Climate Resilience Committee - Regular Meeting

2025 City of Miami Climate Resilience Committee. All right, we're going to start this evening with a roll call, please, from my right. Graham Musher.

Nicosi Muse.

Erin DiMaio.

Okay, Barbara Bisno.

Silvio Frank Pupocasco.

Thank you.

Miriam Flores, Office of Resilient Sustainability.

Sonia Brubaker, Chief Resilient Officer.

Jahan Solomon, Office of the City Attorney.

Thank you.

Sarae Perez.

Thank you. All right, item two on the agenda this evening is welcoming our newest member, appointed by Mayor Suarez. And welcome, thank you for joining us. Do you wanna take a moment just to introduce yourself to our committee and to the public?

I will, just a moment. My background is I am an attorney that no longer practices, I've retired. I'm very active in my neighborhood community, and I think some of my interests, perhaps the largest portion of it, is directed to what is going to happen to our neighborhoods in Miami that face the rising seas. When you find out where I live, you'll understand. I live on the Venetian Causeway. We're surrounded by water. And either we have to decide, let the fishies have it, and and compensate the owners or figure out how to save that neighborhood from the rising sea. So I appreciate the opportunity to be here.

Excellent. Thank you so much. All right. Moving on to item three, it's public comment. If anyone here in person would like to make a public comment or if we have any online public comments. We do? OK, great. Thank you, Miriam.

We have a public comment from Dolly McEntree. It's regarding the update on the flora in chapter 17. Please do everything you can to preserve and increase our trees, canopies. There are so many benefits to due soil.

That's it. Great. End of comments? Okay. So item four is approval of the CRC minutes for the March 3rd regular meeting. Would, does anyone have comments about that? Or would anyone like to make a motion to approve those minutes? Motion to approve. Okay, and do I have a second?

Second.

Okay, all in favor? Aye.

Aye.

Are you in favor?

Aye. Or not, no?

Aye. Okay, anyone opposed or abstain? No, okay. Excellent. So we're now moving on to item five presentations of the Southwest streetscape master plan. This is a project I've been looking forward to seeing for a while. So very grateful to the Curtis and Rogers team for joining us in the planning department as well. Looking forward to this discussion. Thank you so much for being here.

Okay, thank you everybody. My name is Robert Curtis and I'm a landscape designer with Curtis and Rogers Design Studio. We started this project back in 2019 when the city tasked our team with conducting an inventory of the tree canopy within the city-owned right-of-way within this kind of project limit that you're seeing on your screen. So we were to task with analyzing all of this tree data, along with other information that contributed to communities' resilience to climate change, primarily focusing on urban heat and flooding as it related to tree canopy, and then developing a roadmap by which we could develop a sustainable urban forest, as well as preparing conceptual pilot projects that would redesign the right-of-way in order to increase shade, as well as reap the benefits that trees provide. As well, I think it's worth mentioning that while you're not seeing this in the presentation, their public involvement was a big part of the project as well. So between 2019 and 2021, we held several different informal meetings with different HOAs across the project area, as well as two virtual meetings given the pandemic that were hosted by both of the commissioners within this district. So in all, there's 13 neighborhoods at 6.7 square miles, some of the most densely populated in the city of Miami, as well as some of the most canopy deficient in the city. So I'm gonna quickly move through some of the site analysis and then we'll kind of get into some of the takeaways after my colleague Jenny will present some of that. Just overlooking the kind of hydrology, part of increasing the canopy within the project area involved a deeper understanding of how water flowed across the site. So here we're looking at 18th century hydrology, which some of you may be familiar with. This is the Everglades drainage basin as it naturally occurs. But then, of course, with the kind of establishment of the city of Miami, we have this network of canals that really bisect this natural hydrology. But when you're taking a look at our project site a little bit more closely, you can kind of see how this natural pattern of hydrology still maintains despite these dark blue veins of canals that go through. So in the dark blue, you're seeing the canals. In the light blue, you're seeing these low-lying sloughs, what would have been these natural channels for water to pass through the natural, you know, what would have been the natural land of South Florida. And so in blue, you have those low lands. In orange, you have those high lands. So it's really kind of, building an understanding for us to understand how water is moving across the site in a little bit more of a detailed way. So here's just another view of those blue areas, the low points on our project site, and then as well as those orange, those high points within our project. And those will kind of come into play in a little bit, so keep that in mind. So then, again, looking at tree canopy coverage, this was kind of the big effort here. We collected data for over 25,000 trees in the project area. This took close to a year to complete. We gathered basic measurements along with overall condition and some site observations related to each of those trees. And then once we had a complete inventory, we ran a hotspot analysis to determine areas within the site that were statistically denser, as you can see in green, and those that were sparser, shown in red. Overall, we found that the areas in the northernmost project area, the East Little Havana neighborhood, had the least amount of canopy coverage. That was 8% coverage within the right-of-way of those streets. Again, we're only looking at the right-of-way here. And then areas just south of that, kind of in the Rhodes neighborhood and in the Shenandoah area, those portions of right-of-way have 20% coverage, which kind of reflects the closer to the county average for canopy coverage. And then continuing our analysis, I think we took a look at land surface temperature, which really only confirmed what we had seen with the coverage of canopy. Again, areas in the north registering much higher temperatures than areas in the south, like in the Rhodes neighborhood. And then finally, we considered a variety of demographics to really determine the level of vulnerability of residents across the site. So we know that vulnerable populations often face the brunt of the effects of climate change, so prioritizing action in these areas was high on our list. And again, so we were looking at all these variables in that they all play into the degree in which urban canopy is needed and should be prioritized. And so, when we overlaid all of that data that I just showed you, the hydrology, the heat, the social vulnerability, we essentially got these prioritization areas. So, the darkest shaded red are the areas of high prioritization, and we move back further into lighter shades, still high priority, but maybe not as needed as areas like the roads. So just a few photos to kind of capture what it was that we saw on site, starting from the top left and working clockwise, predominance of palms across the site. So 30% of the trees that were documented were actually palms, which really provide little to no canopy. Other portions where you see that there are swale space, but no trees planted, portions where the swale has been paved over, portions where there is parking only, people parking on the swales, and overall kind of an insufficient space for existing large tree canopy. So some of the takeaways, again, a little bit of repeating myself here, but Fewer street trees contribute to a stronger heat island effect. More vulnerable neighborhoods are the hottest. Higher density areas, which also tend to be the most vulnerable, use the swills for parking. And again, that reduces planting space further. 30% of the trees are actually palms. And the aging canopy, the mature tree canopy that we have within the project area is currently planted in inadequate soil volumes, which is currently affecting the health and the longevity of these specimen trees. So a few action items. Protecting the existing canopy, improving the growing conditions. The first two images here are right outside of the Starbucks in Coconut Grove. We just saw this driving in and saw how good those trees are doing with the changes that we made there. This is looking at planting trees in the right conditions. So you can see the progression over three years of a tree. This was throughout the project. We were kept on coming back to this site throughout our project and you can see how the homeowner really did not want the tree there. One of the big things that we found out with the community outreach was One, the residents felt a lack of communication on the city's part about the planting of trees on their site, and they also felt that the burden of maintenance was something that they felt was undue on them in the case of having to maintain the right-of-way while also understanding that the city is the owner of the right-of-way in this case. Planting new trees in most rural populations. The images are clear here. replacing street palms with street trees, increasing permeable area within the right of way to reduce flooding, and then focusing new planting efforts to create walkable routes to community resources. And so Jenny's going to kind of go into a little bit further depth about how we took all of this assessment and these takeaways and we implemented them into our master plan. Thank you.

Hi. I'm Jenny Rogers, by the way. That's Robert Curtis. He didn't introduce himself. okay just going a little bit into some of the strategies that we developed as a part of this master plan for for how how to better sort of implement the the tree canopy in the right away so on on a big level right we're looking at improving planning strategies streamlining streamlining species selection creating street typologies formalizing maintenance goals On a micro level, we looked at, you know, evaluating the urban forestry, species diversity, and connectivity and walkability. So one of the things we looked at was sort of the asymmetrical planting scheme. So we have a lot of the streets that have overhead utilities on one side of the street. where we really should not be planting large trees. And we saw this a lot, a lot of conflict of large trees with the utility lines. The idea of planting smaller species on that side and maximizing the size of the trees on the other side of the street. So we all have a kind of tendency to think like it should be the same on both sides, but it's really not. And it probably shouldn't be for us to get the best use of our canopy and space. Planting the right size tree in the right place. It seems obvious, but we have a lot of very small swales in the city of Miami, and people all want oak trees, and they need to understand that oak tree is not good in a small swale. If you have a big swale, you can support a big tree, but in a small swale, you need a smaller tree, or you need some infrastructure. So this was also part of the plan, was saying if you have a small planting space, but you want a larger species, which I think we need in a lot of places, that you need some kind of infrastructure like the soil cells or structural soil. These are underground spaces that hold planting soils so that the tree roots have more space to grow. They have been proven to reduce the amount of heating of the sidewalks and the roadways as well as improving the growth of the trees. And we've seen, we've implemented this technology here in Miami. Going into Flagler Street in downtown, we used it in Coconut Grove also. And we've seen a great increase in the size of the trees that are grown in these kind of systems. Spacing is another one. We said, like, you know, coordinating with the homeowners. You know, where is the tree growing? Okay, we need a tree on your property. Where is it going to go? Should it be on the property line? This is one strategy, you know, for like a 50-foot right-of-way space. frontage so you know you have enough space put it in the middle so that someone can park a car think about where the cars are going because so many of the swales have the cars on them we looked at like if you leave too much space you know people will try to get three cars in you know you need to leave the right amount of space if there's a little bit too much they try to squeeze two in where really one should go and they end up hitting the trees and we saw that a lot of that too As we mentioned, we developed typologies to sort of document this entire area, and we're doing something similar in the northwest section now. The typologies really just lay out the basics of the street. Like a type A street is your basic street with a swale that people are not using for parking. Let's put it that way. A type B street has parking on the street, so it has parking on the street and a swale. And then you get to C. I think C has, oh, C is people parking on the swale. So it has a street, it has swale, but everybody's using it for parking and there's no trees in it. And then D has none of those things. D has like no swales. It only has parking and sidewalks. Those are the basics. Then we get into some other bigger ones. But those four are the basics concepts. And important to understand as we look at this kind of diagram to see those first four, the blues, The blues are the easier ones to plant in, right? The greens are the harder ones to plant in because we don't have the given space to plant in them. So what we see here is that in our areas of vulnerability, which are inside of those black squares, we see a lot of green streets. Is that typology D? No swales, on-street parking. So in order to get tree planting in these neighborhoods, you're going to have to lose some parking. because you're going to have to take up some parking space to add a tree, which nobody wants to do. There are some strategies about that, too. One thing we were looking at was the idea of trying to, like, say, maximize parking on the side of the street where the utility lines are, where we can't plant large trees, and then, I mean, sorry, minimizing the trees there, right, maximizing the parking, minimizing the trees, and then on the opposite side of the street where there are no utility lines, really going to town and maximizing the canopy so that you at least have one side of the street that is very highly walkable. This is just a little diagram to show you that with what we have in an example here, we can get 35% canopy coverage if you take just the green space that we have. But if you maximize it with the infrastructure, the silva cells, the structural soil, we could get 59%. So we can really increase the amount of canopy that we can have because we can get larger trees into those spaces. I'm just going to give you an example. We went through each of the neighborhoods. This one is East Little Havana, which is really the most challenged neighborhood we've ever found. As you can see here, 90% of the neighborhood is a type D street, which means that it has no green space for planting. So it also has very, very little canopy. In fact, what happens most often in this neighborhood is that the only green space is on the corners. And the corners should be kept clear for visibility. They're not always. So the few trees that are there are often like smack dab right in the middle of where you want to see. Each of the neighborhoods also go through looking at the urban forestry. You can see that the green columns here are what the ideal is for the size of the tree, with the left ones being the smaller trees, to the right getting bigger. The red is what this neighborhood had. And what you can see from this is that we need more small trees. So we're pretty good getting into the bigger trees. But we're lacking are the smaller trees and that's like a succession plan right, so we want to have bigger trees in the future, we need more smaller trees now. reach the neighborhoods, we had a suggested planting palette, this is based upon trying to use primarily native trees. And depending on where the neighborhood is, whether it has more water inundation and any salt water intrusion kind of things like that might influence the species. We tried to rule out species like this one you see in the red box says that we shouldn't plant any more mahogany in this neighborhood because they've already been maximized. So we should plant different species. You don't want to have too many of the same species in any given area. Because if some kind of infection or disease affects a certain species, you might lose, you know, a whole lot of trees. It's better to have some diversity. So in this, we were developing priority streets. And this is like, this whole neighborhood is a hot spot. That's why it's so orange. But we were looking at the little yellow lines. We're talking about, like, the priority streets in these neighborhoods. And it's talking about the amount of canopy we have now, which was 8.5%. And then the goal was like 40%, 42%. We looked at connectivity and walkability. So the idea here was that you wouldn't have to go more than three blocks to find a street that had some shade. So that we're trying to connect, also trying to keep those main corridors on corridors where there are needed infrastructure, things like schools, parks, and social services that might be along those routes that people need to get to the most. We found some of the worst canopy coverage was the closest to the schools, which happens often because they need stacking for drop off and things like that, but it's sad because you get close to these schools and it's just so hot. So then we had the pilot projects. I'll just go quickly through what we did with the pilot projects. We took four different areas within the project area. And we developed two different kinds of projects. There's what we call a blue street and a green street. Remember, Robert was talking about hydrology and the high points and the low points. So this gets back to that. And in areas where we're low, so where the water level table is high, because we're down low and they're more likely to flood, we want what we call a blue street. And here we want to keep it as permeable as possible so the water can drain as fast as possible. Green streets are up higher. They're on higher land. And we say, oh, well, we don't have to worry about them. The idea there is to try to store water in the green street areas so that it does not run downhill into the blue street areas, because that's where all the water's going, right? So there's a lot of intervention you can do uphill that will also help the people downhill. So we had two blue and two green streets developed here. You can see sort of the one and four are blue and the two and three. And we kept these general. They were done on very specific streets, but we did not put them street names, et cetera, into the report. We were asked to make it more general so that it could be applied to any street. But I'm going to show you just a little bit example of what each of these goes through. This one actually happens to be East Little Havana. The existing condition, 0% shade, only 3% of it is porous. With the intervention, we could get it up to 56% porous, and we could get 50% to 54% shade on the street. We looked at stormwater management as well. I'm going to go through these quickly. And we looked at different types of pervious paving. Part of this also was to try to make more pervious space in the right of way. We looked at a lot of different products. These were the four that we recommended. Pervious pavers, precast pervious concrete, which is not poured in places like that comes in panels. We found that was better than stuff that's poured. as well as pervious asphalt and the flexi-pave, which is only on sidewalks. The other three can be used on the roadways as well, although pervious asphalt was not recommended in the drive lanes. Where these pervious materials could be placed, on the edge of the road, we've seen in Doral, they've been installing the pervious concrete panels in the edge of the roadway, and it's really helping with a lot of their flooding in there. The sidewalks also could be done in some type of pervious material driveway Entries as well as crosswalks so we could get quite a bit of pervious Surface in a street like this Infrastructure we talked about and this is a recommendation like most the orange is what we would say structural soil the structural soil can hold a lot of water as well as allowing the tree roots to grow and And the green is the soil cells. The soil cells are even better for the trees. So the tree roots grow even faster in the soil cells. So those would be strategically placed next to where we're placing large trees. That's just sort of a real fast overview where this project has gone. The Southwest streetscape already went through the commission approval. There was a forestry grant that We're not sure how that's getting implemented, and we're going to let Andrea talk a little bit about where it's going.

That was my cue. Yes, Andrea Sandoval, Planning Department, Urban Design Division. So the first phase of the master plan, which is what Jenny explained to you today, went to City Commission July of 2023, and it got approved. So since then, they have approved more allocation of funds so that we can extend the master plan to the northwest corridor, which is the area kind of highlighted in the green-blue colorage that includes District 1 and District 5, like neighborhoods of both. We also applied to a forestry grant. I think our application was for about $20 million to be able to implement a lot of the original master plan into the southwest, but unfortunately we only got $2 million. That money is being, planning department work with public works department to apply for the grant and now public works is actually implementing or in the process of implementing some tasks with the $2 million that they got. The pilot project implementation is something that we're currently studying because Public Works also got funds to do one pilot project in the East Little Havana priority zone. So even though we had four different pilot projects designated throughout the master plan, we try to pick the most similar one to the conditions that they had, and we are looking into getting an update into how they're using those into the street that they selected they're going to move forward with. And number four, the citywide Steers Kids master plan refers to the extension, the expansion of the master plan. So once that got approved, we started working on it, I'm going to say like eight to nine months ago. Phase one of the expansion area has been completed, which is the inventory and analysis. And we're about to engage in community outreach. and then the report will follow and the recommendations and the typologies and all of what you saw today, basically.

I just wanted to add that I think the pilot projects, the idea behind them, right, is that these are new technologies, and so if we, you know, Public Works is not used to dealing with some of the pervious pavements, etc., they're not standard. And because of that, they're hesitant to implement them. And the idea of the pilot projects would be to try out a few streets so the public works would see how these things operate, to see how they could maintain them, to see if they could become a more regular use. Is that a correct assessment?

Can we include things like here? like root bridges or other things that we can put sort of when you plant the trees to give them more support. I mean, there's like a handful of other technology things out there. Is there anything that we can do to help facilitate that pilot process?

Yeah, it's really hard to, it's a lot easier to plant a tree the right way than to try to fix a tree that's been planted the wrong way. But unfortunately, a lot of our mature canopies and is growing in less than ideal conditions. There are ways that you can do it. I mean, we did that in Coconut Grove. It was wanting to fix the sidewalks without getting rid of the big trees. And we used the Flexipave there, which worked very well. But if you go down there now, you can see that it desperately needs to be replenished because it's starting to wear. But things like that can be done for the technology of that. it's hard to go back and put any kind of like, like you talk about a bridging system for an existing tree, because you'd have to disturb the root zones, you know, as they are. But there are ways to kind of get over the roots.

This is an awesome presentation. And you have so many great technical ideas and analysis. And, you know, it's very comprehensive, too, in looking at, you know, it's a challenge because you're looking at utilities you're looking at parking you're looking at you know water management and then living things like it's complex which obviously kind of gets to the point of maybe it's taking time to figure out where to go with this but this type of comprehensive solution really is you know how i think we need to solve a lot of these challenges so i'm really hopeful that these can keep moving you mentioned these budgets for these projects two million for the forest grant, and then $2 million for public works, one going to a street over in the challenging east zone of Little Havana, and the other one is not yet determined?

The other $2 million was for the whole air boundary of the original master plan, so for the whole southwest risky master plan. that how that money gets allocated to all of it was going to be studied by public works and implementation into seeing is it, do we plant trees everywhere? Or does the money go into community outreach? Where will the two million rule basically work better?

Or to one street or a block or two?

They could also do that, yeah.

has has like the next step been taken in this of looking at like a cost analysis of what this could do as far as like what the costs are for implementing the permeable pavement implementing all of these strategies and like possibly juxtaposing that versus a standard street and. Also, the costs that actually come with that standard street, for instance, like the stormwater master plan when you're just implementing normal curbs and gutters. There's also large cost for pumps. So, you know, you're talking like these ideas of the blue streets and the green streets makes total sense. And it really needs to be working in combination so Has any of that been done like cost analysis. So we can start to understand and justify why this makes sense.

For the first phase, it was done, we had some details that talked about how much more expensive it is to replace this material with this material. That was the start of the cost analysis, but I think what you mean is an actual comparison of what the city currently uses versus what it could be using, and that's something that we can definitely explore in this expansion area.

Or maybe some of that funding that you got of that grant could go toward that. How do you even begin to know that you want to implement these things without that last step maybe to do that? Because again, you're talking about so many different pieces of infrastructure here. And this is really thorough. It kind of reminds me of what we saw from Jeffrey Huber five months ago when he presented salty urbanism, which also looks at long-term strategies and all that kind of comprehensive architecture with landscape zoning, all that. So I'm really interested in seeing that. I feel like the cost obviously is probably one of those hurdles. And then the idea of the permeable pavement, I've seen Walter Meyer's presentation on permeable pavement and how it's been used in other places for decades. So hopefully we can start doing that. I have one more comment before I pass it to my committee members. that you know a streetscape master plan i feel like also really needs to be combining long-term utility planning like stormwater master plan fpl master plans but also the bike master plan because like you were saying like every three streets should have trees pairing those with where people are walking and maybe also biking so like those are slower streets those are streets where the sharrows are or full-on bike lanes and hopefully like a next step possibly in this could be integrating where those bike lanes are maybe even turning streets from two ways into one ways which can then buy you also that space to kind of do some of this so has has any of that been kind of paired into which streets are planned because like in your analysis of like the a b c d of the typologies did you plan changing any of those typologies no it's the easy question answer right um but

Because that was not in our purview to do. But one of the pilot projects is on a street that has bike lanes. So we did take that into consideration. So how would this whole thing work with a bike lane also? So we looked at 16th, which has the bike lanes at the moment. but I think you're right like a lot of those ideas are within the master plan as ideas including the one way there are streets in East Little Havana that I don't think need to be two lanes going one way and could you take some of that back you know but those are all things that take traffic studies engineering you know much more so on a level much higher than what we were doing so

I'd love to see that happen, and we're going to talk later about budgets. I might bring up that maybe there should be budget for that, because I feel like that's maybe that next step to really kind of get this across the finish line. One more question. This may be challenging, but you highlighted these priority areas, which are the ones that are denser, really prioritizing street parking, really because of the density of the neighborhood. It's a lot of concrete. Those are really challenging, whereas how much of a microclimate does that neighborhood really get affected? That if you were to go to maybe the middle level neighborhood, where it's maybe a little easier to plant trees, but it's two blocks away, how much do you think that microclimate could be affected from the adjacent neighborhoods? Why go to the absolute hardest one, where it might cost many millions to update when you might be able to do it on an adjacent street, but have a pretty good cumulative effect? Does that make any sense?

I think you could do it in certain areas where you have, especially where you have commercial districts, where it may not be practical to plant more trees on a highly dense commercial district like street, but the residential areas behind can kind of give you some of that microclimate you were talking about. Walter Meyer was involved in this project here in the first part in the Southwest Streetscapes. I know he did some studies about how much the cemetery over in was that big green space, how it affected that whole area. You definitely could look into that, but I do think that the areas... The areas that are most lacking are very large areas, generally. So you're going to have to do something in there. Otherwise, I don't think it's going to be able to gather that. They're not getting from Shenandoah to East Little Havana, or the roads to East Little Havana. That microclimate isn't affecting it that much.

Understood. Well, thank you so much for the great presentation. Anyone else, questions or comments?

Yeah, I have a few. This was really in-depth, so thank you. Kind of building off of what Aaron asked last, I understand we have to incorporate plausibility of solutions to begin with, right? What can we do? What's realistic? Things like that, right? But also in the essence of like equity in planning, you know, to be able to do one area that, you know, may be easier to do as compared to an area that needs a lot of help. For example, Alapata, which, you know, if I look at a satellite imagery of it, it's just, it looks like a row just... business district with no trees at all, right?

That's in our new area, and we know how bad allopathy is.

Right, so that's why I was glad to see it. But I do, I am curious, is that what informed the selection of expansion areas, areas that just needed a lot of help, or was there something else that went into that?

So for that boundary in specific, we had a couple meetings with the commissioners for D1 and D5 to see the neighborhoods that, in their opinion, needed the most help. And usually from I-95 to the east, we have a lot of overlays areas in Miami, like Wynwood and RD1, Wynwood and RD2, Design District, Rico City Center. So like that area of the city had already been paid attention to with other studies, and it was to the west of I-95 that we see the high temperatures, the lack of canopy. That's why on purpose we selected all to the west of I-95 and to the extension of the neighborhoods that both commissioners requested.

Okay. What is the community outreach going to look like in that area?

We just had a, well, not just, like three months ago we had a briefing with D1 before we actually engage on community outreach. We have to go through the commissioner's office to explain the data we have collected so far where we're going with it to get their input before we actually go out and ask people into what are they looking for or how we can make their neighborhood better so we haven't had the meetings with the neighborhood yet because we're still pending the d5 briefing with Commissioner King, and once we have those completed, we can actually start setting up meetings and community outreach events in different formats. For the first phase, unfortunately, it was during the pandemic, so we couldn't really do a lot of on-site specific to the public, but we're hoping that this time around, we can do more of that and get more people involved in the master plan extension.

Do you have an idea of what that would look like? Would it be like surveys or would it be, you know, maybe liaison throughing nonprofit organizations that have connections with the community already?

Hi, this is Aida Curtis. So, I'm part of the team also. So, what we like to do in these community, when we do community meetings, and we have already for the Alapata and all of those citywide streets, is we've identified community organizations that people like to participate in so we kind of go through them and then maybe have a picnic or have something informal where there's a lot of gathering of people and they come in and then we also like to do surveys with people and there's many ways of putting input but that's really how we go through it through community groups that already have been established and then we would go through them and reach the majority of people that's how we find that people are more comfortable coming out and giving us input rather than the standard public meeting at night, you come at night. I mean, we feel those don't work. We like more the informal, picnic, informal, you know. Food, whatever, you know, whatever gets you out there to communicate with us.

Yeah, I mean, look in here, right? The formal meeting.

Yeah, well, clearly. And so what we like to do is, like, you know, bring as many people and then have as many of us to be able to have the dialogue so we just have, like, much dialogue. The idea is to get as much public input as possible. One of the things, and I was gonna add, one of the things that I think, and I think I've told Andrea and I've told Sonia here, is I really, really, really think there needs to be an incredible amount of education to the public about the benefits of trees, because what, unfortunately, what we are finding is that a lot of the times, people see a tree as a nuisance, Because it is in the right of way and it's going to drop leaves and I have to rake the leaves. And it's going to be in the right of way where it's going to take away the area that I can park my car. And unfortunately, we live in Miami where any one of the homes in East Little Havana or perhaps in Alapata and other areas, in one home you have multi-families living there because of the cost of living. So they have more than one car, so they have the need to park four cars, so the right-of-way isn't necessarily enough. So part of what we wanna do is we wanna understand that and make sure that we provide the proper infrastructure and understand and explain to the property owners that you can have both. You can plant a tree And you can park, like Jenny said, if you space it properly, you can park in one way, park it the other way, and provide the framework. But what that could provide is it could provide shade, it could provide lower cooling bills because of the shade. But there's a whole educational process that I think we're not there yet. This community is not there as to understanding the benefits of trees. We had a project that we worked on in the Southwest Treescape and trees were planted on the right of way and the community came out there and they took the trees down and they were planted in the Southwest Treescape area and they took the trees down because they didn't want a tree. They didn't want to maintain that tree. They wanted to park in this whale and we don't want a tree, period. I think it's kind of a little bit of a reality and I think... If I were to put my money into it, I think I would have those meetings outside in July and August. So you can have a meeting under the shade tree and then some people out there in the other shade of the tree. I just feel the urgency is there. Started this in 2019. The urgency is there, guys. It's not getting any cooler. Each year we set the record. 2023 was the hottest year on record. 2024 is now the hottest year on record. I don't doubt that 2025 is gonna be the hottest year on record, so.

That leads me to my next question, which is, okay, so now we don't get these trees taken down the next time. One of the important things is gonna be the maintenance, right? What are the plans to work with the city as far as maintenance goes?

Well, that's an interesting question that you put in because I feel that part of the tree trust fund, which is there right now, could be used for maintenance. And part of that fund should be used to fund a city forester, somebody to maintain the trees. Because what happens now is that that funding The way is, as I understand it, is put in the Tree Trust Fund and it's only to put in to plant trees, period. But it does not include the maintenance of trees or management of a tree forest or any of that. So I think that could be changed and I think that there were the changes of the ordinance. Well, I'm not going to comment and have my, you know, lots of problems with the changes of the ordinance, that is one that is certainly a favorable one. Looking at the Tree Trust Fund and how that funds are allocated in terms of more than just planting trees, because we tend to think that that's just it. You plant a tree and it'll be fine, but you have to maintain it and you have to manage it. And that responsibility at the moment is falling into the homeowners.

Could you elaborate on city forester versus, like, is that a specific role that other places have that we don't have?

Yeah, many cities have an urban forester. City of Miami Beach has an urban forester. And what they do is that they manage the urban forest. If it needs to be pruned, it prunes. If it needs to be, you know, trees at times need to be pruned. and have corrective pruning so that they have a proper structure so that when a hurricane comes and the wind comes, it doesn't blow over and make sure that the infrastructure is put in place and make sure that it's managed properly. That if a storm came and it broke a big tree, a big branch, that there's some sort of corrective pruning or treatment done in the tree. I mean, it's when you have a city and you have a forest in the city, there are many people that have, many municipalities that have an urban forester. The job of that person is to take care of the public urban trees. I mean, if we wanted to find out who takes care of the public urban trees in the city of Miami, I don't know that we have a name.

We do have a division in our public works department that does the maintenance of trees and plants new trees in our parks. We do have someone who has the expertise.

Raphael. Yes. Raphael is the person who, but Raphael is not an urban forester.

But they do maintain the trees. But I don't know that you hold that title.

They do maintain the trees. Part of this contract, when it was advertised, it included the study of an urban forester. And that part was not funded. But the original RFP included an analysis of urban forestry. And if you talk to the Department of Environmental Resources, the person in charge of that, the director, they will say that an urban forester is somebody who is, you know, needed with that. Rafael is fantastic. Don't get me wrong. He is absolutely fantastic. And he's the one in charge of planting the trees. You know, or he's in charge of saying, you know, where the trees go, and he goes and plants the trees. And we have talked to him, you know, about that.

Yeah. Do you have more?

I was going to say, we literally have an arborist, right, a city arborist, or is that not a thing anymore? We do, yeah, we have one.

I think, so if I might add, I mean, I think I would take a look at Jacksonville, and I can send Aaron some information. The city of Jacksonville has an urban forester, and I found in some of my research that Jacksonville's structure when it comes to their urban forestry and how they're managing their urban forest is very comprehensive. And I think while the city has arborists and people serving in different capacities and that fulfills some of the roles that an urban forester does. There's not one singular person that is dedicated to looking at this in all comprehensive. There's not one single person that's managing it from a holistic perspective. I think Ralph is a busy guy from what I understand. He's not just out there planting trees. He's managing quite a bit of stuff. So I think that's just the sense that I got from what the role of an urban forester in a more comprehensive sense is.

We're a little bit over time, but I want to give time to the rest of the committee to also weigh in.

I'm pretty much done. For some reason in my mind, I thought that an arborist was supposed to handle the duties of an urban forester, and it seems like... as we talk about a lot of these tree things, that the arborist is absent from a lot of these conversations, which for me is concerning. So what does that look like moving forward as far as including or maybe changing this position to an urban forester so we can remedy some of these issues and make it easier?

There is a difference between an arborist and an urban forester. You have arborists in the Department of Environmental Resources, and their work is, you know, they review the plans that come in for, application. They look at the arborist reports. They look at public areas. If there's a damage or if there's a hazard, they would look at that. But they're not charged with management of the entire public area. It's the scope of work. It's the magnitude of the scope of work.

Not to say that an arborist could be an urban forester. It's just the responsibility that the person is taking and the training and the responsibilities that they would be taking on.

And that's what I'm trying to insert. Maybe we need to

Elevate an arborist to the level of urban forest.

Would that person, as we now have them, make sure that the trees are pruned at hurricane time?

I think, in my mind, the urban forester would be the person that's in charge of making sure that the master plan we created is actually put into effect, because it seems like there's not It seems like that's being championed by several different departments. It's kind of being taken on in a piecemeal fashion.

I understand.

I guess the point I'm trying to get to is you indicated that people don't understand the benefits of trees and they only see the disadvantages. And I would think in this town, a big tree with lots of branches and cars parked underneath it Somebody needs to prune it before the hurricane. Correct. Or those cars are damaged. I mean, I would think that's the kind of sale we have to make on why we should have, you know, you may have to do the leaves, but we're going to make sure that you're not going to.

Suffer any damages because we're going to prune your trees and does some of that that's being covered by public circle already and I think I want to add to that all of the tree information that was collected as part of the study was given to public works and so they have a database of all the street trees in a program called cartograph and so they're actively keeping up to date with what those trees are in poor condition and they're going out and managing from what I understand they're responsible for going out and pruning the trees. The problem is that Public Works is really strapped in that they don't have that many people And you saw there's over 25,000 trees. So the reality is that not all the trees are going to get pruned by public works before hurricane season because it's just, it's a lot.

Just say one more word. I'm sorry. Were all these meetings that you're scheduling, that's before you use the $2 million? Is that what I understand? That there has not, the $2 million that we got from the, whatever, the Forest Service has not been

Expended yet, is that right? Correct. Okay.

And the last question is, have you, I don't guess you would be the ones and maybe the city or maybe Sonia, but have we looked at private grants to do this kind of thing? I mean, have we reached out to the Sierra Club and people like that to try to bring in some money to get these trees in the neighborhood?

Yes, yes. And we actually, we applied for a grant recently. I'm not going to say because it hasn't been, like, awarded yet or anything. Okay. But for the education part of it. Because as Ida said, the education is so important. And so, you know, we've taken, you know, we definitely have taken that to heart and put in a grant application for that.

Yep. And we usually, we work a lot with the grants department, with SONE, with, the City of Miami Grants Department, because we're doing other projects, and we generally, if a grant comes up that we know about, and we say, okay, hey, Lillian, this is up, and then the city has their grants department, and they evaluate the different grants. So yeah, they are very good at that.

Thank you, Chair. No, I really want to piggyback. I think this was a great presentation. I have a couple of points. The first thing on... Benefit cost analysis. So some things to consider there, and I think that chair, I'm in agreement with you if we need to make some recommendations on budget. I mean, this is the project that's furthest ahead for us to talk about anything about trees. And to think about, like, how do we show. The value and communicate that value to the general public and to our elected officials. So, you know, dovetailing as much as we can to support you guys and basically you're in the front lead. This, I think, is very critical and very timely. That being said, I would, in that budget cost analysis, something we can get this funded, I would triangulate some of that data with storm drain information and what's called the water energy nexus. So all the storm drain that you're helping prevent, I mean all the water that you're helping prevent upstream is helping prevent water treatment downstream as well as water pump usage. And there's a very hard electrical cost to that. So I would look at certainly what that looks like and that probably does make the business case, should make the business case for needing to invest a billion dollars for a million trees, whatever the amount might be at scale. The second point I'd like to make is about Seeing if you could digitize some of these plans to be, I know you're already working with things like GIS, if you're able to take it a step further into 3D, to be three-dimensional, I think it helps a lot of folks that either are illiterate or don't speak the language to understand what's going on and how we might be able to help you overlay that in such a way that the neighbors can understand what's going on, which brings me to my third point, the public comment point and how hard it is to get folks on public comment. I've been trying to push for folks that are presenting these master plans to make them available like an ArcGIS format online so that there's one place people can go to. They don't have to show up. Showing up is very burdensome for a lot of us. And so that you can at least click and comment. hey, we propose this tree here. This is where you can check out where the trees that are going up, or if you want to request it, this is also where you can make that request. So maybe like an online comment forum, we saw Miami Waterkeeper do that pretty effectively. I would explore that as an option as maybe one of the recommended paths for getting more public input.

On the educational campaign, 100% agree.

We've identified this as an issue. It's a bit of a cultural issue and a scarcity issue, but it's a compounding issue nonetheless. So we'd love to support in that effort. In terms of urban forestry, there is actually a proposal that I was going to be presenting today, but I haven't been able to polish it more, called the LEAF proposal, which is about local engagement for public forestry. And it looks at the million trees, I mean, the tree program from New York City. And thinking about your point, even if we do hire somebody, okay, which we should work on that, Chairman, if we can make a note to actually propose that for the budget for sure. I don't know if the tree trust fund is where it should come from. I mean, we have a $3.5 billion maintenance budget for the city. You know, we should have this, I think, role for sure, an urban forester role. But more importantly, I really want to push for decentralizing that. So we take the burden off of the city and into residents. So as we're going into different neighborhoods, we can have these local stewards and have people sign up from each neighborhood, each community, to be that local tree steward in their neighborhood. a tree corpse, if you will, as they named these in New York City in the 1980s. So maybe this tree corp could help take the burden off, help everybody understand this is dangerous or this is an opportunity to do maintenance. And thank you so much for the example from City of Miami Beach and City of Jacksonville. Those are all my comments for now.

I know we're a little over time, so I'll be quick with this. But in terms of how you guys are interacting with this, are you also looking in between male and female trees and potentially approaching in a balanced way? Again, just from, like, quote, unquote, botanical sexism, right, and how we see it implemented in neighborhoods, how female trees are known to drop more acorns, more seeds, more things of that nature, and male trees don't. But it is, you know, seeing that they do produce a lot more pollen And so asthma in certain neighborhoods increase, and a lot of breathing and respiratory issues increase in those areas. As we know, through a balanced approach, female trees can absorb that pollen while male trees produce some. So I just wanted, I guess, not as a question, more as a comment, or keep it in mind when you are implementing this project, just to continue having that balanced approach, just to make sure we don't preference just male trees and do increase, again, especially in Miami and how we see houses impacted by humidity already with respiratory issues growing and being on the rise through it. seeing how we can hopefully, like, increase that and help, I guess, fight that back with the power of trees. And, yeah, that's pretty much it. Thank you.

All right. A lot of interest, clearly. And I'm really grateful you guys came out today. And I feel like we're probably going to have additional follow-ups of comments and questions. And... also related to our next meeting next month that we'll get into later of budget cycle and trying to help continue this work because I really see this as being so important. So thank you all for all the work you do on a daily basis and for coming tonight. Appreciate it very much.

I will send you an article. I happen to have Aaron's email, but you can share it with them. The American Society of Landscape Architects just did an a paper of the economic benefits of nature-based solutions for infrastructure, very interesting analogy. So I will share it to you, yeah. I assume I share them with you, Sonia, but yes, that's a good information there, but definitely.

We'll share it with Miriam and get it to everyone else.

I just wanted to say, too, that the next section is done way more on GIS. But we did do some of Southwest Streetscapes. It was done with GIS, but all of the trees are on GIS.

All the trees are on GIS, and the city has that, and the typologies of the different streets.

Yeah, so some of that. And as we keep going, we're using it more and more, so it's becoming more easily accessible.

Thank you so much. Ida, nice to finally see you here. I've seen your name pop up a couple different times. It's great to thank you for everything you're doing.

For our other projects that we're working on in the public involvement, we have QR codes, and we immediately put them in the city's website, and they keep on providing all kinds of information there in QR codes.

It depends on the neighborhood.

It depends on the neighborhood, yeah.

Some of the areas in Southwest Streetscapes, people didn't have, they don't do computers or go online.

Right.

Yeah, it's...

Well, thank you, and I think you as well in the planning department for the great work really appreciate it. All right, moving on we're going to go to item six old business, the first one is update on flora and chapter 17 so floor was on the agenda for the. The second I believe the second Commission meeting in March and I remember the date. but that item was indefinitely deferred with no comment that I'm aware of at the beginning of the meeting. And indefinite deferral means that it's postponed for six months unless it's brought back sooner. And I was informed this was done so that it would better align with upcoming plans related to chapter 17 of amending chapter 17, that FLORA would be not necessarily a standalone thing, but would be done more comprehensively, which is kind of the whole point of FLORA its own creation as well as comprehensive planning. So I think that makes a lot of sense. And there's going to be some outreach at future community meetings on Chapter 17, which I'm looking forward to. And I believe there was a meeting hosted by Chairwoman King last month where she mentioned that the item would possibly or likely be deferred at the next April meeting regarding Chapter 17. So I'm currently working on simplifying the diagrams, because I think they were a little too technical that I made for Flora. So just kind of making that a little easier to understand. And I'm sure this will be like an ongoing discussion for us moving forward as these community meetings come out. But I was wondering, do you have any additional updates on those?

Just that it is on the April 24th agenda, and that the intent is that it will be indefinitely deferred, meaning it will come back automatically within six months.

It already has been announced that it will be indefinitely deferred from April 24th?

It was announced at a public meeting that the intent is for it to be indefinitely deferred. And then it's on the agenda. And then the day when they set the agenda, as a commission, we'll decide.

When they go through the order of the day.

Yeah.

Do you know about any other timelines of the community outreach or what next steps might be for these chapter 17 review and next steps of Flora and other ideas that have been presented from the community?

Yeah, so we're working with our procurement office right now to procure a group that can help with the outreach. And so that is finalizing pretty soon. And then once once it does then meetings will be scheduled, but I would imagine Up to six months time frame kind of for all of that kind of beginning to end What sorry what to six months?

Or the the public outreach the next six months like okay, so pretty quick like it's gonna be a quick procurement for this outreach and And then, like, the work would be done in-house, like, with staff, but they're hiring people to do, like, hosting charrettes and workshops and meetings and stuff? Yes.

Yeah.

Okay. That's excellent. That's a pretty welcome update for the continuation of Chapter 17. You know, a lot of what we talked about was we wanted them to go out into the community, and I think you kind of spearheaded, you know, bringing that up a couple months ago. So it sounds like it's happening. So that's, you know, very positive.

I also did follow up with the Chief of Staff for Gabella, Chairman, on Flora specifically, to say, hey, we should have a conversation. And they said that Commissioner Gabella is deciding to defer his suggested changes on the tree ordinance indefinitely, as after hearing from the public that this is the wrong direction. And they would like to think about what incentives, in fact, what incentives the commissioner thinks he can champion to help residents preserve their trees. So, which I think, again, Laura is a perfect example of some of that, you know, plus plus. So I think, you know, this is not over, but I think it's headed in the right direction thanks to kind of all this getting galvanized.

Yeah, I don't think it sounds like it's over at all. I think it sounds like it's, of just beginning yeah with like a real outreach um i mean i i am of the opinion that i do think chapter 17 needed to be amended amended and i agree with our last presenter you know ada mentioned that she thought some of the budget should go toward maintenance and we heard from other people that they thought some budget and staff recommends that budget goes toward maintenance so you know that's just like one of many things that should probably be updated in in all the various categories of chapter 17, but it's really nuanced. So I'm really glad that it's gonna get proper attention to go through all those different use cases. Because there's so many different use cases of chapter 17, and they kind of conflict at times. So it's not a one size fits all solution. It needs to be kind of differentiated for all those different use cases. So this is a great update. I'm looking forward to next steps. All right, so item B is coordination of the CRC city budget recommendations. So that's, this item relates to what we spoke about briefly at the last meeting of not a CRC budget, but the city's budget, and if we have specific recommendations of how the city should allocate funds, and that maybe we should make a, cumulative recommendation on what CRC recommends priorities. You know, we talk a lot about different strategies, and a lot of the strategies that we bring up include needed budgets. So I think, you know, the intent of this next meeting next month for May is that I request that each of us come with at least minimum one idea of how you think budget should be allocated. Is there something where it's lacking? Is there something where it should be shifted? Is there a different priority? Do you have an example? We heard about Philadelphia, I believe, or sorry, Jacksonville with the urban forester. Maybe someone wants to do research on what that role is and how much it was and what the benefit brought, for instance. But just like what the idea is maybe a little research on like a you know the background and if we could try to submit those to miriam by april 23rd so that we all have a chance to review them before the meeting and then it'll be included in the agenda packet for the meeting and then it also gives a chance for the community to come out and uh share with us what they think the city's um climate and resilience budget priorities should be and that we can, you know, kind of hear from the public directly and then we can take that meeting to kind of discuss these different ideas together and then come back in June, hopefully with an organized, you know, consolidated resolution and vote on it in June, which would be in time for the city's budget. So that's kind of the plan as of now and the idea and kind of the framework. Any questions or thoughts or you guys still support doing that for our meeting next month?

Absolutely.

Okay, awesome. So, April 23rd.

I'm so sorry, Chair, but what is your... vision for their proposals? Is it an email of line items, or do you want them to draft resolutions? I'm just trying to understand what we should, as staff, be looking out for. Do you want them to, like example, I'm just throwing this out there, maybe one of the recommendations is find and fund an urban forester position for the city of Miami. Could it just be done in an email to Miriam and it doesn't have to be anything long or it could just be ideas that can be massaged through? Is that what we're looking for?

Yes, I think it's just an email or just a document with, you know, I think like a line or maybe one or two sentence of like, what is the main idea? And then if you want to do like live links to anything in the article, kind of like how we do the whereas statements so that we can reference, you know, facts and figures. And then, you know, if you want to do, like, maybe a paragraph of just, or bullet points of, you know, the urban forester role was this. This was, like, the budget this other city did. This is some of the initiatives. So I don't think we should just, like, have a list of things, but we should almost have, like, the whys, but, like, simplified. And then we can kind of group all of those ideas into some form in June for, like, a single resolution. But I don't think it should be, like, many. Got you. Understood. Cool. Okay. So I'm looking forward to that. And also for outreach. You know, I think a big part of this also is hearing from the community. We've had a lot of attendance the last few months at our meetings. But you know, with with your outreach, you know, from your organization, and you also have a platform for outreach, I think if, you know, we should probably do some extra outreach more than just the city's emails to try to hear from the community, you know, if possible from our from our own networks.

A question about that. Would we, since I know we would submit these budget, like, I guess, ideas before our next meeting, is there a way we can still encourage the public to show up and show out for next month's meeting with their own ideas for budget, even though we, like, yeah, we can't, right?

Yeah, that's the whole point. So I'm requesting that We, as committee members, submit in time for Miriam to consolidate them and include them in the agenda packet.

And we'd want the resolution done by June, you said, right?

Yeah, we would work on it between May and before the June meeting to consolidate it into some resolution form. But yeah, no, the idea is absolutely that the community would show up at the May meeting and discuss their ideas during the public comment period. which is two minutes per person at the beginning. And it could be done online as well. And then also, I think we should put a good amount of time at the next agenda. So we'll discuss the ideas that we all bring. But also, if we hear something from the community that we want to ask someone about, we could invite them up to elaborate, for instance. So it could be maybe more of a dialogue even. I'm not really sure, but we'll see kind of how it goes.

Sounds good.

All right, excellent. So next item is the CRC procedural memo, which was put together by staff.

So this was just to help give you guys an outline. I believe staff prepared this, and then I reviewed it to ensure every process and procedure is in line with our code, that you guys are not stepping outside your powers or overstepping anything, you know, any other departments. I figured you all could just go ahead and read it, review it, and if you have questions, you contact staff on an individual basis, but it's really to just help outline your powers and how staff will intake, you know, information, resolutions, and past resolutions.

And also the memos, which we've kind of started using over the last year for, you know, review of projects and the waterfront projects, so... I only learned it once I had to write memos and review them. So I think it was really helpful to have now this kind of like standard operating procedure of just we all now kind of know how it works. So thank you all for putting that together. All right, item seven, items to be voted on. None officially under this category, but maybe later. Item eight, city-owned waterfront projects. AN UPDATE ON WATERFRONT CRITERIA GUIDE. THIS WAS ON THE AGENDA PER YOUR REQUEST AT THE LAST MEETING. YOU MENTIONED WHEN WE WERE DISCUSSING DAVE'S PRESENTATION, DAVE'S PRESENTATION ON WASTE AND RECYCLING, YOU SAID WE'RE REVIEWING A LOT OF PROJECTS, WE SHOULD INCLUDE THAT. SO I DRAFTED A POTENTIAL ADDITION TO OUR WATERFRONT CRITERIA GUIDE THAT MAYBE WE COULD ADD. So maybe we would write something and again it kind of has to be short right because it's like that one page document that was prepared last year where it's like. Does the project do this and then it's like a yes or no and then it's kind of meant as a guide for presenters to to elaborate on like how did they do these things, but maybe the question is. Does the project include a clear plan for proper waste and recycling management. including accessible and well-marked receptacles, as well as measures to minimize litter and marine debris near the waterfront. So kind of just addressing what's the plan, how are you going to manage waste and recycling, and emphasizing, obviously, waterfront. Do you think we should include that? Do you think we should make changes to that sentence? What do you think as far as Next steps.

No, I think that covers exactly what it is I was thinking about. It just reminds me to think about even outside of waterfront, you know, is that, but honestly, that could generate another conversation. We can talk about that in an open discussion, but I think that's fine, yeah.

Any other comments on adding that sentence to our waterfront criteria guide? Okay.

I'm sorry, I didn't hear what that sentence was.

I can read it again. Does the project include a clear plan for proper waste and recycling management, including accessible and well marked receptacles, as well as measures to minimize litter and marine debris near the waterfront? Do I have a motion to add that to CRC's criteria guide? And a second from Nkosi, all right. All in favor?

Aye.

Anyone abstain or oppose? Okay, I think it was unanimous. Excellent. Okay, moving on to Item nine, Office of Resilience and Sustainability updates.

Hi, Sonia Brubaker, Chief Resilience Officer. And I have something exciting.

A little closer to the mic, Sonia, please.

I have something exciting that I'd like to share. Anxiously waiting.

Chair, as we go kind of go through the memo of general purview, does waste and our waste crisis, it's not directly tied in here, but can it be? Maybe that's a question. Can we do that for open discussion?

Back to you, Sonia.

All right, bear with me for just a second.

Okay, there we go.

There we go. All right. All right. You guys are the first ones who are seeing this live. Super excited. Unless you've already opened up our newsletter that we sent out right before this meeting, then you would have seen it first. But this is our first kind of public display of our City of Miami virtual resilience tour. So we wanted to have a place where people could go to see all of the great work that we're doing for resilience and sustainability across the city that we want to continue to update. And so I wanted to show you a couple of our projects. So we've organized it's a story map we've organized it around our strategies and really looking at our adaptation projects and our climate ready plan, as well as our mitigation projects and our carbon neutral plan and then there's there's more kind of in the city and let me see if I can expand this out a little bit more. This is not what I'm seeing on my laptop screen. The way this is shared, it's only shared on this.

So bear with me for a second.

I'm kind of working on this screen here. Okay, so here you can navigate to different parts of the story map, kind of up here. But let's just go ahead and scroll down so I can show you some introduction. But then let's get to our projects. Okay, so we start off with our climate ready and we kind of give a description of the strategy and kind of like why we're doing this, give some links. And then we have some jump links kind of right here at the top where These are the different projects that you can look for or you can scroll through the whole story map and look at all of our great projects. So start off with our extreme heat plan. We give a brief description and really it's just links to more information kind of on our website. Then we look at our stormwater master plan. And when each of these, there's ways to interact. You can see a map of all of our stormwater projects. You can make it bigger, I promise.

At the bottom, let's see if I can go.

There's a little plus sign down here that you can make bigger. So you can actually kind of look at where they are. But you can come back to the tour, get a description, and then the link to our website kind of for more information. Here is our street skate plan that we just got the presentation on, so you can show, it shows kind of where that focus is, kind of why we're doing it, and what we're doing. And so again, this is meant to be dynamic, so we're going to be updating this at least once a quarter with more information as these projects progress. and as well as adding new ones, because we wanted to show there's so much work that's being done, and if you wait till the very end when a very long infrastructure project or program is being implemented, you lose all of the great synergy and interaction and engagement to be able to facilitate that into the project. So I'm going to go back up here. I just wanna show you a couple of features. Let me just go to some specific projects. I'm gonna go to Alyssa's favorite feature. And this is in our morningside park where we have kind of the scroll option where we see, okay, this is what the park looks like today. And then with the plans, you know, this is what's conceptual of what the park is going to look like. And so we have some of these kind of features within our tour as well. So definitely want you to check it out.

There's more and there's more.

There's more sliders. So I'm showing you what it'll look like. Here's what it looks like now. And here's a conceptual drawing of what it could potentially look like. So just want to show you quickly, here's our carbon neutral page. And so you can see the projects that we're working on here. Our BE 305 program, our homeowner preservation program, our FPL amphitheater at Bayfront Park. that a lot of people enjoy, and concerts, our FPL Evolution project that I presented to you guys about. And so looking forward to being able to update that project on here. And then more in Miami, because there's more. We get to look at an Arts in Public Places project, Our Downtown Flagler Beautification Project, Keep Miami Beautiful. We're looking at a playground replacement that we did at Shandua Park with all recyclable materials and shading. Just a great way that you can take a look at the projects. I'm not going to go through them all so that you go there and then you look at them all. But if you haven't seen the newsletter yet, the link is right there front and center. If you don't get our newsletter, please sign up on our website, but you'll see it there on our website as well.

I'm very, very happy.

Very happy to show you this. This has been a work in progress for quite a while. We had the idea, we reached out to all of our departments, kind of making sure that we had all the right language, and then we put it into this great way to show kind of all the stuff that we're doing.

Who made this? Who was responsible for it, mainly?

So Tim from our office, he made it. He is an expert in GIS, and we are so thankful for his expertise. And he put this all in StoryMap. So we did it all in-house.

Shout out to Tim.

Yep. Shout out to Tim.

Great job, Tim. Yeah, it's very impressive.

All right. Are all these projects funded?

Most...

I'm sorry, can you repeat that question? I thought I was, I'm sorry. Are all the... There you go.

Okay, there you go. I'm sorry, thank you. Forgot the question, no. Are all the projects funded?

Most of them are. There are a couple that are in the works and that we've seen presentations on and we've applied for grant funding on, But most of the projects are.

Great.

Awesome. All right. All right. So very happy. Very happy.

And that pairs with the document that you provided us this evening?

Yes, yes. So we handed you some outreach materials that we are providing this month. We're doing tabling. I'm going to tell you in just a second, every Saturday we are tabling this month as well as a Sunday. And so we took kind of these projects from this virtual tour and kind of put it, and put some of them, not all of them are in that there, but that's what we're giving people so that they can see it. They can see it in print as well as on the screen.

Excellent.

Chairman, may I comment? Awesome. This is something I've been like, Craving really and I know that we we had a chance to talk a little bit about outside of the climate resilience Conference and this is exactly I think what's what's been missing There's some things there. I've never seen so that's super interesting. I'm really really excited Sonia very happy to see that What I would like to request there sort of is in a perfect world if we could two things, is especially the infrastructure, again, we could geospatially visualize that in some way, like at some 3D element. And if at the end or somewhere maybe in the bottom, there could be like a map of Miami, right? So... So Barbara mentioned she lives in a specific part of Miami, right, over by the Venetian Causeway. So it would be great if Barbara could open up a map of Miami and see what are resilience projects happening in her area. Because here we still kind of got to, like, click and find and explore and guess, like, okay, what's relevant for me or what's happening in my neighborhood. I think that would be really, really great to see. And if you wanted to overlap any insights that come from ICChange, I think that that would be maybe the next level from there. But this is exactly what I've been wanting to see. And if we could now place it on a map so we can make it more easy to discover, it'd be great. But that's an incredible job. And who do you say? What was the name of the person that? Tim. Tim. Awesome. So shout out again to Tim.

And we, as part of our outreach materials, we do have a map that points out resilience projects. But yeah, thanks for the feedback. We could put that online. And also our Office of Capital Improvement has a map that show their projects. But yeah, that's something that we could look at integrating citywide.

And one thing you could add to that as probably like a color code for the projects so we know what's pending approval, what's already approved, what's already funded on an under-implementation under construction or whatever. So like a legend to go along with it and to your question so that you can take a glance and know where things are at would also be helpful.

Awesome.

Jeremy, back to you. Thanks.

All right. All right. And so next, I just want to talk about, you know, we talked a lot about trees today, and I want to talk about our annual Arbor Day tree giveaways. So every Saturday this month, we are giving away trees. So on the 12th at Jose Marti Park, starting at 9 a.m., On the 19th, our Brewster Park. On the 26th, we actually have two. We have Graveland Park at 9 a.m. and then Charles Hadley Park at 1 p.m. And then we had Douglas Park last weekend. And then lastly, I just wanted to give everyone a heads up that extreme heat season starts May 1st.

Good question. Given the fact that we're probably losing the chief of the officer position, everything that comes with that at the county, how is that? Is that going to change how we address heat here in the city of Miami at all, or is it going to be business as usual?

No, we have our extreme heat plan that we're implementing. That was finalized last year. And so we are actively implementing that. And I know that they have heat expertise that's gonna stay in their office of environmental risk of resilience. And so they are planning on working on extreme heat as well, as far as I know.

You may. On the comprehensive stormwater master plan, I apologize. I haven't studied it. But it's, I guess, where we're addressing lifting some roads, maybe, lifting some structures. When you show a walkway, a new walkway where trees and people are walking, but it's on the water. How are we addressing the issues that we're supposed to... We're the poster child, I understand, in some organizations for the water coming over our city. Is the stormwater master plan, is that the place that I should look to see what we're doing?

Yes, yes.

Sorry, I can't hear you, and the recordings are going to pick up your voice. Oh, my goodness.

I was trying to be soft and gentle because I really care about this. I couldn't. be a little bit more forceful. I was just asking if the comprehensive stormwater master plan was the part of the work that we're doing to address the rising seas, lifting some roads or lifting some structures or whatever it is that, and is that the place we should look to see what the city is planning?

Yes, yeah, the stormwater master plan was updated to incorporate sea level rise and groundwater rise. And so it does focus on priority areas where... On what areas? Priority areas where infrastructure needs to be put in place. And so there are now 24 priority projects as well as some additional projects to implement that plan. And so...

can get you information on the the plan and kind of the corresponding memo that would be great thank you so much absolutely but i i i feel like i should elaborate like when you say is that the project that deals with you know flooding and sea level rise i would say like a good a good portion of all of these projects actually do in some regard the stormwater master plan might be one of the more comprehensive ones, but even the streetscape master plan today, right, like, is still helping deal with it. So it's kind of, it's like a whole, it's a whole suite of them, really.

Yeah, that's a good point. And the way we describe it, we have our kind of sea level rise, kind of stormwater management projects, but we also have like flood mitigation projects that, you know, that are not part of our right of way, but also still publicly owned, like our parks. And so those are separate projects, but it all ties in together. And so that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to kind of show it all tying in together and tell the story.

Thank you. I appreciate what you're saying.

All right. That's it for me.

Okay. A lot of good stuff. Thanks so much. One more comment. Okay.

Yes. On the tree giveaway? And when I pull up City of Miami tree giveaway, Arbor Day comes up, but it's from like 2024. All the dates that I have for April are 2024. Is there any way that could be updated to represent the 2025 dates and giveaways?

There is a registration link in our newsletter. I'm plugging our newsletter a lot. Let me pull it up to see where it goes. We'll get it to you. We'll make sure that you get the link.

It says, I just typed, I mean, it's just going off of what I go. What happens is City of May Arbor Tree Fruit Trees Giveaway comes up for event activities and notices. And then after that, it's like adopt a tree program from the county. But nothing else really showing up for us for at least this month.

We'll get you the right link.

Okay.

Thank you. Thank you. So moving on to item 10, we have open discussion other items. So this first one, upcoming Earth Day events, is in case any of my fellow committee members have a Earth Day event that they are interested in or being a part of that they wanted to mention. Kind of just in case, but.

Yeah, I mean. Actually, it's not city of mine related. But if you're interested in going to Coral Springs, they're having a night at the museum April 25th, Climate Change Solutions. I'll be giving a talk at that event. So if you want to go up to the museum, check out their science museum as well. It's a good opportunity for getting something else. But if it does come up, I can circulate it.

Excellent. All right. And then item B is strategies related to waste management. So this is a... follow up from the conversation that we had and the presentation from the March meeting with Dave, which was follow up from our conversation in February regarding an agenda item on the commission about recycling. So we were told the solid waste department was working on a response and a plan. But in the meantime, we had Dave Dobler come and present kind of an overview. And he showed us a lot of strategies. And then we discussed potentially moving forward with an idea of prioritizing recycling at events. I worked with Dave and spoke to him about the topic over the last couple weeks. And those conversations kind of got to the, what was the real kind of urgent matter at hand? And it's probably actually the solid waste department's work on their, whatever they're working on, their proposal or their response to, how to address recycling and maybe a comprehensive solid waste solution. And back to the whole point of the incinerator burning down and how are we going to handle waste kind of cumulatively and more holistically. And he provided me like a framework for this resolution, which I worked with him on kind of just refining a little bit. putting into our normal resolution template. And we have it here, and we can discuss it in brief now. But what I was hoping for was that if anyone had questions or comments about it, and that perhaps one of you all would want to take this on as kind of championing, making sure you understand these different topics, and also being kind of the point person because if we chose to act on this, that we need to show up at commission in case they have questions or comments, and also kinda just reaching out to the community to ensure people know about this, et cetera. So I kinda worked with Dave just to put this together, but maybe someone else would wanna take this on, and or also the concept of the, the events and creating recycling programs. And a lot of that work has already been created, but maybe it's not a requirement at the moment. So that could also be something that is complementary to this. Did any of you guys have a chance to take a look? Anyone have questions or comments on it?

Well, I can share some experience. All right. How about now? Good. I hope what I say is worth listening to. I live in a residential building that would be covered under this. We no longer recycle. I've been told by the board that there's no one that's buying the recycled material. We used to send it. I'm just telling you what's being talked about in the condos. we used to ship it to China and China doesn't take it anymore that's what I've been told and so we don't do it nobody worries about it if you want to recycle something you have to find where the nearest place is in the city and take it yourself and I have a feeling our building is not unique in its lack of concern for this And so is it true that you can, once you get the recycled material, something happens with it that is worth the effort?

Is recycling worth the effort? I would hope so, but I think more, Dave mentioned to me that there's, I believe, four or five main products that people are buying, cardboard products, Glass is like the least valuable. Aluminum and plastic. What else? And there was like a fourth and a fifth. I'm not recalling, but there are items that they are buying. And if you look at the second page of this document, the first full whereas right there, whereas Miami-Dade County Section 15-2 in City of Miami Code Section 22-1 require all commercial properties, including multifamily residential buildings, to establish diversion-effective recycling programs, yet compliance remains low at 35% and enforcement remains insufficient, leading to significant waste of recyclable materials. So that's based on research that he has and is referencing here. So it seems like your building is contributing, unfortunately, to that low rate. But I don't know exactly why that is.

Well, I was trying to express the idea that we were told we didn't have to do it anymore because now we were told that the recycled material was not being built. It was not being bought, and so we didn't have to do it anymore. I'm not suggesting that's necessarily true. You say it's not, but the word has to go out. I mean, most of these residential buildings had recycling set up. We did. When you put your trash at the hallway, there was a place for each. But no more. We just dump it all out. And all I'm saying is if this is going to be something the city wants to do, there's got a lot of education that has to be to overcome the resistance of many condo buildings.

Absolutely. And I'll just read the first paragraph, just for the record. A resolution of the Miami Climate resilience committee recommending to the Miami City Commission to direct the city manager to work with a solid waste department and all necessary departments to develop and implement an effective waste reduction and recycling program that maximizes the value of materials, reduces landfill dependency, moves the city toward a low waste future, adjusts the waste fee, and identifies alternative funding sources to make the waste management system financially sustainable. enforces existing recycling requirements, creates an investment plan for fleet modernization, collaborates with county and state departments, and establishes an implementation timeline with specific action steps. So there's specific things here listed of tasks to be completed, but how do they get there? I'm not sure. This isn't my expertise, and a lot of what I've learned has really just been over the last two months since the topic came up. So...

Yeah, and it's just to piggyback on what Barbara is saying. I think there's, I'm in a similar situation, and I could tell you that we had, there was like a rule that changed within the city, that if you had more than four units or three units or something like that, then you had to go to commercial, and now we can't use a city service anymore. And commercial never offered recycling. So I looked at our bill last month. We're paying for two tanks, $500. $500 a month, two trash bins, four units. We already had about two trash bins before, one for waste, one for recycling. Almost the same volumetrically. I'm paying $500, which I didn't have to pay before. for it to end up probably getting mixed and tossed or not and being shipped. So there's definitely some problem. And educationally, I don't think it's offered. And I think we don't understand what's going on, Barbara. So yeah, I think you're onto something. And Chairman, I'm kind of happy to be a guinea pig to understand these issues myself, because I have been digging into it. try to understand this at a deeper level it is just very complicated uh issue i could tell you that we're throwing away our money literally we're throwing away our money and if we could think about for example that recycling bin that is now on the side that we can't use because we got pushed to do to hire a private contractor if we would be able to use that to store our cans, and I held onto that for a month, and that, we could probably turn that into some cash or something for the neighborhood. And so maybe we could do something at a small neighborhood scale, or like, you know, with a couple of buildings that sign up that would be willing to sort aluminum, glass, and cardboard, like the chairman's saying, are being paid for, and we can look at the economic value of that. Also, when it comes to Dave, and this recommend in talking about throwing away our money,

the the opportunity of the city to adopt maybe a beverage contract that can help us prove this at a larger level I think is also something else and also help fund you know proper waste management streams and there's you know they've had a couple dozen examples of strategies and you brought up a pain point that you're having but I you know I don't think that this is meant to point out every single thing, right? It's just, CRC's taking a position, if we choose to, on suggesting, you know, how do we get to, how do we even move toward a low waste future, right? So, requesting, you know, a timeline with action steps, and like, what are some of those steps?

could we dive into a scenario for that for example let's just because the budget's going to be coming up right so let's say that a bin a trash one of these recycling bins for a commercial property costs i don't know i don't know how much it could how much that might cost sanya one of those like uh trash trash things from the city let's say 50 bucks so if the city is able to provide that and we're able to collect, I don't know, aluminum cans for a year, does the value of the cans that we collect If we offset that and go and recycle that, does it cover the cost or pay back the cost of that dedicated bin, for example? Something that I would like to...

I have absolutely no idea.

Sure, sure. I don't expect you to have an answer to that. But I'm thinking through how would this work operationally speaking.

I don't think we need to figure that out. That's...

Yes, we do need to. We're going to give a recommendation. In this case, a recommendation could be, let's give an extra recycling bin to these commercial properties for glass and tins, for example. Maybe that could be one of the things I add to the budget recommendation for our next meeting, and that could dovetail to address this specific issue.

Okay.

Well, one point that he makes is that we can't use the city anymore. My goodness gracious. What he points out is that we don't use city pickup anymore. We were forced to go to a commercial, a carrier provider. to pick up our trash, and as I understand it, they wouldn't do the, if we sorted it, they threw it all together in their truck.

Yeah, I don't know, which again is part of the reason of just making a recommendation to come up, you know, suggesting a plan to move toward a low waste future, and I, you know, I don't expect us to figure out the value of a container of aluminum cans, but why don't we table this for this meeting and we could, if you guys wanted to, I mean, does anyone have interest in kind of diving into a resolution of this type and kind of being the point person on it?

Barbara's looking at me. I definitely support this effort.

The only reason I say I should not is because of the limited time that I now have as a member of the CRC, and that may very well be my last meeting. I think my initial concern with this, now that I'm seeing it, was looking at the recycling education too, which is good that that's in there. Yeah, I think I was concerned about like, okay, what is the last step? We are concerned about whether or not buildings are recycling, but I think a lot of buildings are not recycling because they don't even know what happens to it afterwards. So I think if that is something that's going to be emphasized in this education component, then I'm all for something like this too.

So supporting an educational component, and Barbara, to your point, Dave Dobler presented, I don't know if it was the last or the penultimate. Yeah, the last one. And so one of the things that he recommended from a policy perspective that can help us understand what our vendors are doing, and we can compare notes on this by way of Miriam, is to have the vendors provide some type of receipt. So when these waste haulers take their waste, if they're vertically integrated, they take it to their own site, maybe they just mix it together, they pay somebody else the lowest fee, and they'll try to find the lowest place to send it to. So they don't have to show proof. If they had to, and this could be a policy recommendation, if they had to show a receipt that they did deliver it to the right facility that does have a sorting or recycling facility, that would help, in this case, ourselves as residents that are paying for a private service, validate that they are, in fact, doing such a thing. And maybe that's something that we recommend the city do.

Right. Well, I don't know why the vendors stopped.

Yeah, I don't know either.

That's key. The commercial vendors stopped sorting. and I understood it was because if they sorted and they took it somewhere, nobody wanted it, so they just put it together.

That's right, and the reason for that, as I understand it, is there was a lot of contamination, so the fact that it's not sorted right from the get-go means that if it's too contaminated, then the sorting facilities, it doesn't make sense for them to take it on because it messes up their operations and it's too costly. So the So that being said, the root of it is making sure that before it gets sent out, you prevent that cross-contamination as much as possible. So anyways, that's my two cents. I'm happy to keep educating myself, Chairman, on this and run point if that's helpful.

So you're down to one point for something like this? Okay, that would be very helpful. And I appreciate you stepping to do that. If you'd like, maybe familiarize yourself, read through this, coordinate with Dave and others from the community. At our last meeting, if you review the meeting minutes, there was other people who made public comments on like there's a Miami zero waste. initiative. I think there's actually a meeting tomorrow morning. There was actually a zero waste meeting Thursday and Friday of last week. So there's other people you can reach out to to not have to start at square one, right? Like, I don't think we need to be come experts in waste management, right? Like we're here to, you know, work with people and understand and filter and then we can make recommendations for the commission advising them if we choose to. But maybe that could be a next step.

That's a good recommendation. I'm in the Zero Waste Alliance through my foundation, so I'm going to now have a reason to keep following it more closely. And it seems we might have someone that maybe wants to give a comment.

We're close to public comment. But before we actually go to that, let's pause. We need to make a motion if we want to extend, because we're now at 8 o'clock. All right, motion from Nkosi, a second.

Second.

Second. All right. All in favor? Aye. Aye.

Aye.

Any opposed or abstain? I think it was all unanimous. OK. Thank you. OK. Brief public comment. Hi. Welcome.

Thank you. First time here. This is very exciting. And thank you for welcoming us to be here.

If you could just introduce yourself for the record.

My name is Orlando Perez, and I'm a wellness environmental consultant and a health educator. I've been working on this topic and subject for about 20 years. this particular topic I've been building something in Costa Rica where I want to see how I can merge nature and modern technology to create a better future for the cities and when it comes to this I'm thinking AI and maybe looking into infrastructures like e-commerce where they have these huge warehouses and they have a sorting system that seems to be the main issue for like the waste management and So anyway, I think I have resources and just like expertise, so if I would love to find a way to collaborate with the city in some of this issues. Also, for the climate resilience I love what you did with the website and all the projects I actually this weekend I went to go kayaking and I saw that you guys were doing that amazing work, so thank you. And jumping on that topic, I came here today to present a brief proposal to introduce something called biogeometry, which is a low-cost way of managing electromagnetic and geopathic stress on cities that are causing the heavy, like, climate warming in all these different infrastructures, but especially in Miami. So this is a technology that comes from Egypt specifically, and it uses color, shape, numbers. And we kind of install them in different cell towers or infrastructures that emit heavy electromagnetic radiation. That's causing a lot of disruption in the environment and the way like animals, plants, and also we communicate. It also creates a lot of mental and emotional stress. So it's something that currently is not giving a lot of focus, but it's definitely causing a lot of our health, physical, mental, environmental issues. And so this is a technology that has been implemented already in different cities, more so in Europe, in Germany and Switzerland, small cities where they had a lot of electromagnetic stress caused by 5G towers that were installed in certain cities. And so with the implementations of these different called biosignatures, they saw... very strong decrease on the emotional and environmental distortions that they were having in that city. So with the high influx of technology and AI implementation that's being brought to the city, I think, and I see that this could be even a heavier issue when it comes to our, just the heavy heat situation that we have here and also like emotional and mental stress. So my proposal is to install biogeometry shapes to neutralize electromagnetic radiation and geopathic stress in the Miami area. We can track outcomes with residents' health, physical, emotional, immune responses, and plant vitality and local temperature shifts. I can be the bridge with the professionals who are already doing this work. And I can also email you guys supporting material regarding like what other cities has seen in terms of improvements. And I think overall with all the different applications with the trees and all the other infrastructure remodeling that's happening, this is a very low cost solution that has a great impact. overall. I think on the application of a small area like three or five thousand square meters is like maybe five to seven thousand dollars and it's something that can be trackable and if we see several improvement we can maybe implement in a greater area.

If you could you could take Miriam's contact and then she'll be able to share with us to learn more and if you have an idea for trash I'd recommend looking at the county's work they have a current I'm not exactly sure the name but there's a an open call for people with ideas on trash. So I'd recommend reaching out to them directly. I think is it through Opportunity Miami or the Innovation Hub?

Miami Data Innovation Authority.

Miami Data Innovation Authority through the county, correct? Yeah, on trash right now. Thank you so much.

Thank you.

Good evening, Steve Leidner, 1131 2nd Street, Bay Harbor Islands. First, I'd like to thank you, Erin, for your resolution, your municipal solid waste resolution. I think it was really excellent, comprehensive, inspiring. And I would like to see this board pass this resolution tonight because the city of Miami needs guidance. And the narrative needs to come from a resource such as this resolution. And I would also say that as to recycling, the city of Miami stopped recycling was a self-fulfilling prophecy because of severe contamination. By the time the recycling got to the recycling facilities, they were worthless. There are a lot of recycled materials that have value, but not when they're mixed in with other contaminated items. So recycling is, as Silvio articulated, a value and could supplement the city's efforts to recycle. but not if there's no enforcement and contamination continues to be a problem in the process. So again, pass this resolution, give the city some guidance, and if there are any details or further clarification, you can do that in further resolutions, but the city needs guidance. Thank you.

Thank you, Steve.

Thank you both. All right. So we did go a little out of, you know, order doing public comment, but it seemed like there was interest, you know, on the topic. So that's why we did so. But so, you know, just back to the solid waste, if you're going to pick it up and kind of run with it. Do you have interest in in a motion this evening? Or do you want to you want to take more time? What would you prefer to do now is

I think that knowing you and knowing Dave and just reading through this, it's pretty comprehensive. It's kind of general, but there are some things that are specific here that I think we could start with, including modernizing the fleet, which are very helpful, and taking labels. So I think that's pretty specific here and maybe starts to set an intention. I'm okay with... With this as it is, if everybody else would be interested, I'd certainly would vote in favor of it. And maybe looking at more specific next steps we added to the agenda in terms of, okay, what are other things that could be done, you know, further from here that I think could maybe bring economic value to the city?

So is that a motion?

Yeah.

Okay. Do I have a second? I'll second it.

Before, I was just going to say, I think... It does have components that, even if they aren't specific enough, are worth moving forward. So again, like the fleet modernization, something that should be done. The enforcement, something that can be picked up on now, too. So even if they don't take the entire thing, I think that we can take a couple components or harp on those. That's not the right word, harp. Focus. Focus on them a little more so we can move that forward. So I'm... I guess technically that's out loud vote, but I know we have to vote, so.

And let's just start that educational process, too, of educating everybody if this actually, you know, gets passed today, we're able to at least start the conversation.

Which I think should be expanded on a lot more.

Also, this won't go to an agenda for likely five, six, seven, eight weeks to a commission agenda, unless someone, unless a commissioner chose to move it earlier, so. there's time for you to also to kind of get up to speed and become more familiar with them. But we do have a motion and a second, so.

I'm sorry, what is the motion? The motion is to pass this resolution as it is or? Correct.

And then he'll...

Sorry, I didn't know you... And I believe that the board member will then be tasked with, one, informing himself so he gets up to speed, and to market this position to the city. Am I correct? He's being delegated if he wants to go ahead and meet with departments about this, if he wants to. Am I wrong? Yeah, okay.

I mean, anybody can.

Well, of course. Sorry, sorry. Anybody can, but he is... Essentially accepting, exactly, being the point person for the board.

Yeah, when we pass a resolution, I think we should have someone who's kind of the point person on it, on the topic.

Yeah, that way when it goes to commission, someone could be there for public comment to further discuss it if maybe it comes up for discussion and no one's available. At least a public comment, one of these board members who's tasked can bring it up.

Yeah, and I mean, the one thing I would look at, the only change I might suggest is in Section 3, in terms of implementing penalties for noncompliance and drafting new policy, I mean, and strengthening, renewing the enforcement. If we could get some clarification on what would that look like today? What is the fine?

Well, that's where I believe you would be working with those departments to discuss, right? And then closely. They could, of course, just take their own will and say it's a fine of $50 first time or maybe a warning, then $50 third time, $1,000. That would be formulated by the city, but being entrusted with this, you would work with those departments. So I actually always advise, unless you are really hard on your policy, you want to be flexible. So I think this resolution passes as is, has the meat for you to go ahead and push for that. Then let's say they go, we're going to do it a thousand dollars first fine. And you feel that's too much. You'd be tasked, or I believe you should come back to this board, inform them of the talks of the department. So that way, you know, everyone else could maybe get on and lobby with you.

Okay. I like that. So I'm okay as is that being said.

Yeah. And, you know, I think some of these things are just ideas like we modernization, like prioritize investment, figure out how to get fleet modernization, but it, you know, staff can, you know, find the way. Right. All right. So we have a motion and we have a second. So all in favor.

I'm sorry. First motion was from the cozy second was from home.

The motion is from Sylvia, and the second is from Barbara. So all in favor? Aye. Any oppose or abstain? It was unanimous, I believe. Okay, great.

Motion passes.

Motion passes. Okay, great, so item C under open discussion, other topics, was there any other items you all wanted to bring up?

Just the, I'd like to present that proposal for LEAF for Engagement on urban forestry as was discussed today, and I think it sort of seems timely right after the street master plan So I will be circulating some of that and would love some maybe feedback from the committee On you know how we can improve that before the next agenda in case we have some time for that to come up Perfect.

Is that on the future agenda?

Yes.

Okay, so the future agenda is on urban forestry and

He's going to know he it's a Soviet is going to circulate to you a thing he's working on a proposal called leaf on on education forestry right yeah local engagement for urban forestry okay look forward to seeing it, thank you for putting that together, thank you. All right, and then you know so there's other comments on other topics moving on to item 11 future agendas, we have. Again, for May 5th, we'll do the budget recommendation. So please just remember to submit to Miriam your ideas for what we should discuss beforehand. Yeah, please, April 23rd. So Miriam and I can kind of consolidate in time for agenda packet. And all right, moving on to item 12, public comment. Anyone in the audience or any online submissions, Miriam? None. Well, thank you all for your public comment this evening. Appreciate you attending. Okay, without further ado, we'll move to item 13, which is adjourn. Thank you all for the great work this evening.

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cuando su compañero entró a la clase con una escopeta.

Mi hijo seguiría vivo hoy si el padre lo hubiese asegurado con llave.