Climate Resilience Committee - Regular Meeting

The City of Miami Climate Resilience Committee for March 2nd, 2026. Very excited to be starting off at 6.01 p.m.

This is fantastic. So we will start with item one, roll call. From my right, please. Good evening, Grant Musser.

Allison Weinstock.

Aaron DeMeo.

Urella Baguette.

Good evening, Wayne Pathman. Thank you so much. And now, Miriam, please.

Miriam Flores.

Sonia Burbaker, Chief Resilience Officer.

Gigi Solomon, Office of City Attorney.

Thank you. All right, we have a sub item under roll call today to welcome our newest member. Very excited to have you here serving with us and excited to see Mayor Higgins commitment and interest in an appointment after her election. Welcome. If you want to say a few words.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I'm really excited to be part of this committee representing the mayor. She is very, very involved in resilience issues. And I'm so pleased to see that the plastic ordinance passed recently. Just one of the many initiatives that I'm sure we will move forward. And I'm just happy to be here to help make Miami more resilient.

Wonderful. All right, we'll move to item two, which is public comment. If anyone from the public would like to make a comment, now is the time.

I wrote some comments down, if you don't mind. Good morning, Albert Gomez, District 2 resident. Good evening, chair, committee members, new and returning, and everyone here and listening. Tonight, Dr. Ben Kirkman will remind us of climate change. And that climate change and sea level rise, heat and flooding are not future concerns, they're accelerating now. The question before this committee is whether we will match the science with meaningful policy. Our opportunity is to pass ordinances similar to the single use plastic ordinance. These sorts of things can happen every day and all we have to do is have the political will to do them. I think that there's also convening bodies like the Biscayne Bay Marine Health Summit, which Irelia Vargas sat on. I acknowledge you for joining this. I think you're going to bring a lot to this committee. Ordinance like that came from that type of convening. So I would ask from previous times, the Climate Resilience Committee and the Sea Level Rise Committee before had put resolutions forward supporting the Biscayne Bay Marine Health Summit, which happens annually. What that does is it puts it in the commissioner's face that it's happening and gives them an opportunity to participate directly because it's being supported by a board. So I would suggest that you, we've done it before in the past, so there's precedent. for you to bring that forward again so that the new commission, which are all new bodies, many new bodies, could come and see that support from the committee and then have to vote on that resolution and then that further supports their push for protecting Biscayne Bay. And then, I was a little bit perplexed, but I completely understand with the permit renewals and kind of revisions and fast tracking that's going on. I noticed that there's been some streamlining of the tree permit process. And that obviously coincides with your request last week for all total tree permit removal requests and actual removals so that you can have that data ahead of your upcoming workshop. Given that Dr. Kirkman is speaking today on climate change and flooding and heat, which the canopy addresses flooding and heat directly, that we take seriously that these are all the signals that you need, the science that you need to make those decisions, and in so put more priority on this workshop, make sure that it doesn't slide past April, and that we actually get it done, and that we get the data from the city so that we can make thoughtful decisions here and recommendations. And I appreciate it, thank you so much.

Thank you. Are there any public comments online, Miriam? All right. So if there's no other public comments, we'll move to item three, approval of the minutes from March 2nd and March 23rd. Do I have a motion to approve one or both of those?

Motion to approve both. Second. Both.

And both for Morella, second. All in favor? Aye. Aye. Aye. Pardon me, I should have gone back to roll call. Thank you. All right, was that all in favor of the minutes, I believe, correct? Okay, great. All right, so we'll just do one more roll call.

Thank you.

All right, we'll move to item four, which is presentations. We have two great presentations this evening. The first one focused on climate and weather, and this is a trend of something I've done since you guys elected me chair two years ago. My very first meeting as chair, I invited Brian McNoldy from UM Rosenthal School, and he presented on his data on sea level rise. And last year, we hosted Climate Central. So following that tradition, we have the first meeting as your chair to kind of remind us of where we are with weather and climate. So thank you so much for being with us here this evening.

Well, thank you, and thank you for the opportunity.

Just pull the mic a little closer.

Nice to see some familiar faces. I'm Ben Kirtman. I'm a climate modeler. So I'm the kind of guy that thinks about how do we take the global signals that we see around the world and translate that into something that happens on a very regional level and then ultimately how does that get to support decisions that we have to make on a daily basis. That's kind of the research focus that I have. I want to provide Some key takeaways from some of the work I'm going to show you. Sorry. I'm a fidgety guy, so I often drift from the mic. Apologies for that. There are persistent trends in the climate system. We're seeing that global warming is continuing and sea level rise is accelerating. There's evidence of a possible climate shift in 2023. I'm going to show you some pictures related to that. And the Hunga Tonga... eruption possibly contributed to those recent anomalies. And what I want to put those, you know, that's an eruption in the middle of the ocean. Why do I care about that in Florida? And we do care about that in Florida because it does look like there are some of those signals from these big eruptions injecting lots of moisture into the atmosphere that are penetrating down to the very regional level. So I want to show about that. The regional implications is that these global trends are in fact increasing here and are increasingly visible. One thing that I would really like to underscore is that hyperlocal, high resolution information remains essential for planning and risk management. And so what that means to me is we need to figure out how to take that forcing from the global scale and get it down to the one to two mile scale so that decisions can be made. And that's kind of the work that we're doing at the University of Miami. And I'm going to talk a little bit about some of the big projects that we have, some funded by the state of Florida, some funded by the federal government. So those modeling and methodological challenges, it's not trivial. This is really hard work. And one thing I would want to emphasize with that is that to make this information that we're trying to produce useful, useful for the people that have to make decisions on resource management, building codes, whatever it is, draining power distribution, all of those tricky problems, there has to be a collaboration with the people that are making the decisions and the people that are generating that information. If we don't have that collaboration, our information that we're trying to generate is of no use whatsoever. So the decision makers need to be at the beginning of that process. So I really want to, if you had to boil down everything I said as to one ask, is let's collaborate. I'm not asking you to make big financial investments. I'm asking you to make big collaborative investments. And I'm going to talk a little bit about a couple of these projects. The Florida Flood Hub and, of course, NOAA's efforts that are happening now. So like I said, my job is to figure out how to take this global stuff and bring it to the regional scale. And so one thing I like to show is what's happening to the global climate system. This is one of my favorite pictures. On the left here, you're seeing how the annual cycle of temperature varies across decades and epochs. And so the lighter colors, the bluer colors, the cooler colors are from very early on, 1850 to 1890, something like that. And as the colors warm up, what you see is there's a steady trend of warmer and warmer temperatures. And then you notice in 2023, you see that it jumped off the chart. You don't see gaps like that in the rest of the record. From 1850 to the present, you don't see gaps like that. The climate system has made a shift. It's much warmer. And even 2025, which is a relatively cool year, so to speak, the last decade, it's already quite warm and consistent with that shift. So this is a really nice picture of global temperatures, and this is what I mean by a shift in the climate system. You can see these shifts happen. So in the decade of, say, the 2015 to, say, 2020, 2022, something like that, there's a nice cluster of those temperatures, 1 to 1.3 degrees warming, and then all of a sudden in 2023, those numbers shifted and jumped. The climate system warming is consistent, and goes and fits and starts. There'll be plateaus going forward, but there is no evidence whatsoever the trends we see today are going to reverse themselves. And then this is that volcanic eruption that I mentioned that could possibly explain that jump that we just had. And so what you're seeing here is a record of water vapor in the atmosphere. Water vapor is a is probably one of the most important, if not the most important, greenhouse gas. So you hear people talk about CO2. Yes, that's an important greenhouse gas. Methane, yes, 40 to 50 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2. Very important. Water vapor, probably the most important greenhouse gas. As the climate system warms, it holds more water vapor. As there's more water vapor, there's more of a greenhouse effect. So that positive feedback between water vapor and warming is essential and could possibly explain that climate jump that we have. So what I said was I like to think about what are the global forcings and how do I bring that down to a regional level. One of the first things we want to think about is how do those global temperatures translate into temperatures in the southeast. Eventually, I have to bring this down to the Florida scale, but South Florida scale. But let's just start by going to the southeast. And one of the most interesting results from all of our climate change projections, this is really interesting, the biggest warming signal in the southeast is overnight temperatures. Why is that such a big deal? Well, if you think about it, there are people that rely on being able to open their windows to cool their homes. They don't want to run their air conditioners 24-7. They use cold overnight temperatures to keep their house cool. They're less likely to be able to use overnight temperatures to cool their house. And that is the fastest growing signal of climate change in the southeast and in South Florida. Let's go back to squeezing down to a finer scale. Let's talk about what's happening in Florida. These are temperature trends. You smooth the data so you can see things. And this is what's been happening in Florida since the modern instrument records, since basically 1950 through the present. And you can see a steady increasing in Florida-wide temperatures. I'd like to argue that that's still great. You know, I went from the global temperatures. Things are really warming. I went to the regional level. Nighttime temperatures are warming. And now I'm going to the Florida level. Temperatures are warming. That's still useless information for people that want to make planning decisions in South Florida. We have to start talking about what's happening locally, what's happening here immediately. This is a plot that's showing you that annual cycle. It's a little hard to look at. It looks like an eye test, so I agree. It's a little hard to look at, but if you just blur your eyes and look at that summer season, the sort of June through October season, and what you notice is the colors are getting brighter and brighter. That's the number of hours per day that temperatures exceed 90 degrees Fahrenheit in Miami, Florida. So what you're seeing is it's getting to the point in 2020s, it's getting to the point where the temperatures in the summer season are always, always 24 hours a day over 90 degrees Fahrenheit. That's phenomenal. That's a point at which the human body is starting to respond to those temperatures. People are working outside. Overnight temperatures, people then, you know, when it's really hot, you know this. It's hard to sleep. Sleep affects human health. So we should be very concerned about these numbers. This is showing putting that human health into a stronger context. This is looking at the heat index. So the blue and the green curves are temperature and relative humidity respectfully, right? And the red curve is the heat index. And the heat index is that attempt to connect temperature and relative humidity to what you feel as a person. It combines those two effects. Because you know, when it's 100 degrees in Arizona, they talk about a dry heat. No problem, because it's a dry heat. 100 degrees here in Miami, where it's very humid, is unbearable. unbearable for the human body. So this heat index is trying to combine those two effects. And what you notice is that trend in the heat index is quite extreme. It's 0.61 degrees per decade. Let's do the sea level rise part. It's a really interesting plot. This is from the IPCC chapter, one of the chapters I worked on. And what's really interesting about that top panel, nothing's happening. Just a bunch of dots, flat. Nothing looks like it's happening. That's because sea level was pretty flat for the last 3,000 years. No change in sea level. That's a good thing. The bottom panel is showing us what happened to sea level since the 1700s to about 2010, something like that. And what you can see is at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, sea level increased rapidly. This is the biggest increase in sea level for the last 3,000 years. This is something we need to plan for. This is something we need to respond to. Again, that's at the global level. Let's bring that down to the regional level. This is looking at the number of the hours per day where the water levels are above mean high tide at Virginia Key, Florida. So this is where the Rosenstiel campus is. And this is going from, say, 1996, I think, to the present. And so, again, what you can see in this eye test is that as you look at the high tide season, what you start to see is more and more reds, or more and more at a time, that the sea level is above the mean high tide at Virginia Key. So these trends, and it looks like it's accelerating. These trends are not going to reverse themselves. all by themselves. It's not going to happen. And these are things that we have to plan and figure out how to respond to. This is looking at, again, sea level rise in Virginia Key. And on the left here, we were asked to do a study. Actually, the Miami Herald asked us to do this study. And since I'm very forgetful, I'm a typical absent-minded, forgetful professor, They asked me what what what should we do and I said I tried to think about when people care about This nuisance flooding where it's no longer a nuisance. It's actually really affecting their lives. I asked my student to think about How often how many days? you know, when are you gonna cross that threshold of 70 days per year where I There's more than seven inches of water in front of your house for more than seven hours, over 70% of the year. So you notice there's lots of sevens. I can remember the number seven. So I told her to use the number seven. She, of course, ignored me and used six hours and one hour. That's typical of students. And so what you see on this plot is you're looking at various scenarios. And we want to think about how we would plan and respond to those various scenarios. If you just look at the bottom panel, that line, that dotted line, is at 50 days per year that there's more than six hours of water that's over six inches at Virginia Key. So we're expecting, at the best, by the middle, something like the middle of the century, that Virginia Key is gonna have over 50 days a year where there's water on campus for more than six hours. That's a problem, we need a plan for that. When you think about the state of Florida, think about the state of Florida, look at the end of that curve there. Go out to the end of the century, this is only going out to 2060, but if you imagine those curves going out to the end of the century, the state of Florida, just about everywhere along the coast, just about everywhere along the coast, throughout the state of Florida, is going to have more than six inches of water to deal with at high tide every single day. My wife says I'm no fun at parties. You can see why. Extreme rainfall. This is something, you know, some of these projections I'm showing you go way out there in time. In our efforts, we're trying to think about how do we plan and adapt? How do we inform the public? How do we, as decision makers, how do we adapt? How do we figure out where we're going to live, how we're going to live so that we can continue to stay in Florida? That problem is about extreme events. That problem is the question of, well, in five years, right, We had this extreme rainfall event in Fort Lauderdale that was more than 25 inches in 24 hours. Whoa, 25 inches in 24 hours. It was paralyzing for Fort Lauderdale, truly paralyzing for Fort Lauderdale. How often is that gonna happen? Is that a one in 500 year event? Is that gonna turn into a one in 50 year event or a one in five year event? If it's a one in five year event, how are we gonna adapt? What infrastructure are we gonna put in place? How are we gonna manage under those conditions? So that's the kinds of things that we want to think about going forward at the mile by mile. What are the extreme events? What are the chances? And how are we going to respond? For us to be able to develop, help develop those products that you need to use to make decisions, we need to collaborate with those decision makers on day one. So this is digging into that Fort Lauderdale event. This is a typical example. This is the I'm reluctant to show this plot on the right, because this is the NOAA Atlas 14, the NOAA Atlas 15. This is how a lot of local decisions are made about flooding risk. I have to tell you, despite NOAA's Herculean efforts here, they really don't, because they're doing this nationwide, they don't include sufficient local knowledge. It's just natural. It's just going to happen. And so there's a lot to be done in order to improve these products. But what these curves are showing, these gray curves are showing you, is they're showing you extreme rainfall. What are the chances of extreme rainfall? So what you can see on there, the top plot in Fort Lauderdale, that April 12th event of 25 inches in 24 hours, that was a one in 500 year event. That was a one in 500 year event. The question we have to start asking ourselves is, Going forward for the next decade or the next five years, is that going to change? How extreme is that going to be? These NOAA 14 Atlas, NOAA 14 Atlas does not include that. The NOAA 15 Atlas is not going to include that. And then the similar, we looked at some pretty extreme events in Miami. And if you think back to that January 15th event, that was a big deal here, if you remember. That was a pretty big deal in Miami. And that was merely a one in 10 year event, maybe a one in eight year event. We expect a lot more of those going forward. And what I want to argue is, yes, I'm a global climate modeler, but in terms of making decisions, absolutely useless. Look at this picture. If you're worried about flood management in Miami, what are you going to do with this picture? If you're worried about heat stress on people working outdoors, what are you going to do with this picture? And so it's the time now for the climate modeling community, guys like me, to get together with the people that have to make decisions and start figuring out how to make this stuff useful. And one way... You know, those scenarios that you hear from the IPCC reports, and I'm guilty of working on those things myself, I have trouble communicating that to the public. When I tell you, oh, RCP 8.5, people look at me, what the hell are you talking about? What is that? But if I talk about what's the warming risk here in Miami if global mean temperatures increase to three degrees?

Okay.

That you can understand. What if it increases to two degrees or 1.5 degrees? Same thing with extreme rainfall. So finally, we've decided to use language and understanding to help people figure out how to translate that global mean thing into local impacts. And that's critical. That's a sea change in the climate modeling community and in the the flood hub community that's funded by the state of Florida that is looking at extreme rainfall and sea level rise, they have finally adopted that this is the way to look at how there's going to be local impacts of global warming. That was a Herculean fight. It took a long time to convince people that that's the way to do this. So there's two major efforts at the University of Miami and many others, I just don't have time to talk to them, but there's two really quite large efforts. One is the Flood Hub, which I've talked about. It's an interesting collaboration between the University of Miami, Florida State University, and the USGS. And the project is, I'm providing, my part of the project is I'm providing global, very, very high resolution simulations of what the climate system will look like if there's one degree warming or two degrees of warming or three degrees warming. I pass that on to the team at Florida State. They reduce that down to a finer scale, and then they pass that on down to the USGS folks, and they produce it to about two miles scale for decision support. It's a very interesting project to look at. In particular, what's the extreme rainfall risk? What happens with that 25 inches of rainfall in 24 hours? What's going to happen to that if there's an increase of one degree in global temperatures or two degrees or three degrees? Very interesting project. The second project is a very large project funded by NOAA, and it's to develop products, projection products, that people can use to make decision supports. You notice there's this key word. through stakeholder guidance, right? And I view this community here as those stakeholders. We will not be successful if we're not interacting with the folks that are making the decisions. And the folks that need to tell us, no, no, Ben, that product you're producing is completely useless. What I need is this. We go back to the lab, we rerun our experiments, we try to figure out what we can provide that and we give it to them again and they say, almost, but can you do this? And my point is it's a collaborative effort. If I'm just throwing projections over the wall, decision makers, one, won't use them because they don't understand them, and two, they won't use them because they don't address their need. So if we're not providing projections that address the decision support need, they're of no value whatsoever. So I do want to point out some of these. Am I out of time? What's my time? You guys need me to stop? Just cut me off whenever you need to. Let me put it down.

How many, like maybe five more minutes or less?

Five more minutes and I'll be done.

OK.

So this is some of that using that high resolution global model simulations. These are temperature changes. And all I want to point out to you is you can see the effects of the Gulf Stream in this in some of the temperatures. You can see that there's granularity throughout the state of Florida. You can see the West Florida shelf affects those temperatures. Same thing with rainfall and humidity. And so you can see some of those results in how the rainfall changes. And ultimately, these simulations can be used to assess sea level rise. One of the things that really affects sea level rise here in South Florida is the Gulf Stream or the Florida Current. If you could look at that picture on the right, you can see the ocean current speeds, where that current sits. It's right off the coast of Miami. Getting that current right at very high resolution is critical to getting sea level rise. Think of that current as kind of just sweeping the water away. So when that current is raging... sea level goes down. That current weakens, sea level goes up. So the projections that are coming out of the Florida Flood Hub sometime in the near future do not include this effect. And projections, we think, are that that current system is going to continue to weaken. Then finally, last couple of slides, probably on your mind, One of the projects we run at the University of Miami is called the North American Multi-Model Ensemble These are predictions of what's going to happen with El Nino this coming summer and winter. And I'm sure you've heard in the press that there's an Uber El Nino coming or a Super El Nino or whatever you want to call it, El Nino Palooza, whatever it is. These forecasts that underpin all of that information that the federal government releases That's made by the University of Miami. We're the lead for those forecasts. This is a set of forecasts made by, and when I say NMME really fast, you may think I'm saying enemy. I'm not. I promise you I'm very, very proud of this project. I've worked on this almost my entire career. But we are leading those forecasts. And that, one of those models there, is forecasting the Uber El Nino this coming winter. And that's what this looks like in terms of sea surface temperatures. Typically, although not always, but typically an El Nino means that the hurricane, we're going to get a break on the hurricane season. Typically.

There's an offset.

If the Atlantic is really warm, then that El Nino effect is less. And if you look at the temperatures here on the right, these are absolute temperatures, what you can see. is the tropical pacific is warm as heck that's the el nino but the atlantic is also pretty warm those warm temperatures hopefully those warm temperatures will not offset the el nino effect and we'll have a good hurricane season i just thought i'd let you know and i'll end there just keeping the key takeaways and i guess i would really add our ask is collaboration thank you

Thank you so much for the presentation, sharing all that data and all the hard work that you put into it. As you kept saying, it's being used by so many organizations to create subsets and inform us and prepare us. So I really appreciate it. And also, again, I asked, let me actually take a moment, sorry, roll call for Jenny Lee.

Jenny Lee, present.

that just seeing some of this data and the trend lines are continuing to remind ourselves of the urgency of the matter and the commitment that we've all made to this board and to our community. Hopefully we can act with urgency and as we've done in the past with resolutions and memorandums referencing the speaker data that we've seen before us and that we can use some of this data in memorandums and resolutions. Part of one of the things in our bylaws mentions collaboration with local universities. So we're doing that here by bringing Ben here and then referencing his work. And hopefully also we can find a way to act on his request of some type of suggestion of collaboration between city staff and his organization with maybe particular items. Like for instance, the base flood elevation and freeboard, I really want to pay attention to this year. And I think his metrics could be kind of added in to ensure that the research that they're doing is made useful to staff. That's all I had to add for today. Did anyone else have questions or comments?

I do, Mr. Chair. Ben, great presentation. Thank you. None of it is surprising to most of us up here.

Unfortunately.

Unfortunately. Can you please define collaboration? What does that look like?

So we've had a couple of roundtables, both with county decision makers and some city decision makers. What that, at the outset, has looked like is getting people to sit around a table for a couple of hours about what information they need in order to make a decision. So that's step one. And that's for us to listen. We ask the question, what's keeping you up at night? What are you worried about at work and what decisions you need to make and that you don't have enough information for? And that's for us to listen and think about how can we provide products that help that decision processing. The second step is for us to go back to the lab and see what we can put together based on all of the best data we have, the best models, and then present that to them. And for them, the decision maker is to tell us, no, it's no good. This is not what I really meant. This is what I meant. You need to change this and change that. And then for us to go back to the lab and do that. That process, that iterative process, I believe develops trust, and that trust is critical for someone to be able to make the decision. If the decision maker understands where the data comes from, understands how the data was constructed, and understands what's good about it and what's not so good about it, then they can make a decision they can stand by. And that iterative process is critical for developing the trust and understanding. If I can't explain to someone who's making a decision, where that information came from, why it is the way it is, why would you trust it? Why would you make a decision based on it? So only when we interact and discuss and collaborate, I'm not asking them to do work, I'm asking them to tell us what we're doing wrong to really evaluate it.

I have one more question. You mentioned local knowledge.

Yes.

It's my understanding that Broward County is collaborating with most of their municipalities to implement some flood sensors. Yes. Is that something that you all take that data from as well?

Yes. When you think about flooding, so when you think about rainfall, we have all kinds of observations. When you think about temperature, we have all kinds of observations. We have a fair amount of sea level rise observations because we have tide gauge station data. But what we don't have, basically almost zero information on where it's flooding. Where's the water going? All we have is news reports, anecdotal reports, stuff that's on X or Instagram or whatever. We don't have a network of flooding information. Now, ideally, I would like a network of flooding information that goes back from 1950 to the present in order to build our tools. That's not going to happen because we just didn't take those observations. So going forward, I do think being best practices, being responsible stewards, we do need to start taking flood information seriously.

Does that look like a more granular level than flood sensors as Zarrella was just describing, like citizen science, like I see change, or what is the input that you're looking for?

So one of the things I proposed as part of the, I love this question, so I think it requires thought on this. but one of the things I proposed to NOAA's community programs was a phone app that we were calling Flood Sense. Probably could have workshopped the name a little bit better, but the idea of this app, Flood Sense, was that, yes, enrolling citizen scientists to tell us how much water is in front of their house on any particular day, what time of day, how long it was there, just collecting as much possible information data. It might not have the kind of accuracy that we need, but the volume of data that we could collect would fix that problem. So yes, some kind of citizen scientist program, getting the kids involved, schools involved, collecting data, you know, to tell people where the flood risk is. If I don't know where the water is today, how am I going to tell them where the water is going to be tomorrow?

I see change, I think, already probably does a lot of what you're describing. Hopefully they're be some collaboration there. I hope so. I think maybe that's a nice item.

I have a quick question. For data collection, is there any difference between the sensors and the cameras that actually measure the depth of the water?

I'm not a sensor expert, so I couldn't answer authoritatively, but I'd be willing to have somebody look into it. As long as it measures the depth. We need to know how much water and for how long it's there.

How much and how long?

Mr. Chair, excuse me, I have a question. Ben, good to see you again. Thank you for all of your efforts and the school's efforts and all the things that you do. You mentioned earlier that cooperation is important, which I know from work I've done that that's key. You don't always get what you want, though. So as someone who represents the school that's doing a lot of this data that the world is using, not just here in South Florida, but to... localize it, what should the state, the county, and the city do? If you could have one wish of one thing they need to do within the next 10 years, what would that be?

Great question. I can always count on you, Wayne, to ask a great question. I don't want to shoot myself in the foot by not giving a well-thought answer. I think what I would like to see is a coordinated effort among the decision makers and the information providers that starts today to start figuring out how to provide the detailed information that the decision makers need. And I want that to be, if I had my choice, that would be a robust collaboration that cut across county boundaries, because let's be honest, the climate system has no idea what the county boundaries are. And I would like that to be a collaboration that includes the decision makers, the private sector, the for-profit world. I think it's really critical to move this forward that all of the legitimate stakeholders, the community, all are fully engaged and own the results and own the collaboration. So, Wayne, I couldn't agree with you more. You don't always get what you want. And collaboration costs. It costs time and effort. It's hard. It's very hard. We don't speak the same language. We have to figure out how to translate things. And so I think to make that happen, there does need to be a long-term investment in making that happen and having the workshops, getting the people together, doing those things in a collaborative way, the charrettes that need to be done. And I think that's what we have to start doing.

How can you help us and us help you in accomplishing that?

We'd love to be a convener, help convene those events. But I think it's important that the University of Miami not own it. It's important that it be owned by everybody. But we're happy to be a convener. We're happy to help try to organize those things. We're happy to leverage these projects that we have to provide examples of information that could be provided. We are seriously investing in risk and hazards efforts at the University of Miami, the Rosestale campus. And we are, I am arguing we are opening the door to be a facilitator of that collaboration. We don't own everything. Our colleagues at FIU do great work. We need to entrain them. Our colleagues at FIU do great work. We need to entrain them. And so I think this is a problem that we finally need to come together. I think the community, the world, South Florida has recognized that it's raining more, has recognized that it's a heck of a lot hotter. What information do we need to figure out how to adapt to those issues? And at what time scale? When is it going to get worse? When are the one in 500 year floods going to turn into one in 50 year floods or one in five year floods? And I see no way around that in the decision process, but collaboration is the only way we're going to solve this problem.

Mr. Chair, I would just want to suggest that we look into, and I'm sure, Ben, you participate with the South Florida, Southeast Regional Climate Compact, right?

Yes, I did. I worked on their last report, helped develop the heat index I think they provided. I probably did the sea level rise one, too. It's hard. I work on many reports. commissions and projects, so it's hard for me to remember exactly, but I did do the compact most recently. The compact is a fantastic effort. There's a strong commitment from people to work on that, but that I honestly believe that needs to be scaled to a much stronger granularity to what's really needed for decisions. And I would challenge the people making decisions to open their aperture in terms of the kinds of information they're ready to ingest. I think there's this desire to just for them to just take what we give them instead of saying, this is what we really need. This is what, you know, and so I do think that we need to move further along in the collaboration.

Yeah, my point was that that is the right vehicle because it's a regional organization and they collaborate with the South Florida Regional Planning Council. I'm one that doesn't like to reinvent the wheel many, many times.

Yeah, yeah, it may very well be a perfect vehicle for doing it.

And so perhaps that's a conversation that could be had.

Yes.

Chair, may I? Ben, good to see you. Thank you so much for presenting. Good to see you again, too, sir. I think it's quite insightful. Last time, I know we spent a lot of time, I was actually just at the flood hub last week. And the conversation just with them was some of the conversation we had together. There's still visualization, I think, challenge in terms of how do we make this data accessible? We have a new colleague that just came to UM. Jacqueline Lemoine out of NASA.

She's... Yes, I know who that is. She's visiting on the Coral Gables campus.

And so she's been doing digital twins 25 years for NASA. So we met with the Earth Information Center last week. Yes. And... There's an EIC at the Frost Science Museum. Yes. So to Wayne's point in the past, and one of the deliverables that I kind of agreed on, we talked about doing a business leaders workshop. Wayne, you mentioned this worked really well with the experience you had in Miami Beach. And so the chairman tasked me with, okay, well, why don't you run point on this and figure out where we can do this? Michael and Dave Kelly have agreed to work with us to pass a some type of survey that we can send to business leaders so that we can get feedback on what type of information would be helpful for them from this perspective. I find UM's already kind of raised their hand to be willing to host and convene. I've been kind of running point on some of this, Chairman. Maybe this is a good opportunity to dovetail back on what that workshop could look like. It would be maybe an invite-only event where we can really get the right decision makers to give us feedback. So... That being said, one of the things that came up in that conversation with the EIC was if there was an opportunity to combine your data set with what NASA has with the EIC at the planetarium, and this came from a colleague at FIU, at the Institute of Environment, making a decision theater out of the planetarium so that when we look at all this data, everybody can sit together in the same room. We could visualize the different scenarios. I, for example, care about the Army Corps of Engineers scenario versus one of the nature-based solutions, architect solutions, things that actually the chairman here sent to the Army Corps, and see how do these differences, for example, which are multi-billion dollar decisions, change over time in that type of environment.

So it's a great question. So I appreciate it. So one of the things that you're definitively as decision makers are not getting is the ability to test infrastructure scenarios. What if? What if we built a seawall? What if we did? What if we built more canals and more water storage? What if? And testing those what-if scenarios is something that is relatively unheard of in this community. You rely on engineers to make estimates, but they're not including the evolving climate system in that estimate. And so what I would argue is that's the penultimate or ultimate final stage in this collaboration. is that a decision maker that's worried about whether he's got enough water storage for the next hurricane and thinks about, well, maybe I should turn this golf course into a water storage place, how much water could it hold and what effect would that have? Those scenarios, those testing scenarios is something that collaboration between engineering communities and the science community at the universities and elsewhere in the private sector and thinking about testing those scenarios is something and visualizing those scenarios is something that we don't do and something that we really do need to do.

So I think to your call to action, I would suggest that we really do move forward with this workshop, which we've been talking about doing maybe with this focus in mind. Number two, I really want to propose that the city of Miami seriously consider a decision theater and we leverage our city asset like the planetarium. as a way to host this decision theaters, and frankly, even host our Climate Resilience Committee meetings at, so that we could be visualizing what we're talking about in other meetings. I'd also like to suggest that the City of Miami consider sharing the I See Change ground truth data with you, so that you have a way to ground truth some of the downscaling of your climate models. and I would also recommend for yourself, Ben, is to look at the NVIDIA Earth 2 model, which is also, I think, maybe some of the downscaling that USGS might be using.

Yeah, so we've looked at those products, and I would argue, Silvio, that they're extremely useful products. But as with many different machine learning AI-type products, you have to be really, really careful that they are energetic, especially when you're talking about climate change, that they are physically and energetically consistent. And the NVIDIA one in particular is not. And so it's really good at near-term weather. So, you know, what's going to happen to the weather a few days in advance where you really don't have to worry about that energetic consistency. But when you look beyond those timescales, you have to start worrying about getting the physics right. And so from the climate change perspective, those tools can be used, but they have to be trained using the climate models that are physically consistent. And so there's a Big opportunity for collaboration, but those products on the standalone, we can't use.

And on that last point for short-term modeling, how could we, whether as a city or as a board, really leverage what you have so far or the direction that you're going in? Can we use it for emergency management planning? Could the chief have a heads up on what are the areas that might be flooded that he might want to send people out ahead of time? Or is this a different type of thing?

No, no, I would argue that that's possible. That's something. But again, I would want to enter, you know, one of this NMME project that I work on, is an operational product. And so we have a sense for that operational product The timeline, the information, how it has to be provided so that it can be used for those kinds of emergency decisions. And so developing that, coming to an agreement and making sure we deliver on time, in real time, all the time is a high bar. And making sure you get that right so that a grant can rely on it and trust it requires an in-depth collaboration. Those seasonal forecasts that I provide to NOAA, that started in 2011. It didn't become operational until 2016. That was five years to build that trust. So that's a high bar. And so I suspect it would probably be a high bar, but if we don't start today, we don't start thinking about those things, we won't get there.

Very interesting. I think we should try to think about how we can follow through on the request for your desire to collaborate, whether it be something more on the Southeast Florida Regional Climate Compact or Regional Planning Council, which sounds like you may be more familiar with than I am. I'll read on that and kind of understand where that can play into City of Miami specifically, which is our purview. Obviously, you're right. Climate doesn't care about the lines on a map, but... We can obviously make recommendations that the city does something and then also collaborates externally, but focus being here. And I appreciate everything you shared with us today. So thank you so much.

Well, thank you for having me. I appreciate your time.

All right, we'll move to our second presentation of the evening, which is Brazilianomic Strategy for Miami. Welcome.

Let me get hooked up. Hopefully you can hear me.

Yes.

Okay, thank you for the invitation. I'll be talking about a Resilienomic Strategy for Miami. And these are the topics I'll be covering. I'm an engineer by training and spent my career building and running a large construction materials business. I've lived through many hazards, but surviving the World Trade Center 9-11 glued the question in my mind, why are the buildings weak? Not why are the hazards strong, but why are the buildings weak? A few years later, I helped the UN Disaster Reduction Office form a global network of companies that's now known as ARISE. Upon retiring 10 years ago, I founded the nonprofit Resilience Action Fund, and FIU named me Distinguished Expert at their Extreme Events Institute that houses the Wall of Wind. A decade ago, I wrote the book Resilience, the Ultimate Sustainability, which inspired the PBS documentary Built to Last with a question mark. Last year, I published the book, Resilienomics, and produced the PBS film, Built to Last, Buyer Beware, that's currently showing around the country. RAF activities of interest include the Mark Samuelian Resilience Awards, now in their fourth year, honoring the late Miami Beach Commissioner, who was a friend, the Building Resilience Index that I'll cover later, and the Resilienomics in Action Fellowship launching this year for early and mid-career professionals interested in buildings and resilience. When talking buildings, I wish to clarify that resilience and green are two distinct qualities. Green meaning small environmental footprint and energy efficient, and resilient meaning surviving hazards and continuing to function. The overlap is what I call sustainable. I disagree when we automatically label something green as sustainable. If it's destroyed and you have to build it twice, it's neither sustainable or green. Resilienomics is about making homes and communities more resilient by harnessing the market and economic forces that drive consumer and policy decisions to grow and preserve household and societal wealth. Essentially, it connects resilience to wealth formation, and inversely, non-resilience to wealth destruction. In other words, it's about making the invisible hand of Adam Smith more resilient. Markets work better when there is knowledge, transparency, and competitive pricing. For long, property markets at the household and small business levels have been opaque on resilience, with little in consumer knowledge, limited transparency, and resilient blind pricing. Essentially, a buyer beware market, but that is changing. I foresee the rattling that started with insurers will spread to lenders. Both will impact consumers, and in the end, values, as prices between resilient and non-resilient properties begin to differentiate. I also see markets moving faster than governments. Governments appear to be better at making emergency plans than resilience plans. They often confront the dilemma, should we wait, should we resist, or should we adapt? Fears are loss of revenue and investment, plus resident opposition, including NIMBY, not in my backyard. Disasters, however, become their turning points. Pre-disaster, it's easier for government to plan, but difficult to implement. Post-disaster, calm planning is difficult, but implementing a plan that is set in advance becomes easier. So I recommend to plan now, even if you can't fully implement. Let's benchmark government best practices in four hazard-prone cities. Miami, hands down, has the best wind mitigation. Since Andrew, our wind standards are considered global best practice. Unfortunately, that's where it ends. Houston, post Harvey, adopted the best water mitigation. raising minimum freeboard to 500 years plus two feet for homes and three feet for critical buildings. Norfolk has the best public disclosure, identifying and communicating their resilience zones. Finally, with so many grandfathered vulnerable buildings, San Francisco adopted the best sunset programs, setting deadlines to retrofit seismic vulnerable properties. It won't be pretty when Harvey meets Miami. It'll be worse in Houston. And 30 inches, I believe, is optimistic since Fort Lauderdale recently saw 25 as we heard in the previous presentation. When it happens, I feel that our pumps, canals, and defenses won't protect lowlands. The only thing that will really matter is elevation. And to match Houston, Miami needs to raise its free board by two feet. Returning to Norfolk, a few years ago, their Vision 2100 carved up the city into segments based on flood risk and building density. They stated that future investments would prioritize highs rather than low-lying areas, essentially declaring their resilience and retreat, or as I call them, R&T zones. for a government that was pretty bold, upfront, and honest, a signal that they intend to synchronize with markets. The four key elements of market resilience adaptation are measuring, disclosing, pricing, and rewarding. I'll touch on these. Regarding measurement, the lending world now has a resilience credit score for buildings. called the Building Resilience Index, or BRI. During the last four years, I helped the World Bank, the World Bank's private lending arm, the International Finance Corp, IFC, create it. Why? The typical security for a multi-year loan is a building. Lenders now realize that codes are lacking and insurers can change their minds annually. So they want to know how resilient their security is. BRI is a pure resilience metric with four levels, and it doesn't give credit for public seawalls and pumps. AA represents global best practice, and NR means not resilient. IFC is already using BRI in a dozen countries. They often co-finance with other banks. I foresee it won't be long before lenders adopt and apply this in the U.S. NRs may then discover they've become unbankable and uninsurable. How might a Miami building rate? BRI rates each hazard category, the overall rating being the lowest of the four, called the weakest link principle. On wind, we're at global best practice, AA. On fire, we also rate high. Fortunately, we don't have geoseismic hazards. Not surprisingly, our weakest link is water. Thus, many Miami buildings will rate an R unless they're elevated or on high ground. Insurers and lenders are shifting toward measuring and pricing resilience. I like to tell people today that it's better to buy a house with an insurance agent than with a property agent. Resilienomics illustrates this curve. Essentially, it says that the lower your resilience, the more expensive, difficult, and unstable your insurance market. I personally place Miami and Florida, for that sake, at the crisis level. Will we move up? or down. The only way to go up is by becoming more resilient, not by inventing more financial band-aids. Consumers are starting to turn to non-government risk information. Plug any address in Redfin, scroll to the bottom, and you'll see a flood factor from 1 to 10. 1 to 4 is good. 5 to 10 is increasingly bad. Plus, you get maps showing risky areas, essentially defining our zones, resilience zones. I found it reliable and more complete than most government sources. Being easy, clear, and free, consumers will increasingly use this kind of information to screen neighborhoods and properties, and to purchase accordingly. On disclosure, you won't find these signs around Miami, but you will in other parts of the country and the state. Our local artist, Javier Cortada, tried to spread his elevation art. This was at a Coral Gables intersection until DOT made him erase it. Now his other elevation art sits hidden in some public parks and buildings where few people can see it. I ask you, why shouldn't every city bus stop visibly display its elevation? Does resilience really affect values? Last year, RAF did a study in Tampa looking at two neighborhoods in St. Pete, one at 30 feet elevation and the other three feet. We sought to know how the 2024 hurricane season affected the value of working class single family homes. We researched houses purchased during the prior five years that sold in the five months after Hurricane Milton and got a good sample size. The results astounded even me. Low elevation homes sold on average 35% below their purchase price, while high elevation ones sold 25% above, a 60% spread. Households who unknowingly bought at low elevation took a big hit that likely wiped out decades of wealth building on top of the stress These families suffered. How long before consumers get the message? The study can be found on RAF's website. It led to a Tampa Bay Times article that was reprinted by other media. the value and impact of resilience is real. Tampa got its wake-up call in 2024. Now drive around many of the slow areas and you see homes being elevated, existing and new, and they're not waiting for incentives. In fact, all three 2025 Mark Samuelian Resilience Awards went to the Tampa area, including the Tampa Housing Authority that builds more resilient than many high-end private apartment developers. I don't see this around Miami. Sadly, we need a disaster to wake up. During the awards, a local official noted that elevated houses have little appeal here. My reaction? When Harvey meets Miami, being pretty won't matter. So what's the good news? In case you think I'm just a doom messenger. The city of Miami has the largest portion of the county's high ground. Our original settlers, though lacking degrees, could tell high ground from risky low land. I couldn't find an official city figure even at the resilience website, but I estimate that about a third of the city's 36 land square miles sit above 10 feet. For me, these are our resilience zones. In my view, Miami's most economic path to adaptation is to redevelop its resilience zones. It's much less expensive to build resiliently on safer ground than on risky ground. The recent transit-oriented development district legislation and the Resilience Trust Fund move in the right direction, though I feel they don't do enough to incentivize freeboard, and they still reward development in lowlands. This is an example at the planned Little Haiti Rail Station, elevated, dense, mixed-use, and multi-income. It could be a BRIAA. I view these corridors, both north and south, as Miami's resilience lifelines. So what do I recommend? Talk about resilience zones. Be open and transparent. Senate Bill 180 has tied the hands of Florida's governments, but it will expire October 2027. Be ready to increase free board at or above Houston. Prepare now. I estimate Miami will need several dozen Magic City-like developments. Incentivize and fast track them. And finally, there's a limited There's limited capital and time for infrastructure. Prioritize wisely. How much do we allocate to ready our R zones versus to defend T zones? I know this will involve a lot of debate. Bottom line, the goal is for government to nurture more resilient development and to create a plan that's in sync with the market transition that's already begun. A plan that speeds up the supply of resilient, dense, walkable, and transit-friendly residences will help grow and secure the eagerness of working-class households. The Resilienomics in Action Fellowship applications are now open through the end of April, and the 2026 Resilience Award applications begin in June. Thank you.

Thank you so much, Aris. Appreciate the good presentation and all the data, especially the examples of the other cities. I really love to see the case studies of what other cities are doing right so we can learn from it. And in regard to, was it Norfolk, the Division 2100 plan, where they've identified the different grounds and prioritized appropriately based on those. When we saw last year the Southwest Streetscape Master Plan presentation, which took into account topography inland, I thought that was really a great step in that direction. And I agree, the TOD along the ridge and densifying there, it simply makes sense. We're getting more people out of cars, reducing the mitigation of energy for transportation, and building more into resilient zones. And Freeboard, I think, A very important thing. It's what I've talked about a couple of times. I kind of lapsed after I got a presentation pretty far along, but I'm hoping to bring it back again this year. The city did do a T3 freeboard update. I believe it was 2024. It came before us actually. And one of the reasons the structures in Miami don't look like what you showed of the stilts is because there's things can still occur beneath that elevation. They can be knocked out in a storm event. So we actually see things getting closed that are non-habitable spaces. That was a step in the right direction for T3, but hopefully it'll expand to the other zones. And I'm sure there's a lot more we could learn from the books that you showed. I appreciate you sharing those. Did anyone else have questions or comments?

Sure. One question. What is freeboard? What is freeboard?

Freeboard is height allowed above base flood elevation. So it's determining the height where your first floor is going to be built. Did I cover that correctly?

Yeah, freeboard is essentially the amount of height allowed above the 100-year flood or base flood elevation, as it's called. You can voluntarily go above the minimum. That's the minimum. When we say base flood innovation plus one, that's the minimum. You can go up to five feet, I think, is allowed. You can't go above that. They won't let you go above that. But some people are doing it. In fact, I see more high-end homes doing it than middle-income properties doing it today.

And one question, you know, you, by the way, have been a big fan of your work, Mr. Ariz, for a long time at the Extreme Events Institute. And you came across my work when I was getting certified with the United Nations for Disaster Risk Recovery Program using nature-based solutions. I think one of the biggest opportunities we have today here in Miami is to learn from the best practices of UNDRRIs. Have you seen, you know, I mean, you've been working all over the world How do other cities and other markets adopt these UN DRR principles formally into their best practices? Could you share a little bit about some of that work? And thank you very much for your global leadership on that.

Well, when we looked to create BRI, we looked at what's the best of the best around the world. And as I said, Miami, in terms of wind, has the best practices. And those kind of serve as the best in the world. For seismic, Japan has the best practices. For fire, it's kind of a mix. I used to think that the UK was the best, but after the Glenfell Tower disaster, that kind of raised them. For example, BRI requires a three-hour fire rating to be at the double A, which is a pretty high standard. For water, BRI essentially sets a three-meter level above local. It could be the sea. It could be the river. It could be the lake. Or it could be a dry creek that can flash flood. But it's essentially a, let's say, 10-meter minimum. If you're below 10 meters, you're an NNR.

10 feet, three meters.

I mean 10 feet, yeah. Three meters, 10 feet. You're an NNR. So there's a lot of empirical information that's been collected around the world. And we had a global expert group that kind of helped IFC do this that looked at what's the best of the best in terms of not just theory, but actually practice that's been applied and tested and used over time. If you want to be a double A for water, you've got to be at six meters. And if you're in a tsunami area, even higher than that.

Yes, very nice presentation. I've spoken a lot at different conferences about the economics of sea level rise and flooding, and I've always concluded that insurance is going to drive this train. And unfortunately, when it trickles down to the local economy or elected officials, they don't seem to understand where insurance is going over the next 10 to 25 years, and that risk is going to be greater, insurance costs are going to go up, Banks are going to have problems with regards to lending because people who are going to be borrowing can't get insurance or pay the insurance premiums. Where do you see the critical intersection and when when that's going to happen? Because for me, we are, like you said, a very reactionary society. Either we are windstorm codes changed after Hurricane Andrew Houston after their flood. And I don't see anything changing here to the level that it needs to change like it has in other parts of the world. So what has to happen and how do we sort of drive the train in that direction to hopefully hedge against it before it happens so that we are in a position where insurance rates are still can remain reasonable and that we're actually elevating our roads, our homes, and pretty much everything.

You know, insurance rates should be the free market's pricing of risk. Unfortunately, they don't operate freely at the, let's say, house insurance level. Yeah, for big buyers of insurance, there's a freer market there. But we regulate insurance in every state. And the job of the regulators in many states is how do we keep the rates down? How do we make insurance affordable? They don't realize that what they're doing is making risk affordable. In other words, if you subsidize insurance, you encourage more risk-taking. If NFIP, our own federal government, subsidizes, you know, has been subsidizing flood risk for decades, they've enabled more flood risky development. That's what's happened. So, you know, we've got to recognize that if we want to do welfare, if we want to help, you know, those Pricing is not the way to do it. If you try to do that through pricing, you do more damage. Find other ways to give people help. Don't distort the price of risk. Don't distort the price of insurance. And for me, the price of insurance needs to be higher for a lot of properties. We also cross-subsidize. For example, if you're If you do the right things and make your home or building resilient, you should be getting a discount. But guess what? You're not going to get as much discount as you should get because you're subsidizing somebody else who's vulnerable. So we do a lot of cross-subsidization. So we've created our own problem there. When is this going to change? Well, already, the big insurers left Florida several decades ago. What we have is kind of a patchwork of smaller companies, entrepreneurs. And what you've been seeing the last few years is this idea of these kind of mutual insurers that aren't really insuring, aren't risking anything. Basically, what they're creating is a pool of insured properties entities who are insuring themselves. And the insurance companies are just extracting a fee for service. They have no skin in the game. People don't realize what's happening and a lot of what the citizens have been offloading is to these mutual insurance entities. Believe me, if there's a serious disaster, they're going to realize that the only thing they've had is insuring themselves and therefore they've got to pay themselves. You know, so, you know, we've come up with these financial kind of, you know, band-aids, I say, that don't really solve the problem. The only way to solve the problem is through resilience. Yes, Florida's trying some things. You know, they've got the Elevate Florida program. But believe me, I calculate it's going to take 200 years at the rate they're funding it. It's going to take 200 years to address the problem. We're going to have a disaster before then, for sure.

I guess today has served its purpose. So hopefully we act with urgency in the opportunity that we've all taken of being up here and try to actively seek out best practices from our local neighbors from around the world and bring them here, discuss them and proffer them and share them with our elected officials so we can We can do the best we can to learn and adapt from the data that we've seen in these two presentations today. Definitely need to be paying attention to the insurance market. And there was a county level meeting last year that I participated in. It was interesting. I learned a lot there. And hopefully other things like that continue to progress. Do you know if anything has come from that the county insurance meeting that we participated in since the report that was published a couple months after?

Yeah, yeah, no, I know that they continue to have those conversations and look into it, but I think there's definitely more conversations to be had.

And if I could just make one more comment, just everyone's education and Florida, the state of Florida rights, the most flood insurance policies of any state in the United States. So those those funds that are then generated by those policies go to pay for floods, usually in the Midwest homes that get flooded out every year. FEMA and other organizations only just started telling people you can't build in these flood zones anymore because they've been paying every three years to rebuild all these homes and that money is draining the state of Florida. When things reverse itself in probably the next 10 to 25 years and Florida starts having to pay a lot of flood policies, the money won't be there. At one point I mentioned to our prior governor and others, that they should try to find a way in Congress to keep some of those funds here and try to have others in the states where they're paying the most policies actually pay more. Because when it comes to a critical mass, there won't be enough money for Florida to have to rebuild when we have major flood issues. But more of our money, like 60% of the premiums paid, go out of state.

One thing, one conversation that has been had is talking to insurance companies about the infrastructure investments that cities are making. And so I think that there could be definitely more conversations had along those lines that's not being taken into account for policies within those areas. And I think that it doesn't fit into the modeling structure. just like you were saying, that there's some subsidization that's going on, I'm sure. So I think that the more that we are, as municipalities, investing in stormwater management projects, the more we should vocalize that, let people know, let people in the neighborhoods know, so that way there's multiple people having these conversations across sectors.

And we also need to prepare from, unfortunately, many types of flooding events, king tide, sea level rise, storm surge, and rain events, which in some instances use different types of barriers. Elevation would help all of them, but back-based study looking to raise many structures would benefit those structures. But I'm hoping for a much more comprehensive solution or solutions. Hopefully that communication can continue what we were talking about of sharing it with the insurance companies, and we can be filled in in the future on that. And also, you know, Barbara was trying to do something kind of related to this discussion and kind of ended with looking into the SAVE program that was recently adopted, which seems to be addressing that to some extent. So it seems like there are... POLICIES ARE EVEN RECENTLY AT THE CITY KIND OF MOVING IN THAT DIRECTION WHICH IS WHICH IS GOOD TO SEE. ALL RIGHT WELL THANK YOU SO MUCH ARIS THE PLEASURE APPRECIATE IT. OKAY WE'LL MOVE ON TO ITEM FIVE WHICH IS OLD BUSINESS. SO AT OUR. Was it February? At our February meeting, we had a excellent presentation from Vivian from Ascendance on what her company is doing and what the mission home is doing at Ultra and beyond to create sustainable events. And we had talked about having a workshop to figure out something that we might proffer related to the the guide that had been created, I'm forgetting the exact term, and pushing that along. We knew that there was something happening in the city related to sustainability and events and plastic, but we hadn't seen the resolution yet. It came out, I believe, the day after our meeting in the agenda. So that then went to commission and successfully passed, I believe unanimously, which was fantastic to see. And then after that, we had our workshop on March 23rd, with Allison, myself, Silvio, and Avra in attendance. And we did discuss briefly some specifics that might be included in a future resolution or memo or suggestion for things related to events and plastic and sustainability and recycling. But ultimately, our conversation kind of led us to the point that that had just passed, the plastic-free resolution. We thought it was a great initiative in general and I think that everyone should kind of share it and thank the commissioners and mayor for taking action on that individually. And we discussed potentially doing something as an action of the board, but ultimately decided against that as it seems unnecessary and also doesn't directly fall within our mission statement of congratulatory things unless we were going to add something to it at this moment, of which we decided we weren't going to suggest anything. And just we're happy to see things moving in the right direction and that it passed. So that's kind of where the workshop ended. And Kind of just bringing back because we're you know we're supposed to kind of report out from a workshop outside of the meeting minutes. Anything you wanted to add from our time at the workshop. Anything you wanted to add from our time at the workshop other than what I just said.

I think it was good. We're happy to see the direction that the city leadership is taking. And I think that that mention, as you've put here on the agenda, we feel like that means that we should really take a step back to understand what are our priorities. And if these things keep going the way they are, then maybe there's less work for us and other priorities for us to focus on. So I agree. I think there was a lot of deliberation. But ultimately, it's nice to not have to do something.

I'm just pleased that it passed, and it's one of the recommendations from the Biscayne Bay Task Force. So the city is now falling in line with the county, so it makes sense. And being that the bay is a large part of our city, it makes sense.

Could you share, are you currently part of that task force or previously?

I chaired the task force many years ago.

As the bay officer, were you also the chair?

Yes, I was. That often happens when you serve. They want you to serve again.

Fantastic. Well, happy to see that that came out of that and that it passed.

Yeah, there's a number of recommendations, and it would be, you know, I'll see how we can, I'll work with Sonia and see how we can show some of the recommendations that the county has moved that the city has also adopted and bring it back to you guys.

Yeah, as far as sharing information with us, Sharing it with Sonia, sharing it with Miriam to relate to us so we can all be informed outside of the chambers would be great, as well as if you'd like to have time on a future agenda to showcase any of those things that you think we should be made aware of.

I just think it's very important that we keep top of mind that the bay is one of our largest economic engines. We completed a study, an economic study, and it outputs $64 billion combined, and that includes property values on the water. So, you know, it's a big asset.

Absolutely. All right, so we'll move from this item to the next. It's item eight, the Office of Resilience and Sustainability updates.

Hi, good evening. Sonia Brubaker, Chief Resilience Officer for the City of Miami and giving the updates for the Office of Resilience and Sustainability. So updates I'll give this month is that we are really focused on outreach for Earth Month. And this is really a continuation from in the middle of March, we had Miami Climate Week, where we had a lot of activity going on this year. It was really exciting. And we're just, you know, building and just keeping on with the momentum for Earth Month. So for our outreach events, we do our monthly newsletter every month. But during the spring, we do a lot of tabling. And so I just want to encourage you all to come out this weekend. There are actually three events. So there's Bay Nanza in the morning, and then there's River Day in the afternoon. And there's just lots of people there just learning about the environment and learning about all of the great things that we are doing. here in the city. We also are gonna be tabling later in the month at the Clio 5K Run Walk, and so that's gonna be at the Underline, and that will be in the morning, and that's on a Sunday that's on the 26th at the end of the month. But I don't wanna forget about our tree giveaways. It's also Arbor Month, and so we are doing tree giveaways every Saturday this month. So we had one last weekend at Douglas Park. We have one this coming Saturday at Graveland Park at 9 a.m. And then on the 18th, it will be at Jose Marti Park at 9 a.m. And then we'll have two on the 25th, and that will be on Morningside Park and Charles Hadley Park. So Morningside at 9 a.m. and Charles Hadley at 9 a.m. at 1pm. And then I also want to give an update on something really exciting. Just want to make sure I have my note on it. We are going to be doing a demonstration, a three-month demonstration for drop-off composting. We have heard this. That's awesome. We have heard this for years. Well, for the demonstration, it's going to be here at City Hall. It's going to be at our administrative building, the Miami River Center Building. It's going to be at Charles Hadley Park, Morningside Park, and Shenandoah Park. And so we will be looking for feedback. So if there, you know, any sort of feedback of use, you know, service frequency, the locations, we really want to see kind of, you know, how this is going to be utilized. To do that, we have to get the word out. And so you'll see a lot of information, a lot more information come out through our different channels. But I wanted to give you guys a sneak peek because I know you'd be very excited about it. And so we start that on May 1st. And so that will be, again, that will be a three-month demonstration program. So if you want, if you like the service and you want it, use it.

That's awesome. So much good news lately, besides the long-term outlooks. But this is something that we talked about a lot last year, so it's great to see this finally in action, and hopefully we all can partake as well, share it with our networks, and make sure it's a success so that it continues to expand. If the pilot is successful, that is the intent. Is there discussion that it would expand, or?

Yeah, that's the goal. And so I think the more that it's utilized and that people talk about wanting an expansion, then that's definitely helpful for the future.

So it's May 1st is when it's official.

Yeah, it starts May 1st.

Awesome.

And so I'm gonna do a plug for our newsletter. If you're not signed up for our newsletter yet, go to our website. We're gonna put that information in the newsletter.

Anything else to add about Baynanza?

Oh, well, yeah. It's the biggest cleanup for the Bay, and so I highly encourage everyone to participate. Not just the city of Miami, most municipalities do participate, so it's the best day to really promote Biscayne Bay. And so everyone should be participating. I think there's usually a party at the Yacht Club after.

That's this Saturday? Mm-hmm.

Okay. 9 a.m. is the beginning morning session, and then River Day afternoon. So two opportunities.

And there's a few different locations. There's 30 locations countywide. There's a few locations in the city, including Margaret Pace Park. You do have to register online.

Yeah. The county website.

Awesome. All right, so if there's no other comments will move on to open discussion item item nine, so the first one is 2026 committee focus so just again kind of first meeting is as chair. kind of wanted to just take a moment and as so you alluded to a minute ago when we were at the workshop, we were kind of discussing how it was. great to see these initiatives taking shape, the composting, recycling, things that we said we thought should be prioritized last year. And as such, we should try to think of this year individually and hopefully collectively what our focus areas may be. What could make the most impact? What do we think is, because we also only have limited time. There's a ton of ideas. But as a volunteer board, there's only so much we can do. Also, we only meet 11 times a year. So taking our focus and making sure that we do research, do work outside of these chambers, and come prepared and share things with each other selectively. You know, it could be a report with maybe a shorter memo of where our attention should be, things like that, so that we can be as effective as we can during these short two-hour meetings. Just really want to make sure that, you know, I do my best to address all of the various concerns that you all have and that the public brings to us of topics that they want us to pay attention to, which I think we did well last year that we kind of highlighted in the annual report. And that we do the same thing this year. So one thing I'm very interested in still is freeboard. I think that that is a really important mechanism for ensuring that our buildings are designed for a future uncertain. And I encourage all of you to think of maybe something that you want to pay some attention to. And just there is not really a timeline, it could be next month, it could be the month after, but just that If we can work together, also doing workshops like what we just had. I think we've already had a couple workshops recently, and I think that those are really effective as well for us to work together. So hopefully we can continue to do workshops and be an effective board.

I have a couple comments. Okay. With regards to freeboard, has this committee had of late an update on the stormwater master plan update, the updated stormwater master plan and the capital improvements plan?

What would a stormwater master plan update How recent would you consider?

It was, I want to say it was done in 2019, 2018. From Water Master Plan.

I feel like it was largely completed in 20, I want to say 2023. Oh, 2023. Yeah.

Because I worked on it back when we kicked it off and then I ended up going to work for the county so I couldn't finish it. in the private sector.

Well, I guess identifying the priority projects and then incorporating it to the capital improvement plan. I think that was a little bit.

It identifies your hotspots, flooding hotspots, basic terms, flooding hotspots, and then where do we have to invest in resilient infrastructure. And I know that that is an ongoing program, so I think it would be beneficial for us to hear where we're at.

That would be good. A good portion of the early Sea Level Rise Committee, before it became the Climate Resilience Committee, meetings were reviewing and watching various consultant progress reports on things, including the stormwater master plan, which I believe where I met you as one of the liaisons of one of those meetings downtown. So it has been a long time since we've heard an update on that. do you think that that would make, do you think that's something that we should see, we could request? Would that be a staff thing? Would that be CDM Smith or both?

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think, I feel like they came, it was maybe like two years ago, but I think that it is worth getting an update on where the projects are because there has been a lot of movement on, you know, because like we can show like here's the modeling, here's the priority projects that were identified, here's, you know, additional ones that were added, here's like some things that were changed. and implementation, and then here's where they are with funding and timelines of completion. So that's definitely, there's been a lot of movement within the past couple years on that.

And that's my point. I want us to show that things are actually happening, that we are doing things to make Miami more resilient, right? And infrastructure is part of it, right?

Which, yeah, and also we talked insurance earlier, but bond market is incredibly important also for city infrastructure.

Right, the more we invest, the better our rating stays, right?

So the Forever Bond meetings also have an update on all those projects, which has a large overlap in the Stormwater Master Plan. But I agree, the Stormwater Master Plan is kind of sitting above Forever Bond. So seeing that progress I think would be great for our board. So I'll prioritize trying to work to get that on an upcoming agenda. Appreciate that.

Question, Aaron. Would it be, behoove us as a committee to invite them to our next meeting to provide an overview of what's going on as opposed to them providing us a document and us sifting through it?

Yes, absolutely. A presentation from staff and consultants or whoever is appropriate.

They've done it before.

That'd be awesome. I think the, you know, just citizens would like to see it as well. just to kind of see exactly an overall update. I think it would be really effective.

I mean, assuming that there is consultants that could do that. I don't want to overburden our staff. They already do a lot.

So again, we don't need to put anyone on the spot right now as far as this agenda item, but just kind of wanted to do a reset for today and try to make sure that we use our remaining meetings as effectively as possible. You know, I try to keep our agendas pretty full, but also want to be timely that we don't go over. So, you know, again, that'll be the goal this year and to complement it with workshops. All right, so then item B is birthday events in April. This was just an item in case anyone had an event that they were planning to attend or thought that we should know about to share with each other and the general public if anyone had anything related to this.

I do. It's not in April, but we have the Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce Resilient Solutions Summit coming on May 6th. I highly recommend we all participate or try to at least. It's when the business community just convenes and there's a lot of talk about academia and government, but the business piece is one of the most important pieces as we continue to hear more about insurance And lenders and this and that, that's the place where we have those conversations.

And the theme this year, I think I saw was like, the bill passed, let's build. So it was like, was that related to that?

Well, there will be a legislative update because we're really proud of a bill that we've been working on, which was born out of this Game Bay Task Force. Very proud of that. It's a coastal resiliency bill. It was sponsored by Senator Ileana Garcia. And it's SB 203, so you can all look it up. And basically what it does is that it elevates natural infrastructure as infrastructure. And it asks the state to provide statewide guidelines so that we're not all trying to figure out, can this be permitted? Can this not be permitted? And so it kind of streamlines and encourages and incentivizes municipalities to incorporate, whether it's mangroves, living shorelines, you know, those tiles, and those are some things that you're incorporating into, through the stormwater master plan, through the CIP. I know that you're incorporating some of those things, so it would be great to, you know, highlight that.

Yep, I think we can even highlight that at a later meeting. It's more related to the waterfront.

We have that, and then we have presentation on preparing for a hurricane season. And so we have the South Florida Water Management District there. What they do, it's a very old system. I'm sure Grant, you know. It's very old and it needs updating. And so having the state come and provide us some feedback on what's happening and what we can be doing to support that agency as they move forward with updating that system is, that system is critical, is why we live here.

Yeah, exactly. Keeps us dry. Exactly. So any other Earth Day events?

Yes, the Biscayne Bay Summit. So that one's very dear to my heart, and Albert's too. You mentioned it earlier. That is May 20th at Jungle Island, and that is basically a convener of all stakeholders together. that touched the bay. And it's really where the task force was born with all these ideas came from the original. And it's just to keep the momentum going. I'm going to be chairing a panel. I'm going to be moderating a panel of my former colleagues on the task force just to go through what we've accomplished, where we are, and how much more we need to go to get Biscayne Bay back to where it needs to be and to never lose that momentum again.

Fantastic. Any other Earth Day events? Okay.

I would also, just as a reminder, the Clio 5K is also an amazing event. I'd recommend attending it. I've been going for the last couple of years, too. And it's at the Underline this year, so definitely recommend that.

Do you know the date?

April 26th, Sunday.

All right, awesome. So a lot of big events coming up. So, all right, we'll now move to future agenda topics. So item A, April 30th is our next CRC meeting moved forward a few days from our May meeting. So it's not a Monday, it is a Thursday. Thank you all for confirming attendance. So we'll be able to meet that day. And I want to suggest that that is our preliminary meeting to discuss budget recommendations. So we did that as our first time last year. It had been discussed many years, part of the CRC and Civil Rights Board budgets, both an internal budget for the board itself, but we kind of switched it to what do we think the city should spend money on? I think it's pretty awesome to see multiple items now recently passed. I think we should do it again. I think it's also a great opportunity to hear from the public what they think the budget should be spent on. So I just wanted to see if you all think that that's an initiative we should do again this year. Nodding in agreement. Okay, excellent. So we'll put some time on this upcoming agenda for that. And I think that the way that we'll focus on that... I don't have the exact timeline in front of me, but I think this will be the first meeting where we'll look for kind of public comment to be shared. We can also bring general ideas, and I think all of our things should be shared with Miriam a week in advance, really more than a week, so she doesn't have to put it all together on the day she has to send it out, so ahead of time. So that she can kind of put everything together, share it with all of us so we can have a chance to read things in preparation of our meeting. And then we can kind of discuss it up here as part of our meeting that day. Last time we also did a workshop afterward where we created a matrix. And kind of prioritize what we thought was more easy or difficult to obtain and then also dollar value and which things kind of check different boxes and then we came up with our priority list. We drafted that and we voted on it over, I think it was like two to three meetings. So I'm kind of seeing us do that same kind of process this time where we'll also be able to get community feedback along the way and then proffer that to commission as where we think that some dollars should be allocated for next year's budget. All right, we'll do that. And then other agenda topics that I've been thinking about and working on were potentially more on electric vehicles. After our last meeting, there were some discussions and questions about the system, trying to maybe bring an expert to talk about that. Also, we did discuss a tree workshop for us in April. So for us to have a meeting outside of chambers, go through suggestions that Sylvia has proffered in the past, that we've discussed in the past. There's also multiple town hall style meetings that has been hosted here and elsewhere that we could review the ideas that other people have brought forth, basically in anticipation and kind of just to keep moving the needle on Chapter 17 and just natural resource discussion. So I was wondering if we all think that there's time for us to do that in April, seeing as we also have another April meeting rather than a May meeting, and there's also kind of internal tasks for us to individually prepare for this budget recommendation. But I think that this is something that we do need to prioritize, but if it's not going to be in april that it should be early may kind of maybe. Almost swapping because our may meeting move forward. So maybe it's like the first week of may we did a workshop instead or second week of may, but that would be another topic that I think we should be moving on. Soon.

Chair, if I may, on that, I invited the New York City Parks Department to present some of the work that they've been doing with trees. It's inspired a lot of my work and research. They maybe won't be able to do anything next month, so maybe we can, depending on that, I think it could be helpful, I don't know what your opinion is, for us to maybe review some of the things before they have their meeting. so that we just see, just all get on the same page in terms of like the last year and a half. And then for that, and then be ready for that meeting whenever we invite them, maybe May or June.

What date did they, did you suggest for that?

Um, I, uh, up to you. So May or June, they said that they could probably do. So up to, um, whatever, whichever date you think works best chair. So either. My thinking is a workshop is a little bit before. So we're ready in terms of like all the conversations around tree. policy, recommendations, or right thereafter. Just because of the cadence we've had at this board meeting, I think maybe before, so that we come prepared or on the same page before they present. And if they do present, then I might have those resolutions that I prepared in the past or recommendations ready for after the presentation, just to follow that cadence that I think has been pretty successful here. Okay. defer to however you think it would work best based on your priorities here on the committee.

So a May workshop? Yeah? All right. So why don't we find a time now? I think finding a time earlier than later would be better than our next meeting. We typically do them midday, 11 or 12 or 1. Our last meetings were noon to 12. two at MRC. I think we should kind of stick with that. Are there any particular days, Miriam, that you think could work for us? Perhaps May.

Just to clarify, we'll also be having a budget workshop as well in May. Post the April meeting.

We probably would.

I'm so sorry, but all workshops are public. Just want to make that clear.

Yeah, of course. Did I say something that made it seem like it wasn't?

Well, I thought she asked if it's a public workshop. Did I mishear?

No. I was just clarifying that we're going to probably be having two workshops. Oh, understood.

I'm sorry.

Her comment was that we had just discussed a budget recommendation workshop likely. So that would be in May. Yeah, that could be two workshops in May. I mean, I think it's possible still.

Is there such an urgency that we have to have these back-to-back like that?

Not particularly, but the tree item has been something that we've been looking at since it came up about 14 months ago or 15 months ago, and there's currently the consensus going on, the consensus work, and we just want to make sure that we're also... Staying on top of it.

So why don't we flip it?

And do the budgets in May?

Yeah, because right now we don't even know if the state's going to have a budget. And that affects our budget.

So you're saying our budget workshop should actually be pushed past the tree workshop?

When is the state meeting? When is the state's legislative session?

They need to convene now in April. Okay. Reconvene. Just for the budget.

Chair, maybe as you think about it, we can reserve the dates. I think I'm good with either way. And I mean, just thinking about the chief suggestion in the past for each workshop to be focused, I think begs it. So whichever way you arrange, I'll make myself available.

Why don't we pick two days, and then when we come back on our April, what is our date? April 30th meeting, we can determine. which date would be for what, or if we only even want one. But I think it would be good that we just plan them now. Again, kind of getting some momentum here and continue to work on items. All right, so Miriam, are there any dates that you think could potentially work? And we could always clarify after hours, but May 11th, May 12th, 13th, 14th. Can't hear you May 7th.

I think, Chair, if I may, I think Miriam's going to look based on the availability of the boardrooms, if I'm assuming correctly. And I know maybe, Chief, thank you so much for offering your boardroom. So if it's easier, I'm generally flexible. I don't know if Miriam can do it now. I also wanted to, while she's looking for some dates, I know we have five minutes left, so I don't know if we need to extend.

Could this just be polled? Let's do it. Can you just send that email with some dates and see if we can...

Perfect. So she'll send an email with potential dates and we can respond on whichever dates have the most responses we'll go with. Yeah, I agree. I would rather not do a meeting extension. I think we can wrap now. So let's move to...

Two other things I want to have here on the recommended future agendas, Chair. Yep. Just to follow up on other things, I know that we requested tree permit data, tree trust fund information, tree giveaway data.

So we actually received an attachment from Miriam this morning with that. I actually, I didn't realize that there was an additional attachment. Next time, Miriam, if you could, when there's a new attachment, just let it flag it. But we all received that this morning. So let's take some time to review that. I haven't had a chance to look at it yet, but we did receive data. So appreciate staff departments who put that together. Thank you all. Also, quick thank you to staff departments who have helped us add to our CRC web page. Our committee actions is built out. You can now click links to all the things we've done, which is pretty awesome. So thank you, everyone who has assisted with that. Second item you wanted to bring up?

The public benefits, when we were looking at the marinas, the legal team that was negotiating the land agreement said that they were going to parse out public benefit section to the marina contract. I'd like to see where that is to understand what the final public benefits that was part of the negotiation with the two, I want to say the two marina extensions are.

Which one are you asking about? We've seen a lot of waterfront projects.

We had two, I want to say the, yeah, the Virginia Key one, no? Or the one here in Coconut Grove, this Coconut Grove Yacht Club, and then the Miami Yacht Club, I believe are the two ones, that they presented the same day.

I could sound corrected, but just wanted to follow up on that. So you're requesting, I don't understand.

Oh, just following up on the data. So you just mentioned the tree information, we got it. Maybe we can discuss that during the next meeting or it comes up. The second part was checking up on the benefits package information of the Marines, which I think...

Benefit package, okay. Cool. Any other future agenda topics?

The tree information was sent on Friday in the evening, and for some reason I was having kickback. That's why I had to resend the email twice again.

Okay, got it.

Because the files are getting too big.

Thank you, Miriam. Thank you, Chair.

Lots of important things. OK, so you can always suggest future agenda items to Miriam. And all right, we'll move to public comment if anyone here from the public would like to make a comment. Welcome.

I'm Wendy, I live at 815 Northeast 70th Street, City of Miami, 25 years. I've actually read that stormwater master plan for my neighborhood, and thank you to Sonia, because now one of my streets is getting some stormwater infrastructure, because you increased the stormwater tax fee, so there's $10 million there, guys, so you might want to see what other neighborhoods like mine need stormwater infrastructure. The second thing is, I love that you're going to do the compost thing. I might make a suggestion. In Legion Park, we have on Saturdays a farmer's market, and that would get a lot of people to bring their compost and compost. The people that are selling the veggies, some of that stuff, they leave. So if you want to have a great impact, maybe we should include Legion Park. That would be my suggestion. And also the farmer's market over here. You should put one there. I mean, it's like a no-brainer. People come, you know, get their groceries and they bring their whatever. Okay, that's the second thing. I really am excited about the compost because I compost at home, but not everybody has a composting thing. The third thing is, oh my God, there's so much, wow. The third thing is, I think that, and they're working on a lot of our parks, but there are the smaller parks that are ignored, like we have a small park. We're a neighborhood on the water, and it needs improvements, and it needs water retention, I don't know what, never mind the seawall, et cetera. And that's like our first line of defense. And because it's owned by the city, we don't have a say other than to come and harass, which I have been doing for years. Not you guys, but Sonia. So maybe with the storm water and the sea level rising, I would look to the land that the city owns and advocate to start there, right? That would be my suggestion. So anyways, that's all. But great job, guys.

Thank you. And what's the name of the park that you're referencing?

It's called Baywood. You actually won't find it on your website. Don't ask me why. It's a passive park. It's what they call a passive park, but they don't include it on there. And we need desperate infrastructure. So we've gotten this, we've gotten part of it, but I know money is limited and it's so, you know, squeaky wheel, and I'm a squeaky wheel, so.

Thank you, Wendy.

Oh, one more thing. Okay, so sorry. Sorry, sorry. And I'll let you guys go. So, you know, when you guys send out the little tree giveaways and now for the composting, could you do like a little flyer? Because I share it with my neighborhood in our neighborhood chat, and people have gone to get, you know, trees, and they'll go and dump their composting. So do those things that you can easily share on your phone. All right, that's it. Thanks, guys.

Thanks. Are there any online public comments?

None. Motion to adjourn.

Motion to adjourn. Thank you all for coming. Thank you for the public comments.

Don't forgive me to give me your name tags.