Council Sustainability Committee - Regular Meeting

Shown on the screen. When the the chair announces the item on which you wish to speak, click on the raise hand feature in Zoom or star nine on your phone. When the chair calls your name to provide public comment, if you're participating via phone, please press star six to unmute yourself. For in person attendees, please fill out a speaker card, which you can find on the sign in table to the left of the door. Now item number one is complete, and we will move on to item number two, wall call. Miss Lee, can you take roll?

Chair Hicks? Here. Member Showalter? Here.

So we have a quorum, and I've heard that member Clark will arrive momentarily. We're now to item number three, approving the minutes. This would be the CSC meeting minutes from 11/06/2025. Does anyone have any comments or questions about the meeting minutes?

Would

would anyone like to make a motion to approve the meeting minutes?

So moved.

I'll second. And, miss Lee, can you take a vote?

Certainly. Chair Hicks? Yes. Member Shewalter? Yes.

We're now on item number four. It was oral communications. I don't know. It's oral communications from the public, and this portion of the meeting is reserved for people wishing to address the committee on any matter not on the agenda. You are allowed to speak on any topic you'd like for up to three minutes.

State law prohibits the CSC from acting on nonagendized items. Would any member of the public like to provide comment on an item that is not on the agenda? If so, please click the raise hand button in Zoom or press 9 on your phone. And if you're here in person, give a speaker call. So nobody is here in person to speak on this during public speaking time. Do we have anybody?

Miss Lynn, do we have anybody?

We No.

Julie, no raised hands virtually. No virtual speakers. Okay. We will now close the oral communication item and move to our discussion and action items. First, we so we have new business. First 5.1, which is a draft climate vulnerability assessment and scope of services develop to develop an integrated climate strategy comprised of decarbonization and resiliency. This item will be presented by staff from the sustainability division and also Cascadia consultant group. Miss Lee will commence the presentation. Thank you, chair. I'm pleased to

be here this evening to talk with the committee about the draft of our climate vulnerability assessment and also proposed amendments to our existing contract with Cascadia. Next slide. Just by way of a little bit of background, this project commenced at the 2024, November 19. Council approved the scope of work for, Cascadia to undertake a climate vulnerability assessment. In April, we brought to the committee, the framework deliverables and focus areas that we would be pursuing within the vulnerability assessment.

And then in June, of this year, we came to the committee with a preliminary kind of glimpse into what the CBA would look like. We had a focused look at the heat data that we were, analyzing. And this evening, we are prepared to present to you the draft of the full vulnerability assessment. Next slide. The process of developing the CVA has been thorough.

We started with reviewing plans across the city that were already underway or that had been adopted, understanding what the the city's goals already were and analysis that had already been undertaken. So for example, the city has been active in planning for sea level rise, and so our consultants were reviewing some of that work. Next, the Cascadia and the the team worked to develop what we call climate impact summaries just to start to understand by climate impact what would our future in Mountain View look like with regards to climate change. And today, we're at this phase of being ready to present the draft vulnerability assessment. This includes our literature review, what work has been done in other jurisdictions around vulnerability assessment data that has already been analyzed regionally.

The CVA contains maps of some of our vulnerabilities, and we have also worked with our colleagues in departments across the city to vet the preliminary vulnerability assessment. And then after this evening, depending on the direction from this committee, the final stage would, of course, be bringing this to council for adoption, and we will see what form that takes. Next slide. And with that, I'd like to introduce, Celine Fujikawa. She presented, some data to you in June, the heat data specifically.

And, miss Fujikawa will walk us through the results of Cascadia's analysis.

Thank you, miss Lee, and, good evening to, chair Hicks, council member Clark, and council member Showalter. Thanks for the opportunity to present tonight on the draft climate vulnerability assessment. So I wanted to start off with, talking a little bit about some of the goals of the CBA. So the CBA was designed to do three main things. The first was to identify where the climate risks are most significant within the city, and really looking at the Mountain View's people, infrastructure, and services that are being impacted.

The second is to provide a strong foundation for future strategies that can be tailored to the city's specific vulnerabilities. And then the third is to, support cross sector planning by highlighting what are the existing gaps as well as opportunities for, cross collaboration, and partnerships to help the city move towards a more coordinated and better informed resilience planning effort. Effort. Next slide. And so this assessment really looks at, four major things.

The first is how climate hazards are already affecting mountain views, communities, infrastructure, and services. And it builds directly on the city's existing resilience work rather than duplicating it. Wanting to acknowledge that Mountain View has done, a lot of incredible work and is an early leader in this space. And so, we wanted to highlight, it's, you know, it's sea level rising, planning, emergency preparedness efforts, as well as any ongoing infrastructure upgrades that are currently happening. The CVA focuses on a sector based approach to better understand where the risks are showing up across a variety of sectors, which include health, housing, transportation, the economy, as well as city operations.

And, together, we see these pieces providing a really strong foundation for, as I mentioned earlier, the future resilience planning, across departments for the city. Next slide. And so I wanted to highlight, the top hazards in Mountain View. This might look a little familiar from our June CSC meeting. So just wanted to highlight again, these are the four primary climate hazards that the city is currently experiencing.

And so as we look to the future for extreme heat and air quality, projections show the city will be experiencing on average 23 extreme heat days as well as 78 warm nights per year by late century, and this is being compared to the historic baseline. And just to define what an extreme heat day means, this basically means temperatures that rise above 91 degrees Fahrenheit, and a warm night is defined as overnight temperatures that stay above 65 degrees Fahrenheit, which, offers little relief from the daytime heat. We're also expecting to see more intense bursts of rainfall, which can, increase flooding in the low lying areas within the city. For wildfire risk, while Mountain View itself isn't in a designated burn zone, we know that with increasing temperatures, hotter and drier conditions can elevate wildfire potential, especially those that are near the wildland urban interface, which is basically where homes and development meets or kind of the border of where the, natural vegetation meets with developments. And then for wildfire smoke, we know that regional wildfires are increasing in frequency and intensity, and we're also expecting to see more, prolonged and frequent smoke events along with those wildfire events that are happening around the region.

And so we're gonna be also seeing worsening air quality across the city. Next slide. And so I really wanted to just briefly touch on the climate sensitive populations. So, as many of you in this room know, climate change affects everybody, but not everyone is affected in the same way. So certain groups tend to face higher average risks, and this is due to factors like income, age, health, housing conditions, or even the type of work that they do.

And so while this doesn't mean that every individual within these categories are inherently vulnerable, we we see from national and regional research and studies that, there are really clear patterns of disproportionate impacts for a lot of these, climate sensitive populations that you see here. And so when someone falls into multiple categories, some of those risks can be compounded. And so, for example, if we think of an older adult who is low income, living with a disability, and experiencing housing instability, this individual may face far greater challenges during extreme heat or expoke events. And so it's really important to understand these overlapping vulnerabilities in order to help us better identify where the support and resources are most needed. Next slide.

Oh.

It looks like there was a download issue. I can Okay.

Change to the a different format of the presentation.

It's okay. I think I can just maybe explain this slide. So, so this visual that was, on the slide here is just pretty much talking about how we are assessing vulnerability as part of the CVA. And so we're using a simple framework, from the intergovernmental panel on climate change or also known as the IPCC, which is the leading inter, international scientific body on climate change. And so if you can think of this framework in as three parts okay.

Great. So the first part of this is exposure. And so this is really defined as how much of a system or population is experiencing a climate hazard, so something like heat or flooding. The second part to this equation is sensitivity. And so this is defined as how strongly that hazard was likely to affect people or that specific infrastructure or service.

And then third is adaptive capacity, which is, the ability to prepare for, respond to, or recover from those impacts. And so I can provide a quick example of what this may, look like for Mountain View. And so, for example, neighborhoods with very high heat exposure, that have many, a higher, like, older adult population, but also has limited shade and cooling and transit access. These tend to show a higher vulnerability compared to areas that may have similar heat exposure, but stronger access to cooling resources and other accessible services. Next slide.

And so for this assessment, we organized this analysis into four key sectors. The first being health and well-being. The second is emergency management. The third is economy, and, the last is housing and infrastructure. And so these sectors really help us understand, where the climate impacts show up across the different parts of the community, and we also looked at the systems that cut across all sectors.

So for example, something like power distribution. While we didn't look at or include power as a specific standalone sector, we know that outages, when they happen, they affect every part of city operations. And so instead, what we did was we, wove power related considerations throughout each sector, and we can continue to strengthen that narrative in the final report as

well. Next slide.

So before I, dive into the summary of vulnerability across the sectors, I wanted to just quickly pause here to see if there were any immediate questions about our methodology or any of the sectors.

Do the committee members have any questions? No. No? We typically do our questions at the end, though. Maybe you'll get some now.

We just thought it was such a lengthy topic.

Know. It's a lot of information. So

Come back to you. We'll see.

Okay. Sounds good. Well, I'll go ahead and dive into, our first sector, which is our health and well-being sector. So this mainly, looks at both physical health and mental health, recognizing that climate, hazards not only are heat related illnesses or respiratory conditions, but can also manifest into stress, anxiety, and impact overall well-being. And so we'll walk through some of what we found across, both of those subsectors.

So here, this slide summarizes the vulnerability, across the health and well-being sector. And, really, we what we did here is we condensed some of the scoring, just to help make it a little bit more high level and digestible for this audience. And so this reflects, again, both the physical and mental health impacts. And if you're interested in seeing a more detailed, like, hazard by hazard scoring, that information is included in both the executive summary and the draft full draft CVA document. And so just to highlight sorry.

If you can go back one slide. So I wanted to just highlight a few key takeaways for the sector. So we found that, extreme heat and wildfire smoke are the two biggest health threats for Mountain View. Both hazards are already affecting residents today and are projected to worsen over time, and this this is gonna cause an increased case of, heat related illness and respiratory issues. We also know that when we think about heat, and heat being combined with humidity, this also raises the what the quote, unquote feels like temperature is.

So for example, something like a 90 degree day with 75% degree, or 75% humidity, which is not uncommon during the summers here. I'm sure you've all experienced. That temperature can actually feel like a 109 degrees, so we're seeing triple digits here. And so that's actually well into the danger zone for heat related illness, which makes outdoor and indoor conditions much more sense dangerous and sensitive for, groups like older adults, young children, and people with preexisting health conditions. We're also seeing poor air quality, near major roadways, so highways like Highway 101 And 82 where, some of our lower cost housing options are located.

And so we also see some of the compounding, impacts such as existing asthma and cardiovascular risk for, those that are maybe living within or close to these areas. Another major finding from this sector was that, we see impacts on our unhoused residents who experience direct, exposure to heat and smoke and have very little access to cooling or clean air spaces. And so I wanted to just highlight that while Mountain View has a lot of existing resources, like cooling centers and the heat resilience program, the access remains limited. And so things like cooling centers can sometimes be hard to reach or have, limited operation hours, which, we see as a significant gap in service, especially during heat waves where we're starting to see a lot more warm nights, that extend far into the night and after some of the operations or sorry, the hours of operations for these cooling centers. Next slide.

And so, some of the sensitive groups in Mountain View, that, face the greatest risk from extreme heat and worsening air quality, include older adults and young children who are physiologically, more sensitive to heat and poor air quality. We also see our unhoused residents who faced, prolonged ex outdoor exposure, and are also seeing some some that are experiencing rely unreliable access to cooling and clean indoor air. We also see linguistically isolated households that are most vulnerable because they may not be able to see receive alerts or resources maybe in languages that they understand. People of color, which makes up nearly half of, or over half of the city's population. We're also seeing that there's a lot of studies, again, that are showing, people of color who are more likely to live in hotter neighborhoods that have a higher baseline pollution levels.

We see low income households and renters, which make up a third of the population, and those that are more most sensitive are the ones that may lack access to cooling, air conditioning, insulation, or air filtration within their homes. And then lastly are, folks that are living people with disabilities, and they may face, some of those additional barriers mobility, accessing some of these cooling centers, or receiving the emergency assistance that they need. Next slide. So to put some of these risks into perspective, here are some of the data from Santa Clara County, public health department. We're seeing that, between February 2020, there were approximately four hundred and thirty seven heat related hospitalizations, that were directly tied to extreme heat as well as, over eighteen hundred emergency room visits for heat related illness.

I wanted to note that these numbers are almost certainly undercounted, and that heat related illness is widely recognized as undiagnosed and, underreported, because heat is often not listed as the primary cause on medical records. And so we see that a lot of many hospitalizations that are tied to dehydration, cardiac events, and respiratory issues sometimes are actually triggered and worsened by extreme heat, but they don't actually show up on the official heat related statistics. And so I just wanted to caveat that these numbers are here are likely to represent a floor, but not the full picture of heat impacts, in Santa Clara County. Next slide. And so these projections, give us a sense of how quickly conditions are changing in Mountain View.

And what's really striking here are the percentage increases. Mountain View has historically just had had a handful of extreme heat days and warm nights each year. But as you can see here, those numbers jump by hundreds of percent by, mid to late century. And so what this means is that residents are aren't just getting a few more hot days. We're looking at a major shift in how, how often people experience dangerous heat, especially at night when the body needs to cool down.

And, warm nights are especially important because they limit the body's ability to cool down, which, increases the risk of heat related illness, again, particularly in older adults, young children, pregnant people, and, individuals that don't have reliable cooling within their homes. And so these numbers are, you know, kind of shocking to see, but these really help illustrate why heat is one of the most, significant and growing health, risk for the community. Next slide. And so I wanted to, highlight a few of the maps here that we did. So we looked at the neighborhood level heat exposure and sensitive populations.

And here, you kinda see where some of those sensitive populations overlap with the areas most hottest in Mountain View. So what really stands out here is the South Mountain View Ring is it the Rangstorf, Rangstorf? Apologies if I'm mispronouncing it. Shoreline and the Sylvan Park, which consistently shows the hottest conditions. And so these areas tend to have, older buildings, fewer trees, and, more residents that are lower income or older, which can, make these heat impacts, much harder to manage.

We're also noticing that several schools sit within these hotter zones, so kids are, spending more time outdoors in areas that have higher heat exposure. And when you overlay things like senior centers and neighborhoods with more older adults, you start to see this clear pattern of where the heat is hitting people the most hardest. And this really helps, kind of point to where the investments in things like shade, cooling infrastructure, and heat relief programs that could make the biggest difference. Okay. That was a lot of information.

I wanted to just quickly pause here to see if there were any immediate questions about the health and well-being sector.

No questions?

Well, I have some questions about how you made the heat map. When I look at what the, you know, the sort of severe heat areas, there aren't a lot of things to orient yourself on on this map. But for instance, there's this big blob at Quest near in the Cuesta Park neighborhood. What is that?

Yeah. That's a really great question. So when we actually take a look at this, map, so just maybe to step quick take a quick step back. So the underlying data for this is using, Landsat data. So we look at land surface temperatures, based on a few, events that happen.

So when we see, like, a recorded heat island effect or a heat wave day, we kind of look at what the those land surface temperatures are. And so this is basically one of the days that Mountain View ex experienced an extreme heat day to be able to see what are sort of those severe heat areas are within the city. So that area within Cuesta Park is actually a artificial turf football field near the school. And so we didn't

the Saint Francis football field?

Yes. That's correct.

Okay.

Mhmm.

That's fascinating. Okay.

Yeah.

So What about, Sylvan Park? In Sylvan Park, it's it's very much the location of the the mobile home parks. They don't have as much shade.

Mhmm.

In South Yes. South Mountain View is Mountain View High School, essentially?

Mhmm. Yes. That's correct. Alright. And is that I'm gonna jump on your question. Is that plaster turf as well?

So it's a mix of both, I think, impervious surfaces, so highly paved areas, so, like, parking lots, as well as turfed areas. For the Sylvan Park area, I'd have to take a better closer look at the map. But oftentimes, yeah, it looks like there's a pretty big

You see it?

Like, the Moore Park mobile homes, there's a lot of, like, sort of paved areas there that be could be causing that urban heat island effect that you're seeing on the map.

And then and then the one in the in the Ring Store shoreline shoreline west area,

what's that? Sorry.

I'm currently looking. So let's see.

Just under the word rings. There's a bit on that map. There's a there's a big blob that's, you know, dark red. Yeah. Also thinking. Yeah.

I could take a look at that, from the in the draft in a second here. So maybe we could could we is it okay if

Keep going. Anyway, I just you know, since this is our town, we we actually

really Yeah.

On all these neighborhoods and stuff. Okay. Thank you.

Yeah. I agree. It would

be nice to know what's at the heart of the hottest, you know, to see if there's a recurring factor or factors that we would you know, not just the neighborhood. I have a question too at this point.

Yeah.

Back a few slides, you said that near roads and freeways, heavily used roads and freeways, I don't remember your exact What is it? It is. Air quality is worsening near major roadways. Yeah. So that surprised me a little because we've had a lot of cars for a long time.

And they you know, during COVID, they went down in number, and now they've come back up. But I don't know that they they've increased, and we're adding electric cars. So I'm not saying that I'm not implying that living right next to a freeway would should now be a great place to breathe and live. But do you know what do you attribute the worsening air quality near major roadways to?

Yeah. Well, I think we took a look closely at our CalEnviroScreen data, and what we're seeing is a really high percentage of diesel particulate matter actually higher in the eightieth percentile or greater. So we actually have a map for that in the draft CVA that is actually pretty compelling to look at because we thought p m 2.5 was actually gonna be higher, but it's actually diesel particulate matter that is in the eightieth percentile. And I think it could be a mix of things. But, you know, for this specific CVA, we didn't necessarily look at air quality as, like, a baseline.

We mainly looked at it as, sort of how how do we see air quality as, like, this compounding risk to, heat. So when heat extreme heat days are, when we have an extreme heat day, how does the air quality worsen as part of that, and how does that sort of compound the health related risks for those that are experiencing, you know, who have asthma or preexisting health conditions like respiratory illnesses. And so it could be a a variety of of reasons, and I think it could just be the sudden increase after COVID of people returning back to driving and commuting, that could we see sort of the increase in commuters, through those highways because of that.

Yeah. It's an interesting. I mean, all the bullet points there are interesting, but that one interests me in particular because there's a lot of housing and transportation related implications, you know Mhmm. For how we should plan and where we put houses, and do we keep what one of our residents calls vegetative barriers between the housing and the freeway. Where do we plant trees? Related questions. Okay. Thank you. Any other questions?

Okay. Okay.

Great. So if we can skip ahead to emergency management. Great. So for emergency management, the sector is really about how the city prepares for and responds to climate driven events, and so how systems like emergency routes, communication networks, and our backup power is gonna be impacted by during extreme conditions. So for critical facilities, we're defining that as our fire stations, hospital hospitals, schools, and other essential community serving sites since their ability to stay accessible and operational is central to keeping, people safe.

So I'll talk a little bit about how we looked at each hazard. So as you can see here, again, extreme heat and wildfire smoke stand out to be some of the biggest disruptors, and this is because they have been, seen to affect responder responder safety as well as some of the cooling existing cooling systems and indoor air quality. At the same time, we're also seeing, an influx of emergency calls that tend to increase during this time. Critical facilities like hospitals and fire stations and medical centers are already working hard during extreme events. And so many many of these facilities actually sit in those hotter parts of the city, and those higher baseline temperatures, just pretty much will mean more energy demand, more cooling needs, and more stress on existing equipment.

We're also seeing, flooding is less about the buildings themselves in this case, but more about the access. And so we found that a heavy rainfall can block, key emergency routes and can make it harder to reach schools or clinics or stations during a response. For wildfire smoke, we're just continuing to see, this drive respiratory related emergency calls. And even when wildfires burn far outside Mountain View, that can still put pressure on ambulance services and emergency rooms within the city. Mountain View, currently has a really strong emergency management coordination and communication system, but where there are existing gaps is the backup capacity.

This is where we still see the challenge here. So things like redundant cooling, power, or air filtration systems at these critical facilities, still remain limited, and that just ultimately reduces the adaptive capacity during these prolonged heat, events. Next slide. And so for here, we're really focused on those in the community that are most affected when these emergency systems are stressed. So, again, with our older adults, and people who depend on medical equipment, these are these populations are especially vulnerable because they need continuous power and quick access to emergency care.

And even when there are short short shortages, these can really become life threatening for them. We also see our first responders and outdoor emergency staff, that face risk, high risk. They're the ones that are out in the heat, and doing a lot of this extended physical work during these events, and so exposure, inherently hits them a lot harder. We also see students and childcare providers that are particularly at these older campuses. Without modern cooling or ventilation, they can experience higher indoor temperatures and poor air quality during some of these climate events.

We also see residents in in flood prone neighborhoods that are also at risk, and this is because road closures or any power outages can slow down emergency response and make it harder to reach critical services. And then finally, our unhoused and low income residents often feel the impacts first when cooling centers or clean air spaces are limited, and so they rely heavily on public facilities for safe shelter cooling and some of these clean air during these crises. And so, really, across all of these groups, I would say that the common thread is that there's just overall limited access to safe indoor environments during extreme events, which can really lead to increased exposure and reduce their ability to cope during these events. Next slide. And so here, we're talking or wanted to highlight, the critical facilities and heat exposure map.

So several of Mountain View's major critical facilities are again loaded located in the hottest parts of the city. So for example, for example, El Camino Health, Mountain View Hospital, and fire stations two and four all sit within the severe heat zones. And so during prolonged heat, these buildings face just overall higher strain on cooling and HVAC systems, which can affect staff comfort, patient safety, and operational reliability. We're also seeing a lot of schools and child care centers in these same areas. Many of them are older buildings without modern ventilation, which means that they're more likely to overheat or experience poor indoor air quality during heat and smoke events.

And so some of these overlaps or some of the overlaps that you see here can really help the city identify where those upgrades, like backup power needs to happen, or improved ventilation and other cooling infrastructure that can have the biggest impact on these, facilities. Next slide. When we're looking at critical facilities in the flood hazard zones, we're seeing some pretty clear areas of concern. So a few sites that I wanted to call out are the, again, El Camino Health, Mountain View Hospital, fire station five that sit within or adjacent to the hundred and five hundred year flood zones. So when these areas flood even temporarily, it could potentially delay emergency response, disrupt, you know, medical operations, or limit access to safe indoor spaces, during the storms.

We also see the schools in the same regard, in the same zones. So schools like mont Montaloma Elementary and parts of Shoreline West area can also face, some operational challenges when roads close or when facilities take on water. And so all of this really helps, again, point the city towards where maintaining access roads and planning long term upgrades will really matter. And so some of these overlaps, again, show where kind of those resilience, investments can go the furthest in protecting some of these essential community services and community safety. Okay.

Any questions before we move on to economy?

So are there questions on that section? I have one question to you. So I have a question on when I read the full report, and you you kind of imply it here. It talked about the area around around McKelvey Park where we did, like, the Cuesta area as a flood hazard zone, and we put in we put in gosh. I don't remember the technical name for it, but it's Retention Basin.

Thank you. We put in a a flood retention basin basin under McKelvey Park. So I'm wondering when it's cited as an area that, you know, may be in trouble, whether like, have we addressed that? Are you saying it there's additional troubles there? Have we addressed it in that area with that retention basin? Because that didn't come up ever in the report, the retention basin. I'd like to hear that that it has been addressed, and we can just worry about the other areas, but I'm wondering or whether you can get back to us on that.

Yeah. I mean, I think this is something that, we can discuss a bit more maybe with the miss Lee's team about, you know, some of the I think the importance of, like, adaptive capacity is is is being able to, kind of know what existing, infrastructure upgrades there are to addressing some of these hazards. And so, we'll definitely make a note of that, and we'll revisit this and in integrate that some of those findings in the final report. Okay. I don't know, miss Lee, if you have, yeah, additional input on that.

Thank you. Thank you for the question, chair. The only thing I would add to what was already stated is that prior to developing a resiliency strategy or kind of a list of resiliency actions, typically, what would follow a data based climate vulnerability assessment would be ground truthing. So some level of community engagement, but also more, on the ground kind of vetting of the data analysis. So we focused the CVA.

You know, we we originally brought a full, like, all the way through to resiliency strategy proposal, and we pursued only the phase one of this. And so this report is much more analyzing the data that indicates vulnerability. And then what would happen next and prior to a resiliency strategy would be some ground truth thing.

Okay. Yes. That that may be one item you wanna check. Because the report had a had a good number of references to the potential flooding in that area, and I thought that this one of the few areas we really address.

Any other questions? Okay. I'm pretty sure I know also that that, flooding at at the hospital has been addressed. So That's great.

Okay. We'll go ahead and move to the economy sector. So this sector really looks at climate hazards and how they impact workers and local businesses within Mountain View, as well as highlighting any, broader economic, impacts to the Mountain View's economic systems, especially for industries that are, outdoor and service based. So I'll go ahead and talk a little bit about our economy sector and some of the vulnerabilities here. So for as we look at climate hazards, we know that, climate hazards don't just affect people and infrastructure, but they also have, this ripple effect on the city's economy as well.

And so as we know that with flooding risk, flooding actually poses the biggest risk because it can disrupt operations, damage buildings, and interrupt access to key job centers. And where we see some of this and and we can talk about this in the next couple slides here where the the greatest vulnerabilities are when it comes to flooding. But I did also wanna highlight here, for heat as, even though it's a moderate vulnerability, we wanted to call out, specific groups that are most impacted by extreme heat. So outdoor and service workers, service sector workers, including construction, landscaping, restaurant delivery delivery and custodial staff. These groups face higher vulnerability just due to being outside and having to commute and drive between places.

And so the prolonged exposure to heat can reduce productivity, increase, more rest breaks that we're seeing, and also raise existing health risks, and leading to more, risk to heat related illnesses, as well as, we see lost wages for hour hourly workers as well. So for heat, high heat days can lead to, measurable economic losses from fewer outdoor workers, outdoor work hours to reduce consumer activity, especially in sectors that rely on more in person customer service. We also see that flood prone flood prone businesses, areas that are containing some of Mountain View's highest value assets, including some of the commercial corridors and tech campuses, those are all within the floodplain. And so even with some of those short interruptions, those can still have some costly impacts to employers and the local economy. And then lastly, we know that small businesses are the least equipped to recover from climate disruptions, especially because a lot of them have limited cash reserves or high operating costs.

And so these are, in the economy sector, probably the most vulnerable. And then we also know that larger employers have, oftentimes more resources to integrate climate resilience design and planning, but smaller ones, still struggle without added support. Next slide. So I'll quickly go over this since I, kind of touched on a lot of these different climate exposed populations for the economy sector. But just to, again, name a few, we know that outdoor workers are often impacted by extreme heat and poor air quality.

As I mentioned, lower wage and hourly workers as well as service industry employees that work in retail, restaurant, and hospitality, sometimes work in older buildings that might have just, like, less modern cooling and ventilation, and sometimes they can lose work hours during some of those heat waves or smoke events. And then, I mentioned earlier some of the businesses that were in those flood prone, industrial and commercial zones, especially those that are near Highway 101 and North Bayshore can face, those risks to, potential damage to equipment, inventory, and site access during those heavy storms. And then we can go to the next slide. And so I wanted to highlight here where we see the commercial industrial areas that overlap with the city's mapped flood zones, and what this means for local businesses and economic activity. So we see that a number of commercial and mixed use offices, as well as industrial zones fall within the hundred and five hundred year floodplain.

And as I'd mentioned earlier that, you know, what this means for these districts is that we could see, potential field building damage, access issues, or, impacts to operations, during those major storms. North Bayshore, in particularly, especially stands out, as it hosts major corporate campuses and data centers, including areas along Charleston, Landings and, Marine Way that fall directly within those hazard zones flood hazard zones. These sites collectively represent more than $670,000,000 in structural assets, and that makes them just a lot more vulnerable in terms of where we see the highest value areas exposed to flood risk within the city. And then we also see just kind of more of those co commercial corridors, such as El Camino Real and Central Expressway, where some of those businesses may face temporary closures or costly interruptions if there were to be heavy, storms that lead to those localized flooding that we that we might see. Next slide.

And so I wanted to quickly recap some of those potential economic losses that I mentioned earlier. So this table shows how, when we look at specifically rising temperatures and extreme heat days, how that can directly impact outdoor workers and the city's economy. And so by mid century, and late late century, we see 12 extreme heat days that are expected each year, and that's seven more than today, and that leads to about $36 in lost wages per worker, which adds up to roughly about a $125,000 in lost wages citywide each year by mid century. By late century, we're seeing this increase become even more significant. So we see, expect twenty three extreme heat days, which translates to about a $145, in loss wages per worker, which estimates to about 500,000 in total annual lost wages per year for all climate exposed workers within the city.

And so these these estimates are conservative since they only reflect lost income from reduced work hours on very hot days, and they don't actually capture the larger sort of economic ripple effects that happen. So things like lower sales, slower times, and, like, reduced productivity. And I wanted to also just note that these estimates also reflect average wage loss per outdoor worker per year in $20.25 dollars. And so this really follows the national climate assessment and some of the, methods that they use to calculate economic loss. So we use the dollar value of the analysis year because projecting, future wages can, add a lot of uncertainty.

And so even with this conservative approach, we know definitely that rising temperatures are expected to lead, to grow to more wages loss over time for the city. Next slide. Okay. I'm gonna quickly go into the housing and infrastructure section. And so this section looks primarily at housing, transportation, and stormwater systems.

But for today, we're really just gonna be hyperfocusing on the housing and transportation only. And if you're interested in seeing more of the stormwater findings, you can see see that section in the detailed CVA. Next slide. So this section looks at how climate hazards affects housing, transportation, and infrastructure. As you can see here, extreme heat stands out as the biggest housing risk, especially for, multifamily rentals, mobile home parks that are already struggling to stay cool.

And we also see that some of the air quality issues that are, again, more concentrated near those highways, where we see kind of more affordable units that are located there. So there's a clear sort of parallel between air quality issues that are potentially impacting those that are living in those air affordable units within those areas. We also see flooding impacts to about 20 12% of homes within Mountain View, especially near creeks and the bay. And we also see heat and major storms, also being disruption to transportation, through potential warping of frails, and flooding key corridors. And I think across all of these topics, you'll see a range of vulnerability, and the reason for that is because the housing and infrastructure sector, is so varied across the city.

And so, we know that there's a lot of really great planned investments from the city that are really creating that strong starting point for for for this piece here. Next slide. So some of the key, climate sensitive populations here, and other sensitive assets are, renters and residents in older multifamily buildings with limited control over weatherization or repairs. We also see mobile home residents, mobile home park residents that are currently living in those hot zones or flood hazard zones, and those are the ones that are facing a higher, risk of displacements, after disasters. Low income and low low income households and residents that are living near major roadways are also experiencing, higher pollution and have fewer resources to adapt.

We also see that transit dependent riders and cyclists and as well as pedestrians, are also at risk of facing potential service interruptions, unsafe heat, and, poor air quality during those extreme weather events. And then lastly, we see residents that are living in those low lying neighborhoods near the creeks and the bay where flooding and high groundwater can damage homes and roads. Next slide. So for housing exposure to extreme heat, so this map shows where the hotter neighborhoods coincide with vulnerable housing types, including rental units, mobile home parks, subsidized housing, and safe parking zones. And so many of the multifamily and affordable housing buildings are actually located in those above average heat zones where, indoor temperatures can quickly climb during those prolonged heat events.

Mobile home parks such as Sunset Estates, New Frontier, and Sahara Mobile Village sit in some of the hottest parts of the city, making them especially vulnerable during extreme heat. And then for people living in vehicles, we or in older and poorly insulated homes, they tend to face heightened risk health risks because they have, limited access to cooling, reliable cooling, shade, and as well as indoor, or sorry, clean indoor air. And so we see a lot of these vulnerable housing types overlap with high heat conditions, and so this can really help inform the city, to know kind of where to target some of those cooling strategies, expanding existing tree canopy, as well as, having more direct resilience programs to commune communicate to these communities, where they are, you know, most at risk for these rising temperatures. Next slide. And so here, this map is showing the housing within the flood hazard zones.

And so we see here that a lot of the homes, 12% of the homes overlap with the hundred year and five hundred year flood zones. Several mobile home parks, particularly near Highway 101 and Grant Road, fall within some of those zones, and those are the ones that are facing facing a greater likelihood of flood related damage or long term displacement. We also see subsidized and naturally affordable housing, much of which is located in the northern neighborhoods. These are also areas where storm water can overwhelm some of these older buildings and can cause potential flooding. And then for the safe parking sites, and nearby rental housing, we also see that these can be impacted by major storms, which, can create, additional challenges for residents who have limited resource or access to limited resources or alternative, shelter options.

And so seeing kinda where these, vulnerable housing types coincide within these flood hazard zones can really help the city target those mitigation efforts, as well as building, thinking about how we can do stronger building maintenance and support programs for communities that may have the hardest time recovering after a flood. Next slide. And so this map, now is transitioning over to our transportation assets. So we're looking here specifically at transit and active transportation to extreme heat. So as you can see here, many of the hotter areas overlap with many bus stops and transit station, rail lines, and also other multiuse trails.

Many of the city's major transit corridors, which include El Camino Real, Central Expressway, and Grant Road, run through some of the hotter surface temperature zones where shade is limited. And so this can create uncomfortable and sometimes unsafe conditions for transit riders, cyclists, and pedestrians during extreme heat events. And we also see that people who rely on some of these transit and active transportation, especially those that don't have access to, like, air conditioned vehicles, tend to face higher risk of heat stress and reduce mobility during those hotter days. Next slide. And this is the map that, shows parts of Mountain View's transportation system that overlap with those flood hazard zones.

As you can see here, many of the bus stops, transit stations, roads, and rail lines sit within those hundred year flood plains. So corridors like Shoreline, Charleston, X Central Expressway, and Grant Road are especially prone to temporary flooding, which can disrupt travel during those storm events. We also see in the Northwest Mountain view, a cluster of the NVGO route d stops. Those also fall within the flood prone areas, making access less reliable when those storms hit. Across the city itself, about, 16 miles of roadway and seven miles of multiuse trails within the hundred year floodplain.

And so these overlaps that you're seeing here can, again, help I'll highlight some of, areas where we could do targeted drainage improvements, detours, as well as thinking through more reliable transportation, travel options that can be the most important during these, extreme heat weather events. Okay. So, I will pause here. That was a lot of information here, so I just wanted to see if there are any questions.

Questions on this section?

Just a

very brief one. The the maps were really helpful, and I saw in the appendix there's a list of the data sources that were consulted. The, and I realized that these maps are kind of just in the presentation or in the PDF

Mhmm.

Are just screenshots. I didn't know if there if there are, like, high resolution maps that kind of show parcel by parcel that exists somewhere. If if someone reaches out and they wanna look at some of these, do those exist somewhere, or do we need to go, like, pull it from the data sources specifically?

Yeah. I think to obtain the the parcel by parcel data, you would need to go to the data source directly. We used the underlying data itself is using the original data, but if you wanna look at it kind of at that scale, then we would need to look at the the original source directly.

Okay. Yeah. Even even labeling streets so you can kind of tell what what factors might be causing different things on the map

Mhmm.

Be helpful.

Or major sites like schools and so forth. You talked about business, you know, businesses being impacted by heat and other factors, flooding and so forth in a negative way. Do you ever think about them being affected in a positive way? The example being, I noticed on extra hot days, more people dining out in the evening probably not wanting to cook like a real surge in diners. So, you know, I imagine there there may be both negative and positive impacts. I don't know. During storms, people buy umbrellas. I'm

just Mhmm.

Set of things. So is that something you ever look at?

So a part of this analysis, we didn't look at it from that point of view, but we did, as part of our study, include kind of the daytime, populations as we know that, like, we wanted to see sort of the differences between daytime versus nighttime populations. And so that could be something that we look at more from a risk perspective of, like, during those, you know, hotter days when we see, a greater influx of people coming into the city or even just people being out and about, like, eating and and and dining outside, that we could even though I think it it may have a positive impact on revenue, overall, we're looking still kind of at the, sort of the health aspect of that and where we could see, you know, greater populations or greater risk of heat related illness, especially if there are, specifically during, like, those major heat waves that we're looking at. We're not really seeing a lot of folks out and about typically, right, on days that are, like, a 100 degrees or more. But I think that's a really great point to to, I think, acknowledge as part of the economy sector, and we can certainly discuss more internally about how we can maybe do some of that framing in the narrative there.

That one oh. Yeah. I I was just looking at my notes, and I was wondering if, when you did the diesel distribution modeling, did that include the improvements that have been done to Caltrain?

No. It did not.

Okay. Because that that that is

the equivalent of taking many, many cars off the road, so that'd be something to to update.

Okay. We'll make a note of that.

Are we into questions or comments, or what's this?

I guess we're not in the comments yet.

We still have the last portion of the presentation. I wanted to just add to to respond, though, to your question about El Camino in particular. One of the things that we think about with vulnerability is not only the facility itself, but access to it, especially when it's something like a critical health facility. So even if the hospital itself does not flood, if access to it is limited, related to flooding in the general neighborhood, we would still would still sort of surface as a vulnerability. So, but, yes, we we actually we did take into account some of the flood improvements at the hospital itself.

And briefly, just to wrap up this this item, if we could go to the next slide. When we first talked about doing a climate vulnerability assessment with this committee, we we had a proposal to explore both vulnerability assessment as well as resiliency planning. And what we decided to do was do the first phase of that work, bring to the committee what our vulnerability looks like as a community with regards to climate change, and then decide if we would like to engage in a phase two, which would be essentially resiliency planning, taking into account this information that we have started to develop and identify the highest value opportunities for the city to enhance our resiliency. So contained within this item before your committee is a recommendation, for integrating resiliency planning into the decarbonization planning that is already underway and was authorized in the original contract. And what we would propose to do is marry the work, really, and develop a climate strategy for the city that both identifies the synergies between decarbonization work and resiliency and also the tension points so that we can understand when, you know, a resiliency priority might appear to be at odds with the decarbonization priority.

How can we think holistically about these two priorities and solve for those tensions? So staff is recommending a more integrated approach to climate. We we do say in the field that it's all one issue. Right? It's all climate change, whether it's on the mitigation side of trying to reduce our emissions very aggressively or it's on the resiliency side where we recognize that some amount of climate change is before us, kind of no matter what we do.

So we would like to we're we're recommending to the committee that that you direct us to bring to counsel for consideration, a contract amendment to do that where we would develop a fully integrated climate strategy. We do have alternatives. We could pursue adaptation or resiliency planning as a stand alone effort. Effort. We could continue with the decarbonization planning that's already underway and kind of have a parallel track of adaptation planning or resiliency planning, or we could not pursue resiliency planning at this time and move forward with the existing scope of work that's underway in terms of the decarbonization planning alone.

So those are sort of the the main options. There are trade offs to each of them. I think if we do a an integrated approach, it actually could go faster than if we did two separate plans because we're writing the singular plan instead of two. Of course, the fastest would be to not do resiliency planning and to focus on decarbonization. So if if we were to sort of map on a timeline, the fastest approach would be just decarbonization.

After that, an integrated strategy, and then maybe the longest timeline would be for two separate plans, one related to decarbonization and one related to resiliency. And I guess the the other trade offs are really how we take into account the ways that these issues affect each other. You know? I sometimes give the example of of our decarbonization efforts. If we are increasingly trying to electrify, do we end up putting pressure on the grid, and does that have a resiliency implication?

Whereas if we take a step back and we think about how these two issues could interplay, you know, are there ways that we could pursue solutions that would address or mitigate for negative consequences across the two kind of bodies of work, if you will? So, I'm happy to take any questions about this. We have much more specific contract amendments that were included in the memo, and I can walk you through those. Some are to do we could go to the next slide, actually. Some are to, do this bigger integration that I was talking about.

And then there are a few things, minor more more minor enhancements to the decarbonization analysis that we talked about at prior CSC meetings, adding some contingency just to have a bit of flexibility as we move forward in implementation. And I think there is some also amendment related to some of the additional vulnerability assessment that was completed within this vulnerability assessment around stormwater. So the proposal is the the staff recommended amendment would be for a contract amendment that would bring our total contract from $223,000 approximately to approximately $370,000, and that would be for an integrated approach to climate planning. If we can go to the next slide. And these are the recommendations for the committee to continue to to give additional feedback on the CBA and to direct staff with in terms of how to proceed with the resiliency and decarbonization planning, and then specifically to comment on the contract amendment that we would ultimately need to bring to council because it would exceed the current contract amount.

Okay. That is authorized under the city manager's signing authority.

Okay. So now since the presentation is done, let's see what I'm supposed to say. But, basically, it's time for questions on the overall presentation and on the three recommendations before you, questions from the committee, and we'll save comments for afterwards, but any questions you might have on those three recommendations or the presentation as a whole.

And if you'd like, I can we have a slide that outlines the alternatives that I mentioned as well.

Previous slide kind of did. Yes. Maybe that is Exactly. Yeah.

I'd just like a little review of the nomenclature here. What okay. By decarbonization decarbonization, we mean things that lower our GHGs. Right? Yes. Okay. And by resilience, we mean things that make us better able to deal with the impacts of climate change, like what we would do for heat extremes. Right? Exactly. Okay. Thank you. Go ahead. I can start. No. But, Chris, do you have to

The I'm looking through the report. Can you remind me if we if we pursue the staff recommendation with the combined plans? What is the I see the the cost implications. Like, do you have a sense for the timeline implications? You touched on it a little bit. I just didn't know if there was anything more concrete.

I think if we do not pursue resiliency planning, if we just bring the vulnerability assessment to council for adoption and then the decarbonization planning. That would likely be done by the 2026, the calendar year. And then early twenty twenty seven is when we would anticipate being able to bring an integrated climate strategy. And then I think probably one to two quarters later, if we were to pursue two stand alone plans because we'd have to write two lengthy reports. And much of the work would be duplicated, if we had to

That's right.

To do two.

I mean, I'm fine with the recommendation. I'm just trying to figure out kinda when can we pursue that the integrated plans kind of when that might all wrap up. It sounds like some at some point in 2027, maybe '20 Okay.

Okay. So, again, back to sort of principles. What we're getting here what we're getting at here is with the recommendation is you want to have a list of actions that the city should take. Right? That's what we're really shooting for. And so by doing both plans together, we get actions on on both things and on on how they work together. We we come out with because some of them do work together, we we come out with a, you know, a much better action than if we we wait and do them separately. That's essentially what you're saying, isn't it?

Exactly. If we have two plans, then we'll have we'll have sort of two action plans that we would implement more in parallel versus, a singular action plan that considers what is the best order to do all of the climate work and, you know, do we think about the grid first and then push to decarbonize more quickly? You know, is there an order of operations across both sets of priorities that yields a more effective result in the end? So doing it in an integrated fashion allows us to think through that.

Okay. Well, I know we've talked about this on the telephone, and we've talked about it many times, but I don't see it up on the slide here. And one of the things that I think is really vital is is the collaboration opportunities and that are both ongoing and that we feel should be developed and identifying those and talking about, you know, really what's the best thing for us to do specifically as the city of Mountain View for our residents, and what's the best you know, what are the things that are better for us to, you know, collaborate on? And I really think that a big part of this should be clarifying that. So there's kind of a chart that says, you know, we're gonna work with, SVCE on these things and or you know what?

But sometimes it eliminates that because I I think that that's one of the major complexities. And I it was mentioned a little bit in here, but not not a lot. And the collaboration programs that we have ongoing are really massive in some cases. So, you know, they're not afterthoughts. I think they really should be integrated. So that that's that's a big comment.

Yeah. Certainly. I I mean, anecdotally, we have had a few examples of this sort of pop up as we've been in discussions both in the resiliency arena and the decarbonization arena. So we've been trying to think about how we could promote heat pumps. And then we've been thinking about heat resiliency.

You know, heat pumps are great because they offer, an electric option for heating a home as opposed to a furnace. They also offer cooling, and so they they offer heat resiliency to the community. So we were talking with, the community services agency about doing work with our on house population. We, at the last meeting, gave you an update about our heat resiliency pilot project in partnership with CSA. But in those discussions, we also started talking about, well, could there be a way to look at bringing heat pumps to older adults who maybe are more vulnerable to heat, but also, maybe can less ably afford to decarbonize their homes or maybe they're they I don't know.

They have more fixed incomes. And so surfacing the multiple ways that we might be able to collaborate with a given partner or kind of finding you know, we might work with CSA, to support our unhoused and then being able to, identify other ways that we could overlap with their their priorities as an organization. So building out more novel forms of collaboration. I think if we think about our whole body of climate work at once, we can start to surface these collaborative opportunities. They maybe we haven't worked together with a given organization in that way before, but we have had partnership with them in another. Another.

Well, I I also think just inventorying them would be valuable. I mean, when there's that list at the end of this of that you mentioned of all the data sources, you know, that was very very interesting to see. Okay. Well, we've already taken into account all of these things. That's that's really valid. I think to to, you know, to look at what are all the collaborative organizations. I mean, there's there's just a lot of them. So and they're, I mean, they're really kind of incredible internal government consulting that we we already, you know, we already have going.

And Well, and we think of it both in terms of our own colleagues in other departments who are doing great work, but maybe we haven't thought about it as as climate work. You know? They were doing resurfacing. But if they're putting in more pervious pavement, then they're addressing our future flood challenges. So, you know, we think of it, like, in terms of all of our departments and the work that they're doing, and then we think of the outside organizations.

So both and then other cities. You know, how can we, as a region, collaborate more effectively too? Climate impacts rarely are coalesced around a single jurisdiction. It's the whole region that is facing this extreme heat vulnerability. And if we think together how to create a network of support for all of our communities, it'll be much more effective.

And then another thing I wanted to to comment on

Wait. Can we have comments? Or we have to We're questions. We're just questions. Okay. I've got some comments later. So my main question in terms of the thing I'm having trouble figuring out or focusing on is how the the resiliency the decarbonization has we've set a goal for ourselves, and that and the resiliency, as far as I see, is we don't have a goal.

And

it and the decarbonization has been when you last presented it to us, it there's really been a sea change because of changes at the federal level and, frankly, at the state level too because we can't do the clean cars and all this, and there's greater focus on housing affordability now. And so we can't do reach codes, and there's other things we can't do because we're focusing on housing and not sustainability. So that a lot of the things we were relying on or that we were thinking of relying on to get to

our

decarbonization goals, we can't get to it. We can't do anymore. And so I'm unclear on how if we do both of them, are we really and then they are even if we do 2045, frankly, I think given the rocky road ahead with because I don't I was not expecting our federal administration to knock down the the the climate work people were doing, the renewables and so forth, quite this much. But I also don't just you know, I'm hoping that we won't have this administration for long, but, frankly, my hopes are not. I've you know, even if in '26 or '28, we don't some of that erodes, I still don't kind of the bottle's broken, and I think it's gonna be hard to put the pieces back together.

And once you do, you may get another similar administration. So I think we're under a much rockier road than than when we set those goals to begin with. And I'm worried about council setting up a bunch some decarbonization, a set of steps and goals that we don't really have a road to get to. We may we've set ourselves up to do carbon offsets if we don't get there, but, frankly, we'd be punishing ourselves because people kept voting for Trump like administrations, which is not a good thing to punish people in Mountain View for. And I don't know how the resiliency these aren't these are projects without goals.

How does that does that help us do our decarbonization projects? Because, frankly, the projects I've seen are very small. Like, the heat pump thing is a 120 heat pumps. Right. It did not it did not cause that much decarbonization, but it was one of the things that was more reported on for the year.

So I'm I'm afraid that with the sea change, we're losing our way. And as a policymaker, it's my responsibility to respond to sea changes and make sure we're not losing our way. So I how do I also feel like we're doing a lot of planning and not a lot of actions, and we're getting years into this. Nobody's first talked about this, I don't know, six years ago when I we have not done much decarbonization. So I I don't want us to turn this, you know, our sustainability efforts into bean counting efforts.

I wanna actually do projects. And I'm afraid I'm just how are we going to do that? How are we gonna actually do impactful projects that decarbonize, or should we rethink our goals? So because I don't see us doing it all at this point.

It feels daunting. It feels

like we're not like, as a policymaker, it would not be responsible for me to say that we're going to do that and we're gonna do carbon offsets under this new atmosphere. I feel like it's I feel like somewhere down the road, somebody's gonna have to say that, and it might as well be me next.

Yep. I think I've mentioned at various times over the course of this project that this is sort of the the worst possible and maybe the best time to be trying to think through what our approach should be because the ground is shifting beneath us. But in some ways, I think that it's helping us to focus. So before, we had very clear decarbonization goals. You know, carbon neutrality by 2045, council adopted that before any of our team joined the city.

But, you know, we had marching orders to bring back to council a plan, an implementation plan for how we would achieve that. And then resiliency has always been this topic that, you know, followed decarbonization. There was earlier work on decarbonization, and resiliency has been slower to catch up. But, also, how do you set a goal for resiliency when our projections for what the future climate would look like are constantly changing. So it seems sort of like a very solid goal and then like an ill defined or inability to even set a goal, really.

I mean, we could set a sea level rise goal, but to to what temperature do we plan for and, you know, how how do we think about that? Now we see that that they're kind of actually coming to be more in line because there's more unpredictability. And it's caused us I mean, you you, I think, noticed in our presentation last month, a proposal that we bring forward, a five year road map, and that we really focus our attention on what we can do now. And I think the same holds true for resiliency. We know already that we're experiencing events, and there have been extreme storms and floods and power outages.

So what can we do now both for decarbonization to get us towards the long term goals? I might not be able to do the math to show you by what year we'll be able to reach carbon neutrality right now because there's so much volatility. And in the same way, I might not be able to tell you, well, by 2040, we need to be able to hit 20 extreme heat days. You know, that's our best guess as of now, but it won't move. So the idea of this five year plan or this five year road map is really what can we do now?

What sets us up to improve our resiliency to move us forward in our decarbonization planning? In the resiliency space, we think of it as a pathway. So, you know, we we would lay out sort of the actions that you would do and the order that you would do them in as an adaptation pathway. And when you hit certain milestones, you know, you're building floods certain number of times per year or you have a certain number of heat events, then you move to the next phase of implementing resiliency. It's like, I think I've mentioned it to one of you or both, some of you that it's kind of like just in time resiliency.

So we we lay out a pathway of, like, what our process would look like to enhance the resiliency of the community, and then we would build in resiliency as the climate changes. Same for decarbonization in some ways. It's it's a decarbonization pathway. So what we're proposing is we would build a climate pathway and focus on the next five years of that work, really. We would have these longer term goals, but decarbonization, we have that already set.

But I think our emphasis really should be in the near term, you know, what are, right now, the biggest opportunities that we see. You know, we've talked about legislative opportunities to work with other cities across the state. You know, are there ways that we can solve financing, you know, find opportunities to pay for this work? Financing. Right. And can we build out collaborations? Can we look at some of the other efforts that the city has underway to build more housing? You know, we have all these other priorities, more parks. Can they become resiliency features as well? Could we build more resilient housing?

Are there ways to cost effectively do that that are better for the long term? So we are. We don't we don't know. It's really hard for me to tell you what twenty years out looks like. Some at some points, I think we've had kind of higher levels of confidence about, like, okay. We have this pathway to decarbonization, and I could tell you, like, okay. By this year, we'll be here, then this year, we'll be here, and it just sort of a stepwise fashion. But the amount of swing that we've seen this year, I just can't have that that as much confidence. But what I can tell you is that in the next five years, you know, that if we focus on what to do

So for

both. You saying I don't know if so are you saying, as an answer to my question, that we might focus like, you did mention are you making are you proposing another alternative, or is this basically what you've recommended that you focus more on the five years?

Yeah. So our proposal would be for this climate strategy that is aiming at 2045. That was the goal year that we affirmed reaffirmed at the last CSC meeting, but that would emphasize this five year road map within it. And as of now, we have direction from the committee to have this emphasis on the five year decarbonization road map. And our proposal would be that we should also integrate resiliency thinking into that so that it would be a five year climate roadmap.

If I may too, miss Lee. I mean, part of for the resiliency aspect of it too, I mean, one pathway for a goal is we wanna mitigate some of those high vulnerabilities and see how low we get them, you know, if there's a guarantee. But that's another way to potentially look at, you know, how do we address resiliency, and are we doing anything about it?

So so your your answer to my question of how we're responding to the swings at the or the major changes at the federal and state level that are that, frankly, have gotten in the way of our decarbonization strategy is that we should you're saying we should more strongly plan for the next five years and then see what happens. There could be new new administrations. There could be new inventions Right. Etcetera. Because that's something I would my major fear is about doing so much planning for a future that we know so little about.

Right. And so I would prefer, if that's what you're saying, that is what I would prefer.

Yes. Exactly. I the 2045 goal is already adopted by council. We wouldn't be undoing that. But, basically, our first step in getting to 2045 is this year or, by extension, the next five years. You know? Like, we're going to get there one year at a time. And so what we're asking for is permission to really put most of our effort into the next five years, this road map.

Very good. I'm glad you've clarified that because what I didn't want was a stack of papers that said what we were gonna do over the next twenty years when we probably would not be doing the things many of those things because there would be too many changes.

Now with resiliency, you know, obviously, there would be this arc of, like, here's typically how we move down the pathway towards resiliency. And then the next five years, these are the things that we had immediately focus on based on the vulnerability assessment. You know, we've seen sort of the initial highest areas of vulnerability. And so, you know, our initial response would be to address the most vulnerable, the the most extreme vulnerabilities that we have identified within the community.

So we're also doing that within other departments, and there was some of this in the staff report. How are you addressing overlap between and overlap's a good thing. But, like, the one that stands out is that I mean, you mentioned some, but the one that stands out is that we're doing biodiversity planning and active transportation, which I think a big part of that is shade trees. And, you know, so and parks and rec where some residents are arguing for more green space and not so much, you know, astroturf and so forth. So how does what it seems like there's a huge overlap there.

How how does that work?

Yeah. I mean, I think up until now, it has been behind the scenes, building relationships across the departments. We've talked with the urban forestry manager and shared that we're doing this analysis. He asked to see the maps as soon as they're ready because it can be one of the guiding posts for the forestry program to to look at where we see heat already occurring and and see if there are tree planting opportunities within those areas. Their decision won't solely be made based on that, of course.

They have, you know are there available locations for trees within those parts of the city? Are there other constraints? But it can be more information for the departments. And so we've consulted with many of the departments in even just this initial work to understand the vulnerability, and we would certainly think about how to integrate resiliency, thinking, of mindset, and incorporating the information that we've uncovered into future projects across different topic areas. So we would meet with we've we've already met with Department of Housing staff, and we would continue to share information with their staff.

When I was in San Mateo County, we talked about, how to build more build more resilient housing because San Mateo County had a priority of building more housing, and it had a priority of addressing climate vulnerability. So we put out a whole toolkit about how to address both our housing goals and our resiliency goals as an organization. We worked with the Department of Housing to develop that. So we could look for strategies like that that help us achieve building more housing, which is, of course, a priority, and how to build more resiliency. You know, newer buildings have cooling more often. Yeah. So they they can actually be a source of resiliency.

I mean, I think this is getting into comms, but I think it's super important to not be we could be working against each other.

Right.

Like, asking for money when, frankly, the low income people in in our community that I talked to, they just want housing. They don't want resiliency kits. If that means that you're spending a lot of money on that and not on house. So and the same for cooling. People just want trees.

They want

structures all over the place. But and I think you could help by talking to the departments. You could work with them or against them. I mean, I just wanna make sure that you have that perspective. But now I'm going into comments. So are there other questions? Question. Okay. So then now now

we're at the the part where

people publicly speak. So are there any comments from the audience either in person? Yes? So

I'd like to try to answer your question. So I think the frustration you're feeling may stem from the fact that the question that your advisers, staff advisers, Cascadia isn't the right visionary question. So the right visionary question is, what has to happen to get us in 2045 or whatever the appropriate year is to the kind of greenhouse gas emissions and the kind of resiliency that we want to see? The visionary answer is perhaps a set of scenarios of how there are probably multiple ways to get there. All of them are hard, but you need to know what the possible 2045 realities are and then decide which one you wanna pursue in five year steps.

But if you don't have that vision of 2045, I doubt that you'll be able to get a twenty thirty, twenty thirty five, twenty forty set of steps to achieve it. One needs to begin with the end in mind. And so that's that's, I think, where your frustration comes from is that question has never been asked to my knowledge, and I've been in this room for fifteen years. I was in this room when the first twenty fifty goal of being 80% below 2005 was set. I was in the room when it was decided to have a 2045 goal.

I was here when we decided to do a 4.7% reduction every year. I mean, I've really tracked this all. And the challenge is in the role that you play, you don't have the support you need to answer these really challenging visionary questions. And so whatever you do with Cascadia or whatever consultancy you use in the future, I think it's really important to focus on getting them to answer that question. What does this world look like?

And just one quick example. Vulnerability to soft stories and two story old apartment buildings will kill a lot of people if an earthquake comes along. Climate change will kill a lot of people in a very different way. It won't all happen on the same day. It will happen over time. Can you pull these two things together? Can you save people both from building collapse and from heat and smoke? Maybe you can. That should be part of the visionary answer that you need to hear.

So I see no more members in the audience. Are there virtual members of the public who want to speak? Next, we have. Excuse me. You all know how to speak.

Yes. Good evening, sustainability committee members and city staff. I'm Hala Alshawani. I'm a longtime resident in Mountain View. I found the consultant presentation very interesting.

The three things that jumped out at me were very, nonintuitive and not expected where they showed those really hot and dangerous places in Mountain View. They they seem to to be in places that I would not have expected to see them, like the parks, Cuesta Park, Sullivan Park. I think there was one other park. And the reason it seems like the the root cause was mentioned in in the consultant report, they were either plastic turf or, lack of trees or the presence and or presence of, you know, concrete and cement. And then the one by the freeway, which was interesting too, the, diesel particulates and, you know, the greenhouse poll the polluted air, which also produces, of course, greenhouse gas emissions.

Those were really, really hot areas. And when I was looking at that and listening to that, I was thinking these could be mitigated, with policies that really should not be difficult to implement. And I know the biodiversity plan that the forestry folks are working on is definitely include some of these mitigations. So it's easy to to, you know, think of, well, plastic turf. Let's eliminate plastic turf.

Let's make it illegal to have plastic turf in Mountain View. I mean, that's that's a very attainable solution to to lowering the the, you you know, know, the danger in those parks and the schools that we saw. Increasing the the the number of green trees of, you know, green canopy. I mean, that's another thing that I know the biodiversity plan has the draft that I've seen have definitely encouraged that and and have some good suggestions about, how and where to do that. That that should be attainable.

And then keeping any green barrier that we have by the freeway. That's that's something that we should really incorporate in our, you know, protection of of trees and and green canopy. So you have these low hanging fruit solutions that are already some of them being discussed in other departments. So definitely collaborating and pushing really for them as solutions, as goals to attain very soon, sooner rather than later, I think it would could make, you know, some positive impact. Thank you.

Do we have any other members of the public virtually?

No other raised hands. Okay.

So we're back to the committee for, we'll close oral communications, and we'll, it's time for committee discussion and a possible motion. Do people wanna start discussion? Yes.

Well, go ahead. Okay. Yeah. I I was really stuck when I read this that there there aren't as many things that we have to as many broad subjects that we have to work on resilience as we might have thought. I mean, basically, we found out that cooling is a big problem. Right? Extreme heat days, we found that localized flooding can be or actually, I'm gonna talk about that. I think localized flooding can be a big deal. And air pollution from from fires is a big deal. So then I think that's that's just three things.

We've already managed sea level rise, or we're working on sea level rise. So we have four topics. That's not we shouldn't I mean, we've identified them. That's good. Then I think the other thing that we have to do based on, you know, what the JR was talking about, what you were talking about, what we all know is that we we can't count on the federal government to help us out of along these lines like we like we thought we could three or four years ago.

The the the IRA and the BIL are are pretty much defunct. And so we need to look at what is within our kin. What can we do? And that is a very major you know, that's a of a major paradigm shift in a sense. But it's one that I think is very necessary, and it's what you were talking about, I think, with focus.

So I think that that's what we really need to worry about is what can we do. And and the other thing is what can we do not even five years down the road. What can we do next year? You know, I I I don't really think oh, I mean, some of these things obviously will take longer, but some of them we could start very, very soon. And or we could just identify that they're part of our cooling process.

For instance, the heat pump thing. I mean, we all talk about heat pumps as if it's just about decarbonization, but it's not. Because in a large part of the community, which was, you know, there was that interesting chart about when all the housing was built. Pretty much stuff that was built in, before the seventies didn't have any air conditioning. That's a lot of our a lot of our housing stock. Certainly, the area I live in, I mean, everybody had to put it in. It didn't come with it. And and so so, upgrading to a heat pump has does that. And I think we need to recognize that that's another reason why we wanna do that. Then then another thing I wanna talk about is localized flooding.

And there's basically two kinds of flooding that people typically talk about. There's riverine and coastal flooding. That's the kind of flooding that occurs when water that's supposed to be in a stream or a bay gets out of it. And that's the kind of flooding that somebody like San Clair Valley Water District deals with or the Corps of Engineers deals with. That's not what the city of Mountain View deals with.

The kind of flooding we deal with is the kind of flooding that happens when the water doesn't get into the creek properly. In other words, our storm water system isn't adequate. Storm or or we have too much paving, or we don't have enough stuff to absorb it. All of those things contribute to it. But stormwater systems are traditionally designed to handle a ten year flood.

Yeah. That's it. And with this intensification of rainfall, we're gonna have a lot of little bursts that function like more than ten year storms, but they're very, very localized. Now the way we handle those now, we do we we have identified, in our community what we call hot spots. And they are areas where, you know, we know a storm water storm drain doesn't work well or there's a low spot in a road or, you know, I mean, or just or there's likely to be more brush.

There's a lot of reasons that you have them, but but they're not new. Our public works department knows what they are, and so does the water District. They're mapped. We don't have them on a map in here. That is a major flaw of this.

We need to add the hotspots. They are, identified as part of the community rating system, so we there is maps for those. And, we need to concentrate on that because when when, I mean, it's true that we could have, you know, some, biblical flood that would, you know, wipe out houses, etcetera, etcetera. And we we may very well have that someday. And that's what all the planning for the hundred year floodplain and the five hundred year floodplain.

It it's very, very when it happens, it's awful. But every year every year, we have localized flooding. And, and the thing that's so important about this is if you have localized flooding on 101, well, what does that do? That means that everybody that's on 101 right there has to be diverted off of 101, and they and they have to go somewhere else. Or say on El Camino.

There's a number of places on El Camino. We have localized flooding. It's a big problem. So we get on it fast, but I think that's something we're responsible for and we can work on. And it's in our capital improvement project to work on our stormwater system.

So to me, that is the biggest hole in this vulnerability evaluation that that I see. And I it's not something we can't plug. We can, but it hasn't been plugged, and I think it it needs to be added into this. And then and then the other thing I talked about a little when the question was it really a comment? About about the collaboration.

I I really do think that, you know, along the lines of this looking inward, you know, what we can do collaboratively with Silicon Valley Clean Energy, community services, that sort of stuff, I mean, that that's really powerful, and that's what we should work on. And, again, I don't think it's necessarily stuff we should be doing in five years. I think it's just stuff we should be either ratcheting up or doing next year or the year after. I mean, I really I I don't see why we have to wait. And and then another thing I thought was interesting.

You know, I've I've I've been a you know, as a hydrologist, I worry about weather, etcetera. I've always done that. I was really surprised to find out that they're claiming the average humidity in Mountain View is 70 you know, because can be 75%. I watch the humidity at my house on a regular basis. It's almost never that high.

And so I wonder if this is something that varies throughout the community, and it would be interesting to know that. And because 75 is yeah. It's pretty high. And I I mean, a lot of times, I know when I look at the humidity, it's it's in the 30 or 40 range. So or maybe maybe we have our meter in the wrong place.

Anyway but I would be interested is if this if is this a you know, is this a but I did I did Google it, and the AI says said exactly what Cascadia said. So, certainly, somewhere, it's, you know, it's it's 75%. That's that that's a lot. And and then another thing that, I wondered about is that that we didn't talk about in here that, is power outages. It was mentioned a little bit, but it wasn't talked about too extensively.

And, I'm sort of curious about is that because we've, we feel like we don't have control over that? Is that because it's not, it hasn't been if if when you look at it statistically, maybe it hasn't been that big an issue here. I mean, I I, I just felt like I wasn't sure that that was handled well. And I I I it just you know, I I just wondered about it because I've certainly had friends that live, for instance, in the Santa Cruz Mountains that have had their power cut off for, like, two weeks at a time. And that is just you know, that is is just devastating.

But in our area, unless there's some damage to a part of the power grid, things typically go off for a couple hours at a time. That's that's people had it were off it

was a major complaint last year. People had them on for a couple days over and over again. Okay. Well, then, anyway

so I

wonder mine never.

Yeah. I wonder about that if the power outage thing is because, you know, as we move forward, we're all getting more electricity. Yeah. We're oriented. And and, again, one of the things that we could maybe not make in super big inroads in, but we could certainly set the course for is making sure that, there's more we could be looking into microgrids or we particularly for our, you know, critical facilities.

And, also, we could put be putting more emphasis in our community and with SVCE on on getting batteries so that there's so those were some things I kinda wondered about as as vulnerabilities as a power thing and and the the localized flooding. And then but but, generally, I feel like the the recommendation is is reasonable. I just really wanna jump to the actions real fast. I don't feel like we have to have I don't think feel like we need we don't wanna get into the, the perfect is the enemy of the good thing. You know?

I think that, it's perfectly acceptable for us to because we're at this on a regular basis, it's perfectly acceptable for us to try a program, get it started, and find out that, oh, this part of it doesn't work. And then we go back and we we just fix it. We don't need to set these programs in stone and just let them keep, you know, running and running and running if we know that there are parts of them that aren't working properly. So so I I'm much more for let's jumping in and get some of these things done. And, also, I was fascinated by that heat map.

And I would really like a better explanation of what some ground truthing of what is on the ground at those sites, and is there a commonality? Because, I mean, is it artificial turf? Are we finding that that's that's really, you know, a huge contributor to to heat to to heat islands here? Well, that's really interesting information. And we we could take action on that that, you know, has more than just heat implications.

So I I I would really hope that round truth what I guess that goes to question. I'd say, what what would is ground truthing that you expect to do in the next phase?

Oh, I was wondering if miss Fujikawa could speak to what ground truthing looks like. But, you know, we would meet with organizations that are directly serving the community. So for example, the day worker centers. They have workers who throughout the year are trying to go out and do outdoor type work. You know, are they experiencing loss in wages or, heat impacts, things like that?

Same with the community services agency. They're going door to door with working with people who live in their vehicles. You know, are they experiencing some of the vulnerabilities that we see typically arise when we have extreme heat events? And then it can be more detailed looking at the localized flooding, the stormwater issues

or anything.

What you would get, I think, with these listening sessions. Yes. That's but but ground truthing I mean, usually, truthing is somebody goes out and looks and says, okay. What's in

all sites?

Yeah. What's in all those sites? And and and, certainly, our our it doesn't have to it can be somebody separate, but it could it could very well to be done with our, you know, with our our parks department, really, So, like, the

sustainability staff could This is planner. You just drive to every site. Guys can

go out on satellite view. Yeah. Yeah. You can That's what I was doing.

Yeah. You can look at satellite views. Go You out on your bicycles. I mean, there's so many different ways, but but, I mean, it's just going out there and saying, what's really there? Right. I think that that especially on that heat map, we Yeah.

Because certainly before recommending resiliency strategies. Right? Like, we would want to go to the hotspots that we see and see what the conditions are on the ground, if there are any differences from what the satellite imagery reveals, if there's just more information. You know, we've we've on a previous sea level rise vulnerability assessment, we did this very detailed mapping of the flooding. But, you know, like, there's an underpass that was just not caught on the map, and so, like, water just goes right through.

Right. Right.

Right. And so you have to go there on the ground and see things like that. You know, people were like, well, floods there. It's like, well, it shouldn't. You know, the map doesn't really say it should until you understand that there's little channels, ways that the water can move. So I don't know. Miss Fujikawa, did you have anything to add to that?

I think, Nesli, you covered covered it well. I think the maps are a really great tool to use, especially the heat maps to kinda check that hot spot to see if, like, are those areas lacking shade, trees? And I think also, like, visiting a lot of those mobile home parks that are in within those high heat or flood risk and being able to kind of do some of that ground truthing there. So I think for for that, it could look a variety of different ways. And even with community engagement, we've oftentimes brought a lot of these heat and flood maps to these listening sessions to help them do some of that ground truthing to say, like, you know, this is these are areas where we do experience localized flooding that's not here on the map.

So I think that's a really critical part of the the CVA that I feel like was a little bit limited in terms of the the initial ground truthing, but we're hoping to to do some more of that, if we were to move towards a resilient strategy.

So if we do you mind if I just say I usually speak last, but I'm

since I was gonna make a motion, so you can go ahead and say whatever

you want.

So in order to support that's why I wanted to speak. In order to support emotion, I'm feeling like I need a little tightening up. I'm basically supportive of doing a five year plan that includes both, but I feel like we also have the the goals to get to 2045 and that I I feel like like the way it's presented in the staff recommendation. I don't know how much vulnerability you're gonna do and how much decarbonization. I don't really know what I'm what I'm endorsing here.

And I feel like if we don't you know, we keep marching towards it's been I've been on council for over five years. We're talking about another five years. So ten years towards the 2045, and I don't have, maybe this is part of what Bruce was saying, I don't really know what our plan is to get there or if we have one. And I'm not comfortable with that. So I'm not gonna be able to and now we're throwing vulnerability in with it.

And there were many, many things said in terms of vulnerability. I don't know if we're gonna take on mental health and health, which honestly, don't think is something the city should do. I, you know, I don't really know what I'm endorsing, and I need it to be a little more defined than the way it is in this. I'm and I'm feeling that I'm fine with addressing vulnerability, but I think a lot of them in terms of the hotspots are very overlapping with other projects we're doing, which is good Mhmm. With other projects we're doing and things that residents really want.

We're having a lot of problems, for example, with parks in that we can't assess the fees. We're as we densify, we should produce be producing more parks, but we we can't we can no longer assess the fees we used to on developments. So we that's that's a problem. That's gonna come up. We're gonna have to address it. It's gonna come up with our revenue measure. I don't know, and residents are gonna be very opinionated about it. When we endorse this tonight, I don't know. Are we saying we're gonna put other things in a revenue measure that that what are they? Are they mental health things?

I don't know where we're going with this, and I need it a little more defined or I'm not gonna be able to vote for it. It's just too it's too I'm saying the same thing over and over again. It's too loose. We have a definite goal, and we have no we haven't spelled out how we're getting there. Now we're adding vulnerability in, so we're doing more projects, and I don't know how many of them are decarbonization projects. And we've lost a lot of the ones we can do because of the state and local the state and federal changes. So I need things more defined, maybe other community members. Figure out how to define it more.

Chair, if I if I may, I think one way to think of this is that permission to pursue developing a plan would bring more clarity as to kind of what we were actually proposing. And we would bring it back to this committee and, of course, counsel ultimately. So this is really a contract amendment to enable us to move forward into developing like, actually fleshing out what the next steps might look like. And then we would come back to the committee with an actual proposal of, like, here's what we would think the next five years look like. And at that point, I could answer, like, is this a resiliency thing?

Is it a decarbonization thing? I mean, I'm hoping to shift the way we talk about it to being that this is our climate work. But still, we can talk about how things address vulnerabilities more within our vulnerability assessment or they address our carbon neutrality goal. But the this this contract amendment that would go to council, of course, and we could certainly refine it before it goes to council, would then allow us to put some more structure to it. Right?

Like, all we have is really the concept, and then we're asking for permission to build it out. So that then you could say, yes. This is a plan that the council, the committee, and then ultimately, I would hope the council could feel comfortable adopting. But, you know, we're asking for permission to be able to answer that question, I guess, is

So I guess what I'm saying is that if we if within that answer, we don't have so between now and if we are focusing primarily on the next five years, between now and '24 '85, we're 25% of the way there. If we don't have even if the decarbonization projects don't foresee even solving 25% of that, then when it's presented to me, I'm not gonna be able to support it. We can't put that off anymore. We either have to say we're not making it, and we're not doing carbon offsets because the atmosphere has changed on a federal level, and we just can't do it. Or we have to get 25% of the way there because otherwise we're making bad policy.

And we're putting future councils in. Well, they'll probably just say past councils made bad policy, but I don't feel like being the council who didn't think about what they should have been thinking about.

I think earlier this year, I sir I would have been able to say fairly confidently that we can get 25% of the way there in the next five years.

I wanna know. Do you think we can or can't? I mean, sure. Maybe I'll vote for it tonight. But when I see that, I want some thought into we can't have a twenty forty five goal and no goalpost between now and then. I'm just not gonna support that.

Yeah. I mean, I think right now, the math doesn't add up to us getting to carbon neutrality absent offsets by 2045. But, you know, in two weeks' time, I'm meeting with cities from across the state. We're doing a daylong retreat with the local, climate policy alliance gathering of cities to talk about our legislative priorities for the fall session around electricity affordability. Maybe we can talk about direct access and, like, changing all the ways we supply electricity to our communities.

There's room to make big progress at the state level even beyond our borders, which is even better as far as I'm concerned. If we could get 10% of the way there but have that statewide

Mhmm.

That would actually enhance our outlook for the vulnerability side of the house. You know? Like, we're just going to be reducing emissions overall much more. So I think that things may evolve. You know, we we may have a north star of a goal for carbon neutrality, but we may be looking at the whole system.

You know, member Showalter talked about flooding, and we think about flooding at the local level. We've convened elected officials from across Santa Clara County to talk about flooding as it crosses our jurisdictions. We've been working, with the Climate Collaborative. Then there's Bay Can, which is the whole Bay Area, looking at the same issue of flooding, and we have to be able to move from all of these different levels. It might not be that we hit a specific goal, like, at our own city level, but we get farther at the regional level, at the countywide level.

I think maybe there's a way for us to move from very specific goals, like focusing only on the goals, and thinking about moving more towards thinking about the whole ecosystem and where can we make the most change in a given moment?

Well, that's really and that, I think, is what council member Schirwalter was saying. I want more action now. I want less paperwork and more action now. So whatever this can do to to do that, that, know, that's what I would like. I would also like more collaboration with other departments that are which you've been doing.

But I think there's certain traditional ways that parks have been planned in includes a lot of grayscaping and recreational facilities that now have rubberized surfaces and and, you know, the plastic grass, plastic turf. And I think they may have impacts on the wider community, and I think our our community, particularly in the Cuesta Park area, have been speaking up. I don't think they want that, but I think that's the traditional way of planning suburban parks. I think that's what our consultant has pushed. He hasn't pushed trees.

He's pushed shade structures, and people are livid about that. I think your engagement sustainability staff's engagement with that department could be very helpful. But I think if you go off and do things that are other projects that are resiliency projects that are not engaged with them, then it could be not very helpful.

Yeah. It might feel, in the shorter term, more effective because we we might appear to be going faster. But if we're working at cross purposes over time, it doesn't work.

Yes. Go.

I guess I just viewed all this very differently. I I guess what what I just tell me if I interpreted all this incorrectly. I viewed this report as a preview of a a broader and more comprehensive, report instead of plans and a request to amend the contract to basically integrate everything so that, yes, we're spending more time, maybe a few extra months getting everything together. But once that is all together with all the actions and everything identified, we'll be in a much better place to move more quickly than we would have been had we done those things separately. And in the meantime, we're doing all the other things.

Like, this isn't just because we're doing this and studying it doesn't mean that all the other things are going on. Chief. Those are

I just moved.

Those are those are all still happening.

The chief sustainability officer. There's a piece of the picture that you're missing. What is that? Which is that when you were not yet on this committee and when Margaret was on, we had a meeting where we cut down the number of we cut down there was a discussion around doing a lot of paperwork and not a lot of implementing a lot of projects. And so we kinda put the resiliency we we said do the vulnerability report, but maybe we won't. I don't know how we could do a deep dive into it because we want what Pat just said. We wanna see action. We're doing a lot of planning and no action. So or little action. So that's a piece.

And then on top of that, we have what what happened at the federal and state level so that making it even harder to take decarbonization action. So I think that's some of where I'm coming from. That

makes sense. I guess what I'm saying is doing this does not take away from all of the short term actions in the CIP and all the other plans that are going on that that are already in progress. So I don't I don't I don't view I don't I don't view moving forward with this as Mhmm. Somehow not allowing us to move quickly on all the other things by that side. Which are coming up in I only allotted two hours for this semester. I am one, but that's why. So that's what the accountant said, but that's okay. What? Sorry. Went over my head.

Yes. No. I I just I was trying to move this along since we're still on item one, and our two hour window of this committee meeting is expired. Oh. But but I I will I'm happy to move this staff recommendation because I think it makes sense if there are friendly amendments or other things that you would like to attach to it. That's fine too. Mhmm. Just to kind of get things moving. But if we're if you're overall uncomfortable with this and you'd rather do separate plans, then I'm happy to hear that.

I mean, I'm a little uncomfortable with it. And I've said and the other thing I should say is I, you know, I appreciate having some back and forth because this group discusses important things, and we have no ability to have a group. Right. So this is essentially kind of our discussion place. Yeah. So I feel a little bit differently about this than I do about council meetings where if it were this important to me,

I would pick two other people and

go off and discuss it for several hours. So, yeah, I was hoping we could come up with some quick tweaks that would make sure that we emphasized emphasized what what Pat said, you know, actually doing. I don't know what you mean about the decarbonization projects that are in the CIP. I don't know.

I mean, the next item is decarbonization road map with many, many

Oh. Things to

Okay. I

don't think those are the or the and then there's all the other

kind of I mean, we're I

just You mean, like, the active transportation plan or something?

That and the urban forestry plan and Oh, that's the other things that are going down.

Okay. Other projects. Yeah. I don't think of them as in the CIP. A lot of projects we have. Yes.

Yeah. The the the recycled water plants.

You know? So, Pat, you said getting things done. Do you have any Yeah.

I I guess I would, you know, I would you know, your motion. You're making a motion. I'm gonna just

Or you can make the motion. I haven't made a motion. So feel free to points.

Yeah. Mean, I guess for me, the motion is I think it's really important that that the for sure that the heat map be ground truthed extensively, and that sort of because because it seems like so that's one thing. Because it seems like the extreme heat and the wildfire smoke are are really impacted by that. And and then we want to get to actions. The the goal should be to get to actions that can be administered or at least begun in in the in the next year or two.

And that would be decarbonization actions? No. Resilience actions. Oh, well, I want I will not vote for it unless it's decarbonization.

Well, they should be both. I mean, to me

Well, I

don't wanna just name vulnerability

Okay.

And not decarbonization.

Well, I mean, the decarbonization actions that we have, the long term going forward, are we have the amended reach code, which require We did that already. We did that already, but it's it's important. We have what additional decarbonization actions are you talking about?

Last week, we sent a letter to the air district to encourage them to continue moving forward with implementation of their appliance rule. So the heat pump barometer program is meant to accelerate the transition to electric appliances. We will be presenting later this evening about the EV charging for multifamily properties, which is hopefully helping to build out enough infrastructure to allow residents and multifamily to switch their transportation to decarbonize the transportation. We have our general outreach programs, have been focused around partnering with SVCE and promoting the rebate opportunities, looking at legislative opportunities, working with the climate collaborative on regional grant applications. We have three solar projects that are underway, one at each of the two gymnasiums at our middle schools and then at the senior center, and we're vetting an additional three solar projects.

We have the fleet electrification plan that was or policy, excuse me, that was adopted by council in June, and we've been working with departments to move forward and bring, EV charging for our fleet so that we can transition that to be all electric. And then we continue to look for decarbonization within our own city facilities. So as, heating systems fail, we're we're replacing them with electric. We early moved our landscaping we're moving our landscaping tools to be all electric as well. I think the city just announced its first park that is going to be serviced with all electric landscaping equipment, and we've been bringing additional infrastructure to help with having charging capacity.

I just approved an invoice today to cover out of the sustainability action plan, charging infrastructure for some of our landscaping equipment so that CSD can service our parks with all electric tools, you know, eventually. You know, we're transitioning as vehicles reach their end of life or not vehicles, Google. There's like a ride on mower, but equipment and landscaping equipment. I mean, that's that's some of our decarbonization work.

I think what I I think what I need is that this plan, the five year plan, either has a plan, includes a plan, and says it's an attempt to even it. An an attempt to get to '25, it's under the way there because we have or saying that we don't we can't. And if we can't, we have to reconsider the 2045 because we can't you know, I mean, when I started, we're we will be, since I started this, two fifths of the way there. And if we haven't gotten even 5%, then we're not making it, and we have to say that. So I want some re since we have a reality check at the end, I need some goalposts.

So you need some quantification.

For the decarbonization, not for the resiliency. I need some goalposts for the decarbonization. And they can you we cannot meet them in five years. That's fine. But or you can tell me there's no way we can do it, you know, or we're only gonna get 5% of the way there. Anything. But I need some I I need something to say that we're doing because the charging stations, it it's like a there are two different levels you can do them at. It's a 150 charging stations. Home charge that's hardly any. So if that's our plan for getting to carbon neutral at 2045, we should just say right now we're not doing it.

These are little tiny steps, and I wanted to acknowledge. It's fine if we're taking little tiny steps forward because the rest of the country is taking big steps backward. So it's fine, but I wanna be honest about it. I wanna know it. I don't want it to be obscure and then later pretend I didn't know what's happening because I do know what's happening.

I and I think

Basically, I was just gonna say, I'm remembering the materials from the last meeting where the the local strategies were were listed and estimates were given around the carbon reduction potential with those strategies. And then at various points, we've compared that to what would have been the carbon reduction potential had some of the the other, you know, strategies at the the larger level than the local other well, the state level and the federal level. And I I'm recalling that it is in the, you know, less than 5%. So what we have identified so far as things that we can do locally, save offsets, you know, other than offsets are not gonna get us to 25% of the reduction in five years. What I've also heard miss Lee say is that there are a lot of people who are as bothered by this as as we are and having these kinds of hard conversations also to see what some of those bigger vision, bigger possibility items could be, but they're they're not yet developed.

We don't yet know what they are and what their reduction potential would be. And I'm just wondering is that a fair

Yeah. I think the final thing I mean, the inflation reduction act went away in July, so it's very recent. Much of this change is significant and recent. It's not even been six months. The EV incentives within the IRA only expired in October, So we don't have a plan yet. But I will say, in some ways, it's it's not that we can't get to zero, but at what price, I think, also, as part of the question. Absolutely. We could certainly just electrify every home in the community, but it's hard for us as staff to bring forward recommendation. And we could get us to zero. Like, I could get us to zero.

We could get there through offsets. We could get there through subsidizing an electric vehicle for every household or paying the cost to electrify every household. You know, those are ways that get us to zero. So mathematically, maybe I misspoke when I said that I can't see a pathway to it math mathematically, but it's hard as staff to bring forward a recommendation like that. We have put our hat in the ring to participate in PG and E's pilot for neighborhood scale decarbonization where the utility would pay the cost as opposed to investing in their natural gas upgrades, but we have to be selected.

You know, we've we've raised our hand to participate, but, you know, there are ways to get to zero. But if we do it all on our own, if we just say that the federal government has taken away this you know, quite a bit of our emission reduction potential, it would be extremely costly. You know, we we did sort of back of the envelope, and I think it was something like $750,000,000 to electrify just the homes because, you know, PG and E says $50,000 per home to electrify it. And, of course, that will vary grossly. But if we wanted to just think in very broad numbers or, you know, it's now without the inflation reduction act, maybe it's 15 or $20,020,000 more per vehicle.

So so we could bring forward strategies like that, but it would swamp even our revenue measure. Not all of those things would even be allowed as things to fund through our revenue measure. We'd have to identify different ways, different revenue streams. So what we've been trying to do is think through where can we apply pressure in the system to help things move more quickly or to help them align better so that we can be as efficient as possible with the resources that the city has, which are admittedly limited. Every city, no matter, how affluent of course, we still have limited resources and many priorities.

So how do we align our priorities so that we're trying to meet our housing priorities, our green spaces priorities, and our climate priorities, being as efficient as possible with our resources. We could bring forward a plan that could get us to 25% reduction in the next five years, but it it would be extremely difficult to

pay for it. So I would just like since we have since we have a goal that's twenty years out, I need some accounting for whether we think we're making it or not. And I'm not well, now I'm repeating this. Because I I think that if we're not making it, we need to say we're not making it early. We need to be honest about it. We could

certainly share the results of our wedge. I mean, we're not done with the wedge analysis. That was only half of the local measures. We can try to project out additional things, even things that are more costly, and share with the full council Right. The results of that. I think that's what we Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.

I don't I don't disagree with that at all. Okay. I think I'm just I'm just from a strategic level, I'm trying to think, okay. We started with a goal of 2045. The world changed around us. We can only do so many things right now.

Right.

And one of the things there are low hanging fruit and things that we can absolutely do that we're already working on, and that probably some things that we'll identify through this. But the other thing that you go the other thing that I think you do strategically when you're in a position where you can't move forward like you wanna do is you you take a step back and you put the plan in place or do the analysis that you need. So you there's a goalpost, but you also need to know where you're currently starting from and have a strategy of how to get from here to there both under the current world. And then if the world changes again, we don't have to go back and redo this. We've got a whole set of things that we can very quickly start to implement on a timeline.

That's why I think it's I'd much rather we take this extra few months while we're in a not great position to put ourselves into a really good position for a world where, hopefully and I'm not sure it will, but, hopefully, we'll be in a better scenario in two, three years.

And I would just like to add to that. The sustainability task force that met in 2016 or '17, they're did put together, a list of actions and decarbonization, that went along with those actions. But but they didn't talk about vulnerability. Say, it was all about it was all about re reducing GHGs. I think

they did say we should do a vulnerability assessment.

And they did say we should, and this is where we are. And to me, I look at vulnerability as medic is is not is adaptation. We're not mitigating, climate change with these actions. We're adapting to it. And I think as local leaders, it's our job to identify what are the adaptation mechanisms and things that, as I said before, are within our, you know, within our ability to do.

What what are the things we can do that will make, our us all more comfortable as we face this new reality? And, you know, a big one, I've pushed a lot has sea level rise, and and I'm very glad we're making really good progress on that. But I think what this this shows is that there are some others that are you know, need to go come, and they can't mobilize. And, like like, you know, like the heat centers. One of the things that the cooling centers.

One of the things they brought up that's really, obvious, but we haven't done, And until somebody tells you you need to do it, you know, if it's obvious, is we we're gonna extend the hours. You know? So we have to we're gonna have to put together a plan for, okay, how can we keep the library open till 10:00? But it's just it's not it's not rocket science. We can do it. But so I I just think that's where we are with this plan. So we're talking about those those adaptations.

Okay. So you added something regarding you made the motion. You added something regarding the heat map. Heat map. And we're adding something regarding quantification. Do you have of some guess at guessed some quantification of how much decarbonization we'll be able to do, which may be a shifting, you know, shifting policy landscape, but some Yeah.

Configuration and decarbonization expectations. Okay. That's a

good phrase. And then the other thing I would like is to maximize overlap with our existing projects because I would prefer that we do a job that the job we do with Parks and Recs and the ATP and urban forestry and so forth, be informed by the work that you're doing because I think that would be very helpful.

Absolutely. And then I believe member Showalter also mentioned adding more additional information about localized flooding.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I I I think we need to add a map about localized flooding and and hot spots and how we deal with that.

So will you accept the the overlap with our or

Yes. You phrased it better

than me. With existing programs?

That. Okay.

Okay. So is that clear?

Okay. Alright.

Alright. Okay. Now you can take a

vote. Chair Hicks?

Yes.

Member Shalter? Yes. Member Clark? Yes.

Okay. Now we move on to five two, which is local actions under consideration for the decarbonization roadmap. And this item will be presented by sustainability manager Rebecca Lucky.

Thank you, chair Hicks, and good evening to the members of the Council Sustainability Committee and the public. I'm here to provide an update on our decarbonization road map initiative. I don't have a formal presentation tonight as I wanna keep this item brief given the number of agenda items, before you tonight. However, we are gonna display attachment four from a staff report as a point of reference. So last month, we presented an initial list of local actions under consideration for the five year decarbonization roadmap.

And the committee provided feedback, and we committed to returning today to kinda show you how we incorporated that input. At the November meeting, the committee identified several guiding principles for our road map. One was the emphasis on substantial emission reduction actions. Oh, yeah. The table. It's scroll down to attachment four.

Oh, sorry. Okay.

So one of them was emphasis on substantial emissions, emission reduction actions, review the plan regularly every three to five years. And as things change beyond our our city of Mountain View borders. Collaboration with Silicon Valley Clean Energy or other partners is crucial. So that's another guiding principle that we took away from our meeting last month and identifying cost saving actions as a priority and enhancing community education and outreach efforts. Additionally, the committee wanted to include specific actions, and those have been incorporated in this updated list. They're shown in bold, italicized.

One

was explore the integration of autonomous vehicles, particularly minibuses into transportation, into Mountain View's transportation systems. So this measure has been incorporated into the expand and electrified Mountain View shuttle services. Another was to include, groups to support outreach and education and all actions that involve these efforts. And so we've we've included it anywhere in the table where we talk about outreach and marketing and and education. And another recommendation was to provide education on Mountain View's bicycle infrastructure.

So we've included that as as part of the action under explore accelerated implementation of the active transportation plan. And then for buildings, two new actions have been added as a result of last month's meeting, which is enhanced permit streamlining streamlining for emission reduction activities, occurring in construction, and explore integrating emission reduction actions into other city policy and programs. I just wanna emphasize that the what was presented in November was a very early draft of our initial action list, and we're considering more ideas such as reach codes for commercial buildings and programs that support multifamily building electrification. And as miss Lee mentioned, the last item, the PG and E neighborhood decarbonization program. And as we progress in identifying these local actions, some of the actions you see tonight may be removed and others may be added, allowing us to determine which the which best areas are to focus on over the next five years to meet our 2045 decarbonization goals.

And we'll, of course, return to the council sustainability committee throughout the next year as we develop the five year road map. And we appreciate your ideas as well as any members from the public. Over the next few months, you could feel free to reach out to me or Danielle and with any suggestions that you have. And with that, I'll return moving back over to Chair Hicks. Thank you.

Alright. So now it's time to ask any committee questions.

Just a comment for later. Okay. Any questions?

So my only question is about the structure of this. So we I assume we can just say yes to all of them, and then you evaluate not that you actually go out and do all of them. Right. You evaluate which ones are the best next steps to take, I assume. Are there comments from members of the public in person? Indeed.

Believe all of you received two documents from me. One was a presentation I gave on carbon free Mountain View a week and a half ago, essentially sharing my concerns about the Cascadia report. And then, also, there was an email about the dirty direct access energy that produces a very substantial amount of greenhouse gas emissions in Mountain View. It has for decades. One of the core recommendations of the twenty seventeen task force was to find a way to make that electricity zero carbon, like Silicon Valley Clean energy was at that time and like PG and E is now.

The approach that was recommended back in 2017, 2018 was essentially to seek voluntary commitments from companies or entities that use direct access energy to choose a zero carbon direct access supplier. And if they didn't do that, to change the business licensing fee so that they would pay more for business licensing than they were saving by using dirty energy. This to me seems not as bold as ending the flow of pipe natural gas by 2045. But between those two ideas, neither of which cost the city any money, and in fact, the first idea could make the city money, I think you would solve that twenty five percent in five years. And I'm very disappointed that the carbon neutral end of flow by 2045 was taken off the list of recommended items to study.

I think it should go back on. In addition, I think that putting solar thermal hot water heaters on apartment buildings to preheat the water that goes into their boilers could be a very effective thing in our lovely solar climate as as the country as the as our environment warms. And I'm also disappointed that the recommendation around time of sale, which was briefly discussed but not really put forward in a positive way, that they're blinking off the list. I don't know whether this is gonna be would be a big deal. Berkeley won't be implementing it for another month, but I have a feeling that it should be modeled because it is modelable.

Many of the suggestions for, you know, what is what is the term in table for, things we should do or we should be considering doing are not modelable. Simply, there's no numbers to associated with them. Cascadia didn't show their assumptions except for population where I think they got the assumption wrong, And it's really hard for me to say that this is the kind of analysis that you should be paying a third of $1,000,000 for, when they don't even show their assumptions. If this were a college class proposal and I were a professor, I would flunk them. So that's my thoughts.

Okay. Are there any are there any virtual

speakers?

Yes, Mary.

Mary, are you there? Yes. Just waiting for the unmute symbol. I wanted to also echo the comment about considering a a time of sale requirements for putting money aside as they do in Berkeley to help future owners electrify. Parts of the Bay Area have much more complicated time of sale requirements as regards sewage.

So inspections are required and actual improvements, I believe, are required to be made at time of sale in certain of the counties that have apparently really poor water quality. So that that is a pretty complicated thing to make happen. I'm assuming this is still in place. It was is there, I don't know, five years ago when I was looking into this. So requiring people to put money aside in an escrow account for electrification at time of sale.

I realize we're concerned about increasing the cost of housing, but it's a pretty it would be a relatively small number, think, I've seen at Berkeley anyway, that they're being asked to to set aside to help future owners with. So I I feel pretty strongly that this is a a useful thing to keep an eye on in Berkeley and to start discussing and considering. Thank you.

Thank you. Is there anyone else online? No one else.

Okay. Sure. May I clarify both the point of sale and the end of flow of natural gas were contained within attachment four. Our apologies if we scrolled through it too quickly during the presentation, but it is both are still within the staff report.

Yes. Actually, I have a question regarding that. Is it now that several members of the public have brought it up, there's a list of 10 things above the table. Are those included in the table or not?

Don't know. I

I'm being clear on why I'm asking.

Yeah. Page two.

On page two. Yeah.

Right. Is that report? Mhmm. Yeah. Are those included in the

The the

preliminary list that we showed at the last meeting, we had discussion. And I think in rather than trying to track all of the changes in real time, we committed to coming back to the committee to inventory to make sure that we captured all your additional feedback. We didn't remove anything from the list, but those items are the things that were incorporated into the list, to this expanded list. So the

So the 10 items are now put into the table Yes. Colored table.

The first five are guiding principles that we took away from the meeting. Okay. And then six through 10 are things that have been actually incorporated into the Okay.

So they're all included in some way either as guiding principles or incorporated into the table. Thank you for that clarification because I think

Maybe it was an additive activity, not a

If you go to track the building table in the blue Okay. Next. I oh, sorry. Stop. Go up again. For example, there was a recommendation to include groups in outreach and marketing, so where it's bolded and italicized.

I see. So we added

you know, that wasn't there before.

So those are the comments that were made during the meeting, and then you show us how you incorporated Right. The specific ones, but not the overall guiding principle.

And if you go down to building the first page, if it still have Yeah. Explore time itself. Mhmm. But then it was you know, there was some feedback to consider establishing a regional partnership for that instead of the city just doing it on its own.

And adopt a goal for end of flow of natural gas is there.

Yeah. Did not change.

And then we had these to ensure education that includes contractors, engage local community groups to assist in educating communities as well. Okay. Sorry if that wasn't stair steps. Okay. Clarification.

So now it's time for discussion. Committee discussion and possible motion.

Need two suggestions. It's okay. The so I thought a lot about the because I don't just, like, say, no. We shouldn't do this. Instead, like, thinking about something that might be with respect to time of sale, something that might be replicable, not just here, but in other cities without increasing the cost of the of housing and the administrative overhead with time of sale.

And one thought that I had, and this might just maybe this doesn't make sense, but one thing that we could do is partner with an organization like SPCE on a on a trial, maybe, like, for a year or two to see how something goes. And instead of a a specific like, a traditional time of sale requirement, one thing that we could do is set aside a bucket of funds, and maybe SVCE would be willing to match or cover some portion of it as part of a trial. We could we could find the source of funds could be anything. It could be it it could be from the property transfer tax. It could be from any that we already collect at time of sale, and just have a pool of funds and then say, okay.

If you're a new homeowner because we know all the sales that occur, and let's just say that sales under a certain threshold to your number x million dollars, When those happen, the owners we we'll publicize this, but we can also send those folks a notice and say, like, hey. You qualify for this grant program to where we'll match you know, we'll we'll do you qualify for this set of funds to do energy upgrades as long as you're using them within a certain time frame. And SVCE already has, and the reason I say partnering with someone like SVCE is they already have either they can, themselves or through a partner, kind of vet these very basic applications just to confirm that folks are, you know, using the money for heat pumps or other things. And and maybe something like that, if we were just to do a a pilot with them for a year or something and we were to set aside the funds ourselves and maybe they can match or at least they partner on the administration of it, that might be more reckable. And then you're not you're not imposing a a charge on the new homeowner.

It's it's something that, you know, they're already kind of paying for through either their property transfer tax or maybe we have grant funding from other sources for this trial that might work. I don't know if this is a good idea or a bad idea. It was just kinda my my play on, like, a a version of time of sale that might be more palatable to certain interest groups.

Well, also, you know, we're both serving on Silicon Valley Clean Energy. We're always looking at ways to kind of increase participation in in our grant programs and the electrification. I mean, that's really the goal is with with any extra money we have this year. We're not not adding to that kiddie, but most years, we do. We had quite a bit. We want to increase participation. Is this a way to increase participation? So I I don't think that's a bad idea to suggest.

I mean, I know if if someone who, you know, purchased a new condo for, you know, under some some threshold or whatever choose your choose your threshold, but then you you know, if you get a letter in the mail and it's saying, like, you qualify for $2,503,000 toward energy upgrades, and here's a list of things, all you have to do is We know we know we know the property records through the through the through the county recorder. So all we have to do is just make sure they are aware of it and then process that and see how it goes. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn't.

It could almost be formatted like a matching rebate, like what we do with Yeah. Our heat pump water heaters now. Something like that. Certainly. Yeah. We would we would include a measure like that and then fully design it out and actually implement it in the next

Yeah. So I'm not I'm not suggesting kinda moving around. I'm just saying that we could be one play on it as well. Go ahead.

Thank you.

And and then this is sort of a question, but it's also a comment. You know, I wonder about the multifamily EV charging infrastructure and and kind of how effective that is and what what are the most effective ways to get people in apartment buildings to, you know, to buy electric cars. Now, certainly, having an electric charger in every carport, it it it if you were building a new one, that's probably easy. But for retrofits, I'm also wondering about how do, do we have any information about how people in multifamily homes, utilize existing charging facilities around the community and to find out you know? I mean, would it be better for us to have, like, build a gas station that was essentially a supercharging station that everybody would go in and pay, don't know, $10 to charge their car or whatever was the amount, and it would charge their car in a half an hour.

I mean, is sometimes I wonder whether, you know, the road we're following is the is the best one. And with these EV chargers in multifamily homes, it just seems like because of the of the the incredible number of buildings that are involved, it's really the heavy lift. So if there are other I'm just interested in in are the some of the other things we're doing effective.

Yeah. I think explore actually, I think exploring that would be given that there are faster and faster chargers, and they're starting and I'm not on top of all of them, but they're starting to put in faster chargers. I used one yesterday or something, but it doesn't it's not faster on my car. I I know where the but I'm starting to see where they are and how many of them there are. They're not the ultimate five minute ones, but they're much faster. So I do it does make me wonder about that, but I have to say it's super handy to charge even very slowly at home. Overnight. Overnight. Yeah.

Yeah. It is.

And but I do wonder, you know, what's the bang for the buck? And I also wonder why aren't we and I think that Bruce Kearney brought this up at the last Carbon Free Mountain View meeting and to some degree. Why aren't we well, he didn't say it this way, but I'll say it this way. Why aren't we given the atmosphere we're in now federally and so forth and no more clean car campaign, why don't we promote plug in hybrids more? Because maybe that's for a lot of people, it's really the way to go to electrify. Then you lose your range anxiety.

I don't have all the answers. We do have our final item this evening is a presentation council

Oh, talk about that.

Yes. Sorry. Yeah. But but I do think kind of exploring what's the what's the best route where's the biggest bang for the buck? Is it encouraging more fast charging stations? Is it encouraging plug in hybrids? Anyway, we are moving to

And I will I will simply I will, you know, briefly say that we are thinking of the pilot program for multifamily to address the current situation, you know, being cognizant. It's all funded through SVCE grant funds. Being cognizant of the fact that we are where we are now. The infrastructure that we have is what we have now. And what can we do right now to start that transition to more electric?

Even a plug in hybrid, if they don't have plucks where they live in multifamily properties, then it still doesn't work. And so we're taking this small pilot to address the need. We are very excited about the day when we have fast chargers that are widely available, but we don't have them yet. And we don't wanna wait and not take any action until that technology is deployed, but we aren't investing millions, tens of millions of dollars into something that we know will be solved in a few years. We want to just address the current need and start to shift, make early changes. So it might not be the long term solution that ends up emerging

Mhmm.

The way that people that live in multi families ultimately charge their vehicles, and we do hope that ultimately they will all be in electric vehicles. But for now and the disparity that already exists between access to charging for people who are in single family homes and people who are in multi family properties, it's addressing a need that already exists. Tough one. Just to

add to that. Yeah. I think I'm you know, there's gonna be a balance, you know, is is what we're looking into. And I can say for one, I had an EV and I lived in an apartment complex. I returned my EV after having it for two years. It was hard with small kids to try to find charging and wait for forty minutes. And I think their other part was the cost. If you go to these fast chargers, some of them cost, like, 68¢ a kilowatt versus you can charge at home for a lesser amount. But, yeah, I I think, you know, the future is still kind of unfolding on how EV charging is going to work. But if we're working toward this goal, it's kinda like, well, what are the short term solutions that we could provide today for someone to jump into an EV tomorrow, or do we want that to be further out?

Do you want them to jump in when the infrastructure is in place? Okay.

So back to this item, are there any more so are there more comments? I'll I'll let you

I just have one more comment, and then I'll have you make a motion or you can. The I think this is a reach code, but mister Carney talked about, and rightly so, you know, from especially multifamily buildings, solar, hot water, heating, and so just I'll give you an example of our building, which is built, you know, within the last ten years. We have a central gas fire boiler that serves hot water to the entire complex. It would be for our small HOA, cost prohibitive to replace that early with something, something electric. But one thing that would make a huge difference in the amount of water that we use is having those dedicated return lines for recirculation pumps so that folks on the 1st Floor don't have the hot water turned on for two minutes waiting for hot water to get down to that level.

I think that's probably a reach code, but which we can't do at the moment. But in a multifamily building, that would make a huge difference. If if folks can't convert the the central heating or the the central, void or something else, just having recirculation pumps would make a huge difference. Absolutely. Maybe that's an idea for a a grant program someday.

But And at our senior center, we've we started with solar hot water, and now we're in the process of electrifying it. But the solar hot water was the first measure

Yeah.

Undertaken, of course.

I I'm I'm fine with the staff recommendation on this one, but

I want you to be able to I just have four people brought up mostly mister Kearney, but maybe I have one additional fit ideas to add. So one was the solar thermal hot water. One was from a past past task force idea, which was eliminating emissions associated with direct access electricity, which I think so you know that one is. Mhmm. Another would be, is there any possible program with what they're calling balcony solar or plug and play solar?

I don't know if there's any way to that's getting a lot of airplane now. Any way to incentivize that? And then you just brought up recirculation. Yeah. So so to add those as possibilities.

There's something to think about.

Yeah. Okay. Some of this. Anyone ready to make a motion?

I think Chris made the motion. Right?

Yeah. I'll move the SAC recommendation incorporating the comments that we've made. Okay.

I I'll second, and I'd just like to also say that I fight and capture our discussion very well, and I remember it was sort of one of those wandering ones. So thank you. Okay. Chair Hicks? Yes. Member Shell Walter? Yes. Member Clark?

Yes.

Okay. So now we're up to five g, which is the electric vehicle charger rebate program for existing multifamily properties. This item will be presented by Climate Fellows, just Lenny Grant.

So hi, everyone. My name is Remy. And, yeah, I will be presenting on our electric vehicle charger rebate program for existing multifamily properties. So first of all, this program will be funded completely by the Silicon Valley Clean Energy noncompetitive member agency grant. This was a grant from last year that assigned each of SCCE's member agencies a predetermined amount to spend on a decarbonization or resiliency project.

So the city of Mountain View's formula grant is $379,921. And on November 18, the city council approved staff to use this grant towards an electric vehicle charger rebate program.

Next slide, please. So

as we've covered in previous meetings, transportation accounts for roughly 58% of Mountain View's annual greenhouse gas emissions. Most of these emissions under the transportation sector are passenger gasoline powered vehicles. And, also, as we've mentioned, multifamily residents have a significantly lower rate of EV adoption compared to single family residents in the city of Mountain View. This was partially because single family homes in Mountain View are far more likely to have dedicated garages, and these garages have at least one standard one twenty volt outlet, giving some opportunity for charging installation. Next slide, please.

So currently, an estimated 13% of multifamily units in Mountain View have access to on-site EV charging. It is worth noting that this charger charger availability is often limited per property. There may be just a few chargers for any number of EVs or folks who are interested in purchasing an EV. And incentives are available for properties to install EV charging, most notably and consistently SVCE's rebate program that launched in 2022. Currently, SVCE offers up to a $100,000 to install EV charging at multifamily properties.

So as of recently, 10 sites in Mountain View have installed a total of a 159 charging ports with an additional a 114 ports in progress. On average, SVCE rebates have covered around 66 of total project costs for properties. However, through outreach that stuff have conducted to property managers and owners, we have still been hearing that this cost is still too high, especially among competing priorities and lack of market saturation of EV charging and multifamily properties. So our proposed Mountain View rebate adder will be stacked on top of SVCE rebates kind of in a similar fashion to the heat pump water heater grant or rebates, and will cover up to a 100% of project costs for multifamily properties. This partnership with SVCE will enable simple app simple application process, low admin fees, and increased outreach capacity.

The program's goal is to encourage early adoption of EV charging stations, hopefully inspiring other multifamily properties to follow suit secrete drumming up a little bit of market competition as well. And through the program, approximately a 180 electric vehicle charging outlets or ports are expected to be installed. Next slide, please. So here is our proposed incentive chart. We collaborated very closely with FCCE on creating these amounts.

So for level one or level two outlets, the current incentive is $4,500, combining both SCC and Mountain View. For level two EV charging ports, which are have so far been more popular in the program, it's 8,500 per port. And then for panel upgrades, SCC offers an additional 5,000 per project. And then Mountain View's amounts will also be eligible to cover other project costs such as panel upgrades, trenching, any other costs that aren't covered in this in this chart. And, yes, next slide, please.

For the outreach portion of this program, we are proposing to hire a property owner ambassador who will provide guidance and support to existing multifamily property owners. They will assist property owners, managers by answering questions and offering support throughout the process. Ideally, this would be someone who has property management experience, who has worked in this space, who, you know, maybe as a property manager or owner. And, of course, staff will also promote the rebate program through city events and communications. Next slide, please.

So the proposed budget for the program is most of it going to the rebate funds, of course, and then we're we propose to allocate $25,000 to the liaison and other outreach outreach efforts. SCCE may have a 4% admin fee. As of now, you know, we think probably not. But if it admin becomes burdensome, this fee may be charged.

Next slide, please.

So for going into the future, the rebate program is expected to launch this spring. And throughout the program, SCCE will share regular reports so the city can track rebate reservations and any of their project metrics. Towards the end of the program, the city may consider using an evaluation process that would conduct surveys to property managers, contractors, or tenants. And, yes, that is that is all.

Thank you. So do committee members have questions?

This is for any multifamily property could qualify for the most part. I'm sure there are some parameters, but

Oh, sorry.

It doesn't necessarily mean it. A rental property or a small condo property that's that's older or something like that would qualify.

Wait. I don't know if

I understand the question.

There are some especially some older in Mountain View, there's a lot of them are soft story structures. There's they're they're both apartments. They're the garden apartments, and then some of those have been converted to condos. And I guess the question was, do would either version of those multifamily properties qualify? Or do they have to be rental?

Condos would also qualify. Yeah. Any kind of multifamily, like, facility.

Okay. Yeah. We're trying to make qualify under SVCE's program. I assume it would just be the same consultant. Okay.

Yeah. Exactly. Well, we started this discussion during the last time. So do you have additional questions? No. It sounds great. Yeah. I was gonna ask, can the ambassador promote plug in hybrids? But I don't know. We'll see how they could. There's not much I've never thought. But if you can think of a way

for them to promote with yeah. As well. I guess one question I have is could could I've I've heard that there's a lot of these chargers that aren't functioning. Mhmm. And Is can this rebate program be used to repair chargers, or is that not expensive? I don't know anything about that question.

Oh, not functioning at apartments? Yeah.

You mean, like, existing chargers that aren't functioning for that's a great question. I can definitely ask a cc. I know.

Yeah.

It's a great question. But I hear people moaning around that, you know, I'll be Well, the general corporate ones,

they often don't repair, but that's another Yeah.

That's It's another company. Yeah. They're such okay. Oh, no. Move move this afternoon.

We have to let the public comment. So But we're not there yet. Okay. So any in person people want to comment? Is there anyone virtually who would like to comment? No.

Okay. So Mary has her hand raised. Mary.

Good evening. I guess this is I apologize. Almost more of a question than a comment, but I'm I wonder about the effectiveness of putting, at the extreme end, one charger at did we say however many up up chargers we can afford? One charger at at, 20 apartments versus 10 chargers at two different apartments. So I'm hoping staff is working with SBCE and kind of doing an analysis that sorta optimize the number of chargers that go in at different at at different places.

It it seems like it might be useful to try to work with a larger number of apartments and get more people exposed, but that's that's just a guess, and and I'm hoping maybe there's some analysis to support a a good answer to that question. Thank you.

So that's a question. Are you gonna do some analysis of what the some question and answer on what the most what the sort of optimal you know, how many you have to put in before people have the confidence that they can actually buy a car and charge when they need to.

I think that's the kind of data that we might be able to glean after our initial thinking was to qualify participants in a very similar fashion to the existing SVCE program. So however many they allow per building, we would just mirror all of the structure of their rebate and add to it. But afterwards, if we do pursue a survey, we can try to find out, you know, different buildings may have pursued different levels of charging access, and then we can start to answer that question. It's very hard with such a small sample size.

Mhmm. That may be a question that I should get silicon melting in. What

information they may already have on that question.

I don't is there a maybe Denise, miss Lynn, or is there a cap on the level I think I thought I

On level two charge.

On level two charging, there's a cap per property. I don't see a

18 per port cap for level two charging. And there's no sir, there's a cap for level two charging on the program for till eight or until eighteen. And then on the outlets, they're they're removing the cap, so there won't be there won't be any cap on how many out of sickness. Also, that might kind of mess a little bit with how many charging you know, that's also partially based on that. But they found that people haven't been running up against that limit super often.

Okay. Thank you. Any other comments, or are we ready for a motion?

Ready. K. I just make a motion. You wanna make your motion, Pat? I'm really

Sure. I move the staff recommendation.

Second.

Chair Hicks? Yes. Member Showalter? Yes. Member Clark?

Yes. Okay.

So now we are to five four, which is a verbal update on sustainability and resiliency division progress. And this item will be presented by sustainability division Ms. Lucky will commence the presentation.

Thank you, chair Hicks. We do have

a a

very short presentation, but I think we can give very brief highlights. We've subscribed fully to our water heater program, and so we'll be returning back to council to amend our agreement with Silicon Valley Clean Energy to add more funds to this program. So we do have budget to do that. So it's more to amend our agreement with SVCE.

That's why we would be going

to council probably in January. It's and we've we've done a lot of outreach. I don't wanna make the presentation too long, but we'll definitely come back and update you on all of our other programs as well. But

can include something in council connections. Yeah. A brief update.

We've got

one of those in council connections. Yeah. Okay. Cool.

Alright. Well, thank you. And the answer is that. Okay.

Now we're to six, which is committee staff comments, questions, and committee reports.

I'm sorry. I know this has gone gone on. I just have a few a few. Okay. Okay.

One, I just want to share with everybody that they should check the front page of the Mercury News for this morning because there was this great article by Paul Rogers about the A 2 W Salt Pond and how far along and what a great job it is. So that's one. Two, we did have as as miss Lee mentioned, about a month ago, we had a sea level rise elected officials meeting. And there was sort of a kerfuffle in that I was the only I was the only Mountain View council member there. And that sort of sprang from we didn't tackle the idea of the Brown Act early enough to get it through the the our staff.

And so so, I would like to suggest that next year or the next time we have this meeting, we make it a special sustainability committee meeting. And we just we just notice it as a meeting and and it's public. And so, you know, that way, all the sustainability members, you know, will be able to come and participate. And other members could come. They just wouldn't be able to participate.

But that would be my suggestion and request. So I'd like staff to sort of think about that as a way to handle the Brown Act, issue. Because as it it just seems like in the last year or so, we've gotten much more strict. The staff has gotten much more strict about the, about carrying out the Brown Act, and we wanna make sure that things are done properly. But at the same time, we want people you know, it's important for people to be able to take part.

So wanna bring that up. And then another thing I would like us to think about sometime is the long term establishment of an advisory board for sustainability. I'm just gonna drop that as a, you know, as a thought here, but, you know, I really think that we sustainability and working on climate change, that is that is not something we're gonna stop doing anytime soon. And we know that, we have several organizations in the community that have been very helpful with that, and our sustainability task forces that we convened twice were very helpful. But I just I think that it would it would function as a good source of, of volunteers for many of the, the efforts that we are going to have to continue to do for many, many years.

And and, also, there's just a lot of interest in the community. So just wanted to drop that as a something I would like my fellow, those committee members to give some thought to. So that's it. Thank you.

Okay. Any more updates, reports, questions? Okay. In that case, we're now on item number seven. His adjournment. This meeting is adjourned at 09:18PM.