Climate Resilience Committee - Regular Meeting

609. All right, we'll start off with a roll call. From my right, please.

Jenny Lee Molina.

Allison Weinstock.

Aaron DiMeo.

Urela Baghe.

Silvio Frank Pupo.

Nick Atkinson, Office of the City Attorney.

Sonia Brubaker, Chief Resilience Officer, City of Miami.

Miriam.

Miriam Flores, Office of Resilience and Sustainability.

Thank you. All right, we'll go to item two, which is public comment. Anyone from the public would like to make a comment? Welcome.

My name is Lindsay Kane. I am a resident of Miami-Dade. This is my first time at one of these committee meetings, but I've been to the City Hall quite a few times this year fighting to save the trees that are currently a threat all over the city. So currently, citizens are asking for more parks, more green spaces, and they all currently seem to be under attack. And I feel like when we talk about climate resilience, trees should be a key factor. I feel like this summer especially has been so extremely hot, and it's directly related to the more than 300 trees that have been cut down in Miami this year alone, and there's more planned. So Allen Morris Park in Brickell, which is one of the only parks in Brickell that's untouched, is at threat, planned to be demolished. I believe they're going to start that next week. Margaret Pace Park is planned for a huge renovation that will remove 105 trees. And there's another historic site in Brickell with old trees that is set to be demolished. So it seems like every green space and the ones that aren't touched have a for sale sign. So at the meetings, I've been reading the Citizen Bill of Rights, which states that it shall be the policy of the city to conserve and protect its natural resources and scenic beauty, which policy shall include the abatement of air and water pollution and excessive and unnecessary noise. So I'm here in hopes that your committee can help change the dangerous trajectory that the city is currently on. I feel like we're becoming a city of hostile architecture, anti-green decisions that will ultimately affect everybody's health, People want more parks, more green spaces, more trees, in addition to saving the ones that already exist. Thank you.

Thank you, Lizney, for your comments and your efforts. And we'll talk more about park expansion and trees later on in the meeting. Any other public comments or any submitted online?

None.

All right. Let's move on to item three, which is the approval of the... June 1st, regular meeting minutes, as well as the June 18th budget workshop minutes. Do I have a motion to approve both of those together?

Second.

I need a first.

Oh, motion to approve both.

Okay. Thanks. And a second?

Second.

And a second. All right. All in favor? Aye. Aye. Any opposed or abstain? All right. Those both pass. Thank you. So we'll move to item four, which is presentations. We have a status update on the implementation of the 2024 stormwater master plan. This is something that came before the CRC and I think possibly the sea level rise committee many moons ago, a number of times during its creation. Mirela requested this at your first meeting, and I'm glad that we were able to get this on the agenda. So thank you all so much for joining us, and really appreciate you being here.

Good evening. Is it on? Yes.

Okay.

I have a cold, so my ears are a little bit... Oh, you might need to... Can you...

Okay. Is that better?

Much better. Good evening. I'm Clara Zidane with the City of Miami Resilience and Polyworks, Assistant Director for Stonewater and Permitting, and I have CDM, the engineers who prepare the Stonewater Master Plan. Do you want to introduce yourself?

Good evening, everyone. John Goldman, associate with CDM Smith, the author and engineer record of your stormwater master plan. With me today is Dr. Tom Nye, our principal modeler for the firm. So first, I'd like to say it's been almost four years since we presented to this committee. You had some really good input and kind of shaped a lot of the way that the master plan was written and some of the things that were included, the additional beyond just the mathematics of the hydraulics and hydrology. And we really appreciate that. Tonight on the agenda, a little bit of an overview. It's been a while. I know it's two giant volumes. It's hard to sift through.

I'm so sorry. Can you speak closer? Yeah, sure. Thank you.

Is that better? I'll talk a little bit about the model parameters that were used. I know there was a bunch of questions on that and boundary conditions and other things about the model itself. Project prioritization and phasing, we'll talk in the city, we'll talk a little bit about that. Current status of some projects, schedule, budget, anything about grant funding that we can talk about. Cost tracking and metrics, a little bit about the shoreline hardening program that's going on. Any new technologies that have been incorporated, parks and open spaces, and of course water quality and restoration of Biscayne Bay, which FDEP is kind of full circle, coming back and doing it again, right? So a little bit of the overview and goals. You've seen this before. Flood control, water quality protection, aquifer recharge and water supply. Conservation and harvesting, we're able, you know, we're very big with your residents. Maybe one cistern doesn't do a lot, but a thousand in an area really do help. operation and maintenance, long-term financing, and, of course, community acceptance. There were two levels of service that we'll talk about, and then all of that went through the Miami Forever Bond, and that was put into action, and some projects started to be put out on the street. Talk a little bit about the initial widespread problem. Yeah, go ahead.

You had a question?

Oh, yeah, yeah. The widespread problem areas identification. So we remember we have workshops in each area of the city and people were putting dots on the maps and we were talking in different languages and having these workshops. Where is it flooding? How long? So we got a lot of good data from that. FEMA repetitive loss data you had at the time, something called the County 311. You had to kind of sift through that. Sometimes a cat in a tree came under the flood, but we were able to get through that. I know Aaron provided a ton of photos for us for our calibrations, and we were able to also sift through all the media coverage and then send surveyors out. and figure out the worst. So we had this hotspots map that we did in the GIS and we kind of knew that's basically where we were headed. It was pretty much agreeing with the LIDAR and where there were no positive systems for drainage. A little bit about the level of service goals that we evaluated. It was a very lofty goal at the time. more than most of our other clients. The city really wanted to know what would it take for no flooding over the crown of the roadways in a 10-year storm, right? And you know that's a lot of water on a very low, flat area like this. So there was a secondary goal, which was no flooding over the crown of the roadways in a five-year storm event. And this is the South Florida Water Management District curve on the NOAA Atlas 14 data that we had records for. And then it would be temporary flooding, safe, predictable death. FOR SHORT DURATIONS OF TIME IN KNOWN AREAS DURING THAT TEN-YEAR EVENT. YOU KNOW, THE DISTRICT'S CURVE HAS KIND OF A FLASHY PEAK ON THE FIVE YEARS, SO IT DID TAKE A LOT OF THE TENURE WITH IT. SO THAT WAS STILL A VERY ROBUST GOAL. IT WAS MORE PRACTICABLE AND POTENTIALLY MORE AFFORDABLE SOLUTION. So in general, the city had recognized that the primary alternative, which was that 10-year, might not be available to be met in all areas. There might be an area of just four or five houses that needed a South Florida Water Management District-sized pump station. It's just not feasible to put that in everybody's backyard. And where it couldn't be achieved or where it just wasn't economically feasible, the secondary alternative, too, was going to be used. Like I said, it's a very robust design. A five-year storm is moving a lot of water out, so it's a very good design, and it'll do a lot of much-needed relief. When we were presenting this to most of the residents, they said, it's okay, we're not flooding into our houses right now, but if I could just get out of my house within a few hours and not be trapped for days, and that was really the most important thing to them. So we listened to that, and that's kind of how we geared a lot of these projects. The model considered a resolution down to 5 to 10 acres. It was at a neighborhood level of detail.

Hi, everyone. So first of all, the model, it's a hydrologic and hydraulic model called SWIM. It's from EPA. There are other models that do very similar stuff. In Florida particularly, there's something called Stormwise that does something similar. The good part about the EPA swim is it's free. Anyone can download it. The picture you're seeing is actually in a proprietary model called PC Swim that is a GUI wrapped around the model, but we could give the model in the free version, and you would be able to run it.

And we also train the city staff on it.

Way back in the day, I don't know how many people are left who were in that training session, but a few people can still open the model, put new pipes in and test the model. So when we say a neighborhood level of service, there's a few thousand sub-basins in the city and a few more outside the city because there's areas outside the city that drain into the city or share a waterway with the city. So you can see, kind of can see in that picture, that the city boundary has some extra space around it. The models previous to this one were like an order of magnitude bigger. So every sub-basin was maybe 100 acres. That's an entire neighborhood. This is getting down to the city block. So we don't have every leader. So if you have an inlet in every corner of an intersection, we don't have all those little leaders. But that's more of a design detail when you're building something. This is a master plan. So it gets the trunk lines in there. There was a question on whether we considered the county models. We did both calibrate and run design models with inflows from the different canals that come in. So the main one is the Miami River up by the airport, the C6 canal, but the other ones, the other side of the airport, the C4 canal comes in from the west. And up in the very north, you have the C7 canal. And then there's a little bit where the C3 is in the southwest. Our portion of the model, so all those we have all those county models, because at the time I was actually working with the county reviewing those models, so I had access to everything. And we were able to run the models calibrate to different design storm or to the different. storms that occurred, some of them as we were building the model, if you remember back to 2020. There was quite a big storm, and I think maybe the very next year, also in May, there was another big storm. So we had some models. We had some storms we could calibrate to as it was being built. And then we were on the design storms for all our analysis for the alternatives. The surface storage is in the model. So when the runoff, as you can see today, doesn't stay in the pipe system and gets up above ground, that's all in the model as well as storage curves based on a digital elevation model from LIDAR. That's the topography. We have the whole county, so we were able to get the city. This is a little older. I don't know particularly if Miami-Dade has a newer one yet. But since we started in 2018, I believe it was from like 2017, it was new at the time. It shouldn't change too much. You might have a little bit here and there that has changed, especially where they're redoing roads and stuff. But in general, it should be the same. We used the Miami-Dade WASDA future groundwater for the future conditions and the sea level rise conditions. So they had a 2040 future groundwater And we use that for the low level sea level rise. And then I think we extrapolated it for the higher level sea level rise. And what that does generally is it gives you less soil storage to infiltrate into. So as the water table gets close to surface, you don't have the full column to infiltrate into. So as sea level rises and groundwater rises, you're gonna have that issue. And the second issue is there's a lot of exfiltration in this city. That's the perforated pipes that run under your ground. those need driving head to work. So if you have an inlet at four and your groundwater levels at two, you don't have a lot of driving head. And with sea level rise, if that goes up to three or four, then you have no driving head. So our recommendation, where you see us put in exfiltration, I think our minimum was five and a half or six. Sorry, I'm getting two different projects mixed up, so I'm not positive. I think it was six in Miami. for that, just so we could account for future groundwater levels. So we're trying to catch the water uphill with the exfiltration trench. And a lot of the existing is at the bottom of the bowl, and that's why it doesn't work very well. There's not enough head at the bottom of the bowl, especially as the storm raises the groundwater table regionally, you don't get a lot of effectiveness from some of those old exfiltration trenches. We had a lot of KSAT data from both the city and the county. That's what the South Florida Water Management District uses to predict how well exfiltration trench will work at a given head. So we use that data. The known 14 rainfall, which John already mentioned. And we originally started calibrating to Irma which was 2017, actually wasn't that old at the time, seems like forever ago now for me anyway. But like I said, we had a couple storms and as John mentioned, Darren had some videos and some pictures for us that really helped. We got some other videos from media sites and stuff and we were able to find some good calibration points and tweak the model a little, especially with soils infiltration. Rates where we weren't matching we would adjust soils infiltration most a lot of the other parameters are pretty much set You can't really fake Impervious cover, you know, you don't want to play with stuff like that but Swills and some other smaller parameters were what we used to validate and calibrate the model We did do originally to sea level rise foot and a half and two and a half feet and That way, we wouldn't have to predict what year it happened. We would just say, at 1 and 1 half of a sea level rise, this is how the models are going to react, both in the existing condition and our alternative conditions. After we finished, the FS380 came out, and it's four different elevations. But they're very similar to what we used. I think down here, the lowest one's only a few inches, but then it goes to a foot. And both the 27 low and the 2480 high are very close to a foot. And then the 2070 high is very close to the two and a half we already used. So we ran those for a vulnerability study for the city. So we've got actually four, but a lot of them are very similar. And we did run a high tide and a high rain event at the same time. And what I could say about that is if you remember Irma probably had a tide around four in AVD in places, I think further north, but at least over three and a half here at the mouth of the Miami River. So the problem with the existing city, at least the way it was in 2020, was that with tide that high, When it rains, you're not getting any water out even if you have a backflow preventer because the inlets are so low, your gravity doesn't work anymore. There are also a lot of seawalls that are less than four. And we did fly a special purpose LIDAR.

We did for this one too, right? Yeah.

We ran a special purpose LIDAR on the seawall specifically to get accurate seawall elevations all the way up the Miami River and along the base. And so we found a lot of places are less than four. So in the existing condition, yes, a high tide with any kind of rain is very problematic. Since then, I know the city's put in a lot of backflow prevention and is starting to raise seawalls. So in our alternatives, the seawalls are higher. And the pump stations are going in. So now that kind of fixes all that problem. So for your high coincident rain and surge, as long as the surge is below the seawall, the pumps are doing all the work. There aren't a lot of gravity pipes left at all in the alternatives. I mean, the ones that are existing stay in, but they only work at low tide, especially with sea level rise. But the older one, I'm sorry, so all the alternative stuff is basically unless there's some really high elevations near the water where you can still run gravity. And I think there's maybe a handful of those, but compared to hundreds of the other ones.

All right.

So, yeah, I mean, we talked about this a little bit. So, I mean, right now, what you're looking at is a pre and post with the L2 version of the post condition. At this scale, you can't really see, but if you have a copy of the master plan, we get down to the neighborhood level with these flood maps, and you're going to see on the right picture that there are still places that flood some, but, and we're showing the 10? Yeah, so we're showing the 10, so it doesn't, The Alt II doesn't meet the 10-year level of service of no flooding above Crown. So even in Alt II, you will see some crowns with some flooding above them, some roads with some flooding above the crown, but not a lot. It gets pretty close to the other one for about half the price, as he's going to show later. What's next? We were actually just talking with Aaron before we started. In the Shenandoah area, there's a lot of bulls There's just no positive outfalls from them.

So every area like that in the city got looked at and got something in the alternatives.

And what John said earlier about all two being short duration, that means even if it didn't flood too deep, but if it wouldn't go anywhere for... hours then we still put something there in all two even if it was not so deep in a five-year storm that it would need it if it lasted forever and never went anywhere we went ahead and got some pipes in there as well that eventually would go to something like a pump station or if it was high enough had exfiltration we always went with exfiltration first especially in the higher parts of the city because you know that's more green for one it gives you your water quality credits and you know we don't want all these pump stations to be So, you know, we're trying to get some water into the Biscayne Aquifer first, which is good because it's such a highly transmissive aquifer. You can put a lot of rainwater into it and then go into the pump stations second. But when we get... So areas that are too low for exfiltration, anything below six feet and anything that's left over, even if it's higher, that we just can't find enough room to put exfiltration in, then we're pumping. And so there are a lot of pump stations, I believe in all two, it's in the 90s. So yeah, 90 some pump stations in all two throughout the city, most of them along the bay or the river, but there are some that are inland and then very long force mains, and especially when we start talking about the Flagami area, so south of Blue Lagoon, because we couldn't pump into Blue Lagoon. If I tried to pump into Blue Lagoon, I raised stages in the Miami River and the C4 Canal, and that affects other parts of the city, but it also affects our neighbors, so We can't raise stages on the rest of the county. We can't raise stages at Miami International Airport. So we couldn't pump directly to Blue Lagoon. So now we're moving a lot of water east, further down river as far as we can. We have a lot of injection wells also to pump water into the aquifer because if we pump everything to the river when we're further west, we're just raising the river too much and we're causing problems elsewhere. So there's a lot of pumped injection, as much as we can do. But to do pumped injection, you gotta be west. You can't do, I'm sorry, you gotta be east. You have to be a certain amount east to do pumped injection because you wanna pump into the salt water zone and not the drinking water zone. So there's a line where we start doing pumped ejection. So we had to move water pretty far east just to get to that line. Let's see what's next.

So some of the initial stormwater, you can see how we got to the $3.1 billion price tag pretty quickly. A lot of those force mains, as they were heading to the bay, have pop-offs into wells. So the porous main can get smaller along the way. You might start off at twin 42s, but by the time you're getting over towards the ultimate outfall, we've put enough into the ground. But that's limited by South Florida Water Management. So it's a very delicate balancing act. There's an engineer record that's going through that now for flagaming, trying to get through that process right now. So the first couple of project areas. So we had a big internal meeting with the city and everybody talked about all the different pieces and parts, and there was some political involvement of what should go first and how things go, and you want to, obviously, Miami Forever Bond, you need to spread the work equally throughout all the different areas, so noted commission priority areas, we sat one-on-one with each commissioner, some of you were involved in that, and asked, you know, really, what are your residents saying, what are your priorities, and they were very vocal, and they understood their The worst areas, sometimes it was just an intersection or this one area of Cayocho or just something that some areas were a little bit more that were repetitive loss areas where houses were repetitively flooding. So then we phased that to remain within the available initial budget. All the bond didn't come at once. You qualify in tranches. So that was another constraint there. So really the highest number of the flooding complaints, the highly visible areas, the areas that are always on the media, those were first. And then... Areas of known capacity shortfalls that were already on the city's radar that you're trying to be getting to for the last 15 years, those got put into the mix and they were spread throughout the city. And of course, they're all flexible, so it can all be adapted. And you look at the master plan, you see what was supposed to be put in. If you have to upsize, you can upsize. Or if you make a connection to something for the future, just so it could be expanded, that was part of that process. THESE WERE THE INITIAL 24 AREAS.

So as the outcome of the stormwater master plan and all the meetings and all the recommendations, the critical areas, the repetitive locations, there were 24 neighborhood projects that were identified as priority based on historic flooding complaints, the damage claims, potential risk to residents, and the available funding. Out of those 24, there were 12 projects that were funded through the Miami Forward Fund that were at least partially funded. So it was identified that those were the 12 projects that it was decided to move forward with the funding, and it was enough to start the process of the sign, applying for grants, and moving forward with those 12 projects. so so part of the of the of the approach was to get those 12 projects going apply to grants this was done right after the the projects were recommended in 2021 and as of we were getting grants we would be moving forward when the money was allocated so we could start with the signs Besides those 12 projects, we had some other projects identified as priority that included seawall replacement. And again, that was based on assessment of the seawalls, based on the condition of the elevation and the level of protection that was meant to be prioritized. Besides that, there were over 100 valves that were initially installed as part of the initiative, and then we identified a couple more projects to install over 80 valves along the bay and the river. Besides that, we also had some money allocated to upgrade existing pump stations and to install SCADA to those existing pump stations, basically to help identify, monitor, and control the pump stations, and that one is ongoing. With that, this is the status of those neighborhood projects. We have a total of seven new pump stations that are between design and construction. And from these locations, I can point out that East Flagami was one of the ones that John mentioned. Edgewater. Edgewater is one of the more critical areas in the city. Recurrent, high tide, the street is not traversable. It's the one that we get regular feedback from the residents. And we actually have two portable pumps located there just to mitigate temporarily. So that project is in the final stages of permitting, and it will be ready to start construction any time now. Basically, we're waiting for the permits to start construction. where the contractor is already mobilized and ready to go for the pump station installation and all the associated infrastructure. As you can see in the table, we have, for these neighborhood projects, we have 137, roughly $138 million in grants. I know that some of the information that the committee was interested in knowing is is what's being funded with city and what's being funded with grants. So for the most part, the city funds are Miami for Urban. A small portion, it's additional capital from the general funds match to basically to be able to match your grants and meet the the budget requirements and there's a part of the project that is that we have shortfalls so basically even these projects we've had to face to address the main infrastructure to me to address the the critical areas and we we are also incorporating localized projects that we have been doing between 2021 and now And even developers, when there's required improvements because of the improvements that are going on on the public right-of-way, we use the stormwater master plan recommendations to incorporate. And then now we are counting for what has already been done. basically to revisit the scope and bring it to a project that we can build. But in the meantime, we did phase a project so that we can build infrastructure that can address the critical locations. So some of them are Edgewater, Shorecrest, Flagami, Melrose, no, Melrose is in the sign now, and Fairview. So basically those were locations, hotspots that we know that we had, Portable pumps, every time there was high tide, significant rain, we have classified permits that we know that we need portable pumps, so those are the ones that were finest priority and we're moving forward. The rest are in different stages of design. We have East Little Havana and Southwest Wynwood that we had a grant through Florida Commerce that requires some environmental evaluation, and those are the ones that are a little bit farther back in the sign, but we are moving forward with those projects now. And the sources of the grants are FDEP, the Florida Resilience. We have a BRIC grant. We have, from Florida Commerce, the CDBG-MIT. We have some state appropriations. So we have multiple grants. We had one from the Viscayne Bay Water Quality. And now that the period is open, we're applying for additional grants. for the projects that we do have some match capacity. Besides the neighborhood projects, I mentioned that we have a number of seawalls and some other improvements to the pump stations, to the valves. So for those, we did have some city funds and grants, almost a 50-50. And we're moving along. Again, the seawalls are... More than half the seawalls are ready for construction. We have the contractor selected and basically mobilizing to start the construction on nine of them. And a total of 2,500 feet, almost 2,700 feet of seawall are going to be upgraded, either seawall or shoreline protection. These are some of the sample projects. We have Brickell Bay Drive. This is a seawall that was low elevation. There was a significant overtopping during hurricanes and mostly hurricanes. So we do have a design bill in place, and the construction is anticipated to start later this year. And this project incorporates a baywalk, a linear park, a silva cell under the baywalk and the landscape area, so basically to separate that storm water. And the cab elevation is being raised to 8 feet. The recommendations from the stormwater master plan and what we have in the code right now is that sea walls along the bay are to be built to elevation 6 with the ability to increase to 8. We are building this already to 8. This is the East Flagami Pump Station. This is a rendering of what it's going to look like. And this is the project that started construction last month. Another compensation that it's a recommendation from the master plan. It wasn't necessarily one of the 12 projects that I mentioned. It was already underway when the stormwater master plan was developed, critical area, and one of the hotspots. So this one is already going to construction. Working with the Office of Resilience, there was a waterfront enhancement plan developed with some options for street ends. When we can incorporate it, we do have at the street ends a very limited right-of-way. If we have buildings up the seawall, we don't have a lot of opportunities, but we do have a plan when those opportunities come to a project. One of the master plan projects was Jose Marti. That one is going to construction there. They're basically finalizing the contractor selection. For the seawall projects, and we have been working with the Office of Resilience as well to incorporate living seawalls. in any of the other seawall projects that we have. If it's a seawall, we are using either tiles or panels to install in front of the seawall, so to enhance habitat in the seawall. So the other projects that were in the priority list, this is the list of them. We don't have funding for them yet. We have... a process to complete the ones that we have going on now. And when we are closer to a level of completion, I think that there will be discussion of the approach to the funding sources. Some other initiatives that the city has taken is through the code, right? So part of the recommendations from the master plan, it's a balance between what is taken by the city and what is taken by the parcel. So we have... We are working with the building department or the building department is taking the lead as far as private property on having the requirements for retention on site and recertification of those stormwater infrastructure to make sure that they are retaining what they're meant to be retaining on site. We also modified the code to add some illegal discharge enforcement capacity to prevent private properties from not only stormwater, but any type of paint or illegal substances that are not meant to go into the stormwater system. Then we have some landscape codes and actually the seawall requirements. We did go through the stormwater fee increase that was approved early this year, and after 30 years of having the same groundwater fee, we were able to increase it to $7 on ERU. For now, it is when it will provide the ability to have some funding for capital projects. This year it was basically just for operating costs and minor infrastructure. We also have some policies in place and design standards within RPW to restore swells, to have a limit of how much you can pave in the front of the property. The requirements that came out of the stormwater master plan, that depending on the elevation you have certain requirements for the roadway and the drainage infrastructure. We have the streetscape master plan, we have Part of the stormwater infrastructure upgrades, I think I mentioned that we always look at the stormwater master plan recommendations to assess, even for localized projects. We have a reported flooding in certain areas. We don't have a capital project, so we start addressing those projects. localized flooding on a yearly basis. We have a number of projects that either through the reporting tool to our department or the district's office, we identify locations that need to be addressed sooner than later. So we do take into account the improvements that are recommended in the master plan to avoid rework when do those projects come in place. And the same thing with developers that we take into account and we leverage that to start reducing the flooding now. We did increase the stormwater infrastructure maintenance frequency to make sure that they function to the capacity that they were intended to. It used to be five years. Now it's two years for the main inlet French drain pipes. And we do have a little bit longer program to maintain the cover ditches and the drainage wells that they're a little bit more expensive to maintain. And they don't require the same level of frequency that the French drain and inlets require. Now, we do have the reporting sources that are 311, I see change directly to the city, so we are working on documenting and we keep track in GIS. Not only to identify the localized flooding or the larger projects that need to be prioritized, but to use as part of the grant applications. In many of the grants, you need to provide the number of flooding events, the depth, the frequency. So it helps document the need for the project. Icy Change is one of the sources that we have. They're developing different approaches from the pictures, and the benefit of it is that the pictures are related to the location, and basically from the picture, they can map the level of flooding that is reaching based on the location. level of water that is in the photos. It's very helpful to document for us and for future grants. Some of the tracking mechanisms, we work with the Office of Resilience. We provide metrics on what's being done on a quarterly basis. We also have our metrics of what infrastructure has been installed on a yearly basis. And you want to talk about the water quality and then the coordination that has been going on with other agencies.

So with the master plan and the additional infrastructure, it's one of those interesting situations where the more you build, the better the water quality becomes. So we ran several different ways with half an inch. We had this great impervious layer, so we had half an inch over that for the water quality storms. We had an inch over the whole thing. We had it by watershed. all mixing and setting down towards the bay and what we found and we were able to show South Florida Water Management District was that we are better now in the future, we'll be better when all this infrastructure goes in than we are now with both flow and water quality and other things such as heat and other things that we do. Miami-Dade does accept your pollution control devices and swirl separators and things like that. We tested this just recently just down the street here One of the new projects that was just off of Bayshore, doing a nutrient removal pre and post, and it had a significant impact, putting something in where it just got a runoff to the bay before, just over land. So it is working. catches you got to put all of it in but it gets better and better as you put more in and that's I know sometimes a hard thing for regulators to say hey you know we have all of this exfiltration going in and these wells but this has to go in first so there's a timing to it they're no longer doing the conceptual permits that was the plan 2020 whatever when we started we were going to have a conceptual plan that we would follow and the district would just check off yes yes yes this is but They've kind of shied away from that with all the new regulations that they have on their end that they have to meet with actual physical as-built since you can't do any of that with a conceptual permit. They want full O&M plans for things that just don't exist yet or they can't sign off. They eventually said, no, it has to be done piecemeal. But most regulators here seem to be of the effect that you're putting in more exfiltration, you're putting in more water quality where there was none. It's only getting better. And the difference is you're not building new, it's retrofit. So it's a retrofit replacement of something that wasn't there before and it's only going to get better. So sometimes you don't have to prove that you're meeting a certain amount because you are at least putting in a lot of additional water quality. And we did do a pre-post on the flows to make sure that we weren't affecting stages or flows anywhere towards the bay. And that is basically all we have. We'll be here for technical questions. Claire can answer anything for internal. So we'll turn it over to you guys now.

That was fantastic. I appreciate the detail and the technical analysis. the thought that you guys put into this. So thanks so much for being here. I'm going to start it with just like two high level questions. But there were a few things you said that I think were important that I kind of want to just double tap on for a second. You said it's just not feasible to meet that level of service in some areas. I think that that's something that we need to remember. And I don't think everyone realizes that. You said goal of not getting trapped for days and meeting crown of road. level of service, that when there's water in the road, that the system is actually designed for that. I feel like that's still a concept that not everyone is familiar with in the general public when I speak to people. Also, you mentioned there are certain tides, the water's just not going out. Again, the back bay study is going to be critically important for that. I really think the river needs to be part of the system. As far as costs go, we just saw the flamie pump station at $65 million and you mentioned it, we probably would need more pumps because gravity isn't working that well. So just a small you know glimpse into the future of what a world with a pump only stormwater plan might look like. We saw a couple, and I really appreciate the, I know we sent a lot of questions, but very interested in this topic. So I think you did address a lot of them. I really appreciate that. As far as like cost and timing goes, you showed us those phase one projects and that there's the 13 priorities and about half of those were in construction or in some kind of getting close to construction. As far as the overall 20 year plan that was created and the goal of say 3.1, $4 billion, Where do you think that the current, like, obviously there's time to get going, and now you also even have, like, a second set of projects that you're about to get started after these kind of wrap up. Where do you think you are as far as, like, that 20-year timeline and how the cost estimate may have shifted based on inflation and other things? Like, do you think that the total cost may have gone up? Do you think the timeline might be a little shorter, might be a little longer? Like, realistically, where do you see the city kind of going to meet the master plan?

Realistically, the 20-year goal is not feasible. We do have... We just received an increase in the stormwater fee. We went from $3.50 to $7 an year. That is... have the numbers that we got from the analysis we did when we increased the fee. The increase means an additional 14 million a year from the stormwater fee. So if you figure each project, and the flagami, it's a big neighborhood improvement project. When it's a pump station, when you compare it to edge water, edge water is a, what was the cost of edge water?

It's a, hold on, give me one second. Edge water is 40.

And basically, a big part of it is the pump station. So we did phase it to address 23rd Street, and we are able to phase it and use some of the developers to implement some of the parts. So basically, to ultimately address the neighborhood. But it's a smaller neighborhood, right? So you compare East Flagami, 60 million. Edgewater, $40 million. So not everything is going to be a project like Flagami. But we are far away from reaching $250 million a year to be able to implement the 20-year plan.

And again, we are... And that number that you just referenced is... The stormwater master plan said something like five $50 million projects a year to get to the level of service.

Correct. That's the reference that I was making. For people who may not know. Exactly. The idea was based on the amount of projects. I think the range was between three and five point some billion projects. to implement the entire master plan, which would mean 250 a year, five projects. We would have to raise some water fee to about $100 per year to be able to have the resources to implement it, which is not feasible, right? We are working with the additional funding that we have from the stormwater fee, identifying other potential so we can apply for more grants. I think that there was a period that a lot more funding was being allocated for those grants as well. So we don't anticipate either that we're going to get that amount of funding. If you look at the numbers, we got almost 50% match. dollar to dollar with the grants. But we do have plans to prioritize the locations that are more severe flooding, more repetitive flooding. So out of those 20 years, we're not going to be able to implement the entire master plan, but we will identify the ones that are more critical to address, not only with this large infrastructure projects, but even with the localized projects.

Yeah, when you showed that chart, it seemed like progress is being made, but that's just on the first round of priority projects, and there's many phases. I think that you showed us also Brickell Bay Drive, which is $26 million, I think, and it's a seawall raising, protects those neighbors. And, you know, we heard directly from staff and the consultants when they presented that project to us, there was concerns of residents of views, you know, looking at the amount of expenses and the timeline and just getting the priority projects off the ground, I think that it's important we keep in mind when we see other projects in the future that there's probably not going to be a chance to come back and upgrade projects for a while, especially after they're spending all this money. And I'm really happy that they did increase the seawall height over the six feet there, but it sounds like When we hear projects, you know, making sure that they're giving the maximum benefit that that can be done at the time and using that money as wisely as possible is going to be really important.

Yeah. No, and the analysis that was done for the Brickell Bay Drive, it was a detailed analysis that considers the length of that seawall, the overtopping that has occurred. And the wave action, the exposure of that seawall.

Yeah, it's right at like a wedge in the bay. Yeah. Aurelia, go ahead. Do you have questions?

Some comments. First, thank you very much for coming out and providing us with this update. Full disclosure, I was part of the CDM team back in the day when we kicked off the stormwater master plan. I had to step off when I joined the county to deal with Biscayne Bay so I just want to put that out there in public so that there's no but I I just want to say that you guys have done such an amazing job in such a short amount of time because we have projects in construction infrastructure and costs money, we know that. Especially this type of infrastructure. And it's just gonna keep going up. And I know that right now we're in budgeting, and so I think the public needs to be very, very aware that these tax dollars are going towards them, and to alleviate some of these flooding impacts that they've been dealing with for, you know, Very very long time and so I just wanted to congratulate you on and hopefully we can keep keep it going Again, it's it's incredible that you've gotten so much grant funding So it just is also a testament to the hard work that's being done by the public works and resilience office And I just want to you know commend you and the young the only question I have is as we're putting these projects online How are we to your point? How are we keeping track that they're working and that they will be working on the long run? And will we have to tweak along the way? And is that being factored in?

Tracking of the project progress, all those projects, except for HOS-MRT, are managed by Resilience and Polar Works. So again, we have metrics that is reported to the Office of Resilience. It is reported to the administration on a regular basis, on a yearly basis, the budget, the project status. And to the point of making the most with the funding that we have, making it more efficient and tracking is basically we have documented everything in eBuilder, in Oracle, and we keep track and update those estimates or ongoing on a monthly basis. And the way that we are facing the projects, because not necessarily that the total cost estimate is 64, 65 million, we're still finding efficiencies. Clemente Park is an example. We have very significant redevelopment in that area. so we are making sure that all the projects that are coming up we are accounting for them in our project and we we don't necessarily reduce scope but we reduce the amount of infrastructure that is needed the same thing with uh is little havana we know that there's some development coming up same thing for brickell bay drive there's upcoming uh development to the north that we are working with them to to make the systems uh uh to start incorporating the infrastructure that we need. And I think for all the projects, we're doing that to be able to streamline the scope. A lot of times we have approached CDM and asked, look, there's this developer that we were previously considering that everything is going to the road because there were older buildings. Now they're retaining everything on site, so we are reducing the flows that are going to the pump stations. So that is ongoing to make better use of the funding. And because it is an analysis that we did when we were actually applying for additional funding, we have to provide justification. And it is that during a period of two, three years, the construction cost was increasing rates at 20%, 30% higher than previous years. Now with the economy as it's going, we need to reassess how that is fluctuating as well.

As far as this goes, budgeting, design teams, permitting, construction, where is the pinch point at the moment? Funding, grants, what if you had more of, would more get done?

The pinch point of why it's costing so much?

Or just what thing, if you could wave a wand, is limiting your, like making it harder for you to implement?

The funding and the construction, the construction cost has been increasing more than was anticipated. The construction cost. The stormwater master plan, cost estimate is a master plan level. And there was a good amount of details included in those cost estimate and there was continuously built in. And even with that, even with that contingency and detailed cost estimate, we did find that between the time that those were done in 2021, 2022, and when we are putting these projects to bid, everything was, and not only in the city of Miami, any municipality, they're running into the same issues.

I think that that really, again, when we hear projects come before us, we're keeping this financial aspect at the top of our mind. It has to be critical. And also, as we're hearing from Clara, that private development is so critical as part of the puzzle, which is what we somewhat addressed with the green roof ordinance, when if they add a purple roof, for instance, they could hold water. With the Flora proposal, there's more on-site water retention on sites. I think us coming up with bringing in best practices that other cities are doing on the private sector to incorporate is definitely going to be a really important part. Like when we saw the presentation from Bayshore Park, excuse me, Canopy Park two meetings ago, they traded development density for a multi-acre stormwater park. And the Resilience Trust Fund in Edgewater that trades density for additional resilience benefits, Those types of incentives, I think, we're going to have to keep looking at to help offset all of these challenges that we're hearing about. Were there other questions?

Yeah, I have a few questions. Thank you all so much for presenting. To follow up on Aurelia's question, is there a plan in place for when some of these

complete construction to kind of test how they're performing against the model to ensure that everything else will hopefully also perform so like the way we had described it before just in case there was going to be grants which some of them were each area we took the existing conditions model and we did a pre-post with just that project in and then with other projects in that area to see so we have a pretty good idea of the pre-post and what we're doing up in Broward County you know When we started this, flood sensors was just a thing that we were doing as R&D. You can buy these things now on the land based on poles and put it on a SCADA system and start seeing. So Broward County is putting in a program of sensors, $10,000 to $12,000 a piece, but every year you put in a couple more, you put them in in these areas, and then you can positively see the impacts of what these are. Is it camera? No, it's not camera-based. It's literally a flood sensor.

It goes in the ground?

Yeah. It puts it in a small manhole, and it's a pressure transducer. It's a small box. And so we use a section of the master plan that recommends those. But back then, it was the camera wanted the whole thing with the infrared, blah, blah, blah. Now it's literally just on a pole, and it's turnkey. You buy the thing. So something that you can do to do your metrics and see.

So is it similar to the smart covers, Clara? Yeah, very similar. Similar to that?

Yes.

Could those be retrofitted? Because I know we have those in the city. For sure.

I mean, you can do that. You can do these. That might be, you know. And then you can start doing your trends and things like that.

We already have them in parts of the city of Miami because they measure, they really measure SSO sanitaries who are overflows. but they could probably, you know, flooding is flooding. When you have an SSO, that's basically your flooding. So, I mean, I wonder if,

And that's something that we can team up with the county and verify. I know that the county has some measures for flooding. South Florida Water Management District as well is collecting data. So we haven't pinpoint what infrastructure or the method, but we do have... known areas of flooding, and we do count on feedback from the residents, our own operations that we know. We go to the sites when we, our operations, whenever we have a storm event, larger storm event coming, they know the areas that they need to go to to check that it's flooding. It's not before to make sure that it's clean, so we know the areas and we are I mean, we can team up with the county or do some pilots with some of those technologies.

I think it's, you know, from a tracking perspective, you know, after the ribbon cutting, everybody forgets. But it would be good to find out, well, yeah, it did alleviate flooding to this point.

Yeah, to verify that it was efficient. Right. Mm-hmm.

I have another question for you. You have brought up the stormwater fee, and I know you mentioned like it would be absurd to raise it to like $100, but was there ever consideration to like adjust the stormwater policy, the stormwater fee policy at all, like maybe based on impervious surfaces?

Increasing the stormwater fee was a process of basically comparing to the statewide, comparing to other municipalities with similar conditions in the Miami-Dade County area. We are still... close to the state average. We're still below some of the municipalities in the city. The approach was presented to administration, and it was increased to $7. now and then every year at 50 cents additional up to five when it will be reassessed that's the way that it was approved and from my understanding that seven dollars is for residential properties it's the er use is an equivalent residential unit so any any residential property, say a house, a single family, is one residential. If it's a duplex, it's two. If it's a building, it's per unit.

For non-residential is based on the equivalent of the impervious divided by the are you which is like a thousand Yeah, I mean that I was thinking about is Like for condo buildings, they're paying like significantly more Because they have so many more units like each individual property But they're they have less impervious surface proportionally and i wonder if that is something that we could dig into like if there's a way to adjust the policy i don't know if that sounds crazy it i mean it depends on the on the um

The use of the... It's not only the direct use of the... Right away in front of you is the general city, right? So there's access to your road. There's access to other arterials. And it's basically... There's other costs associated with more urbanized area that are linked to high density. Right, right. So I don't, I mean, I don't. Right, it would have to be backed really well. Yeah.

Okay.

I think that's a complex one. One of my questions was tracking the costs like on a per unit basis because per linear foot and it's costs more maybe in an urban setting because of the complex underground utilities, but there's definitely a division where certain dollars of the stormwater fee are translated to the whole city, which is part of what I think the Resilience Trust Fund and Edgewater is going to help do is keep funds for that area that's very low-lying and maintain them there. So again, I think that those types of kind of innovative policy mechanisms we're going to see more of.

And I know that you had a question on how you can correlate by linear feed, by ERU, but we do look at basically to see if there is a cost comparison to checks and balance, right? So if you have a very similar setting, type of project, type of neighborhood, pump station, if it's a low-lying area that needs a pump station, needs wells, it's going to be more expensive than one that has exfiltration, that is smaller roads, you have less footprint. But we do have a comparison when it is similar characteristics. If you have a project like East Little Havana and Wynwood that you have 15,000 linear feet of road, more or less similar conditions, more or less combined residential with industrial with similar, then you do have a way to compare the cost. When you have something like Edgewater and Flagami, you see that the area of Flagami, it's more residential, less density. And it's more spread out, so it's gonna cost you because of the amount of infrastructure, but Edgewater is, it's basically, you have 70 foot right of way, but with tons of utilities. You have an outflow directly to the bay that you have to balance with another outflow that is coming from the west, so it's very, It's not easy to compare those two, but then you can compare it to maybe ShortQuest because it's right on the base. So it's not one-to-one on a regular basis, but there are some factors, some items that we do take into account.

Yeah. I know, because just to stay on time, are there any other pressing questions for tonight? But I think that we'll definitely need to keep following up afterward.

Yeah, I have two quick ones based on some budget recommendations that we're going to be proposing. I just want to confirm. So a conceptual ERP was brought to a permitting agency, and it was determined that They'd no longer do them or this project was not?

It was actually submitted to the district. Right, okay. And we had discussions with them and they said they were no longer gonna accept that type of a submittal. It's gonna be a one by one individual.

Okay, great. And then one on the stormwater design standards manual and design standards updates. I just wanted to confirm, is there a plan to have a completed manual for the city of Miami? a stormwater design standards manual. It was recommended in one of the immediate action items.

We have updated the design standards, including the stormwater design standards. Okay. And basically the level of the sign, it makes reference to the stormwater master plan. But as far as the sign standards, we have updated the RPW standards.

Okay.

Jenny Lee or Silvio, any pressing questions?

Yeah, thank you so much for this, and also, Irela, for recommending that we prepare the questions ahead of time so that we can make the most of our time here together. And my question, I have a number of them, and I'll try to just go through them quickly. How are you, if at all, incorporating IC change data from the former plan into maybe since the original master plan? How are you incorporating continuous data like the 311 in the IC change data sources and inputs?

So the stormwater master plan was prepared based on the reporting mechanisms of the time. So the way that we are using IC change, the same way that we use 311 and the reports that we receive is that we have them compiled in GIS. The way that IC change has been working towards is utilizing that data Those reports, with the photographs, with the location, because they are georeferenced, they're able to provide us the extent of the flooding. And compiling all the information, the extent of the flooding, the number of, some people keep reporting it to 311, so we are actually incorporating that into ICChange. into our GIS so we can see all the data together and identify the critical areas. And the reason the 311 and our own reporting, because we do get pictures by email, by phone even, is that you can actually get the level of flooding and see how critical it is. When you have a report that is used in writing, that you have flooding. But flooding could mean that there's water in this well. Flooding could mean that the road is passable. But when you see something that it's beyond the sidewalk or it's beyond the crown, that's the way that you can actually assess the severity of it.

And are the current models accessible for research purposes by researchers, like the different integrated models that have been produced?

We work with CDM to basically, the model is available. We have to be mindful that this is a very robust model. So we do, with our consultants, we provide the information per base and we work with CDM because we have to keep track of our own model of how it is being updated, how it is being used. Whenever we have requests from an educational facility, we meet with them, we go over how it is, how it works. I think that Even for a designer who gets a model, a lot of times we have to meet with CDM, look at all the technical approach that is taken because it's a citywide model. So we go basin by basin, or if it was extracted for a specific project. But working with the entire city, it's something that we work on case by case. It's not something that we have published and it's just available to download. It's on our case by case.

Right, that makes sense. And in the beginning, and one of you mentioned this on the CDM side, that some of the models, and this answers one of the questions we had earlier, are accessible with like open source tools or other more accessible tools so that staff or others are able to take a look or take a peek at that. I'd be very curious to learn more about what those tools and that looks like, just to be able to tinker and explore with that to understand, you know, any other potential improvements or suggestions that we could make going forward. Doctor, you wanted to comment on that?

Sure. If you go to just Google EPA SWMM, it should take you. I haven't done it recently, but it should take you to the EPA website, and there's a download, and you can just download it onto your computer, and then If the city says, okay, to give it to you, then you can just take it and run it and see what it looks like.

All right, thank you so much. That answers that. And I think you already mentioned this, the digital monitoring, reporting, and verification. I know that that's one of, to Chairman's point and my colleague, it is something that I want to support going forward. My question to you is, especially with some of the, I saw for D1 and Alapata, my area, that there's some funding gaps, $20, $30 million. How do you fill some of those gaps, or do you need to access, for example, could you access the new Alapata CRA to help supplement some of those so that we can move the project beyond design? How can we help you make progress to help meet your goals on time and on budget? I'm just trying to think out loud here.

We have coordinated with some CRAs. We actually did some initial coordination with the area by the park on Northeast 18th. I forgot the name. What's the name of that park? Just went away. But there are some CRAs, private developers that have approached the city to basically provide the shortfall so for some of the projects in lieu of safer with private developments that they need to do off-site improvements and we have an ongoing project then we get uh funding for the allocated for the project um i know that um that we provide that type of information, the shortfall that we have. And it helps say that we have a shortfall of 10 million. If we can get five, two, four, and we can reach the gap and apply for, use it as leverage for a grant. That way we can fulfill the shortfall. But at the same time, we do work with the designers to analyze any any existing infrastructure that can remain, any recent infrastructure that has been put in by a developer, basically to reduce the infrastructure that we need. Taking into account that there's some existing that the level of service is not the level of service, but the efficiency is not necessarily 100%. But we are basically maximizing what we have and what we're getting by other projects to reduce the scope and still meet the level of service for the project overall.

I was talking to a real estate developer that's developing something across the street from my house, and they said that they would love to learn more about some of the things like, for example, Chairman, you mentioned the purple roofs, these types of incentives. I'm not sure if we have something like that anywhere on the websites or right now, but they're like, hey, if we could, because they have flooding across going on, if we could adopt these on our side, we'd love to be able to explore what that looks like. And even the consultants were not very clear on like, where to go and how to reference it, you know, the landscape architects. So I'm not sure if we have like a little resource library. And to that question, Chairman, since we just passed the storm resolution, I'm wondering if you're considering how local parks or other types of public infrastructure near the existing master plan can help supplement, maybe offset some of the costs, right? So maybe if parks or something could absorb that, if that helps reduce or maybe kind of recast and reforecast the predictive forecast modeling scenarios for different areas. I don't know if that made sense. So you just passed storm, so you want to see... Are there other departments like Parks now that can help supplement and take some of the pressure off of your budget?

I think you're talking about the sponge proposal. Sponge, excuse me, yeah. That's what's going to be done in the next 175 days, yep.

Another method of kind of chipping away at those costs and getting things in early. If state roads are getting redone, if county roads are getting redone, you said the CRA development projects, because the roads are already torn up and all you're paying for is some exfiltration pipe, filter fabric, and rock. and that's coming back to your original question on the stormwater utility. If the rates were higher, you could have a kitty of reserves, so when these opportunities come up, you can jump on those and say, okay, we'll allocate that fund, that fund, that fund. You don't want to put in some large pipe to a future pump station that's 20-inch stranded infrastructure. It's a waste of money, but always the exfiltration, always some of the water quality, swales wherever possible, those types of things, so you can always start chipping away And the 30 million comes down to 29, 28, 27. So it's all synergistic and kind of builds upon itself by putting things in phases while someone else's work is going on.

How do we do that right now, if at all, to be able to kind of make sure we're looking at all these options? And I think this kind of goes back to your point on dovetailing processes to make sure we maximize ROI from once these projects get done.

We're going to need to move to the next item pretty soon. Sure.

Basically, the parks, we typically have, or actually the parks have on-site retention of the facility. Unless it's an existing condition, it's typically there, self-contained, and they don't necessarily have the capacity to receive additional runoff from the road. But they are part of the contribution of putting less water on the road, basically the same way that off-site or private developers have a requirement to retain everything on site. So that's the way that it contributes. We are also promoting the restoration of swales, the use of more green area. And following along the lines is that state projects and county have their own funding source. And we do work with DOT and with the county, not only to coordinate what's going to their system, but if there is a common output and we have a contribution to upgrade it, then we work with their funding plan to incorporate those. And we bring up the projects that have more critical flooding for their consideration because they have their own funding limitations to address those because there is immediate impact from their roads to ours. I know that the county is planning one on Bayshore Drive, which is a high area that is going to alleviate a lot of the flooding east of Bayshore Drive because it's going to prevent from running down to those lower roads. So yeah, it's all connected.

Awesome, thanks. Jenny Lee, was there anything pressing?

Nothing pressing, but thank you so much for this super informative presentation. I can't wait to see some of these projects come to life and really help mitigate stormwater flooding. So thank you.

Thanks. I saw you raise your hand, and normally I might offer that opportunity, but we're pretty far behind schedule at this point. We do have a public comment at the end. Or if there was a question about what we just heard, I'd welcome you to maybe speak with them while they're here. But I thank you so much for the presentation and all the detail. And thanks for all the hard work. Appreciate it, guys.

Thank you. Looking forward to getting those projects on, too.

Absolutely. All right. So a lot of detail. You know, I'd encourage you guys to follow up if there was more questions you had, and we can hopefully keep the conversation ongoing. All right, so we'll move to the next item, which was item five, old business, budget workshop, recommendations, update. So we already had, you know, the approval of minutes at the beginning of the meeting of our workshop minutes. We had a workshop. Arella, Silvio, Allison, and myself were present. Appreciate you guys showing up. And we discussed the items that had been submitted And we talked through them, and then I went ahead and drafted a draft memo on those items that we have before us. So, you know, if there's any other things you guys want to add, we can do that now. But we'll kind of, like, move this item into item seven, items to be voted on. So this item is a memorandum. This would be the second time we've done this. We did this last year. Our bylaws state that we can ask for funding for the committee ourselves, but We've chosen not to do that and instead to make recommendations. So the memorandum follows the same format as what we did last year, kind of just outlining the need and then going through each item one by one with the request, the rationale, and the supporting policies.

Mr. Chair, I think that there are two, and if Allison's okay, that we can strike off.

Yeah, I was a little bit confused on the response for the design standards manual because I'm not quite sure that that exactly is what is... I think there's a miscommunication on what a stormwater design standards manual is and then a drainage standards for the city. Because when I went to Publix Works, I don't know, Miriam, did you send the document that I had sent after our workshop to the chair? Yes. Okay. So there's a drainage standards document that the city has, but it's not the same as like a design standards manual, which is more holistic. And I'm not 100% sure if... Clara's still here.

So she may be able to answer that.

maybe more, maybe, maybe, yeah, I didn't realize, thank you, make it more clear, I just, because I could see her from here, so I was like, no, I, I, thank you so much, I only, I started paying attention when you said drainage, thank you so much, yeah, so I reached out to Public Works and asked for the design standards manual, and they sent me a drainage standards document that had, like, 10 to 20 different like standard drainage and piping types that was like standardized across the city. But I didn't know if there was like a holistic stormwater design standards manual that kind of came out of the stormwater master plan.

There's not a separate, say, design manual. Okay. The drainage... component of the standards includes any details for drainage structures, pipes, restoration, and the swell component, any green infrastructure. So, I mean, I don't know if you received the entire, yeah, like you said, I think it's like 20-some. Basically, the the parameters that are required for the design are based on the master plan. I mean, that has the level of service, the elevations, and the elevations of the seawalls are in the code as well, but then the design, the stormwater master plan has the rainfall, the tailwater.

And they're all updated based on the, okay.

Where you can have, where it's recommended to have French rain or, yeah. But it's not the main part of... The design component is in the stormwater master plan because it tells you the rainfall event and the level of service and the elevations, the tailwaters, what considerations are needed. And besides the stormwater master plan, they actually have a technical document of the approach that it needs to be modeled and things like that.

Okay, yeah. Okay. Okay. So then I would agree that we can probably remove items one and two. Thank you so much.

Yes. Strike items one and two.

We'll strike one and two, and then we'll move to item three.

So item three is to incorporate the NOAA Atlas 15 when it is available into projects that continue from the stormwater design standards master plan. And then I believe also any additional capital CIP projects in the future.

Yeah, my only question on that one, I keep bothering Clara. Would that trigger an update to the stormwater master plan using the updated NOAA 15, was it Atlas?

Yeah, NOAA Atlas 15.

It hasn't come out yet, right?

It hasn't fully come out yet.

What I would recommend is that we take a look at that, we take a look at the differences, and probably make, do an addendum or some type of... bulletin on what is required in reference to that.

And we can do that without doing that.

I mean, an update to the master plan is a robust effort. So depending on the differences and what we are going to undertake, we can do a bulletin for that. From RPW, basically.

So as it reads, maybe read it so that she understands what we're... Because right now, we're trying to determine budget requests, budget recommendations, and right now it doesn't seem like it's going to trigger direct budget costs, but maybe in the future it might.

So that's kind of how... And we also have to see the... documentation that is made available is published and what we are going to adopt and what permitting agencies are also going to require. So we have to be mindful that other agencies have certain requirements, but also what we are going to adopt.

I think as it is, it's good. Yeah. Because we're not really asking for it. You're making a recommendation that once it comes online, to Gladys' point, they'll look at it and determine whether they're going to need budget or not.

Yeah. And I think like we talked about a lot today, it's important to ensure that anything that we're spending money on, we're doing it right the first time. Okay.

Okay. So item four is dollars for sponge program implementation. And essentially just saying, you know, this sponge just passed. There's tasks being done to evaluate the feasibility and maybe dollars should be earmarked for making that happen. And it may be new dollars or it may be existing forever bond dollars that are still remaining. It may be existing parks or public works dollars, we're not sure, but just kind of earmarking dollars for the program that we already endorsed. And then item five is inland street pilot implementation of the Southwest Streetscape master plan. So there's a great master plan that was created and it has some innovative street type designs. And I think that there should be a prioritization of one of those in an inland area. I think it has a lot to do with green infrastructure on the swales. So I think that seeing that through and having that as a pilot would be really great. Item six is tree related funding readiness. So this item was edited after our budget workshop meeting, where we did have a couple potential more specific items. But this one, Is just kind of just generally tagging the efforts of the tree advisory committing and saying that. We don't know exactly what's going to come out of that set of recommendations on chapter 17 and trees in general and that. There may be existing dollars in the tree trust fund and people have made various recommendations on how that should be allocated or or not be allocated but regardless that. there's gonna be a report in the near future and having dollars earmarked to implement what comes out of that committee I think would be poignant. And then item seven, the green gray hybrid infrastructure cost estimating capability. This one is a repeat I think from last year as well. That as we see products come before us, continuing to implement green infrastructure I think is key and I think that the ROI and the dollars is critical. After our workshop, we did make a request and we did receive a response. Thank you so much on the response. It was cost estimate efforts, including green and gray infrastructure are conducted by consultants on a project by project basis. So there is already a process of doing that and it's done as an ad needed. This item was saying, is there some way of kind of streamlining that potentially? Maybe there's a way of finding like, main capabilities that could be born across projects is what we discussed in the workshop. If you all think that that response shows that city already has that capability and we should strike it and be more narrowly focused, I'm fine with that. I'm also open to keeping it. While we think about that, we also did receive a list of a few recommendations from Silvio, but it came after the agenda was published, so I'll move to allow it to be added to the meeting, but we actually have to make a motion, and there has to be a majority vote for us all to be able to see it, his items. They would need to share them with us if they were, if we allow it. Would you want to make a motion?

I'd like to make a motion, yeah, for the committee to consider allowing the review of the other proposals. I can get a second. We can keep it short and maybe circulate it and just get written comment.

Which is why it's important things are in the agenda.

And thank you, Chairman, for the consideration.

I don't feel comfortable, you know, doing something like that, but if you can give us a summary, a quick summary.

Well, we have to have a vote, and then he'll give us a summary, and we'll see it, if we agree to see it. Because it was provided after the agenda packet.

But we had a workshop for this purpose.

We had a, yes, we had a workshop first.

But you didn't bring those to the workshop.

Yeah, I did, I brought some of those comments to the work.

This Overtown thing, relief, yes, you did, I remember we discussed that, and that's fine with me.

Right, and right, exactly, the two proposals I had for budget kind of relate to that recommendation on citizen science, and we can even dovetail it to, for example, here in the budget recommendations on.

I mean, if it's related to this Overtown Relief Program that you're recommending, If you want to add on to that, that's fine if it's related.

Yeah.

But if it's unrelated, we don't have, we haven't had time.

It's four additional items.

It's four additional items?

I don't know. Let's, how about we cover what we can and what we can't. You know, we sort of limit it to this, you know, let's put a time box.

Well, I'm going to let there be a vote. Sure. And again, I really think you should have submitted it beforehand, but it is, you know, So if anyone's gonna second it, but to allow a vote, but it doesn't.

I just wanted to say that I'm not going to second because we do have policies in place for how to deal with this and it's frustrating to try to meet those deadlines and then have others not and then them just get to provide their input anyway. So that's why I'm not voting in favor.

Okay, then we, as of now, we don't have a second. So we won't, we won't take up those items. And I do think what we what we came out of the workshop saying was we were going to do a blanket item on item, item six, tree related funding. And then some of the things you mentioned were, again, very specific to trees. But I think that that item kind of groups the overall idea of making sure that there's dollars allocated to results of the tree committee. So I do think we're generally covering that and that was the consensus of the workshop that you attended.

Okay, so yeah, to comment on point six, I just want to make sure that we add that the budget recommendation is there for the funding readiness inventory, tree inventory was one of it. And I just want to make sure that the detail is we want to incorporate citizen science entries and everything with stormwater management, data verification, et cetera, to incorporate citizen science in our budget and in the way that we take inventories, digitally monitor, report, and verify, and obviously not just take it at face value, but work with our local universities and institutions to verify and validate the data of citizen science so that then the city can consider adopting it into its formal database and inventory, for example, for canopy. And then I think that will encourage a stewardship by the local community, not just a third party vendor that is not as invested in the community, but actually have that local even verification after the inventory is done for continuous monitoring, reporting and verification purposes. And That's sort of 2.5 on that detail. And the last one is in terms of the budget is we talk about open data. And I mentioned this at our budget workshop as well. I want to think about open process. Stormwater management is one of those.

I think that we made a motion or you asked for a motion to introduce these other ideas and we didn't take it up. To not review them. You're trying to introduce them now.

I'm talking about the budget. Yeah, just a budget recommendation detail, Chair. But I mean, we have another.

Is it specific to one of the items you're

specific to the conversation the presentation we just had that it would be helpful i think to map out processes not within resilience and public works and buildings to understand where those processes overlap whether it's storm water or whether it's tree permitting knowing that process i think might might hear you but at the same time i want to respect the will of the committee yeah and you know mr chair i move the budget recommendations as as as

as stated with the strikes.

I was going to go to item seven. We didn't talk about it. Okay. Go ahead. So I just want to make sure that if we spend money on something like this, that the city is also not going to be simultaneously spending money on the consultants as well. Like they already do it that way. Are they going to do it the same way they always do it? And then we're also adding this additional like budget item or like is it redundant, I guess? Or are we suggesting that they get rid of the historical way of doing the cost estimating and that they only implement this? And it saves a lot of money because they no longer have to retain consultants.

I mean, I'm reading the item here right in the middle. If they do not, the committee recommends the city build capacity in-house by allocating budgets to train existing staff in a skill or hire for it so the expertise is retained within the city and can serve many projects over time. If neither option is feasible, the city should retain a qualified consultant to perform the analysis I mean, I think the response we received actually says that this is being done. I think we should strike item seven. I think we should be more concise with X number of things that we've already agreed to, and we should be focused.

I am in agreement.

I'm okay with that, too.

All right, so then it's going to be item one and two are stricken. Item three remains as is. Item four remains as is. Item five remains as is. Item six remains as is. Item seven is stricken, and we will update the order of items to start at item one, because we've stricken item one and two, and would you like to remake your motion based on that?

I move to move on the items you've just listed with the strikes.

I second.

And a second from Allison. All right, all in favor? Aye. Aye. That was Jenny Lee. Was anyone else?

Aye.

Any oppose or abstain? Nay. I would only feel comfortable recommending item five, if we incorporate the Feeley Lab research for the right heat and saltwater-related species selection of the trees. And for point number six, if we're clear that part of the goal of the tree-related funding readiness be focused on enabling citizen-led...

Okay, it already passed. So, and again, you know, you've said in the past, I don't give you time, but I even tried to today. And as you can see that the will of the board wants things to be done in the process. And it was also stated at a previous meeting a couple of months ago to have things printed and ahead of time. So, you know, I just encourage you, please. All right, so let's move to the next item.

Yeah, thank you, Chair.

All right, item five old business on sponge program commission approval update. So the last commission meeting, the item, the item did get expedited forward, which was fantastic. Commissioner Pardo sponsored it, as well as Commissioner Rosado. And then those are the formal initial sponsors. I don't know if there's a technical term. But then afterward, there was additional sponsors by Mayor Higgins, and by Commissioner Escalona and by Chairwoman King. Commissioner Gabella was not present at the meeting, but of all present members, they all voted to sponsor it, which I thought was a really, really strong support from the city in this concept. And I think we should be proud of that and hopeful as well. It does direct to look at potentially even new parks, which we heard a comment on earlier of citizen requests for new parks and green space and That item does directly look to build new parks. Do you have something?

I just wanted to congratulate you, Mr. Chair, because you followed the process, you brought presentations that were related to this item so that we can workshop it here together, and then you developed the policy with staff, I'm assuming, and you were able to move it onto the agenda so quickly, so congratulations, and I think we should all feel very proud of the work we're doing up here. But when it comes to process, that's how we're supposed to be working here. You have an initiative, you bring it, we workshop it together, and then we move it on as a recommendation. That's how committees work.

Yep, exactly. And I have more items I'm going to bring later this year, and I'm going to try to even bring things even earlier in the process so that you all have them even earlier than the agenda packet timeline. And just as far as what the next steps are on this sponge item, there's how many sections? One, two, there's five items. The main thing is to evaluate and prioritize candidate sites for the city manager to formalize knowledge sharing. the city manager to report back to the Commission on an assessment on candidate sites on coordinating with the county acquisition of parcels acquisition cost estimates evaluation of how sponge could defer gray infrastructure summary of academic partnership opportunities review maintenance so you know in just a few months time we're gonna see how feasible it is and hopefully it's a positive outlook, and we get to hear about that, and hopefully we see sponge parks in the near future. So it's pretty awesome, and let's keep up the good work on those. So let's move to the next item. So we already moved through item seven, which is items to be voted on, and now we go to item eight, Office of Resilience and Sustainability Updates.

Hi, good evening.

I have a couple, just a couple of updates. One, some great news. We were awarded $50,000 from Bloomberg Philanthropies recently for the Bloomberg Youth Climate Action Fund. So we have more information that's coming on this, but these would be microgrants for youth-led climate projects. So more information in just the next couple of weeks. Next, I want to give an update on London Climate Week. Mayor Higgins was one of three U.S. mayors that was invited to attend and give remarks during multiple sessions during London Climate Week, and that was the week of June 21st. She talked about urban resilience, climate finance, clean energy, and just really highlighted Miami's climate leadership, and so really, really exciting to hear about that, and we will have a blurb in our next newsletter. And lastly, just want to give a heads up on upcoming tree giveaways. We're tentatively looking at October for our next round. So more to come on that.

Fantastic. Very exciting to see the leadership and the grants. So if no other comments, we'll move to item nine, open discussion. We don't have anything listed today. Oh, I do have an update, actually. So I almost forgot. So on the the tree committee, the tree Advisory Committee, I have a message from Melissa Fernandez steers that they have confirmed that the first tree Advisory Committee meeting is on Monday, July 13, from 9am to 12pm at City Hall chambers. And there is another update as well. that there is during the June 25th city commission meeting commission directed the city manager to bring legislation to the July 9th commission meeting to increase the membership of the Miami tree ordinance advisory committee from 10 to 11 members to include the appointment of one member from the climate resilience committee. This is an at large appointment. So I think that that will be in a possibly addition to Avra who's appointed, I believe, is Commissioner King, one of Commissioner King's appointees. That's going to be at this upcoming meeting. So I'm excited to see that the tree committee is starting next week, and looking forward to participate and encourage you all to participate. And, you know, as we see how that kind of shakes out, I think that there'll be opportunities for CRC to see how how we can offer our guidance, which Mr. Chairwoman King did indicate it when I was at the at the podium for

Speaking on sponge that she did indicate that she wanted us to be aware of what they came up with and an opine Question I know that we had Voted previously to share all of the public comments that have come before us to the committee So now that they're gonna meet I mean, I'm assuming they already have it or I don't know I just want to make sure that they get it Those comments were shared right Miriam Yes Thank you very much for piling those

had a lot of comments last year in our meetings thank you um i also have been collecting on social media several comments from the public because there's also comments from the public that are made that are not necessarily submitted and i'm happy to submit that for the tree advisory committee so i think it'll be helpful to get some of that information absolutely there'll be i'm assuming staff

liaisons on that committee and I'll be sure that there'll be a process for ensuring, or maybe Miriam could assist with that,

Yeah, I'll share it with her. I've just been monitoring on social media some of the comments. I wanted to just make one quick comment, and I apologize that I couldn't make the workshop, but I also wanted to request, is there an opportunity for us to attend workshops via Zoom? Being that it's at noon, it's really hard for me to get downtown during work hours, but I would love to participate, and I just haven't been able to. So I just wanted to see if that was an option for future workshops, if there was a Zoom opportunity or doing it after hours.

We usually plan them kind of case by case. We've always kind of done them at noon. But, I mean, I think it would be up to Nick and Miriam as far as the capabilities of alternative methods of attendance.

You can have online meetings if you wanted to. Yeah. They just have to be available to the public on that link as well.

Okay. Thank you.

All right, so then we'll move to item 10, future agenda topics. We don't have anything listed here, but we have an ongoing list of all the various ideas that you all have submitted. And our next meeting is not for quite a while. It's September 21. So in that time, I'll be planning hopefully multiple meetings for the rest of Q4 and be ready for Q4 to keep it moving. If there's no other comments, let's move to public comment. All right, so item 11 is public comment. Did you have something you wanted? Welcome.

I haven't done this in a while. I have to give my name and...

Yes, please, your name and address.

Name and address, or...

Okay, yeah, hi, my name is Gabriel Requena. I'm from Lopata 33142. Actually, it's Model City. And thank you. for your time and what you guys are doing. I actually, this Saturday was the 250th anniversary of our country and one of the things in the declaration it said, it asserted that governments derive power from the consent of the governed. That would be me and everybody here in the public. So actually when that, presenting the public works, can the public that is present submit questions to them not necessarily here but like after since we are all part of this okay that would be great and then in addition I think I may have brought this up a long time ago but I'd like to know as the public like the effectiveness of this this committee and how many recommendations go to the commissioners and become policy So I'd like to just share that to see for the public to kind of see how effective this is and how positive or how much we're moving forward to adopt climate policies. And I think the public should have a right to know that. And lastly, with all these proposals and budgets and millions of dollars required, one of the things I notice is that we continue to depend on either taxes or grants, or now there's talk about private-public partnerships. And I'd like to know if the committee has ever considered or recommended any solutions to create new sources of revenue. So one example would be in the city of New York. There's policies or laws for polluting. And if the citizen notices it, records it, and presents it, it generates new revenue. And the citizens get a percentage of that. So I'd like to take this time for you guys to kind of consider and open your minds figuring out other ways. I know that there is a penalty for discharge with the public works in your presentation. So maybe working with the public or people that care, like this lady here and myself, and maybe to engage and bring those matters to rest or mitigate them. So those are the things I wanted to bring to my public comment. Thank you.

Thank you, Gabriel. I appreciate you being here and taking the time to come up with those ideas for us. And I can't speak on behalf of staff, but he can reach out to the departments for his questions, right? Yeah. And as far as your second question of Things we've done, you can go on our webpage, and there's a whole section of legislative items, and we should be very proud. It's getting quite built out. There's a lot of things we've done in the last couple years, and the committee's been around for about a decade now. So there's been a number of proposals and legislation and memorandums that have been passed on behalf of ourselves, as well as many other members who have served on this committee before us, and when it was the Sea Level Rise Committee. And it was noticed that actually they highlighted it in a recent online article about the work we're doing. I think we should all be very proud of that. And as far as your idea for revenue, I think that that makes sense. And it's something I'll look into myself. And if you have ideas that you want to share with us and share with Miriam and to share with us, I'd be happy to take a look at those and also would recommend that you show up to the budget workshops that the city hosts, because that sounds like a budget type of item. And as we kind of enter this new realm of fiscal responsibility, kind of tightening our belts, I think that those kinds of ideas would probably be very welcome. So thanks so much for your contribution.

Yeah, and actually, I do have one more. So when the costs were being brought up, perhaps to paint a better picture is also to see what revenue you're going up against so that you can see how tall the order is to try to achieve your goals. That's just for me. I would like to see things kind of know what the income that's coming in to the city so that It's get a better picture of trying to Accomplish those sure thing.

Yeah, I think that'll be very apparent in the in the budget documents that the city prepares Thanks so much Yeah, welcome. Thank you

question. I wanted to know if the tree, excuse me, oh, Lindsay Kane. I'm a resident of Miami-Dade. I wanted to know if the tree committee meeting will be open to the public. It is? Okay. And then also I wanted to say thank you for fielding social media comments and bringing them to the tree committee's attention. If you need any recommendations, try Miami Canopy Watch, Miami Tree Coalition, and even my page, because I'm constantly getting hundreds of comments from people who are quite upset with all of the tree removals going on in the city, who want to see change in the city. And I feel like from everything I've read, Miami ranks pretty low on being a green city. So I hope with the initiatives discussed today, we can move forward to better progress in terms of that. But yeah, thank you for that.

Thank you, Lindsay.

Thank you.

Miriam, any other comments?

No, but can we go back with regards to the meetings, workshop meetings? Could you clarify that statement? You said that if it was offered to the public at the same time?

I believe that a workshop where there's no official action taking place could be online, potentially, if we wanted to do that. For sure, someone could attend online, and we have it in person. They just kind of call in. I think that Chairwoman King did that a little while ago. So that's what I meant for that one.

Okay. So that's if we're able to offer it to the public at the same time.

Yeah, it would have to be open to the public for sure, yeah.

Okay, so if we're not able to do that through the call, then in that case we could not do the online phone call.

Correct, yeah, it would have to be, yes.

Thank you.

Yeah.

Well, it's my understanding, maybe you can check, Mr. Attorney, that it's under workshop. The public does not have public comment, but they can listen in to our meeting.

Yeah, it has to be accessible to the public, yeah. They can listen in to our action.

It doesn't have the same procedural requirements. Or our discussion, because we don't take action at workshops.

Yeah. I have one public comment.

OK.

So I want to congratulate you, Chair, on the stormwater and the sponge resolution. I think this very much aligns with our nature-based thinking for how we can solve some of our issues and where we can make a lot of money and save a lot of money. Also, on the new tree task force conversation, especially since we've been wanting to invite, particularly me, the New York City Parks team to talk about some of the things that they've done in New York. So I want to see if I could liaise that and maybe circulate. The leaf and canopy documents I've written so you could all review them at your own leisure and perhaps Bring up that invitation that workshop to really be able to to get improved Allison I was inspired by how you did your budget Recommendation so I use that format and then a chairman I use your format for some of the draft resolution language offered to share it to the city attorney's office so we can improve that and i'd like for your support especially if we don't want to have the conversations about trees here all the time which i respect then i would love your support so that i can continue to have these conversations at the right venue at the right time and to consider myself for him or the other appointments that i've suggested to my commissioners and to be able to continue to work with the tree task force to carry this forward especially as we transition from this into that um that collaboration with the other committee so again congratulations on your progress thank you allison for for setting you know high standards i think we should abide to those standards by all means and i would ask you to to help me um continue to shepherd this process forward is as we consider the the new stage and again thank you for allowing the the committee the opportunity to hear out these options here

sharing the items that you shared the other day. I think that, yeah, now that the meeting's passed, I think that we would share them in anticipation of future meetings, but I feel like those two resolutions, like, you should just direct them to the tree committee in the time being, and when we have time for a New York Parks presentation, I'll look to add it to the agenda, but it's also based on when I think that it's appropriate and all their documents are available online. So, you know, I'll have it on the list of potential items for Q4.

Thank you, Chair.

All right.

Motion to adjourn.

Yes, motion to adjourn. Second. All right, thank you all so much. See you guys in September.

Please hand me your name tags.

Thank you.