we're gonna do this streetscape project and plumb the drainage from this 85 acre watershed outside the park boundaries and bring it into the park rather than dumping it into the canal and into Biscayne Bay. So this is a quick little animation as to get it to work. the wrong way there we go so there's the park right there in the dashed outline that's this is the what's been happening historically that's just bad polluted water going out from the area into the johns canal canal on the on the bottom john collins canal and the bay That's the strategy. As opposed to that, we're going to start taking water into the lake. We need to create a storage space into the park. Coming up front in the section, you'll see this is when it rains. That lake that we dig fills up. You can see it starting to fill up beyond its banks up to a levee. It fills up as much as possible, holding water, preventing water, diverting water from going to the bay. As the sun comes out, it dries up, it's fine. Any leftover goes out to the bay much cleaner. We've got to bring in Kelly.

Coming with some details on things. So our project ended at the property line of the park. So we couldn't actually connect the stormwater system without the city doing their part in the neighborhood. And what we did is there's a red rectangle. That is the civil engineer. We built a control structure. that will help control the flow of water into the park. Once it fills up to its max, it'll divert it into the regular system to the canals. The pipe is connected to the lake and out to the street. Eventually, when the neighborhood project is done, that will connect and the whole drainage system will go to there. In the interim, we are trying to work with the city and public works to connect to this existing pump station that's on the park site. So temporarily, at least some water can come through that pump station into the park and alleviate flooding more locally to that side of the park. Even just redoing the swale on the north side has reduced flooding on that street significantly without changing any of the piping of the drainage. The orange circle is a half-mile jogging path which functions as the levee. It's at a set elevation all the way around the park, and that's where the water will kind of stop when the park itself floods from the lake outward. And yeah, that's it for this slide I think. Okay, so part of the, you know, creating this lake as the basis for the stormwater collection was a big part of the park, as well as it becoming an amenity, you know, for the visitors to the park. And some of the thoughts around that were balancing cut and fill on the site, and that's where these big landforms came from. Another big aspect of the site as a former golf course is contaminated with arsenic. So we were dealing with groundwater and soil contamination. So by building the lake and mounding the contaminated soil up, we had to bring in less clean soil to cap the site, and we had to truck out less contaminated soil, which is very expensive and costly to do. So we pretty much balanced the cut and fill. There was still a little trucking out of stuff, but not nearly as much if we hadn't built these mounds. And we ended up working with DERM to, because of the large mature trees on the site, we worked with them to get some code changes for how they treat big trees on contaminated sites to give them more of a chance to thrive rather than capping on top of their roots, which really hampers them. um and we also ended up doing just one foot cap with a demarcation netting so if anyone digs they'll hit this orange net and not know there's contamination below and then your inspiration here?

Well, I mean, in terms of design inspiration, we wanted to bring these kind of principles to something in the city that would be memorable and exciting. So we harkened back to the old Central Park, what they did in terms of really earth-moving land works and the land work environmental artists of the 60s and 70s. Smithson, Wordsworthy, everybody. The second one, we also were involved with South Point Park. That's the top picture in the middle. You may have been there before. It's an amazing landform. What height does to a site, especially in Miami, is incredible. Have you ever been to Reynolds Park? There's one, William Layman Phillips, but one 20-foot hill? 13, 14-foot hill. It's amazing. It's a life-changing thing in terms of a park experience. We said, let's just kind of amp this up a little bit and do something really special because we could really see, in Solid Point Park, you just see the ocean. Here, it was to get up above the lake so you can see a sunset where you never can see a sunset in Miami Beach. This actually, the park is set kind of in the geographical middle of the island, a half mile from each side.

You also use that soil that we we also use the soil and we didn't have to export that soil so they gave us all the advantages that we needed.

I want to point out some numbers about the stormwater capacity. Before I do that, though, I realize after the first presentation, we didn't really address the drainage that's going on underground here with the civil engineers. So the issue with the arsenic and the groundwater hampered some of what we could do underground. On the west side of the park, it's a higher level. And Durham would not let us infiltrate stormwater into the ground there. So on the left side of the park, there are lined swales that are now covered with planting. They're pretty invisible at this point. And those lines swales lead to pipes that go into the lake. On the east side of the park, we have our tanks, which are just kind of giant exfiltration trenches under the grounds that are, you see some drains on the surface, but all over that side of the park, there are a lot of these are tanks underground collecting the water. So the site itself is designed to hold its own 100 year one day storm on site without spilling over into the streets. That's within the levee area. The grade outside of that won't allow quite that much holding. And then it also in addition is designed to collect up to the 10 year one day storm from the 85 acre neighborhood. So those two things combined will fill up that basin in the middle. There's 65 acre feet of storage capacity total for the park. Some other park resiliency elements we mentioned were the balanced cut and fill, the remediating and capping of the contaminated soil, the tennis building that serves as restrooms and office for the tennis courts for the city parks department. has solar panels on the building that are feeding into the power grid. We use local materials as much as possible. I'll get into that more when we get into some detailed photos. And the parking lot has a permeable paving system. We were able to preserve 91 mature trees, some of them very mature and large. And I'm not going to read all these numbers to you, but we added a lot of new trees and palms and shrubs. majority of that was all native planting. We have pollinator planting in a butterfly garden, and we also have designated some of the open lawn space as kind of a South Florida meadow. We're calling it a beneficial lawn that incorporates some native wildflowers and

what some people would consider weeds that attract butterflies.

We're working with the city to try to get a maintenance program where they don't mow that as much. That's a challenge, but that will happen. And also, around the edges of the lakes, there's some literal zone planting that's designed to help remediate the water that goes through there and filter the water of the lake to keep it more clean. This is an image showing kind of some of these things I've talked about. The kind of light brown color path is that levee path and it is made of coquina sand that's been stabilized. So that is permeable and it is a local material and that was actually came to that through the running community of Miami Beach. They wanted a soft surface jogging loop for their knees mostly. And then you see the lake edge. This is right after it was planted. So the literal plantings are growing in here. We have this dock leading out to the lake. There are four docks on the project and a bridge going across. The planting just, let me see my mouse up there now. The planting just left of that dock, that first section is actually tidal, so the water goes up into that area and out as the lake goes up and down with king tides and just daily tides. On the other side of the bridge is a recirculated city water for the water feature.

This responds also to the planting communities. This community adjacent to that levee is mostly floodable, let's say, and coastal planting.

This is just an image of the parking lot with the permeable paving system there. And these are some of the planting communities, kind of a section across from the upland tropical coastal hammock down through the littoral zone and mangrove edge. The plants in our beneficial lawn meadows and then some of the plants in our butterfly garden here.

I'm just breathing through these. Yeah, you wanna talk about this one?

This kind of is the existing conditions that we found when we got into, it's a 20-acre site. It had a lot of mature trees that we preserved and also had different conditions, like the east side is a more public, active site. There is a civic uses, there is the youth center, the mikvah, the Hebrew Academy, a multifamily residential. The south side is the Miami Beach Senior High, and the west side and north side is a residential single-family homes. So the site offered different conditions, and our response was likewise. The east side is going to be the most active part of the park. And again, also the south side, we place in that area the tennis facility, the dog park. the parking, a public plaza, and the playground. We place it in the northeast side, adjacent to the youth center and the community. And the west side of the park is more a pastoral site. And these are some of the views. The miracle is that this park is built. In terms of the process, it was a long time coming because actually Barry and I live in that community. And it took about maybe 30 years fighting to preserve this site as a green space. And the process was long, but well worth it.

yeah that's a picture from that's what i was talking about before sunset hill the view from above uh and the lake and that that tree there that was preserved i was and we just built an island around the tree uh to allow for the uh lake circulation so it maintains uh and this is just some photos of the kids you know doing what kids do just exploring uh the fauna has just with in within six months it's just amazing uh between the geese and the herons and the uh egrets turtles everybody's come in uh and and hinga and hinga was there that's extremely rare um This is some other pictures. Here you see that recirculating non-immersive fountain that comes from the entry and goes to the lake. In terms of a design exercise, that's the tidal basin that Kelly was talking about. The playground from Berliner that we designed with them more or less to kind of reflect the idea of the ficus roots coming down. An amazing zip line. This is a big-time attraction right through the ficus. Part of the idea of the park was to make it inclusive and diverse. We added all the things the stakeholders wanted. fitness center, the tennis courts, the new tennis building that Adriana talked about, dog park, and the butterfly garden. That's just a close-up of the limestone ridge. Oops. Oh. We have time issues here?

We should probably wrap sooner than later, so we have time for questions and comments.

Yeah, this is just what happens with the kids on the hill. How do we do this? And this is kind of like the idea of what kids do in that fountain. That's also a big hit. So I'll move on. They get the idea. This is the levee path. That's the coquina path underneath that canopy we were talking about, along with the LED lighting that is supposed to go eventually up and down in terms of dimming when people go around. One thing we did want to mention in terms of parks, this is truly a parks without borders that we also fought for. There's no fences. There's no gates around this whole thing. You can walk in or out any time you want. The playground is locked up in there. Amphitheater for events. Another view from the top of the hill, Sunset Hill, popular place. There's your, this is the tree, this tree is, you should go there and visit, it's one of the most amazing things you'll ever see. We call it Big Mo, but other people call it the Cathedral. It is really that, it's almost a sacred space, really amazing space. And that's just at sunset. You want to give the key takeaways, Adriana?

Some of the takeaways is, first of all, the collaboration with different disciplines and policymakers is crucial in the design of something like this for urban ecology to really make it. It requires a multidimensional approach that ideally includes its unique ecology, history, culture, identity, and resiliency. The key is to understand relationships and how these layers interact and create an urban landscape. Understanding how these layers relate and define social and spatial interactions to propose comprehensive solutions. There is not one size fits all solution. Design should be flexible and allow for adaptation. And we are very happy that our profession is one of advocacy, education, and stewardship. And that's it. Thank you.

Thank you. Incredible work. Really, really amazing and inspirational. I encourage everyone to go visit it and enjoy it and learn from it. It's incredible how you've preserved all this nature and it's still performing as infrastructure as we heard through all of those details that you just walked us through. It's a gorgeous space and yet it's also doing all of these performance features. And I think that we need to do like this also throughout the city of Miami, especially inland communities with our recommendations for sponge parks. So, you know, kudos and congratulations on a great project. And also the other work you showed us, like South Point, which is, you know, a model for how we need to stop storm surge across the entire coastline. So thanks so much. Anyone else have any comments or questions?

I think you guys did a wonderful job. It's beautiful. The pictures speak for themselves. The takeaway for me and something I would argue for the board to take away from this presentation is so often we get focused on the idea or the concept that we want to have this park, we need to have this park. And that's what the first half of this presentation was. But showing the activity and the people using the park and what happened after the fact is the sales pitch. That's the argument we have to make when we're presenting this to our senior leadership, to let them know that this is what it will look like at the end for the people, not just how it looks beautiful as an empty park. That was the takeaway, so really good job.

I wanted to respond to you in particular, that levee path, it functions as the levee for the water, a jogging path, but it is also the fire lane around the park, so it has that triple function for that too.

The reason why we named this the model is we think cities and municipalities can use this system and this approach as a model for low-lying, flood-prone areas. We happen to have an old golf course that was abandoned here. That was serendipitous for us to have that right there. Cities can do the work, the political hard work to put together properties, blood-prone properties that we've built on over the last 100 years, and to aggregate these lands and build these parks, these stormwater sponge parks, if you will, collection parks, at an amazing amenity. Part of the money that could be, then you hear about repetitive loss properties. That's where you look at first. Part of the idea is to increase the value of the land right there. And values, we think over time, over the 50 years, that the property values increase by having amenities like this will help pay for the long-term costs and short-term pain. But it's a model for low-lying areas. And it could be continued all the way up the coast. Yes. Allison?

Yeah, thank you so much. This was incredible. And the Banyan Tree, Big Mo, I've been there and it's so beautiful. But I was just curious, this is kind of a technical question, but maybe not so much, but how difficult was it to change the direction of the flow of water from how it was previously diverting into canals and then you reversed it essentially to kind of go inward towards the park?

Well, the work is still ongoing. As Kelly said, we are working now with the city to get that water into the lake. When we dug that lake, that's groundwater right now. All the water through those R tanks she was describing goes into that or over gravity flow through the littoral zones.

Right, right.

Eventually, when we replumb and we do the streetscape project, that's part two, the big part two of the project, where we replumb in that 85 acres. We send that, rather than out, we send it towards the park.

Okay, got it. That's the idea. Got it. So that's, yeah. It's a civil engineering.

It's a civil engineering and pumps, gravity flow.

Right, right. I just watched a documentary on the reversal of the Chicago River, which is really an incredible engineering feat that we could look to.

A lot of the neighborhood water is already going towards that pump station and towards 28th Street.

A little closer.

Sorry, a lot of the water is already going towards the park and the neighborhood, so it won't be that big of a change. Got it.

Yeah, we are in the lowest part in the beach. Right.

It's that location.

And it's interesting. As soon as we build the swale on 28th Street, the flooding is a lot better. So it's interesting.

Yeah.

So hopefully it will be even better later. Awesome. Thank you.

First, thank you, Mr. Chair, for bringing these fabulous presentations as examples of what we should be doing here in the city of Miami. Question, how long did it take you all to work with Durham to convince them?

I know the answer to the question, but I just need to put it on the record. I'm going to jump in before Kelly gets on, because Kelly's going to give you a whole harangue of issues. Durham was, in my opinion, Durham was actually pretty amenable. When they heard what we were trying to do, they were very amenable. And that's why we got some code changes, actual things which are not easy to do with Durham. The big issue was the groundwater.

The answer is years. But their biggest concern was the contaminated groundwater and digging that lake and how that would change the plume of the contaminated groundwater, which is still now post-construction being tested and reporting back to Durham on that. So we had to do, our team, our geotechnical engineer and civil engineer had to do a lot of modeling. And then Durham hired their own separate consultant and did modeling on their side, so there was reports, you know, stacks of reports and models done to allow us to build the lake. That's the end. A long time.

The kicker was with Wilbur and company and Tom was the fact that we have a little bit of an advantage in Miami Beach because we don't dig wells here. So we're not using drinking water, we're not using irrigation water from the groundwater. So when they realized that, that's when they said, okay, we're okay, we'll put some monitoring wells and find out what happens. But there's really no public health threat in the plume moving out. It may be different in the city of Miami if you have groundwater. If you have groundwater pollution, yeah, that's another issue.

Something for us to consider.

yeah when the way we I suggested it last year, and we put together a document which I now realize I probably should have requested to be sent out in in. Just reference to the item the budget item that we identified some different areas when you look at the stormwater master plan there's some areas that are pretty far inland that won't. technically be planned for adaptation until phase three. So that's over a decade away, potentially, and billions of dollars away. So this could be a solution for those inland neighborhoods in a shorter term timeline, both for repetitive loss properties, so looking at the bottom of a slough in a neighborhood, and helping those people have an out where they may also be having challenges with simply keeping their property dry, with insurance, with maybe selling it. So it's a solution for that. And I think it might even have a higher ROI than trying to come up with a gray solution for those slough areas. But there may also be opportunities that it's not just a sponge park at the lower end of the slough, but there may be other ones slightly higher up the block at the midpoint or even high point adjacent, because if there's not enough room As you just described and you showed us how you had to do cut and fill, for smaller sites there may not be enough room to actually do that kind of a topographic change. So this is a good example, but it doesn't technically perfectly apply for the smaller scale sites that I think also may need interventions like this. It's going to take a lot of research and a lot of people to kind of figure out.

I want to comment on, you know, Irela, you requested something, the stormwater master plan. And maybe there's a way for us to overlap the stormwater master plan with some of the different parks conversations we've been having. So it makes it easier for us to understand how do we prioritize what kind of sponge areas. I'd actually be open to also considering this as part of our budget recommendations. My question to the presenters, by the way, amazing presentation, is really about what the additional cost goes into in terms of design and the pumps and getting those flows and potentially what are the perceived savings that you generate as well from not needing additional hard infrastructure in surrounding areas. And then finally, What happens with that water flow and that change of water flow? Does that increase water contamination at all? Is there any water quality testing or component that is considered as part of it?

I think you just went over the...

The groundwater?

Yeah, I'll work... backwards the in terms of water quality we think the planting and literal zone there will help filter the filtration sands down below it's we it's a deep lake it's 14 15 feet deep lake that's a good first lake health etc I won't go into the morphometry stuff but that's the idea that filtration around the lake and through the sands of the, so that by itself should help. We don't know exactly, that's why the monitoring stations are there, what's gonna happen with the arsenic in the groundwater. We think over time it's gonna be dispensed and diluted over time, so that remains to be seen, and that's a good thing for a feedback monitoring system, which I think that's what Durham is involved with right now. In terms of hard cost, it's hard to understand exactly what the total economic benefit is in terms of property value around, in terms of just pure, how do you value recreational value? How do you value your kids playing and discovering when they're climbing up something? That's something that's kind of amorphous. I think it's just a matter, we just got back from San Francisco. We went for the first time. And we were stunned at how much of that city is park and green space. I'm not sure if you've all been there or been there lately. It's just incredible. In the middle of the urban infrastructure. And that may end up being what's happening 100 years from now. when the water's up two or three feet, you may not be able to build around it. And that's where your real costs may come in. Trying to put infrastructure in to incorporate, you know, if Antarctica's glaciers all melt down soon. So these are fundamental questions.

And the pumps that you mentioned, you put some pumps in there, and I'm sorry, just FYI, I wasn't able to open up The link to the presentation, there was some security issue. I got, like, a phishing alert, so I wasn't able to, like, dig in as much as I'd like to. Did you have mangroves? Mangroves? Yeah.

Mangroves are being planted, that's what it is.

I'm trying to think if there's any telemetry between the pumps and what your thought process was between how many pumps and how long maybe those pumps will last and how you think about the maintenance going forward of something like that for the life of that asset.

The one pump, the big pump in the corner was there already before we built the park. It's part of the city's pump system. And then the only thing we inserted is a non- It's not a pump, it's just mechanically open and closed valve and that big box under a hill that leads into the lake. The lake itself does have, to help with the lake daily cleaning and circulation and algae, there are some circulators under the docks that move the water in kind of a counterclockwise motion all the way around the lake to keep the water moving and pushing it through the littoral zones. And they're also injecting ozone into the lake to help with the water quality there. So those, I don't know the lifespan of them, but they're, it's a pretty, the same designer that did like the lake system on Lincoln Road, the water features on Lincoln Road and the Miami Beach Botanical Garden worked on this lake as well.

Thank you so much. Amazing presentation, really inspirational. And probably going to be following up with you all with some more questions as we think more about these specific recommendations that we'll be working on over the next month. So really appreciate your time this evening.

Yeah, we'd be happy to help. Thank you. Thank you.

All right, we do have a third presentation today. Item 4C is the FIFA Fan Fest.

It's a purposeful delay to build suspense. All right, my name is Chief Graham Musser. I'm also the emergency manager for the city of Miami. So I've had the pleasure of working with FIFA and all the federal partners and local municipalities in planning for the Bayfront event. which is the FIFA World Cup Fan Festival. Every host city that has matches playing in their state or city or country also has a fan festival built into it. So those members or civilians that don't have tickets can come to this event. It begins June 13th and ends July 5th, and it's at Bayfront Park. Technical difficulties.

Second slide, Sonia, please.

So Fan Festival is free to the public. The way I like to describe it is it's an American football tailgate where the families can come and enjoy the festivities and also watch the game. So there's going to be three screens there. They're going to air all of the games that are on during the times that the fan festival is open. They're trying to stream three matches per day for 23 days. They're also going to have live shows and performances, food trucks, and we're expecting about 30,000 people per day. For 23 straight days. Miami-Dade County at the Miami Stadium, they're going to have seven matches. Five of those matches are going to be during the same period of our fan festival. 30,000 is a very rough number. This is something, it's a first in the world for the Miami World Cup to do something like this as a grand scale. I know New York and New Jersey closed down, decided not to do their actual fan festival at one site due to security reasons. Everything that's going on nationally, there's a lot of concerns. So they decided to split it up into multiple venues. Here in the city, we decided that since we're used to having ultra festival at Bayfront Park, albeit three days, but the same amount of people. So we feel confident that we can make sure it's safe and secure for the residents. Some other numbers there, 33 local businesses are contracted to participate within the event. Now, how do we prepare for such a large scale event? 23 continuous days takes a lot of people, a lot of planning. We were fortunate that City of Miami didn't have anything going on last year when the Club World Cup came into town. for Miami-Dade County, but they began early last year starting planning for that and for this, because we knew it was coming the year after. So Miami-Dade County was hosting biweekly meetings for preparedness, about communications, public safety. They had a whole bunch of working groups that a lot of the departments were sending representatives to participate in. We've now streamlined it down to monthly meetings as we're getting closer to the event because we feel like everybody's nailed in and on the same page. A lot of what we're doing in the city is based off of plans that we've already had in process. But plans are only good on paper. You have to test them. You have to make sure they're operational. So how do you do that? You've got to get everybody in the room and discuss the plans and make sure we're on the same page. So January 28th of this year, was basically me coming out to the city saying, this is the event that's coming on. It was real early. We didn't know how many days it was going to be. It was, talk about two weeks, 21 days. We landed on 23 days after January 28th. But what is it going to take for us to put on this event and what are the concerns we have to worry about, right? Not just city of Miami folks, but Miami-Dade Emergency Management, the Florida Department of Emergency Management, all federal partners, all in the same room, talking about the what-ifs. And the what-ifs were, it's June 13th through July 5th. Heat season begins May 1st. It's in hurricane season. We have thunderstorms, lightning, floods. We have all these things, perfect trifecta. It's not just over a weekend like Ultra Fest. This is three weeks. So what do we do if the worst case scenario happens? We did a complex coordinated terrorist attack. We had drones dropping unknown chemicals. We had vehicle rammings going in this scenario. And it was a very engaging conversation. And the takeaway from it all was we were all in sync on what we were going to do. There was no question about it. I'm not going to say it was perfect. There were some takeaways and some preparedness items we needed to do. But it was great to see that without testing all these plans for a long time, we were all a cohesive group together. Then we did a cybersecurity tabletop exercise a couple months ago where our city department of intelligence, or DOIT, Department of IT, participated in. And the feedback that we got of all the municipalities was that our city IT department was the best prepared. So that was a great takeaway from there. And then now coming up on June 3rd, I hate saying this, but Family Reception Center. What happens when we have a mass casualty incident that affects the lives of hundreds or thousands of people? We have people coming from all over the world speaking different languages. Something happens. They're all going to be calling 911 asking for answers. Where do we set this up? How do we prepare for that so that we can reunite families together and hopefully all positive reunions? So during the 23-day event, we're going to have our family reception center staged and set up at the James L. Knight Center. So all we got to do is... push the button, call out the people that are supposed to sit in those seats. They show up, and we can open the doors, and we can provide that service to the residents and their families. On site, we have public safety. We have fire rescue doing what they do day in, day out. Firefighters, paramedics stays for all 23 days. They're all treated in heat response. We have our hazardous materials teams on standby, decontaminated trailers. The police department is going to be out there in full force. but they're limited in their capacity. There's only a finite amount of Miami police officers. So we got Coral Gables, Miami-Dade, and other municipalities coming in as a force multiplier, no different than what we do in Ultra Fest to make sure that we have a safe event. And then the citywide support. We're going to have the City of Miami Emergency Operations Center opened. We have the National Weather Service embedded. We're going to have Miami-Dade Emergency Management and Florida Division of Emergency Management on site in case we need additional resources. We're just overpreparing, but we're preparing for the worst. So I already touched upon heat seasons May 1st through October 31st. The National Weather Service criteria is that if the heat index reaches 105 degrees, that's the humidity plus the actual temperature. that reaches 105 degrees we send out a heat advisory and just letting everybody know it's hot out there and sweaty to hydrate and and you know be cognizant if it gets to 110 that's extreme you only got a certain amount of time before you're going to overheat and and need to call 9-1-1 the fan festival has three cooling centers they're going to have a bunch of tables and chairs and picnic tables with umbrellas misting fans free water all that out there ready to go We talked about extreme heat, hurricane season, thunderstorms and lightning. National Weather Service is going to be there in our Emergency Operations Center. We're going to be dialed into everything, checking the weather daily, three days ahead, seven days ahead. If something significant happens, like a storm is coming, the hard decision to shut down will be made, even though it's a FIFA-sanctioned event. It's not going to delay any World Cup matches by us shutting it down. So that's why it's an easy decision that for the safety of our residents, we'll shut down when the time comes. And all of the plans, emergency operations plan, the life safety plans for the event, all that's been worked out. Everybody's being trained on all of that. So what success looks like. If we did our job correctly, it's a safe, welcoming event every day for those 23 days. If that works out, nobody's talking about what happened, what we did wrong. They're only talking about the matches and how the games went about their days.

The rest of the city is running normally.

Weather is handled in non-variable. And one thing is one coordinated voice when something happens. So if something happens, unified messaging is the key. We want to make sure that the same message is going out no matter who's speaking and what platform, whether it be federally, FIFA, the Miami-Dade, Our commissioners, we need to make sure that they have everything that they need to keep the residents and you informed. And that all goes to the Emergency Operations Center, to our Joint Information Center as well. So one message will be sent out, everybody will be uniformed. Now, I know she didn't want this, but she's going to get it now. Turning it over to Sonia. I saw you skip that slide real quick.

Good evening. So we talked about resilience that will be at FanFest with extreme heat and extreme weather, but there will also be some sustainability aspects as well. And so we're really looking at doing some plastic-free measures at FanFest. And so when we think about single-use plastics, we think about how they're going to the landfills, which are overflowing, and we think about right there, Bayfront Park is Biscayne Bay. You know, you just, you have these images in your head of, you know, what would it look like if there were a bunch of plastic bottles and cups that went into the bay. And so we want to prevent that because it threatens marine life and, you know, it just, it pollutes our water and it takes a really long time to degrade and it actually ends up in our bodies. Um, so, um, with, uh, with, with, um, the, you know, the World Cup games, you know, that, that is, you know, through, through our county and both, um, our county and our city have plastic free policies that are really, really similar. And so, like, they focus on concessions of, like, internally, you know, what we're doing within the county and the city. And so for, for events, you know, we encourage, um, that are on city property, we encourage plastic free as well. And so, This includes, you know, wrappers, straws, food containers, beverage containers, utensils, bottles and lids, stirrers and bags, with the exception of some prepackaged food items that are ready to eat meals and snack packs that aren't readily available without plastics. So we're looking at, again, with the concessions, with sponsors, food vendors, the bars, and Also, Debris Free Oceans is having a Kick the Cup campaign because there's going to be lots of cups that people are drinking water from and other things during the games. And so we're really encouraging people to use reusable bottles.

That was... good reminder of all the work that goes behind that a lot of times as you said what are the what's the goal here that everyone has a great time and they don't think about those things but all of the work that gets done behind the scenes and and how hard you guys are coordinating to keep us safe and uh really appreciate that and uh just sharing all of those you know pretty pretty important and tough challenges that you guys have to make and decisions. We don't get to hear a lot about what you do on a regular basis, but appreciate you sharing with us, and I hope it goes off without a hitch. It sounds like you guys have really prepared for as best as you can, and hopefully it's a fun time. I mean, we have the F1 outside right now, and then that going on in Bayfront. It's a pretty active time for the city, and I think this may also be One of the first times we've seen seen something kind of related to our mission statement of. Like use and disposition of city owned water from properties normally we see things related to like renovation or redevelopment, but this was great to actually hear about specific use of water from properties. We also heard about it with Ascendance for Ultra from Vivian Hunter a month or two ago. But really appreciate making sure that we're meeting our mission statement of that as well. So thank you. Any other comments from the board?

I mean, this is chair, I think something that I'm really excited about. Yeah, you're great. Chief, I'm excited to see this. I'm curious, how's the how's the joint collaboration look like from things like, you know, the pecking order of, say, Secret Service, I know, is one of the big Department of Homeland Security agents that's, that's, that's playing a part. How are all their agencies coordinating and community communicating amongst each other? Inter-municipally, inter-municipally, and intra-municipally, as well as up the ladder?

That's actually a really good question. In pecking order, Secret Service, everybody else. So when they come, we listen and we accommodate. But the unified command post is how all of those agencies work together collaboratively. You'll always have a lead person or incident commander. Usually in the city of Miami, it's joint between police and fire because of public safety. But all the other federal agencies that are coming to assist, I didn't even get into the acronyms that are going to be here, they're all going to have a representative with decision-making authority in the unified command post. Most of the time, if you see an EOC, you have a whole bunch of people working. That's not a unified command post. The command post, there's a whole bunch of leaders leading. They're not really working. The workers are in another room. So that's how we all collaborate and get on the same page. As soon as an issue is identified, everybody is aware of it, and they're all communicating back to their partners.

Great presentation, both of you. It's also incredible to just hear how many steps and how many preparations are in events such as like big as this um some of my questions were more related to the sustainability aspect of the festival hearing from vivian before on like the leave no trace policy i was curious if um there were any processes for like pollution prevention and like storm waters um i know um vivian they use like stormwater protections with sop technologies for example i don't know if that was something that was explored or um considered as well um Other than that, also, if there was, like, a volunteer-based program, maybe working with Clean Vibes, again, the festival is, like, 23 days, so how can we, like, minimize the damage or minimize pollution through that way? Yeah, if that was also explored or if it was, like, how would that look like?

I'll answer part of it. So they do have a volunteer organization set up. Their actual base camp is at the Brightline station here in the city. So they're volunteering to go out and make sure that everything's being cleaned and not polluted. As far as what they're doing before and after, I can talk in detail about Ultra Fest, but the Really, I don't like saying this, but it really hasn't been my concern as much, but I know Sonia has been talking with them about what they're doing, if it's something similar to Ultrafest.

Yeah, yeah, on the, I start with the, I think this is the stormwater front. You know, this is, you know, going to be during rainy season, and historically we have seen some pretty big storms in June, and so, Our Department of Resilience and Public Works is really on standby during those times to really take control of any sort of flooding situations, as well as the Division of Emergency Management. We all work together for emergency situations like that. And I think that for this event in particular, since It is so big and there will be so many people there. There's going to be even more of an effort to control any sort of flooding that comes. And then for volunteer organizations, I've been hearing more and more about how volunteer organizations really you know, rely on these sorts of events, you know, to really get people to really be able to educate people and then get people to be able to, you know, do things like cleanups and things that they didn't know would be available otherwise. And so I could definitely see that as part of this as well.

Yeah, definitely. And I think this is also, like, a great international educational opportunity So I'm really excited to see how this goes. And again, thank you so much for explaining the processes for everything.

Chairman, one last question for the chief in regards to CERT. I know that usually for ULTRA, sometimes you guys rely on CERT. Are they going to be involved at all to support and provide other aid in terms of different situations? Say heating, you know, I know some things we've done like heating.

Yeah, so we're soliciting our CERT members now, getting a tally of who can go in on what days. I already have on the fire department side because when we actually have CERT members out in the field, we have to have an instructor with them so that they understand what the rules are within public safety. So we already have that roster built out for every day. We just don't know how many volunteers we're going to get and which days we're going to get them. Because most of them work or go to school, and it's just 23 days. It goes through the weekdays. So we're working that out. But we definitely will have a presence there with a CERT table that can give out flyers and information on our community emergency response team.

Awesome. Thank you so much. All right, we'll move to item five, old business. So update on the tree committee. This has been a topic of conversation for us for a while now since we heard about a tree committee being formed. So I reached out to the city. I asked for an update on, you know, we've been asking about it and also we've had people from the public asking about it. So I reached out to Melissa Fernandez-Steers and she provided me with something that I can read off So by way of an update pursuant to prior city commission action, the city has been working with Florida State University's Consensus Center to support the public outreach and engagement process associated with potential updates to the city's tree ordinance. To date, the Consensus Center has already conducted initial outreach and assessment interviews with city staff, community residents, and other key stakeholders as part of its preparatory work. In addition, the consensus center has been in direct contact with individuals who have already been selected for appointment to the advisory committee and who have responded to its outreach. In parallel, the city continues to coordinate with the commission offices on finalizing committee appointments. Districts two, four, and five have advised that they have appointments ready to submit. And we are actively working with districts one and three to identify the remaining appointments. An item formally establishing the Tree Advisory Committee is expected to be brought before the City Commission in May. While a few steps remain outstanding, our current expectation is that we will be in a position to convene the Tree Advisory Committee for its first meeting in June or July. Depending on the timing of the remaining appointments, it may be necessary to convene the committee with a majority of appointments in place in order to avoid any further delay. As these items are finalized, we will be better positioned to confirm specific meeting date and anticipated schedule please feel free to share this general update for purposes of keeping the CRC informed thank you that was the message I received and I also received an update that I want to add that I am awaiting submissions from district 3 for the committee and I was recently advised they have names to propose also If your members have any District 1 residents that they can recommend that district to serve on the committee, I believe that would be helpful. You want me to reread that? I want to add I am awaiting submissions from District 3 for the committee, and I was recently advised they have names to propose. Also, if your members have any District 1 residents that they can recommend that district to serve on the committee, I believe that would be helpful.

So if we have recommendations, we can submit them?

Yep. To Biryam or directly to Sonia? To the commissioners, District 1. I think that's what she was referring to. So it sounds like there is a timeline. It's great that we have a timeline and hopefully we can have something to participate as well. And also Avra is a member. She's let us know a couple times that she would also be filling us in as that progresses. But also, as members of the public, we can participate in those events or whatever things there are, actions that they do. And we may potentially also take a CRC action in support or, you know, in collaboration. So I think we can talk about maybe more of that later, maybe under future agenda topics in case we want to talk about maybe another workshop. Or maybe we could do it now, but we did talk about a workshop, so now we kind of have an idea on a timeline so that they said, first meeting in June or July. We talked about a workshop for us to discuss ideas that Silvio had already prepared, as well as review some of the comments that we had heard from the town halls, as well as all the comments we received when we had this as an item on our agenda across four or five meetings last year. So if we wanted to plan a workshop, I think we should think of when we want to do that.

Would this be specific to trees?

That's what I'm suggesting.

I would propose that perhaps we collect all of that and submit it to the tree committee and have them evaluate rather than us kind of, I don't like reinventing the wheel. They're already tasked to do something, we can make recommendations to them for them to consider.

Exactly, so like what recommendations would we make to them?

What I'm trying to say is that I don't think we need to have a workshop on trees when there's already a tree committee being formed.

Do you think individual members should just submit things to them?

That could be one, or collectively we prepare recommendations and we submit them to the tree committee for their consideration.

I think that's what the workshop may be, that we review things and then we agree on these five things we should submit on behalf of the CRC suggests is what members have discussed.

I don't know, I just think it's duplicative is all. Let them do their work. So maybe we submit our own.

Chair, may I? Okay.

Thanks, Cirilla. I've actually been pushing for the workshop the last like seven months, so it's okay. So I would really, I really think it's important that we have a lot of loose ends to tie and this is not really the venue for that. And on the last note, I am a resident of D1 and a D1 appointee. So I'd like to make a motion to recommend that somebody that's also been spearheading the conversation with trees here be considered for that appointment in my district to the tree committee.

I'm not sure what a motion would do here.

Sure.

What do you mean?

That if we're looking for recommendations from D1, from the committee, as the D1 representative, I'd like to throw my hat in the ring and let it be known that I'm interested in that appointment.

So when you say we are looking, so I read a message that said that District 1 is looking. All right, I'm going to read it one more time because I don't want to be misconstrued. Thank you. I want to add that I'm awaiting submissions from District 3 for the committee. As I was recently advised, they have no names to propose. Also, if your members have any District 1 residents, they can recommend that district to serve on the committee. I believe that would be helpful. End quote. It sounds like Melissa is recommending to the commissioners who are the appointees. I don't think it's a motion for us to be recommending people.

The note says, if your members, who are your members in this case? Could you define that?

Isn't that memo for commissioners? Are you reading a memo?

No, I'm reading an email. An email.

Address to the chairman or address to the commissioners?

It's addressed to me.

Okay, so the chair, the chairman's members for the committee, i.e. us.

Yeah, we, okay. Okay.

Just trying to.

But we're not making, we make motions, they go to the commission. Sure, sure, sure. And I think that these are appointments that are done by district.

I recommend that you reach out to that commissioner and put your name, propose yourself. That would be the best course of action.

Regardless, we do have a motion. Do we have any seconds?

Just to clarify the motion, was that to establish like a workshop date or?

No, I don't even know if that's of our purview to even ask.

No, it is not.

I don't know if it's up for us to say it. I think we should address the city attorney.

Yeah, that really isn't your power as a committee to nominate or ask for appointees to be appointed. So I would say this motion I don't think could pass. It's not within this board's powers. Okay. Sorry.

May I? Sure. Yeah, thanks, Gigi. So just to address the note, members' recommendations for the record, I've made a recommendation. I think your feedback is warranted. I'll go ahead and I'll speak to the D1 office. And thank you, Gigi, for your clarification.

Okay, so as far as doing a workshop, I do think the CRC could do some type of a role here. You know, we did have a lot of conversations and hear a lot of public feedback and, you know, sharing that public feedback with the tree committee, I think would be helpful. So besides, I mean, we could take an action now simply to request if Miriam could consolidate any public comments from our meetings where we had trees on the agenda and organize them and share them with the consensus center. I think that could be an easy first step right now. But maybe there were other actions that we would like to take in the future. So we don't have to make this decision now. Also, it is getting later. This was kind of just meant to be an update on the timeline because we had a pretty packed agenda tonight. Do you all think that we should Anyone think we should make a motion for request for sharing the public comments that we received with the Consensus Center and the Tree Committee?

I'm happy with that. I'll make a motion.

Yeah, could it also be requested that we receive that compilation of the public comments ourselves so that we can, like, if we want to make future recommendations and make a future living document of that, we can also do so? Is that possible? for Miriam, I guess.

It has to be prepared anyway, so I'm sure that we can receive copies of it, right?

OK, so just go ahead.

No, no, pretty ladies first. Well, I did, so I'm wanting to, I don't really think that needs to be a motion per se, because again, that's not like a resolution, it's not really a, you know, you're asking a staff member to just, I don't think it, you can make a motion to direct her, but it's not necessary. If she's, you know, willing to send it, there's no need to make a motion.

Cool, so.

It's basically a compilation of our minutes.

I agree, yeah.

Public comments within our minutes. They're in our minutes.

Okay, so I think we'll do that as a first step. All right, thank you. And then also, Miriam, if you could just circulate those to us per Sarahi's request so we could review them in our own preparation.

All right, so public comments that are within our minutes and also on the video.

From those meetings where we, I guess, had related to trees. I think it was probably from December through February. So I think it was around that time of end of 2024 and beginning of 2025.

So you're saying from 2024 to 2025?

Well, yeah, I think the conversation either began in November or December. But I don't know if we need to determine this right now. We could also, I mean, I think it's pretty straightforward, and if it's not, we can always review it after this meeting and figure it out.

Chair, to comment, if I may, on this to move on, and maybe I'll go back to this on future agenda. it would be helpful just to see the sequence, if we could, is gather all the data, have it ready for our workshop, including some of the information I'm bringing, and then I have a few guest speakers that I'd like to have, maybe after our workshop, so that all this stuff kind of comes together, and maybe, to Irila's point, that helps complete the package that then we give to the tree committee. Doesn't have to be, no.

All right, so if we're good on this item, we'll move on. So all right, we'll move to item eight, Office of Resilience and Sustainability Updates.

Hi, good evening. Sonya Brubaker, Chief Resilience Officer and Director, City of Miami. So I have a couple of updates for you guys. The first is we have a groundbreaking for one of our FPL evolution sites. So I've been talking about this for a very long time. And one of our sites has been cleared to to do the groundbreaking. And so we're gonna do that in mid May. Right now we have it scheduled for May 13th, but look out for some information. And this will be the first of about a dozen. So very excited. Next update is on our composting pilot project, so we are going to be piloting composting here in the city for three months, so if you already compost please bring it to one of our sites, because we are. using these metrics and evaluating then to see the possibility of expanding it in the future. And so we're going to have five sites. We're going to have a bin at Shenandoah Park. We're going to have one at Charles Hadley Park, one at Morningside Park, one at our Miami River Center, our administration building. And then one right here at City Hall. So if you didn't see it when you came in, it is a pink bin and it is over here to our right. So when you walk out, look to the right, there is a sign that has a QR code that tells you how to get in there because we'll have a little lock so that trash isn't inadvertently thrown in there. And then you'll be able to see all of the things that you can compost. And it will be food scraps and brown cardboard paper. So please, if you compost already, bring it in. And if you don't, then start collecting your food scraps and bring it. All right, next update is extreme heat season. Chief Musser talked about heat season starting tomorrow and going through the end of October. And so the city is doing a number of things for that. Chief talked about tracking 911 calls. Last year, there were 171 calls. And the majority of them, people had experienced heat exhaustion, And two people experienced heat stroke. So we're gonna put out some more information this year about how to stay safe in the heat during our events, but also during every day. One way to get that information out is Grant sends out notices through Alert Miami. So we're gonna encourage people to sign up at 888-777. Another thing that we're going to continue doing this year is operating our cooling centers. This year, it will be 11 of our city parks. And so we've added one. We're looking at senior programming. And so take a look at our website, miami.gov backslash cooling centers, and you'll be able to see the list. And so you'll hear more kind of communication over heat season about that. All right, and lastly, we have our fertilizer prohibition period coming up. So that starts May 15th. We've been letting people know that if you wish to use fertilizer when you're planting your gardens or your trees that you received at your free tree giveaway in April, you can do that now, but you cannot do that starting May 15th through October 31st. And that's because of the rainy season. And it will run off into the bay, and there could be fish kills and other pollution in the bay that Arella could tell us horror stories about. That's it for me.

For the first item, the FPL evolution groundbreaking, what's the location of that one?

So this one is going to be Gibson Park. It's going to be right beside the pool. It's going to be curbside, which is the first time that we are doing that in the city. We have some in our garages.

And are all 12 in parks?

Most of them are in parks, yes. We will have some in Regatta Park, which is right over here. that is an MPA lot. Most of them are not MPA lots, but we are looking into lot 19.

Because in parks, some parks don't have pay by phone. They're just open parking is what you're referring to. That's correct, yeah. It's not an MPA lot. That's correct.

Yes, they will be in six parks, and then one that has an MPA lot, one park that has an MPA lot, and the other a strict MPA lot.

Okay, thank you so much. All right, if no other comments, we'll move on to the next item, which is item nine, open discussion, other items for budget recommendations. So this was something we discussed at our last meeting if it was something that we wanted to do again this year. And kind of took today as just like an introduction for us to try to discuss some idea, submit things, and then hopefully we would have public comment. We didn't yet today, but that's OK. that could have been ideas from the general public, but we can also make recommendations and hear public feedback.

Chair, if I may, I'm going to excuse myself for this conversation.

Thank you. As the city employee, understood. So we did receive budget recommendations from Allison, so I really appreciate that. And We also have the upcoming workshop on May 6th in a few days where hopefully we can dive a little bit deeper. Hopefully more people can contribute to the suggestions. We'll see how it develops. And did you want to give an overview of what you recommended and why? Maybe not a full deep dive, but just so everyone can kind of understand your framing?

Yeah, definitely. So I took the suggestions that Aaron gave to kind of look at documentation and plans that the city already has in place and kind of look to see what we haven't done yet, what we still need to do, and that's where I kind of got the ideas that I had. I did as much research as I could, but I'm sure the breadth of knowledge that we have on this team, you all might understand some of this more than I do and also have better insight into where we stand on some of these things. So I'm not 100% sure the status as I wrote these, but I made assumptions based on what was publicly available. So the first item is a stormwater design standard manual, which is indicated in the 2021 stormwater management plan. And to my understanding, this hasn't yet been completed. But I think it would be really great if it was. Again, I included, based on the documentation from last year, some comparable programs and then the two supporting policies that I have, which is the Stormwater Master Plan and then the Miami Forever Climate Ready goals. The second is also based on the Stormwater Master Plan. And essentially, in the plan, it's indicated that the NOAA Atlas 14 model data will be used for all stormwater master plans without any indication that once additional science-based data becomes available, that it would be utilized. So it's just a suggestion to do that, which I imagine will increase the budget of And that was also based off of the resolution that we, as a committee, provided to the commission and was adopted by the commission. I wasn't on the board at this time, but the storm resolution. is the municipal fleet electrification. This one was in the Miami Forever Carbon Neutral Plan, and I think it's kind of low-hanging fruit, and I wasn't able to understand the status of fleet electrification, so that's kind of where I came up with that idea. But I think I personally need to do a little bit more research on that, on where the city of Miami's status stands. And then the third or the fourth rather again has to do with the stormwater master plan and it's based on Another idea that was mentioned and I'm not a hundred percent sure that it has been achieved yet It's called a conceptual environmental resource permit and from my understanding this is like a plan level permit that allows the permitting effort for each individual plan, like a master, this is a master plan level permit that allows the permits for all the individual projects to be much more streamlined. And from my understanding, the city of Miami has not gotten that permit yet. So those are the four items that I suggested.

Mr. Chair, unfortunately, I will not be able to attend the workshop, so I just wanted to kind of give some...

I know it's at the same time as the chamber event.

The chamber event, yeah.

Would you like to attend the budget workshop?

No, I don't want you guys to change it on my behalf. I mean, I'm more than happy to give my two cents here. I love these. Thank you for doing that research. The only... I have one question to start with, and then I'll get into these. FROM ALL THE RECOMMENDATIONS, BUDGET RECOMMENDATIONS THAT WE PROVIDED THE COMMISSION LAST BUDGET CYCLE, HOW MANY HAVE BEEN ADOPTED? DO WE KNOW? DO WE HAVE AN IDEA? I HAVE THE SAME QUESTION.

YEAH. WE DID SEVEN RECOMMENDATIONS LAST YEAR THAT MIRIAM CIRCULATED. THE FIRST ONE WAS A COMPOST PILOT PROGRAM.

SO THUMBS UP THERE.

THANK YOU, MAYOR CAVA. Item two was a zero waste plan consultant. Last year, we had a number of meetings related to the incinerator, recycling, waste in general. We thought that that could be kind of helpful to the city in how we just handle things through the county. Three was electric leaf blower program. We had done something on electric leaf blowers previously suggesting a ban that wasn't well received. So we suggested maybe some dollars to help offset either partial or full cost for a portion to residents and a portion to commercial businesses. Item four was an urban forester position. Again, because we had a lot of conversations about trees last year and that was something that was suggested to us. Item five was a cost estimator for green versus gray infrastructure. to help kind of understand some of the projects that are ongoing and actually actively do comparisons. So when questions like what Silvio asked earlier of what was the cost of that program and maybe what's the benefit, we could have those answers more readily available for infrastructure. Item six was an inland street pilot project for the Southwest Streetscape Master Plan. And item seven was land acquisition for stormwater conversions. So the one that was implemented so far is the compost pilot program.

Yeah, on the cost estimating, I believe, and this we can ask staff, I believe we have consultants that can be used already, existing consultants that are contracted by the city that could probably be used to do that exercise rather than creating a position.

I don't know if our recommendation specifically said a position or it just said budget. But yeah, I think kind of being broad here.

Maybe we need to be a little bit more specific sometimes.

Okay.

But that's just my recommendation.

Also, we just went past eight. I think we need a motion if we're going to continue. Do I have a motion?

Motion.

And a second?

Second.

Second from Allison. All in favor?

Aye.

Any abstain or oppose?

I'm actually, I do have a question regarding Board Member Allison's stormwater design standards manual. Okay. Are you saying that's gonna have a budget impact?

Yeah, I think to hire a consultant to do the plan would be the cost.

Understood, okay. That should be, because I'm not realizing where the budget ask is.

Yes, I didn't include that.

No, no, this is great. I'm sorry, I'm not trying, but just to help for the workshop coming on May 6th, you may want to say that proposing, hiring a consultant, that's the budget impact. Because here it just says do a manual, which arguably, I don't know the expertise level for that, but maybe an internal city employee could do that and not have a budget impact. So you can maybe work that out or think about it and how you can maybe either transition it from a budget ask to just maybe a recommendation instead of a city policy.

That makes sense.

Just a thought.

Yeah, I was gonna go there, but thanks. Because it was recommended in the stormwater master plan update. We may want to, to your point, find out if either it could be done administratively or using one of the consultants that could update or can make recommendations to this. And also, I would say probably include the new DEP standards and the counties.

Yeah. Right? Yeah. I think just from working in the industry, it's a heavier lift than being done internally. Yeah. We should definitely look into that.

And so, yeah, it would probably have a budget impact because either you do as a consultant or a staffer, it's still going to have a budget impact. NOAA Atlas will probably require an update. I'm thinking of the entire master plan, so we've got to think about that one a little bit more. It would be good to maybe ask staff. I don't know if that's Public Works or OCI, one of the two, if that would be super impactful. Basically using an entirely new model.

New prediction model. You're kind of like re-quantifying predictions.

That's definitely going to be a budget impact. And then, yeah.

Sorry, one more time. You said, what was your recommendation for the item two?

For item two, I would say let's inquire within staff first. Before we blanketly just throw out recommendations, budget recommendations, it might be a big lift. It sounds like, oh, it's updating a model, but updating a model may require a huge lift.

I was thinking about it at the project level as well, and there might be a way to prioritize locations to say that once new data becomes available, these locations, as we work through the stormwater master plan, should be prioritized to be remodeled to ensure that they have the best.

I'm not an engineer expert, so it could simply be a question that could be asked of a consultant. The consultant said even did the master plan? Right. What would that require? Or it could be being done and we just don't know it per project, right?

Yeah, that, like, was not clear in the stormwater master plan. Like, it didn't, like, it said that they were using a specific data set, and there was no indication that they would change that if new data became available. Right.

And electrification, I mean... That's fine. I don't have an issue with that one.

I thought I heard that there was challenges with the electric fleet.

Well, there are already grant challenges. We all know that, right? At the federal level, they've all been... So in order for us to make this recommendation, we have to figure out if it's already budgeted and if there's already a plan in place where the city is willing to pick up the tab.

I think what's going on right now is there are conversations about the trolley master plan, which I think is what's operated by the city, whereas the buses are operated by county. So maybe look into... currently what's going on with the trolley master plan and how this may relate. Maybe in the trolley master plan there's discussions on the fleet or the age of the fleet, things like that. I don't really know.

And then the last one, this sounds like another question we should ask staff to confirm because might be done, and if it hasn't been done, we need to really find out how long that, it doesn't seem to me like it would be a huge lift.

Right, I was on the South Florida Water Management District's website, which under comparable programs, oh, that doesn't make any sense, but the image that's there are all of the approved conceptual ERP Permits that have been approved. So my inkling is that it hasn't been because I don't see it listed.

They may have been per project. What you're asking for is a blanket.

Right, right. Permit, right? Right. And I think that it is. based on what was indicated in the stormwater master plan, it was intentionally supposed to be blanket, from my understanding.

So in this case, this is probably costing us more money. Right? If it's per project, if we're getting an ERP for each project.

Right, exactly.

So this one's about efficiency, and then the first one was about updating to the latest standards to be the most prepared.

Right.

I think framing both of those things, like how we did it last year, and I can help with that to make sure we're kind of, like the rationale for each request is, because... To be honest, this kind of goes over my head a little bit. Yeah. So I'm really happy you guys are, you know, helping kind of elaborate.

Yeah. And, you know, wherever we can.

I can help with the framing maybe.

Wherever we can help with efficiency even better. Right. Because as you all know what's happening at the state level, we may be dealing with a property tax issue.

I think exactly. More than likely.

So how that impacts our budget moving forward. Right. At all levels. Right.

So addressing efficiency, like this is great because you're showing a way of saving money.

But your recommendation doesn't have to be give me more money. It could be here's how you can save money.

Yeah, I love this. I think this is, you know, exactly advisory capacity. Really good.

That's all I have.

Hopefully we can continue this conversation on our workshop. If you have any other insights, please submit them so we can discuss them. Are you all still able to make the workshop? Are you able to make the workshop? Yes? Are you able to make it? No? Okay. I'll be making it. Are you going to make the budget workshop?

Yeah, I think maybe through the phone.

A little closer.

I'll probably dial in for that. Yeah, I have it on my agenda. Who else is going to be there? You're confirmed? This was really great, by the way.

Allison confirmed and I confirmed. Okay. It's Rahi cannot make it and I'm not sure for everyone else. Okay.

That's why I wanted to provide this feedback.

So as of now, if it's just two,

And I'm dialing in.

Yeah, which is, I mean, okay, but it's not exactly the purpose of the workshop.

I'm sorry, did you say you're dialing in?

Yeah.

No, no Zoom in the workshop?

Okay. But, okay, so maybe we need to check in on Wayne and Jenny Lee and Avra and see what their availability is. And if it doesn't work, then we should find another date. Also, we only had, I do really appreciate your submittal, and also Allison did submit ideas when we had our last workshop, so really appreciate the active participation, and that's really what it takes to make this happen. So maybe if we, depending on their availability, it may make sense to even push it a couple weeks, allow us to kind of wrap our head around this, because we do have time. I think we want to vote on this on the July meeting. So we still have the June meeting and the July meeting, so We have a good bit of time. I just want to kind of get ahead of it this year so we're not rushing. So this is kind of like an intro. So really appreciate that we got the conversation started.

Great.

All right. So that's the plan. We'll look for their availability and consider another date later.

Public comment.

Yeah. Well, I'm going to go to future agenda topics. because I need to address that formally. So again, the budget workshop, we'll do that. And then also future agenda topics. I have a, I did receive an email with a list, which was quite extensive. And also you said, including this, it seemed like maybe you had more, you know, maybe you find the priority ones and a little more information. It was just like a website link. I don't know what the purpose was or who the presenter is or where it ties into our work so you know from those maybe try to like scale back refocus and like let's you know it takes a lot of work to get something done and then to get it passed so maybe just kind of focus on what you think is the most impactful that you want to focus on and then let's add it to the agenda um for june um let me find the notes we do have a couple uh city presentations in june tentatively, too, as well as I had already made a request for Robert Colon from the county to present on what the county is currently doing with sponge parks. Kind of really trying to, again, drill into that topic. And also Tom Klein from University of Miami to talk about their work upcoming on sponge parks. So that was kind of tentatively for the June meeting. And then... The park presentation that you requested, is that, did they tentatively confirm? Did they confirm for June and or July?

Yeah, they're available for June, they are available. But we're tentative for July, depending on, I know we have a lot of things going on. I just wanted, I'm trying to, that's gonna be kind of at the top, so I'm trying to get that.

Yeah, and I know it's relevant to our tree conversations, and I looked at that, and it looked really well-developed, so I appreciate you taking the time to find something that really applies to what we're doing.

Mm-hmm.

Um, it seems like that's going to need a good amount of time, especially given the amount of topics that she seems to have expertise in. So, you know, in that regard, our meetings are two hours and we have a lot of topics that we want to discuss. We, we have the option per our bylaws to extend meetings up to an hour, but when I'm planning meetings and you're requesting a lot of meetings and we have things being requested also from the city, um, you know, we have to decide, are we going to make presentations shorter? Are we going to tackle less items? or should we plan for longer meetings? Because we do have the option to occasionally plan meetings to go longer, and we could amend the bylaws to allow that.

I think something we can potentially do is maybe cap the number of presentations that we have per meeting, maybe keeping it to two just in case, instead of forcing them to shorten them, because I think it's great context. But yeah, keeping it to two, and then we can open to the other discussion items.

Yeah, I agree, and I think that we need to start kind of honing in on a theme, perhaps, so that we can craft or develop policy, which is really what we're here to do, to make recommendations to the commission on policy. I mean, I can watch webinars all day if I wanted to. I don't need to do that. I want to be able to be active here as a member, and I think we all do. But listening to presentations for the sake of presentations is just education. That's not what we're here to do. We're here to advise. And so let's keep that in mind. I love the concept of these sponge parks and if that's going to be our theme and we're going to start looking at crafting some policy around that to make a recommendation to the commission, then great. But let's just kind of keep within the purview of what we're supposed to be doing here and then moving it towards action.

yeah that makes sense it does but i mean i'm kind of yeah not totally following i mean i'm i'm we're moving toward action and uh last year we passed something on sponge parks i think it's incredibly important um and anytime we're going to pass legislation i think we should see a presentation on it so like everyone can i'm not suggesting that we're doing anything wrong i'm just saying let's stay focused yeah so like last meeting we kind of had a An agenda item of like what's our what's our focus this year, so I you know I kind of pose the question to the group and i'm. I would like to hear, I think this bunch parks are incredibly important so i'm bringing legislation next month to support sponge bars. And the reason being is that it's actually already in our code, so I highlighted that in the agenda in the budget and last year it's already in the stormwater master plan and in the parks master plan, I think we kind of just need to like. double tap the focus of the commission, like, hey, everybody, these are the things. And part of the reason for the presentations is that we can point to them and include a link, and hopefully the commissioners and their staff can watch what we just saw. So that it's more than, so it's also like showing that We saw something. We showed the general public. They have the opportunity to comment. So we're going to keep having presentations. But if you have specific focus areas, we need to plan them for the year because it goes pretty quick.

If I may on the point, that was loud, sorry. If I may on the point of the presentations, I would like to keep the educational aspect of it still. There is members of the public here listening online. Each of us have our own focus points that other members of the board should also listen to. So I would like to keep educational presentations every once in a while, but definitely agree on keeping a theme. I think the sweatshirts are a great idea. And I think it's also important to remain adaptable when updates to the city code, for example, happen and have presentations on those too. But yeah.

And I'll chime in here. I think you're a wealth of knowledge, you know, and just being able to, like, listen to the exchange right now with you and Allison was really insightful. And I think that's why that the board has kind of been engineered the way it has. Like, everybody has a bit of a specialization. I do like what Aaron is doing and the belief of, first, I've learned a lot from this, so I can be more informed to make decisions. But a lot of it, hopefully, is I'm learning outside. The pattern I like, Erin, that you're doing of here's our recommendation, here's a presentation that gives us context to why we're recommending this, I think is very powerful. I've tried to give recommendations out of that necessarily context, but folks like Grant, for example, Chief Grant and myself are visual. So that combination works. Chair, I know it's a tough balance, but you have our trust on, and I think you've been doing a pretty good job to figure out what that balance looks like.

So what I'm planning on is for next month, I wanted the budget recommendation, I'm going to propose that it includes the sponge parks, but also as a standalone memo or resolution, I think we need to kind of just like remind our commissioners of this and hopefully you all support that. And the University of Miami is also working on it at the county. And we have great potential partners in our universities here. So when I heard of that, I thought we should also recommend the University of Miami collaborate with the city to evaluate which is kind of like almost you know free expertise and knowledge the cost there is us asking the commission to direct the manager to direct staff to have some manpower available you know for crits maybe with the students the midterms or maybe an intro and then a midterm and a final like is typically how those kind of design studios work but I think that kind of tapping into UM could be awesome when they're already gonna do it for the county. Maybe some of the students get divided out and some of them do county sites and some of them do city sites. So the purpose of today's presentation was both for the budget and for this meeting next month. I don't know how to kind of factor all of this into next month's meeting, so I'm gonna have to figure out which ones to.

That's why you're the chair.

To do it, but also the parks presentation, which is again why I suggested There may be times when if we have numerous priorities, I mean, how quickly do we want to act? If we want to just spread it out, we could push some to July and some to September, but I'm proposing that sometimes we do longer meetings. I think that...

I think we'll need to.

Like, for instance, I think that our June meeting, we should plan it right now to be up to three hours. Like, we already are doing it here, and if you allow me to do that on select meetings, and you allow me to plan it, then I can include everyone's recommendations, and I think we'll be more effective this year. Obviously, I need to be, you know, consider everyone's time and staff time, but there are a lot of impacts, and our committee is kind of tasked with trying to help with those.

As long as it's not every meeting, because again, it's staff time, and we need to be considerate of that. They planned for two hours, and now we just extended it for another.

So how do you all feel about three hours for June 1st?

I think we I think a quarterly one right so we say hey like maybe once a quarter we know we have to give a push so we can plan and prepare for that even mentally I definitely think June is important right regardless of the tree committee information I want to get this I've been working on this for two years I want to get it out and maybe I'm part of the tree committee maybe not but if it's out I'm good right like I just this has been now that being said if tree committee is planning to meet in July I And we have this New York City presentation happen, and we don't have a workshop before. Maybe it's not synced enough, Chair, to be able to have the presentation, plus Canopy and Leaf, for example, which I'd like to workshop. So that, to your point, there's a context, there's a presentation, and then you can understand where the recommendations are coming from.

You want New York in June, and then you'll bring other things when they're ready, potentially in July, is what you said? Sorry, because I zoned out for a second.

It's okay. To repeat that thought, I want to dovetail the presentation from New York City Parks with one of these workshops on... I don't know what dovetail means. Dovetail means... Is it the same meeting? Yeah, to make sure that they happen around the same time. So this is happening and this is happening, and if July is around the corner, then this and this kind of end up both falling together in July. So I want to... All right.

Okay, cool. So we'll plan for that. And then your other recommendation for the presentation on emergency preparedness, I forwarded to Miriam, and she shared it with the chief, and you've had a chance to see that?

I saw it. I love it. My recommendation would be to keep it out of the committee and let me absorb it within emergency management and within the EOC. Okay. I'm going to reach out and have them come do a presentation for us and see how we can incorporate that with an emergency management.

Excellent.

So thank you for bringing that.

Excellent. Thanks so much. Any other comments on future agendas?

If we could potentially just include it as a discussion topic, discussing maybe a tree workshop happening eventually, if anything, doesn't have to be actionable, but just to have it to discuss it as a board.

Chair, if I may, to address that point, and I'd love your opinion on this. Do you guys think that it would be more helpful to you to have the City of Miami Parks present in June? And then we workshop some of the proposals that I have of how I see those things being relevant as an example for us. Or do you think it's better for us to workshop first, maybe this month or after? I'm trying to think of whether we ask them to present in June or July, basically. Right now, they're ready for June.

I think they present first, and then we can have a workshop after with what we learned.

Whatever you think is best, I just want to make sure that you see the sequence here.

So again, this is trees? Yeah. City attorney, we are about to have a tree committee established, right?

It is established already.

It's already established?

Correct.

They'll be meeting? They'll be meeting soon? Yes. Okay.

They should be. I mean, I don't know if they.

So I just want to be clear as to should we be workshopping tree committee stuff or should it just go to the tree committee?

That's a policy decision. It is within your purview. Chapter 17.

Make recommendations to other committees.

Well, it wouldn't be to that committee, it would be to the city commission to consider the recommendations in conjunction with whatever the tree committee sets up. So again, it's a policy decision whether you want to work in addition to that tree committee or not, but it is within your purview.

I thought we previously discussed things could go between committees, knowledge could be shared.

Yeah, if it's transmitting information, but what your power is, you would be making the recommendation to the city commission, because that is, you make recommendations to the city commission, not to other committees.

Question on the tree committee, for my knowledge. Do they make recommendations like we do to the commission?

Well, this was a special ad hoc committee formed directly from the city commission, so I do think that should be heeded. I mean, that is a tree committee formed by the city commission itself, so... Perhaps you may not want to step on a committee that was formed directly for one issue by the City Commission This is what I mean. It's up to you.

This is where I'm getting at so You know I know that things have come before this committee granted. I get it. We should I craft a recommendation perhaps to provide like we just did. Provide all the minutes, all the information to that committee for their knowledge and they can make the recommendations to the commission. We're gonna be duplicating efforts in it. I just don't find it useful. I understand that you have been working on this for a long time and I'm happy to hear presentations, but I'm just saying that we're going to step on other people's, you know, responsibilities.

Through the chair?

So, I mean, your points are, we've had, I don't even know how many meetings where we've discussed this, because Sylvia has requested this a number of times, and we have had your meeting, you've presented your things, we had a workshop on it, and I mean, you have an opinion, he has an opinion. I don't know what to do.

I'm just trying to make a point. I have no objection to hearing presentations from New York City or City of Miami or whoever on trees. My point is that whatever, it makes no sense for us to make recommendations on tree when there's a tree committee that's supposed to make recommendations to commission on trees.

One of the things we discussed was seeing what they came up with and then reviewing it and responding to it. We discussed that at a previous meeting. I'm okay with that.

I'm okay with that. I'm okay with the tree committee making recommendations and we stamp it. And we say, yeah, we're in agreement.

What if a path forward is if we can get a member of this committee on the tree committee, align forces.

Avra's on the committee.

She's on the committee already. So perfect. Then we align forces and we come as a united front. It comes from the CRC and the tree committee that we're both advocating for this. And that's how we move forward.

I like it.

I agree, Chair, if I may. I think your point's well taken. And I just been I want to these next 45 or 50, 60 days until whenever finally the date was set. there was no clear date, so I was like, there's no point in me waiting four years of research that I've done to come to these conclusions and get these recommendations. I wanna get them out, so then I don't have to talk about it after. The tree committee then will take their information, whether I'm on it or not, and then they'll come back and then we'll finalize that. So to your point, Hopefully, this is one of the last kind of pushes we have just to take all that institutional wisdom and work. So ideally, I don't have to say, hey, I want to be on that committee. I don't want to put any more free time into this project. I want to get it out the door. So that's my sentiment, and I agree with you. Once that committee is set up, my goal is, which is predicted to be in July, Our pathway with what we're recommending between the recommendations and the presentation should then automatically get into that July, and hopefully then we push all, we figure out our modus operandi handling trees from there.

So can we, sorry, I know you've been trying to speak. Can we put a placeholder on our agenda, just like we have the updates from the Office of Resilience and Sustainability, from AVRA, to give us updates on what's going on within the TREE Committee, so that we can have regular updates in our meetings and see what we need to do to align forces and move forward in that aspect? I want to be cognizant of the time and effort that we put in here as a committee, but now that there's this established committee, I just want to make sure that we're getting all the information that we need.

Yeah, once that is formed and they're happening and we're made aware of it, we'll add it to the agenda, I think, at that point in time.

Okay. I think that was a great idea, actually. I was going to suggest that after. I think how I saw the workshop was just setting up the tree committee for success. I know each of the members are very, very adept that their fields are ready. It's just to pass on the information that we've been working on for the past years as well. So again, the timing of the workshop, if we have one can be decided on another meeting, I want to be conscious of our time as well. But yeah, trees are under climate resiliency too. So it's very important that we prioritize that as much as possible, but recognize that we now have additional members of the team, you know.

All right.

Excuse me. Gigi, this question is for you. So the recommendations that are made from the CRC, that goes to the commission?

Correct. Okay. Like resolutions that have been passed, legislation that they actually adopt? Like a resolution recommending something? Like Flora was, I believe, one of the...

Okay. So, and then any recommendations that the CRC makes to the tree committee that can go to them?

Well, that's the thing. Any recommendations from here would need to go to city commission, which I do state. essentially you would be combating whatever the tree committee is going to be doing um because you only make recommendations to the city commission you don't make recommendations to the other committee so it is if you're not wanting to make formal recommendations you know you could have this back and forth with avra when she is here you can you have your input at at that time but to take actual legislative action you would be going to city commission which you know again would be you're doing it in addition to the tree committee set up by the city commission so then at that point um i mean if there's knowledge sharing to be done any any member here can share correct with that committee like yeah these are public meetings as well so you can come and bring your information so like for instance sylvia if you wanted to share with them the

million trees from New York, you could share that with the consensus center and share that with the tree committee and make a public comment. I don't really know what the process will be. And make them aware that there's programs. And hopefully they learn about it and read about it. And we can attend those meetings. I plan to attend them if they're open to see what they talk about. And then if we want to suggest things in addition to what they do, we can always do it at that time. So I mean given all of this. Back to the question at hand of should we continue with like a long presentation from the New York City parks director on their on things that they did at our next meeting or the following meeting.

I think it could be helpful to have it for the June meeting. I think there's going to be probably other aspects in that presentation that we can use for our work too. Yeah, those are my thoughts on that.

Yeah, because even though this committee is going to be set up for a six-month period or whatever it is, like, we're going to see things like the Southwest Streetscape Master Plan and, like, park things that come before us and, you know, part of... So there could be knowledge from that, but... All right, so I don't want to belabor this anymore. Let's, if there's anything else to add about future agendas, well, let's move to, let's move to public comment. Anyone from the public? Welcome. Thanks for joining us and staying past the eight.

No problem. Thank you guys. My name is Kyle Lockridge. I am a District 2 resident based here in Coconut Grove at 3724 Loquat Avenue. I'm just a concerned citizen. I'm not trained in this space and I know a lot of people here. Well, actually, first of all, I want to thank you guys for your attention and your time in these resiliency efforts. I think it's incredibly important and something that I've not really been privy to in the past. I found the presentations very interesting and I will plan to attend more of these meetings going forward. But despite this being a point that I think many of you guys are feeling maybe done talking about tonight, I'm here to talk about the trees. I think that they're incredibly important. I think that your guys' attention to this is of the utmost important, again, as just a regular citizen that is not trained in this space. We love these trees. We talk about the heat index, you know, for the FIFA event, flooding, heat, storms, the resiliency of our city depends on these large trees. And I live in a community where my neighbor's houses have been torn down in the last few years, clear cut the entire lots with very large old trees. And then when they finish, they just plant a couple of palm trees and some bushes and it's sad to see. So, you know, that, A lot of times the developers here are just, they appreciate that there will be a fine paid for cutting down a 200-year-old oak tree. And if it costs them a couple thousand dollars and they're making a couple million dollars of profit on a house, they don't care. So I guess the point of what I'm trying to say is that I do think that this subject is of the utmost importance. And the current plan to streamline the process, I think that anyone... realizes that the current process does not work. But streamlining it by just eliminating aspects of it and allowing people to kind of just proceed as they will has already been demonstrated to not work. It results in increases in flooding, higher heat index, and a number of things that, again, I'm not trained to speak on. Now, the alternatives, such as the flora proposal, I think make a lot of sense. In the first presentation from think it was architectonic a geo where they used a concept like that with the logical base of building up instead of out and therefore creating more green space made a lot of sense to me and I think it probably would to a lot of people who would be be made aware of it so you know I just see rather than taking the process and trying to make it short and simple so that developers can run amok and do whatever they want to do in their best interest I I know that sounds very critical of developers. I'm sure there's a lot of great people that are developers. I'm not one and I don't know any.

Your two minutes have expired.

Okay. I think it's very important that we think through this and do it in an intelligent manner. Thank you. Thank you, Kyle.

Albert Gomez, District 2 resident. I'm a developer. So I want everyone please to go home and read the mission of this board. Natural systems is right there in the third line. Okay, so trees are part of that, part of the watershed too, very important for Biscayne Bay, but it's not in Biscayne Bay. So trees will remain integral component and subject matter in this board, or I'm going to blows with someone. Literally. And what I would say is, city attorney, that was a gross mischaracterization. I just want to address it because frankly, if they submit recommendations to city commission and as their role, as sitting board members of the climate resilience committee they are more than willing to cut are able to go to the tree committee meetings in their role as crc members and share their recommendations to commission On behalf of the board.

I think the only thing gross is your mischaracterization. I told them they can go as members of the public because it is a public meeting. You said it was combative. Oh, I'm sorry. I thought you were a developer. Are you a lawyer?

You said it was combative. Are you a lawyer? You said it was combative.

Anyway, go ahead.

You said it was combative. You want to be defensive about it, that's fine. You made a statement that it was combative for them to share knowledge of recommendations they've made to the city commission. I just want to be very clear that that's not the case and that it isn't combative because there's no one else here to combat that statement and the public needs to hear that. So I'm here to combat that statement because it is not combative for them to share knowledge of their recommendations to the city commission. And I think it's their right to do so.

There are powers within the city code. There's a difference between a committee power and their individual. Thank you.

Okay. Just wanted to make that point. And then the final point I wanted to make was that as we came, I come to the meetings because it means something. I was in the sea level rise committee. I was there when it was converted to the CRC. I'm here and wanting to make sure that this committee stays relevant and doesn't get thrown to the corner. And realistically, there was no other committee now. It's being formed. It's been being formed for a while. We've sent out messages to the city manager, to the mayor, to request that FSU reach out to us. We have over 350 people that are actively interested in getting engaged on the community engagement, supposed meetings that are going to happen, so that they can share data from researchers, compiled information that they have. No one has responded back to them on any timelines whatsoever. So this is good that they responded to you and gave you some information on this, but the public that has actively reached out for that critical information has not gotten any. Zero. Zero responses. So that is a real big problem. Now, while that's happened, I came here to request that the city offer you guys information to give you knowledge on tree removal permits, and total trees cut. A motion was passed for that two meetings ago that it was supposed to come to you by the April timeframe. The I-tree summary that they gave you had a lot of assumptions in it and it didn't have any information on the tree removal permits. Is that ever going to be done? I really want that information to go out into the public so that we can be informed and communicate to the tree committee that information.

Thank you. Sorry, I don't know why I was so loud. We made that request. We received a PDF, and it may not have received all the requested information, but it's, you know, we made a request, and that's our abilities. So, you know, hopefully the tree committee has ability. Maybe the data is being created right now, or hopefully the tree committee can continue to showcase the data, and it can make data-informed decisions.

Chairman, I'd like to just note that we made a motion with Barbara Bisno to have the all tree permit data from its inception of the program, tree removals and permits as well as any other tree permits and information is denied and approved to be shared with us. I think that's what Albert is commenting on.

Yeah, I think that's what he just commented on, which is also what I

just acknowledged and we did receive a pdf that was shared uh from miriam uh to all of us so that was that was the response to the request it doesn't have any tree permit removal information it doesn't have any tree either denied or approved it's just it's a report from itree that isn't really even a great report by the way i'm certified and trained on itree That doesn't give me what we need. So I'd like to reiterate the request that was passed by our committee for that information and also the information I requested on the public benefits from the marinas, particularly Virginia Key and Miami Yacht Club. Again, no big deal that things take their time. I just want everyone to know just because we don't get what we're asking doesn't mean we forget. I'm not going home and forgetting. The community's not going home and forgetting, right? So, yeah, so that's all. I still want that information. I think we requested it, and I want to reiterate that the information we received is not what we requested.

So, City Attorney, we made a request, and we received information that may or may not have fully responded to the request.

Well, the city, you know... This is almost like a public records request. The city is not required to make documents, only provide what they have. If the system isn't catching it how it is, or isn't catching it in the manner you all wish, that information just wouldn't be provided that way. So am I trying to understand that you did get some, but you didn't get all of it?

None of it. We got an ITRE dashboard or like an ITRE report, but no permit information that we requested.

You know, it may be just because of how the records are kept. Like, you would have to go and pull every property that, you know, you'd have to do that kind of location. I don't know how the city maintains its records for tree permits. But perhaps maybe the city, you know, it's building department. The building department may have some other type of report. It's it's possible to do a follow up and ask if there's other type of information that's easily transmittable and received, but it may not be in this report form. And so if it doesn't exist, you know, the city's not going to create it.

I got a quick I want to address the gentleman's concerns there. I don't think anybody from this committee was dismissing trees. I think we were just trying to unify our efforts so that we don't have conflicting information going to the commissioners from two different committees. That's why we're trying to get Avra to give us monthly updates on the agenda and get all these things in the committees for a finite number of months. So once it's over, then it becomes our responsibility again. That's why I think it's important that we stay involved like we said we were going to do.

Actually, I do have a question for you, the city attorney. If we ask, we do follow up question, we inquire if they have this information available. If they don't have this, I guess, a format that's like readable or shareable, can we make a recommendation for them to have that?

I was actually going to say, right, if the record keeping isn't what you would like it to be, you could make that recommendation either through budget and or a standalone city policy to change its record keeping, to start tracking that information in a form that's easily digestible in one area.

Thank you. Then maybe what we can do, if we do push the budget workshop a little bit further, just so more members can attend to, maybe they'll respond after about the inquiry and then maybe that could be a budget discussion on that. I think that could be helpful.

One of the things that was in the potential presentation from the NYC Parks Department was a thing that there's a map of all of New York where you can zoom in and see every type of tree. It's pretty cool. And there's definitely different levels of data collection and visualizations out there. So that looks like that's a perfect example of a budget recommendation item as a means of of a next step on this topic. So why don't we kind of follow up on that.

Chair, I think Sarahi's point is a quite good one, and maybe we change the approach here to make it easy. I don't want to burden our city. We have groups like Code Miami, civic tech orgs, they'll be willing to compile, analyze, support the city in cleaning data, improving data. It's not the first or the last city that we do that. In fact, that's part of what they do. The other thing is that maybe could be helpful, Sarahi, based on your thoughts, is we can open up the API endpoint from the city database so that API endpoint is just publicly accessible, right? And then boom, you know, Code Miami or whomever else can make the dashboard and provide the information and support city staff so they're not creating things they don't need to as long as they're able to just open up that technical endpoint. So maybe one of the recommendations is how do we support, and again, so Irela, your point, I know we're long on time so I'm going to be short-winded on this, My theme for this year is nature-based solutions for disaster risk reduction and transparency and accountability. So you'll see that thread in some of this, and I think this aligns with very much that. Maybe with your recommendation, I could pass up a recommendation chair in whatever form you think is best to work with the city and meet them where they're at. you know, in whatever capacity. The first ask is, say, could you open up the endpoint? And Senecan is, if they need some technical assistance, we could help provide that for free. Thanks so much.

All right. Another public comment? Welcome.

Hi everyone, my name's Amara Bella and I want to celebrate the fact that we're composting. That's really cool. I did my undergrad at the University of Edinburgh and Edinburgh, they have a really good composting system. So my friend and I were just talking about how scanning barcodes can be quite difficult. Is there any way that you could add like different signage to the composting so that people who can't scan a barcode can learn, because it's just an extra step that humans don't usually like to take, especially if you're going out of your way already to compost. I don't know if it's something that can be done, but you could even test between different bins in different areas, have one with barcode, one with both, see if it makes a difference, but no.

Yeah, thank you for that feedback. This is a pilot program that we're doing for three months. But we are taking all of the feedback that's received and either if it's implementable within this time frame implementing it or implementing it for the future. So there are two emails that I suggest that you submit feedback to. One is the city email, and one is the vendor, the Compass for Life. And so I think that to have it on record would be helpful. Okay, thank you.

Thanks so much. Appreciate it. Mary, are there any public comments on mine? No. All right. Well, thank you all for the input this evening and to our presenters for the great presentations and all of you for showing up. Thanks so much. And maybe see you for the workshop on the 6th, but it may be postponed. So with that, we'll adjourn. Good evening. Move to adjourn. Thank you.

Move to adjourn.

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