Climate Resilience Committee - Regular Meeting

July 7, 2025, City of Miami's Climate Resilience Committee meeting, which, unfortunately, we do not have quorum. So our meeting is going to be a workshop instead. We'll still be going through the same agenda. All right, we'll start with a roll call. Aaron DiMeo.

Silvio Pupo.

Avar Jain.

Staff, please.

Miriam Flores, Office of Resilient Sustainability.

Sonia Brubaker, Chief Resilience Officer.

Thank you. All right, item two is public comment. Anyone can make a public comment in person in one of the stands, or we may also have online public comments. Did we have any submissions, Miriam?

Just the one?

Okay. So it was a little longer, so it's gonna be in the record for the meeting minutes. And yeah, we'll follow up with that in the meeting minutes. All right, so item three is the approval of the minutes from our May 5th meeting. It's from two months ago because we had to skip our June meeting from weather and quorum. So do I have, oh, we can't vote on that. So, all right, we'll push our meeting minute approval to our following meeting. All right, so moving to item four is presentations. So we have a presentation this evening from Climate Central. And, oh, Nikozi just joined. So Nikozi, would you like to do roll call?

Can you hear me? Yes. Okay. Uh, I'm not sure if I used this time to, you know, say what I was going to say or a person used it to just say hello for a roll call purposes.

I couldn't, I couldn't quite make out what you were saying.

I'm sorry. Can't hear me. I'm in a semi loud environment. Can you hear me now? Yes. Okay, I was just saying, I'm not sure if you wanted me to use this time to say what I was going to say, try to say June meeting. Is that okay to do right now, Mr. Chair? Yes. Okay, sure. Sorry, everybody, for the loud environment. I literally just landed back in the state, so I am in the airport trying to get off my bags. Sorry I couldn't be with you in person tonight. As you all know, I'm currently on the move, transitioning from Boston. But I just wanted to say to everybody, I prefer to stick to business. Last meeting in May that we had, but it's been a pleasure to serve with you all. And I look forward to still staying involved as much as I can from a distance.

Take care. So tonight is your last meeting?

No, May was technically my last meeting. This is a goodbye as a public citizen.

Okay, got it. Well... really appreciate having you serve on the committee and serving with you. And it's been a pleasure getting to know you and you know, on behalf of the rest of the committee, thank you for your service, and wishing you the best of luck in your next endeavor. I'll definitely be following along and hopefully see you again soon. Anything you guys would like to add?

Congratulations on your new chapter in Harvard and taking all the great heat work that you've done here sort of to the next level. It's really exciting to see that. And I'm sure we're going to, you know, stay collaborating with other great work and other great examples. So bummed that you won't be on the CRC anymore, but excited to see everything you've done and everything you're going to be doing. So thank you for your service and your friendship. And hopefully, you know, please stay involved.

Yeah, continue to share, please. Because hopefully you'll have a lot of great new innovative insights for us. Thanks.

Thanks, Nkosi.

Thanks, Al.

All right, moving back to item four, presentation. So I invited Climate Central to join us this evening and give a presentation. I've been following their work for a couple of years now. And this is in the theme of data. And last year, My first meeting as chair, I invited Brian McNoldy from the Rosenthal School of Marine Sciences to come and present his work on sea level rise and on climate and weather. And I think it's important that we have a refresher at least once a year on data to make sure that we all are talking about it up here in our role at CRC. Obviously, I think we should be knowing and reviewing and reading about it outside of here. But just for that, that we're here today is also talking about the data. So Climate Central team, welcome. Thank you for joining us. Please introduce yourselves and looking forward to your presentation.

Hi, it's nice to see you all. I'm not sure what your view is like. Will you be able to see the presentation from where you're all sitting?

Yeah, we have a view of, we can see both of you on camera right now. And I think if you share your screen, we'll be able to see that as well.

Awesome. Okay. Well, hi, everyone. I'm Abby. I am on the communications team at Climate Central. Let Shell introduce himself.

Yeah, Shelling Clay, how are y'all? I am a meteorologist as well as the weather and climate engagement specialist here at Climate Central. Prior to my time here with our organization, I was a broadcast meteorologist for almost 20 years in the state of Texas.

Can everyone see this okay?

Great.

Yep.

Okay, so a little about Climate Central. We are an NGO. We're a group of communicators, scientists, researchers, data analysts, lots of nerds, and most of our work revolves around doing science and research that is accessible to the public and what we like to call our trusted messengers. So folks like you guys, meteorologists, other media partners, other community teams. And I'm just going to do a brief overview. There's a lot that we do. We're a small but mighty team. But I'll do a brief overview of some of our programs just to give you all sort of a taste. And then we'll talk a little bit more about our tools and how they can be used for data analysis. So our first program is Climate Matters. Climate Matters puts out weekly localized climate change stories. It sends out via email. And these are usually on topics that are that are relatable to viewers. So we do one on allergies every year. We just did one on baseball, but also more serious topics. We did one on pregnancy risks. Another one of our programs is Sea Level Rise, which I think all of y'all will be quite interested in. We have our coastal risk finder and our flood vision team, and they create really interesting visualizations of future flooding scenarios. And we have a bunch of different tools that we'll get into. And then attribution science. Attribution science uses data and analysis to show exactly how much climate change is impacting everyday weather. So this can be extreme and severe events, or it can just be slight changes in weather. But we can tell you often pretty specifically how climate change is impacting the weather. So a little bit more about Climate Matters. We have a nationwide media network. And these are all free tools and reporting materials. And it's almost everywhere in the US. We have I think it's more than that number now. I think it's over 245, but lots of US cities and media markets. And here are a few examples of the types of reports and analysis we put out with Climate Matters. So these are all things that really localize and make climate change personal to folks. Um, and here's a bit of more about attribution science. I won't make, can you all hear this? No, no. Okay. One sec.

Yeah, we can hear you.

You can hear me, but you couldn't hear the video.

Okay.

Um, I might just play it without sound for, for a bit. Um, and I just want to, this is a, but I want to show you a few examples of the types of uses of attribution science. I wasn't going to play the whole thing anyway. Can you see the video?

Yeah.

Okay. So I can talk over it while you watch, but CSI is the Climate Shift Index. It's used to identify daily weather temperatures. So you can see it being used by several meteorologists here. There we go. Yeah, and I'll go back to our slides now. Yeah, and here is the climate shift index map, which is based on research that's peer reviewed. And you can use this to look at any location, not just in the US, but globally. and see how impacted your daily weather is. So here is Florida. This is from a little over a month ago, but I believe you have some CSI today. Shell, correct me if I'm wrong. We'll see. And yeah, and this tool we've used for land temperatures, but we've also, as of last year, expanded to ocean CSI, which has helped us to do more attribution science around hurricanes. And I'll let Shel get into more of that. Oh, here's the scale before we get into that. It's fairly self-explanatory, but Yeah, we're seeing a lot of those fives these days. So a very exceptional climate change event.

Yeah, and I'll jump in, you know, when it comes to the the scale, you know, when you get into a four and a five, essentially what that means is this is an event. So like a CSI of four, climate shift index of four means that, you know, the event happens. would be rare without climate change, right? This is something that it's possible. It's just highly unlikely without climate change. And the same comes with number five. We're not saying that a temperature like this is impossible without climate change, but we likely wouldn't see something like that because unless we had climate change influencing our temperatures, right? That heat trap and pollution that's causing things to warm. So it's not anything that is unknown there for the city of Miami, right? You're a hot city, you're a humid city, but we know that the temperatures are getting hotter and we know that it's getting humid and more humid. Let's jump into the climate shift index ocean. So the same idea, right? You go from a zero to a five on the climate shift index. And the reason that bin is so small is because temperatures can change quickly. It could be a thunderstorm. It could be a cold front. You know, weather happens and we know those temperatures change. When it comes to the climate shift index ocean, what we're doing is the same idea, right? How have humans evolved? alter the temperatures specifically when it comes to sea surface temperatures. And because the ocean has a longer heartbeat, right, it's harder to change the temperature of the ocean. You need something really big to get a dramatic change, like a hurricane or a tropical system. So what we can do, this spin can go anywhere from zero to 1,000. That's not to say that a five or a 10 is insignificant, but when you get those really higher values, that's when you know that there's a strong influence of climate change there. When I brought up the humidity, this plays a part. We know that warmer oceans leads to more moisture evaporating into the atmosphere, and that means more humidity. It's holding up your overnight temperatures there in the city of Miami. It's making things more humid, which is dangerous, especially for outdoor workers and just being outdoors in the city. And then we can, like we saw in Texas over the past weekend, like we saw in North Carolina today with the remnants of Chantal, added moisture to the atmosphere also means that rainfall rates are getting heavier. So climate shifting next ocean can do a lot of things for us and will detail probably the most important for the city of Miami, which is hurricanes. But you can use this to look at marine heat waves, coral bleaching, ecosystems, right? We can understand all the impacts of climate change by looking at the warming temperatures and what we have done as humans to make those temperatures warmer in the ocean. So let's talk hurricanes. We'll bring up maybe the biggest example from last year, which was Hurricane Milton coming on the heels of Hurricane Helene, which underwent that rapid intensification as it moved to the Gulf of Mexico. And then we had Milton, which underwent what's called extreme rapid intensification. So in less than 24 hours, It intensified more than 58 miles per hour. And the area over the Gulf of Mexico that that happened, we knew that the waters were unusually warm for October. And we knew that with climate change, those temperatures were made anywhere from about 600 to 800 times more likely. when that rapid intensification process began. So what this helps us do is communicate, you know, because I think a lot of the questions are, well, what do we do with this information, right? So if there's someone in Florida, as we know, you know, through the great forecast from the National Hurricane Center that the storm is pointed towards you there in the state, we can use this information to say, yeah, it may only be this category when it makes landfall, but we know that there's something unnatural about this storm. We've taken a natural disaster, which is a hurricane, and we've made it unnatural. We've allowed the ability to have these storms intensify further and more than they would have been in a world without climate change. So one of the things that we can do this season is apply this to hurricane attribution. And again, attribution science, We're not saying that these storms were caused by climate change, but what we're saying is that, you know, how much more likely, how much more intense are these storms because of climate change? So new this season, we have our hurricane attribution storyline tool. And what that will do for us is basically give us a real time understanding, as well as along with all of our media partners. how climate change is impacting a storm once it reaches its lifetime maximum intensity, basically its strongest point. So Abby, if you go to the next slide here, what we did is we took just a hypothetical storm for this example. So we did Hurricane Shell because we figured by 2050, if we've run through all the other S names on the list from the National Hurricane Center and the WMO, that maybe we have bigger problems beyond that. But Let's pretend that we have Hurricane Shell in 2050. It's a category four storm and let's say that it went from a tropical disturbance to a hurricane in less than 12 hours. It reached a maximum intensity of 140 miles per hour. So what we can understand, given the warming of the ocean, And even the stabilization of the atmosphere above these hurricanes due to climate change, because we know that that is something that's happening as well. But we also know that sea surface warming is outpacing the stabilization. So we know that with temperatures that were up to 400 times more likely due to climate change on the path that this hurricane took, let's say that 11 mile per hour winds were added, which moves it from a category three to a category four. And I know we pay attention to storm surge. We pay attention to wind speeds specifically. But that category shift, even a half category shift, can mean more damage for wherever this makes landfall. So that's why it's important to be able to make this connection and answer the why. Why did Milton... undergo that extreme rapid intensification. Why did Helene drop as much rain as it did? Why did the hurricane act the way it did? Part of that is because a hurricane is going to hurricane. But part of that we know is that humans have influenced the things that intensify hurricanes, which is the ocean temperatures. And now we can make that connection in real time so that you as a city and just residents of Miami can make better decisions knowing what we know from that. All right, go ahead for the next one. All right. So the other thing that's very important for you is sea level rise, right? We know that that is something that is already an issue and will continue to be an issue as the climate warms and as the oceans continue to rise and warm themselves. So we've got a couple of tools that we can use, one of which is called the Coastal Risk Finder. It's a brand new tool. And if you go to our website, I'll show you where to find it in just a bit. but you can type in any location along the coast and you can really understand the different scenarios, different warming scenarios, different high tides, along with those warming scenarios. How is this going to impact the city and specifically where in the city that could be underwater due to sea level rise? So go to the next one for me, Abby, if you would. There you go. So this is what it looks like, right? A 100-year flood in the year 2050, even with reduced commitments to bringing down climate pollution. We're building all this off of scientific data, right? The IPCC report. So it not only shows you mapping wise, who has the potential to be underwater under these different scenarios that you can on that sliding scale change, but also gives you an idea, right? So in this scenario, 19,000 people are at risk in Miami with 12,000 homes specifically being at risk. And then it kind of tells you how high that water will be. Go for the next one if you would.

Yep. And do you want to define really quickly a hundred year flood? I know that that's a term that's challenging, confusing sometimes.

Yeah, so the 100-year flood, these are the things that we don't expect to happen often. So if we're talking about a 100-year flood, this is going to be the water levels that you would expect to be above the mean sea level rise in that scenario where you would have the worst of the worst type of flooding that you could see. So again, when we're talking about the oceans coming up, this kind of shows us that understanding there next to the water. The other thing that we can do is really break this down by census blocks. So you can understand the amount of people, the population. You can really break this down to different districts and different neighborhoods of Miami to get a better understanding of where and how and who these 19,000 people will be. Because the other thing we know about climate change is that one, extreme weather is how we as humans experience climate change. But two, we also know that it is not equal in the people that it impacts, right? It's usually our lower income neighbors, those that don't have the opportunity to move away if these flooding events begin and occur. So this really helps to tell that story as well. Go ahead, Abby. Okay. So do you want to take flood vision?

Yeah, I can start. Okay. Wait, yeah, I can take it, okay. So flood vision is one of our really interesting programs. You can see our truck here. It's gone down the entire East coast and up the Gulf coast mapping the entire coast. So we can have these really interesting visualizations and I'll show you an example of one. And here we're able to see at these different levels and inputting different climate scenarios, what these flood scenarios will look like in actual places. This was pulled, we have some publicly available flood vision materials, so I can share this link. So this was just pulled from there, but we also have the ability to make these custom. So if there's somewhere that you guys want to see in a different scenario, if this is a, you know, a hundred year flood or, and different hurricane scenarios, we can, we can create these. There's some guidelines around it, but this is something our team is able to do. Yeah.

And I'll jump in to add to this, you know, this is used for sea level rise. Like that's, the reason that we did this data collection and research. But one thing that we're finding is that if there's a hurricane approaching the state of Florida and there's a storm surge forecast that's put up by the National Hurricane Center, these visualizations really help get people to understand, right? You know, that when we say there's a, eight foot storm surge, we can show you what that looks like there in the city of Miami so that again, people can make the decisions they need to, to protect themselves and protect their families as tropical systems bear down on the states.

Yeah, and these all can be found on our website and we'll share specific links with you all, but somewhere to check out that I think you all have interest in is our data products. If you go to the Our Work part on our website, Um, yeah. And I mean, they're, they're interesting. Feel free to play around and reach out to us with any questions you have. Um, great. Yeah. And are there any, um, questions for, for Shalini?

How often do you have to update your data? Meaning that with climate change happening so quickly and it seems to be accelerating. How do you guys keep up with the science?

Which, do you have a specific tool that you're interested in knowing or just in general?

No, so like if they start talking about the, you know, the iceberg up north falling off or, you know, the leakage underneath, I mean... Those would be big events. I mean, is that something you guys keep track of or is that something that you wait till it happens? How hard is it to keep up with the other tools out there?

Yeah. So, you know, that's a great question. As long as we're still doing the research, which we are, right, it's just not maybe as prevalent as what it was. We can keep up with that. So like Coastal Risk Finder, that's built off one of the latest IPCC reports. So as we get updates on that, we can then put that science back into the tool and update it. Now, in terms of how fast that would take, that's something we could get back to you on because that's going to be the sea level rise team. But once that research is done and once we have that peer reviewed science, then we can plug that into the tools and get a better understanding. When it comes to the climate shift index, so when we're talking about temperatures, what we're doing is we're essentially running two sets of forecast models in a pair, right? That's over 20 models. And what we're doing is we're running it, one, with the historical carbon emissions, and then we're running it again without those carbon emissions put into the atmosphere to get that ratio to understand that number. So again, as long as we have that data that is available to us, be it public data or somewhere that we can find it privately, if that's where we have to go, then we can continue to do this work.

Sounds like a long process.

It is, but we have some really much smarter people than I am. That's way above my head. But they're there to do the science. Our whole science team is there to put that data together and then continually work on our tools.

Yeah, and many of the updates, the tools are, I mean, not flood vision specifically, but a lot of the other, the heat-related tools, they're well-oiled machines, so they get updated daily or weekly.

Interesting. I think the flood vision and just your ability to help articulate the data is really critical for how we move forward in this industry and on this topic. And I appreciate your sharing of this and all of the different resources that you shared. I think you even mentioned on your website, please reference this. Please utilize this. It's a repository of data that you're actively trying to be referenced in the public.

Yeah, and that's the whole mission of our organization. It's all publicly available. It's all for folks like you to use and reference. And also, our team is here. It's my job and Shell's job and our analyst's job to be also a resource. So if you have any questions and there's not some information on our website, there's a chance that someone on our team does now or can pull data for you they do that every single day for for folks they pull data for for different people so um yeah if something ever comes up that that y'all need broken down feel free to to let us know um and with the flood vision stuff too if you need something more specific um please reach out

Chair, yeah, thanks for inviting them. Hi, I'm Silvio. Abby, great job. Michelle, you as well. Really interesting work, especially from a research side. I do have a couple of questions, and I think Avra's question is excellent because it kind of underpins a lot of mine. For example, and it kind of opens up the conversation, Chair, to have also what's understanding of what's happening with NOAA. A lot of this NOAA data is being taken down. I don't know if we have a plan for How do we prepare for hurricane alert or alert systems? This helps open up sort of that level of conversation. And on that side, Abby, one of the questions I have is if we're able to maybe enhance and augment the data that you have in some way using ground truth data. I'm not sure sort of where your data sources are from. But is that something that's possible? So part of it is like, you know, so granularity, for example, is a question I have. Can we create prediction of algae bloom, for example, in a river or Biscayne Bay so that we can be ready and create sort of alerts before we hit that heat stress level? And then the other one is like, can we predict the hurricanes and what's happening with sort of NOAA's unwinding? as it is. So I'll just pause there to see if you maybe can answer some of those questions.

Yeah, I mean, I'll let Shel jump in here too, but one thing I will say, I mean, there's no great replacement for the loss of NOAA data. It just doesn't exist. However, Um, a lot of our information runs based off of modeling. So a lot of that future looking stuff is based off of modeling, but you know, losing node, no data is, um, will be just a huge loss for, for everyone. Um, not just us. Um, and then secondly, um, I think you asked about, oh yeah, like the algae bloom. So our science team does a lot of reports and analysis that sort of reminded me of where we come up with some sort of a threshold based off of other research and then look at historical data to talk about where those thresholds might be in the future or to look at the past year or so. for example, pregnancy heat risk days, that one's top of mind. I just talked to someone about that today. But, you know, we have a threshold for when pregnancy heat risk increases. So we can look and see how many of those days were added. So, you know, it's interesting that algae blooms are an interesting topic, because if we could figure out that threshold, we probably could add on to the science. But yeah, I mean, it depends on our our researchers and our science team and how that works. John, anything you want to add to that?

Yeah, I'll just throw out, you know, we've got a couple redundancies on what we can do, right? When Hurricane Helene happened, the data that we use for sea surface temperatures is OIST data, which comes from NOAA, which is housed in Asheville, North Carolina at NCEI. So they lost Internet connectivity and power because of the flooding that occurred there. So we had to figure out a way to be able to tell the story about Hurricane Milton there. because we didn't have that data source going into our system, right? So we're able to switch over to what Copernicus uses over in Europe in order to do that data. So we do have a couple of fallbacks that we can use, even if we lose some of the data that is openly available currently. I think what is great, you know, it may not apply specifically to like algae blooms, but when we're looking at these storms, right? So let's take what world weather attribution does. So after a big storm or a big event, they can go back and they can look at these similar weather events and put it with the computer forecast models and the climate models and understand how much was added by climate change. And that's all good and well. That's very good to know when we're answering the why. Like, why did the storm behave the way it did? Why was it as intense as it was? We can understand how much more rain, how much more wind was added because of climate change. But what I really love about where we're going with attribution science and our ability... to do this science is that we can say, OK, we know that the world's at about 1.3 degrees Celsius of warming above pre-industrial average. So what happens in a world with future warming when we get to, say, 2 degrees above? And we know that in a similar storm, this much more rain on top of what was already added is possible. This much more wind will be possible. So it really gives us a window into understanding the extreme weather that we used to deal with, the extreme weather that we're dealing with now. And then if we don't cut carbon emissions,

the extreme weather that we could be dealing with in the even warmer world so no there's no opportunity for real-time real-time alerts threshold real-time threshold alerts and i don't know sonya that we have the chair maybe there's maybe we already have something like that for for the water sort of surface water or another plan in place with the county in terms of alternative methods to get some of these threshold alerts?

Yeah, I don't know that we've thought specifically about algae, but that is interesting that that's something that would be useful, and we'll definitely bring that back to the team. Right now, the only alerts that we're putting out in real time are about air temperature, and then we'll handcraft some of the alerts around, like, hurricanes. but we're always looking to see what else we can do with these tools. So that's super helpful and something we can bring to the team and see if that's not something we can add in as well.

Maybe our resident expert might have, I don't know, comments or two, I don't know, for Sonia.

I did have a question. What sea level rise projection curves are you using?

Did you hear that, Joe?

Yeah, I believe. So, again, this is more of the sea level rise team on this one. But, again, based off of some of those IPCC scenarios and research that they came out with.

Yeah, and the sea level rise flood vision or coastal risk finder, they have two different – let me pull it up – scenarios that you can look at. So you can toggle between.

And the reason why I ask is that we're part of the Southeast Florida Climate Compact. And so all of Southeast Florida, we're all using a unified sea level rise projection. And we're using the 2019 NOAA Intermediate High

So I'm wondering, I mean, we can look, so you can do the IPCC 2021 or the US interagency. So that's like NOAA. So it sounds like that's not what you all are using, but you can also like choose different pathways. I don't know if there's a way for us to get you, you know, to input this information. change this, but we can bring that back to the team and ask too.

Okay, yeah.

Is that answering your question on that?

Yeah, it does, and we have some additional modeling data, so if we could potentially, you know, exchange some information later, that could be really helpful.

Yeah, I will ask.

It would make the South Florida alerts more Robust and applicable to the things that we're already referencing from the climate compact. Yep.

Right.

I think also with the, uh, the IC change data, you, you mentioned ground truths, but if you have the flood vision and you generally know, and your flood vision, um, vehicle was taking scans and you, you know, you're, you clearly have topographic data. If you're applying this modeled, uh, wet scenario so you know what heights are of of water on a wall at a different height because you're you're visualizing it you could actually maybe plug into the ic change thing and maybe even add data onto people's photos along the route of the flood vision vehicle and they could then people could see when they post how likely that was like what was the what was the attribute the attribution science of of what they saw and then you can actually tie that back into

like individual people's you know experiences which is how i've seen a lot of people kind of realize the the gravity of the situation yeah that way to abby my question about how we might be able to augment with with ground truth data is exactly what uh what the chairman's mentioning But we might have to need somehow to have the resilience team able to use what we have and then maybe leverage what you've built and add additional sort of government data and private data that's been localized.

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it seems like there's a lot of opportunity to expand with what you all have.

So i'll definitely follow up with you about the dicey change. contact and also a link to the southeast Florida climate compact, and you know sonya office of resilience will probably want to integrate that I think that would make it a. the data even more applicable to us down here. And hopefully part of what I was thinking was we could utilize some of the research that's going on here that we've seen tonight and that have available on the website for when we write resolutions and memorandums that I try to push anytime we write something that it's not just a statement, that it's grounded, exactly. And that we're referencing live links back to where we're finding it. So I was thinking that we could look for those opportunities on their website moving forward.

Yeah, and after this, you know, once we follow back up, we can do a secondary call with Dan Rizza, who leads our flood vision team, to talk about, you know, where there's possibilities there.

Okay, sounds great. Well, thank you so much for joining us this evening and taking the time to share our the different resources and initiatives that you're working on.

Yeah, thank you for having us. It's good to meet you all.

Excellent. Thank you so much.

Bye.

Bye. All right. So moving on to the next item, we have old business. We don't have any old business this evening. And then item six is items to be voted on. So since we don't have quorum, we won't be able to vote on this directly. I think we could possibly have a straw vote, kind of symbolic. We did that last February as well. But what we could do is, depending on our review right now of this item, of this memorandum, we could possibly submit the memorandum to commission with a subject to approval, meaning that we've tentatively approved it, but we're waiting for a quorum, which can just get it in front of the decision makers, the commissioners, and their staff in the office to see what we're thinking about. But then the other option is that we can suggest coming for a meeting in August at some point, and we can try to find a time that works for the three of us, having been attending most meetings, which I really appreciate you guys, thank you. But we'll follow up with Miriam and find a date in August. It doesn't even have to be here, it could be at a more central location, and it could be a single item meeting, specifically to vote on this should we want to do that. So it wouldn't even need to be very long either. So that's an option that we can take. But as far as this item goes this evening, what I was thinking is we would just read through each section, maybe not read the reference areas, the comparable programs, but just read each item, and then we could talk through each one if there's any questions or comments, and just go one by one. But before we do, is there, and also the last item, the property acquisition, land acquisition for stormwater park conversion, that item we discussed at the workshop that we would, that I would do some additional, I did additional research on a few of them, but that one in particular, so I did that and there's a presentation that we'll go through at that item. But before we get started, in case you guys had any questions or comments just about process. And just to tee up this topic for the public, this item was discussed in our March meeting as an idea. If it was something that my fellow committee members wanted to do, we generally agreed. And then we brought it up in April and talked about the formatting of what we thought would be relevant, which was for each member to submit ideas of what they thought should be included in this item. Then at our May meeting, we actually had it as an item, as a discussion, where we presented a number of different ideas. As like a you know first pass and then we had a follow up workshop one week later in May, where everyone attended so really appreciate that and we went item by item and decided on a list of seven items and then based on our discussion of how we kind of. decided to adjust those seven items. I had drafted this memorandum, which we'll go over now, and it includes an overview of each item, as well as comparable programs, like examples from other municipalities, and then supporting policies, which are policies that we already have within the city, for instance, Miami Forever Climate Ready or Resilient 305, and those specific action items. So just because something isn't included here doesn't mean we didn't think it was relevant or should be included in the budget, but we came up with, as Silvio brought up during our workshop, because we had a lot of items to start with, and he suggested that we have kind of a chart or a matrix to kind of decide on Importance of things and does it does this item affect one district or all districts like how realistic do we think this is of? Being achieved so we kind of had this internal matrix that we were going back and forth on In our workshop on this item, so that's how we got to this point this evening Okay, so let's uh let's get started so I'll just read into it the background and In an era of escalating climate challenges, these recommendations represent a critical investment in Miami's future, directly addressing both immediate vulnerabilities and long-term sustainability and adaptation goals. The Climate Resilience Committee, CRC, respectfully submit the following budget recommendations to the City Commission for consideration in the upcoming fiscal year. These recommendations were developed through multiple public meetings in a workshop held in May 2025 and reflect the input from residents, subject matter experts, city staff, and committee members. Just to clarify, when I say city staff, I mean presentations and conversations that we've had with city staff aside from our budget workshop. Just to clarify that, you know, city staff, they had to step down from the dais when we had the discussion in May, and also they were not present in our, or they weren't able to participate in the May workshop either. These items represent a holistic approach to resilience planning addressing immediate and long term needs across adaptation mitigation infrastructure environmental health. operational capacity and financial readiness, the committee intentionally supports diverse priorities from strategic staffing and public health initiative interventions to land acquisition. Natural infrastructure and waste system reform several items also complement initiatives already underway within city departments, such as the Southwest streetscape master plan. the city's zero waste and tree canopy goals, and evolving resilience planning in response to extreme heat, flooding, and community health. Where possible, the recommendations are structured to leverage outside funding, support phased implementation, and produce measurable results that can inform future grant applications, public works allocations, and resilience bond strategies. Each recommendation includes examples from peer cities supporting policies and cost estimates to guide implementation. So that's the kind of the overview of just letting Commission know how we went about this. All right, so item one is compost pilot program. We have an estimated budget of 45,000 to 81,000. This was a budget that was suggested to me from conversations that I had with Fertile Earth Worm Farm. They showed me how they have kind of like a tiered system of different options that they present to cities and kind of go from the simpler option to the more robust where they actually have a scale and they actually weigh how much weight is being put into each bin from each person. So like they can actually measure the amounts. This item was also heavily commented on by the public at our May meeting there was a lot of public comments in favor of this. Which is also one of the reasons why we put it as as item one, so the committee recommends allocating 45,000 to 81,000 to support a one year pilot composting program operated by an external partner, such as fertile earthworm farm. There has been significant public support for composting at the CRC public comment periods. Rather than distributing bins alone, this would fund a full-service initiative that includes collection, processing, education, and reporting. Designed as an opt-in program, it can be scaled in response to public demand and operational capacity. Compost bins would be placed in 10 strategic locations on city-owned land, selected based on commission district coverage, proximity to residential density, and community interest. Potential sites are already being explored in Coconut Grove and the urban core. And then we have comparable programs in Austin, Orlando, and two examples of supporting policies that we have. Thoughts on this?

Well, I think the fact that we had so much public comment in favor of this, which we're relying on the public right for the participation as well, I think, you know, it should be supported on a trial basis. And the fact that we can, if it's possible to measure, I don't know if we have to measure individually, but if we can at least measure collectively, you know, how much is being gathered and we can show the results, I think, for the amount of money, I think it's a great start.

Yeah, Chair, I think this is really great. The workshop was also super helpful, so I would recommend certainly trying to do that more. We're often very productive in all your feedback and comments where you better really get into details. Yeah, I fully support this. I would add, for the example of an external partner, a compost for life. which I think it may be spun out of, but we're informed right now that they've been doing different pilots across Miami. So if we want to add a couple examples there, I would add those two. As Avra mentioned, the public came out, spoke very much in favor of this. I think the format that you've laid this out to make it a comparable versus supporting policy also is a great format to think about and follow from my learning on a policy example. And lastly, as you mentioned, we arrived at these recommendations as part of a decision matrix. I mean, we had a lot to propose, and these were really at the top of the list of things that were like, hey, this could really make a difference. Composting, I understand, could help us reduce waste by 20% to 40% or more. So I think this could be, yeah, quite big. I'm in favor of this, and I think it's written out well. I would make that one change to add sort of the other group that I know. And I'm not sure if there's another way to support these organizations. I think that they're facing some obstacles at the county level. So perhaps by engaging with a pilot at the city of Miami level, we could help move the needle at the county level with some of the composting policy that's currently being discussed there.

I agree, comma, or compost for life. And yeah, just to clarify, again, this is 10 pilot locations in on city owned land, like a library or a park. You'd like to make a public comment? Or you're just saying showing support?

It's, you're welcome to come up to make a comment if you want to.

Yeah.

Chairman, while we wait on him to come to the podium, I wanted to recommend a couple of parks, like, and so whenever there's an opportunity to recommend a few parks for the pilot. I think that's too detailed.

Okay.

Please state your name and address for the record. Good afternoon, all. My name is Andres Restrepo. Our company are the Planet LLC. We are a sustainability-focused company working on technology and solutions for different challenges. And one of them is we have been thinking about stormwater. So I would like to ask what is the capacity of those areas that the city is considering for storm surge or storage, if this is the right word.

Okay, got it. We'll address your comment, I think, on item seven, which is about the rainfall.

Excellent.

Okay. Okay, so moving on to item two. Item two is a zero waste plan consultant, and this was initiated from what is happening at the county level. We had a presentation on it earlier this year, I think in February, and we also had a resolution that we proffered recommending the city commission to take a stance on it, which I believe was fully unanimously approved What's the word seconded? What is it? It was approved, but everyone put their name as like a supporting person. What's that? Sponsor.

So it was unanimously sponsored and approved.

So item two is the committee recommends allocating $120,000 to fund a consultant to develop a citywide zero waste plan in partnership with relevant city departments. This builds on the CRC's resolution adopted on April 7th, 2025, which recommended that the city develop a comprehensive waste reduction and recycling strategy that includes implementation timelines, funding models, and operational reforms. The consultant would bring dedicated time and technical expertise to assist city staff in assessing current waste streams, identifying opportunities for diversion and circularity, and designing a phased roadmap. This foundational work would enable the city to accelerate progress toward a more sustainable and financially resilient waste system aligned with its climate and infrastructure goals. And there are two comparable examples here, Key West, Florida, which also reached out to a consultant to help develop their zero waste plan. And also in Worchester, Massachusetts, which hired zero waste associates to guide them and there was a lot of public outreach or public comment during our meetings earlier this year when we had it on the agenda. So again, reason for it to kind of be higher up in the order being at number two. Agreed. So item three? All right, item three is the electric leaf blower program. This was something that we kind of

I think we've discussed that. We've exhausted that conversation so much. I mean, publicly, too, which is fantastic. So I think item number three is... Do you want to go over it?

Because you kind of came up with this.

Yeah, no, no, no. I just think that on the leaf blower situation, and obviously we've discussed it at length here, that... that we've got full support from the committee on this one. I mean, hopefully the city will choose to engage on this.

What's different, though, about what we're doing here versus previously is we suggested when we proffered a resolution to suggest a ban on leaf blowers over a period of time with a phase-out period, and in case that's not desired anymore, that what we're suggesting now is actually budget to fund purchasing leaf blowers a specific amount of dollars for residential scale units which are pretty affordable we're suggesting fifty thousand dollars for residential scale units which you know they could be seventy five dollars two hundred fifty dollars and a hundred thousand dollars for commercial grade units for local landscaping businesses and it's you know simply a free thing to be given to these people. And it doesn't mean that there won't also be gas leaf blowers in the city, but by doing so, we could bring hundreds of new electric ones to the neighborhoods, which will hopefully make a pretty sizable impact and just inspire more adoption, widespread adoption of this. And I did reach out to a couple different companies who were interested, but they wouldn't commit to anything. But we discussed during the workshop reaching out to companies for them to possibly even sponsor the events, give out their equipment or at a reduced price to help with this. So, you know, I feel like the Office of Economic Development or another department could probably work on that kind of a sponsorship. All right, item four is the urban forester position. This was suggested to us from public comment of... general public as well as from landscape experts. So the committee recommends allocating 125,000 to fund a full-time urban forester position within the city of Miami. This role would expand the city's capacity to proactively manage, protect, and grow the urban tree canopy across all neighborhoods. Unlike the existing city arborist who primarily handles Permitting inspections and code enforcement, the urban forester would focus on canopy planting, program or coordination, community engagement, and long-term strategy. The position would also support the implementation of policies tied to Chapter 17, tree equity, and natural infrastructure resilience. Both members of the public and design professionals have raised the need for this role. This investment would help institutionalize urban forestry as a climate and public health strategy, ensuring trees are protected and strategically expanded where needed. And then there's a couple examples of other, one example from Chicago, and then a couple examples of supporting policies.

Would this role fall under the LaQuantisha, or who would they report to? What do you envision for that?

I feel like that's kind of outside of our purview. I have honestly no idea. You know, the org structure of how that would work, I think that should be up to commission and that department to see how they might want to do this, or hopefully they even want this, right?

No, it's a great idea. We need somebody that can offer some expertise and some planning. I was just wondering, have we thought through, yeah, would it fall under resiliency, or would it fall under, let's just say the under half person?

Do you know where forestry currently falls? Where does urban forestry currently fall departmentally? Is it under resilience or which department?

So right-of-way trees are public works, and private trees are building department. So they work together.

Work together, but the research I've found, urban forester is more on the public side, from what I can tell. But I think it's kind of up to them to define the role, and basically just add more hands on deck in that department, which is what we heard earlier. be needed from a lot of the discussions on chapter 17 which we had you know over five meetings was a lot like the whole process that there was like timeliness to it which seems like it's kind of a an administrative thing and a process thing so maybe this role could help augment that staff yeah i think i think um chairman if i may jump in here for a second avro's question is pretty key and i've seen this in other orgs institutions where you you want to make sure that

you can put the urban forester in a role that the intention behind the role will be supported by their supervisors. So, But you're right, this is maybe ultimately up for the Office of the Manager to think about. I would lean in, Avra, to your question and say that maybe putting it under the Office of Resilience would help make sure that they're focused on resilience efforts, tree planting and more of that. and supporting other programs that go by the, that really augment and enhance their resilience office goals.

Yeah, and it might be, they would work with Public Works and the building department, but maybe under the Office of Resiliency, they would have a little bit of autonomy and could speak to both parties, you know?

Right.

They'd come up with a plan and speak to both parties. Yeah, what we don't want is for that person to get buried under something. So, I don't know. I mean, whether that could be part of the suggestion or whether the Office of Resiliency wants it to be part of the suggestion, but just an idea if we wanted to further clarify that. Otherwise, I would lean towards public works because they do the most tree, this is the tree canopy addition, so that if it wasn't under resiliency, I would actually push for it to be under public works.

I second that.

Where should we insert that? Should it be under the first sentence or maybe under the last sentence?

We should ask the Office of Resiliency what's their preference and suggestion.

I don't think we can. I had to step away. I even asked her. I probably shouldn't have asked her about that because it's budget, so they have to take, I don't know exactly how to phrase it, but a bifurcated role.

We could say we recommend that it be under the purview of the Office of Resiliency and or Public Works.

Yeah, I would maybe add a chairman to where it says, unlike the existing city arborist, and then we can write comma in the X department. And unlike the, you know, the folks that are in the public right away, this role could be in the comma resilience office. to fulfill the goals of sustainability and resilience and help coordinate. I think that was a really good point, to be able to, from an independent place, help coordinate the objectives of the building department and the public works office. And if not possible, for whatever reason, to think that maybe supporting public works office in that effort might be aligned with some of the programming and responsibilities of that role.

Okay, so sentence three. on the on the first page unlike the existing city arborist comma working within the public works department comma and then continuing the what's already there who primarily handles permitting inspections and code enforcement and i hope that's accurate the urban forester would focus on canopy planning program coordination community engagement and long-term strategy

under the Office of Resilience and or Public Works to meet the goals of, you know, urban reforestation or, and supporting programs, related programs.

So, and long-term strategy, comma, under the Office of Resilience or Office of Public Works, period. What was that?

You can always say and or.

And or, okay. So item five, cost estimator for green versus gray infrastructure. $75,000 total phased over four to five years. That's our estimate. The committee recommends allocating $75,000 over multiple years to retain a cost estimator for the Southwest Streetscape Master Plan project adjacent to Jose Marti Park. The consultant would compare the cost of a conventional gray streetscape design to a green infrastructure alternative estimating both upfront and long-term costs across construction, maintenance, and environmental performance. Funding could be phased at approximately $15,000 to $20,000 per year over four to five years to support initial estimates and post-implementation monitoring of benefits such as cooling, water retention, tree survivability. I would possibly add here quality of life as well from the public comment that we received today. The results of this analysis could help inform future public works capital allocations and support planning for resilience-focused bond initiatives, including potential expansions of the Miami Forever Bond or new infrastructure funding programs, period. And this item is based on, we had a presentation of the Southwest Streetscape Master Plan, I believe in April, and it's very, very thorough. There's some really great ideas on how that comes together. And we were told at our last meeting in May that the city is moving forward with one Southwest Street Skate Master Plan project adjacent to Jose Marti, which is kind of like on a downward slope toward the park. And then this cost estimator could be working, for instance, on that street and looking at what the difference of those two strategies might be. So that's the general idea, how we got to this point.

I think it's fantastic. We've got to start measuring and having some references on the success or not success of programs so that we're making sure that we get future support for other projects. We need to have some way to analyze the success. So hopefully this will be a model for other implementation of other projects.

I'm suggesting we add, at that last sentence of the first paragraph, where we had these monitoring of benefits such as cooling, water retention, and tree survivability, I think we should add maybe quality of life. Agree?

Yeah, agreed.

All right. So item six, inland street pilot implementation, Southwest Streetscape Master Plan. The committee recommends allocating funds to implement an inland street pilot as part of the Southwest streetscape master plan. The city is advancing a streetscape project adjacent to Jose Marti park near the riverfront. This pilot would enable the implementation of a complimentary inland corridor, likely with a different design typology that reflects distinct flood risk and urban conditions of a street with different topographic considerations. Testing this inland pilot alongside the river adjacent project would provide a valuable comparison of design approaches. Community response and resilience outcomes would also allow the city to begin executing components of the master plan and phases while capturing lessons that can inform the broader rollout across little Havana and similar neighborhoods. So, again, the basis of this was that we saw the Southwest streetscape master plan presentation, I believe, in April and. They categorized all the different streets based on historical flooding from historical water movement, both at grade and below ground, as well as overlying the grid on that historical topography. And they categorized the streets based on different right-of-way widths. And this is a complementary one to the one adjacent to Jose Marti.

I guess I'll add to that, you know, with the reasoning, I think it's important, at least from an economics perspective, that we chose to go along with prioritizing these. And this is for the public benefit, is that we're thinking of how to be sort of cost effective to prove our point, to prove like, okay, what do we think is like the right way to go with design and implementation? and as Avra mentioned, to show some success. And if you look at five and six with these projects, there's already, you know, basically, it's adding to something that's already far along so that we can use that, as the chair is saying, for other lessons and broader neighborhoods. So, I mean, the ticket item's a little bit high, which would raise eyebrows, but when we think about all the other costs and investment that it's taken to get that far, it's almost like, okay, this is like a nice thing to add on top just so it moves the needle forward, right?

It's not necessarily like an additional cost, right? Because every year there's public works projects of road resurfacing, drainage improvements, and various other infrastructure things. So this is more of a suggestion that a project that happens to be when a drainage or road resurfacing or other infrastructure project is going to occur in the southwest streetscape area where they already have these designs, that instead of just doing a stripping of the surface and a restriping, a paving and restriping, that this happens. So in the scheme of total cost, I feel like the potential additional cost of implementing those additional green infrastructure things is probably kind of small and we'll hopefully see what that difference is quantifiably if they do item five of the of the or whatever item was that right of the cost estimator right so the incremental cost of doing this is already piggybacking on something that's already going to happen so it's

It really helps. It's almost like a drop in the bucket. But I think that's that. And for the record, I think we should keep we should keep taking that approach to how we think about, you know, identifying projects that are that exist that exist right now and that we can add another layer to to to to show some lesson or some best practice. And so I like really what we did here. And I wanted to just point that out for for the public.

I have a suggestion or just a comment. There's a lot here, and you've done such a good job pointing to other references too, like whether it's a resource on the compost or whatever, maybe at the end of every item, or in this case, or the stormwater park or the corridor plans, if we could put a link to those plans or a link to the compost companies. I'm just thinking if we send this to the commissioners or whoever, that if we provide links, maybe it makes it easier for their staff or for them to reference those things. So if we have those types of resources that we can actually list with websites or links, I think we should do it to make it as easy as possible.

100%. Everywhere you see an underline is a link. So I linked everything that was outside of the city. I didn't do links to like Brazilian 305 and stuff like that because I thought it would just be like almost too many links.

Okay, so those are already linked.

Yeah, everything that has an underline is a linked text.

Yeah, I think it shows up like that in our email, on the document in our email. It shows up linked here. It just looks like that because it's printed online. They did a really good job, and it still doesn't hurt, I think, Ava's suggestion.

So like the Southwest street gate master plan, that wasn't underlined?

Like item four? Yeah.

Item six. Page five. So where can we see the master plan?

Maybe we make it clickable there on the title.

I don't really know where that is. I have a copy of it because we saw the presentation. I mean, I guess I could put the link to our agenda packet because it was part of our agenda in April.

But shouldn't that be public information? Shouldn't we have access to that?

Yeah, I just don't know where it all is.

Okay.

The way that we, I think we did that in the past, Chair, is maybe they uploaded the file and the city gave us, like, a publicly shareable link within their, within the internal, like, cloud system. But if not, we can just do what you suggested.

Like, some of these, I know where they are. Like, Supporting Policy, City of Miami Stormwater Master Plan, I mean, that has its whole own webpage. That's an easy one. Yeah. I can try to find... I can go back and try to add additional ones. So Southwest Street State Master Plan, I'll try to find that, or at least our agenda packet, the Stormwater Master Plan. Are there others that you saw throughout, or should I just do a once-over at the end? Okay. Anything else on Item 6?

I would just add that last, maybe something from the last point you just said, Chair, that That this is an opportunity to, when something's already going to happen with existing plans, to be implemented? If that matters. Otherwise, I wouldn't even bother.

I added that in the initial, in the background. Right? So you go to the first page. So the third paragraph, the second underway, where possible, the recommendations are structured to leverage outside funding, comma, support phased implementation and produce. Oh, no, that's not it.

The first line of the third paragraph, several items also complement initiatives already underway within city departments. Exactly.

Such as a such as a Southwest Street Master Plan.

Yeah, perfect. Maybe worth emphasizing, but otherwise not.

So you're just re-emphasizing it? Yeah, so they know that that's already underway. Okay, so the committee recommends allocating fund settlement and inland street pilot as part of the Southwest Street Escape Master Plan, which has already been developed. I think it's already been adopted. Actually, I think commission adopted it. So I'll look into that and either put developed or adopted.

I accessed something online, so I don't know.

For which, for the streetscape?

Yeah, for the streetscape. Images.

Okay, so moving to item seven. Item seven is land acquisition for stormwater park conversion. The committee recommends allocating funds to support the acquisition of flood-prone properties for conversion into stormwater parks. This strategy would help manage localized flooding, improve water quality, and provide passive recreation, particularly in historically underserved neighborhoods. By holding stormwater locally, these parks reduce pressure on the city's drainage system and can lower long-term infrastructure costs. This is especially valuable in neighborhoods far from outfalls, where moving stormwater through conventional gray infrastructure is more challenging and expensive. Initial funding could support set identification strategy development and pilot acquisitions, while positioning the city to leverage outside funding for future resilience investments. And we mentioned at the workshop that I would do some some research into this item and and see the applicability of it, so I did not have this PDF here so. If we could click through it miriam are you in control of this what we're seeing on the screen. Yeah, I'm ready. Is it you or is it Alyssa if she's listening? Okay, so this first page is Jose Marti actually on a king tide day. I took this photo and you can see all of that water. The water is actually overtopping the seawall and going far into that park. Okay, so let's go to the next slide.

Jeremy, and I also saw Andres Restrepo raise his hand, because he mentioned when we talked about, I'll try to, let's, I think we should just go through the item.

And if there's a question at the end, we can, we can still address it. So this is just a repeat of what's in item seven. And I think it's important that this is, you know, not just creating parks, but we're replacing risk with resilience. All right, next slide. So the following page, and if you could just hit like the minus sign just so it goes a little, so we zoom out because I think it's cropping the bottom of the page. Or if you do like view full page on the top. So this on the left, like file, edit, view, I think if you go view full screen, we would get the full screen. To the right, the next one. View. Yep, exactly. Thank you. So the following pages are from these two reports, the draft executive summary and the final report of the CDM Smith master plan. All right, next page. So the city has this, this is the stormwater master plan that was, that is being followed and was developed for the long-term strategy of the city. Next page. They show the FEMA repetitive loss properties. I think those are properties that have, on the next page, page five, those are the properties that have had multiple flood events, reported flood events. So you can see there's some specific hotspots. Next page. And then when you overlay that on the elevation data, you can kind of start to find where there's opportunity, particularly in the sloughs. All right, next page. This shows the city's flooding inundation predicted by the city's primary level of service goal of a 10-year storm

under the existing conditions.

So all of the blue are where they're anticipating flooding of those levels. And then next page. This is the 100-year flood with 72-year-hour design storm situation. And you can see it's a much greater area. Next page. And I don't know why it's so blurry, but... So looking at this paragraph, paragraph one, it says low-lying undulating topography. And this is, the master plan is pretty clear that it says the flood-prone areas lack both topographic conditions and the land to support traditional drainage upgrades. So that's why targeted buyouts and conversion to stormwater parks are essential for resilience. So the master plan is already introducing these strategies. Next page. And sea level rise makes everything harder, so the rising seas are going above outfall levels, which also reduces the gravity system, and then the backflow preventers are required, but they add cost and can reduce efficiency. And then as groundwater rises, it also undermines the infiltration systems, so they note item three on the right, which is hard to read, but it says no available dedicated stormwater management lands. So they're just talking about how the city is pretty built out and that could be a challenge compared to other municipalities. All right, next slide. And they also talk about...

Next slide, please.

Page 11. Planning for future relocation of at-risk population infrastructure. It's on the right, on the next to last paragraph. I know it's hard to read, but again, they already are supporting something like this. Keep going. Next slide. The plan calls for raising the city in certain areas and creating storage in the lowest lying areas. And they say that that work begins with land acquisition. And it's not just about today's storms. It's about setting Miami up to thrive in the decades ahead. Next page. And it also emphasizes, page 13, that flooding is interconnected. So fixing one neighborhood often depends on upstream or downstream changes to the system. So many of these problem areas that are highlighted here, they require multi-phased projects To to be working in tandem to make a meaningful difference, so what we're seeing here this this graph is the like. The stormwater plan created a series of phases of how they recommended it be created so because some of these areas are determined to be taken care of in later phases, but they're having flooding now that's what this proposal can can assist with. Next page. So these are the two cost comparisons of the level of service that they estimated. 3.8 billion and 5.4 billion. So those are the, and you can see the different, that's for the total stormwater mass implementation. And then there's these colors, the red, yellow, green, those are the phase over the next decades. Next slide. So then, if you zoom in on, for instance, like the Southwest streetscape area, this is just impervious surface. And all of this is in the stormwater master plan. And then next slide. They show the areas of anticipated flooding from 100 year storm. And then next slide. I added these pink dots on top, which is based on publicly listed properties for sale. And, you know, this is, I just used pretty large dots to put in the general area of where properties are available just for, you know, illustrative purposes, not to represent any specific buyout, but basically like what we, what we discussed at the, workshop was, well, are there properties available? And are they in a range that seems appropriate for a park acquisition or a stormwater acquisition? And there's definitely a lot. And these pink dots are on the lower lying areas. But there may actually be opportunities to not just buy the lowest lying properties, but also slightly higher adjacent to these locations. Because you may actually want to store the water at a higher location before it goes lower as well. Because once it gets to that point, if the groundwater is too high, you might actually not have much area for exfiltration. So that's kind of the main point here. There's a number of additional pages where I kind of outlined that there's a bunch of other properties in the different districts. But let's just skip to page 31. The second part that this proposal kind of overlays with is the city's park master plan, which is called Reimagine Parks. So that's the master, we had a presentation on that earlier this year. And we see that certain districts, for instance, District 4 has a lot of areas on the next page, on page 33, or two pages. This map shows that there's a lot of, of areas where they don't have parks and walkable within walking distance. So, you know, this policy could also align with that goal of the city of making sure that there's parks and walking distance to all residents. And the page beforehand is from the, directly from the re-imagine, no, one prior, go to 32, please, sorry. The parks master plan actually shows integrating stormwater into into like plazas and stuff like Avril like you were mentioning it doesn't necessarily have to be a green park it could be a plaza and there's various ways of designing it so you know a high level point here is the city already has us in its policies of the stormwater master plan and of the of the parks master plan we're just kind of suggesting that it be prioritized hmm So I put this together, I know, because like, this is one of the bigger ticket items, but it's something that I think is important for the future of the city and kind of looking ahead. And thus, this document kind of helps put all of those points together and hopefully make the case for why this should be prioritized.

Well done. Yeah, thanks for doing that.

Okay, so as far as next steps, sir, did we answer your question as far as where we would be prioritizing flood reduction? Did that help answer your question or not quite? If you want to say anything, if you could just come to the mic, please. Thank you.

Hello. Number one, I am impressed with the master plan have been developed for stormwater. It's impressive. It has been something we have been thinking about. And I believe there is a lot of things that can be used and integrated with other elements in order to make it more practical and more usable because every time things are worse, right? My earlier question was regarding the storage capacity of those lands that you were discussing, but now I understand I need to read more in order to understand this as a part of the whole master plan. And the other thing is, have you considered to re-infiltrate all that stormwater into the Florida limestone or just wait until it can outflow into the ocean?

Yeah, a majority of the solution from the master plan is for exfiltration trenches that go quite deep. And then there's also... additional larger pipes and pumps to push water into the canal system, which for a majority of the city is the Miami River, and then to the north, the canal.

We have a highly porous geology, so we can do a lot of things on the ground. And the other thing is what has been planned in order to use that water, because storm water is not a problem. It's an asset. If we think ahead into using that properly, of course, nobody wants a flood, but it's water, and water is precious.

Yeah, for instance, we had a drought until 30 days ago. We had very little water in the spring season until we started having the summer rain. So water... It wasn't so much of a drought that we had to have rationing, but we have in the past. So I agree that green infrastructure and infiltration and exfiltration trenches and getting water back to the ground.

So all that is in the master plan?

Yeah, it's very thorough.

I would like to have access or to understand how to

There's a webpage on the city's website. If you search for the stormwater master plan, you can find it. And there's a company called Sealer. Alexander is here this evening, the founder of the company. I've been talking to him last week about he's trying to – he's working on a solution to – create a barrier underground for storage capacity in these lower-lying areas, which I think is interesting. This is a very good idea. We'll probably have conversations about that continuing, but that could probably be integrated with this park system plan as well.

There is not one single solution. No, and each solution should address multiple problems. And my other question is, Is the city thinking on doing something with all the dust that is being spread out with all those demolitions and constructions?

I'm not sure that right now is the time to discuss it, but I think you should reach out to the department in charge of that. It's not this area of the city. I mean, air quality is probably our area, just not the discussion right now.

No, but also these individuals can't speak for the city. These individuals can't speak for the city of Miami, so you may want to talk to a director. A director of building would be the one to talk about those issues regarding construction and any pollution to the air. That's the building director.

Because maybe there are solutions that can be, we can combine the stormwater for those reduction as well. Yeah, and we have that.

Chair, I do apologize. I don't want to interrupt and be the bad guy, but I do want to put you on notice. We can't move the meeting past eight since there is no vote to extend. Understood. So you may want to at least get the budget item. Yep. All right, sorry.

So I think we're done with the discussion. Is there any other questions or comments?

Chairman, I want to acknowledge Mr. Restrepo really quick. I think his suggestion is to think about how do we maximize stormwater. It's really interesting, especially I want to add thinking about nature-based solutions. I'm not sure if Andres, if what he's thinking about is nature-based solutions, but perhaps if he has something that he wants to present for you to check out to see if it's worthy to consider.

Yeah, another time. But as far as this goes, the options of what we can do is, I mean, we could do a straw vote right now. We could also, and the straw vote could be something along the lines of we agree to share this with commission subject to voting with a quorum planned in an August meeting, for instance.

And it's still okay even if, worst case scenario, we have to do it at September one, so it would be.

I'm happy to make a motion. Okay, yes, not really a motion. Suggest a straw vote in support of the proposals that were made with the small modifications. take a straw vote for the three members that are here today, and present to commission subject to a quorum vote, hopefully in August, if not September.

Do I have a second for the straw vote? I would second that. Yeah. Okay, great. I like that approach. All in favor? Aye. Aye. Aye. All right. Three ayes.

Straw vote it is.

Thank you, so I will make those couple edits and circulate it to Miriam as soon as possible, and then we will circulate it, and then we'll also speak with Miriam about a follow-up date in August for all of us after the 5th, and possibly a little more north, a little more central in the city.

I'm happy to volunteer the Vagabond event room lobby. That's more convenient for everybody.

Parking's pretty easy there, right?

Yep, free.

Free and easy in and out. Okay, cool. That's a good incentive. We'll propose that with Miriam and find a date that works to make sure that we have a quorum if we're going to do that. Awesome. Thank you, guys. All right, let's move to the next item. We have no items under city-owned waterfront projects. We have Office of Resilience updates, item eight.

I'm sorry, Avra, what was the location you were offering?

7301 Biscayne Boulevard. It's the Vagabond Hotel.

Got it.

The lobby event room.

Hi, good evening. Sonia Brubaker, Chief Resilience Officer. I have a few updates for the Office of Resilience and Sustainability. I want to start off with the City Hall Energy Star Certification. Through our building efficiency program, we are benchmarking the energy use and water use for buildings all across the city above 50,000 square feet. And then for our city buildings, all of them, which many of them are under 50,000 square feet, we are also committing to benchmarking energy use and water use. And so through doing this, we put this into the EPA Energy Star portfolio tool, and then found that we received a score of 80, saying that we could then apply to have Energy Star certification, which we did, and we received it. And so with that program, you have to have a score of 75 to be eligible, and so City Hall has a score of 80, which means that this building is being... uses energy more efficiently than 80% of the buildings of its similar size. So, exciting. We have a framed letter out in front, as well as an emblem. So, just wanted to shout out our building. Second, we host annually, we contract with Dream and Green to hold energy and water efficiency workshops. for households across the city. And so we try to have five different workshops and one in each of the districts. And so we have had four of those already. And we have another one coming up. We'll have the date and location soon for District 5. And while they are in all of the districts, anybody can attend them. So if you're interested, we'll put that notice out. Next, we are actively working on our heat sensors and homes program. And so this was a grant that we applied for last fall. We were awarded to work with some community-based organizations throughout the city to install, to purchase and install heat sensors. that we are placing in homes that have indicated that they have high energy burdens so that we can get some data on how people are experiencing the stream heat in the city. So we're working with the Miami Foundation to do this and so right now we are working with a little over 70 households. We're looking to gather data from July through September, early October range. And then we're going to use that data to see kind of what the temperatures are kind of inside and outside of their homes, kind of what they've experienced with it and the building types that they're in. So then we can look to see, okay, how can this heat be mitigated for people in the future? And so using this data, having this data will be able to be used for potential grant applications in the future to potentially establish a program that can help with some heat mitigation. So that's a direct result from our extreme heat plan that we put out just a couple of months ago. And so this is just one of the actions in it where we're forging ahead. And then lastly, we want to let people know that we have free Wi-Fi in some of our parks. This is phase one, where there's a group of parks that now have free expanded Wi-Fi throughout the parks. And our goal is to do this in all of our parks. We're going to be putting out our newsletter this week that will have this information. This information is also on our city's website if you want to look at these parks sooner. But this is a way for the public to be able to have connectivity and be able to have access to information more readily.

Great work.

Agree. Good work. Thanks for the update. Okay, moving on to open discussion and other items. Before though, I think it's more applicable if I quickly mention future agendas, item 10. So item 10A is current and recommended best practices regarding trees in the environment. So it's like that statement is in regard to the chapter 17 ongoing discussions that the city was hiring outreach specialist to go to the community and ensure their voices were heard and best practices were being responded to. There was a commission item last month. It was deferred. I'm not sure exactly what the status is right now, but it's going to come back probably and probably be voted on. And then this gives us an opportunity for us to kind of Recollect on chapter 17 and you know with flora with what you were about to show us But I think what you're gonna show us now. I think we'll we'll possibly go into those future agenda things just like as far as like where I think our process might go from here and Align, you know and see what the city does and what like what process they want to initiate that we can try to you know participate in Okay, so then moving back to open discussion. Also, we're gonna have, you know, we have a vice chair opening now, because Nikozi is no longer here, so we'll do a vote sometime September, October, once we have all of our members back again, and hopefully a D4 appointee, and you know, then we'll have hopefully a full board. So let's go to item A, LEAF, Local Education and Forestry. if you want to present. And as Gigi mentioned, we have a hard stop because we can't extend past eight. So sorry, but try if you could to keep it condensed. And maybe we leave like one minute, you know, at the end for public comment, just to be respectful, I think would be appropriate.

Okay. Yeah, so thanks for putting this up. I think this is, I think goes well with today's agenda. It's a Proposal I've been seeing from different opportunities around the community, if we could maybe do a full page view. Yeah, that's good, that's good, thank you. So yes, this idea is how do we solve a number of issues and take this opportunity with Chapter 17 to think about best practices that we're seeing already done in Miami and other places around the world. And so the idea here is to think about how we leverage local engagement for urban forestry. We came up with this acronym, And the idea is to empower communities for themselves to be able to do more community gardens. A conversation today with composting, for example, could fit very well when we think about community gardens and sort of how we could overlap even what we recommended today in a pilot today with something like this leaf initiative to connect community directly with a lot of the urban forestry goals that we have, maybe even with the future forester goals. They'll be coming in place. So I put some of this together. This picture you see here is courtesy of Greg Clark. This is one of the community gardens out in Overtown that I think is certainly worth highlighting. Next slide. That community garden, by the way, is called the Green Haven Project, if anybody wants to look it up later. So this is a bit of the overview. I'll run through this fairly quickly since we only got seven minutes here. I want to focus on community engagement piece of this. We're not really going to touch on the Tree Trust Fund. I think that that's another conversation that I'm splitting into a different presentation in the future. A tree dashboard, certainly, to keep advancing the conversations around transparency, public data, understanding where the Tree Trust Fund dollars might be going. Tree Corp is something that I think was worth highlighting as an initiative for the community to move on. So it's like a placeholder name and to collaborate together with the community and ultimately integrate and work with existing programs here at the city and maybe with the county and the state. Next slide. So just give you that introduction in context as a need for community forestry and overview and partnerships for implement. How do we get this done? Next slide. So we're seeing a lot of need in terms of, for example, a lot of districts, especially in the one that I live in, for example, in Alapata, a lot of low-income residents and the elderly are having hard times taking care of their urban forestry, not being able to talk to about it, how to navigate some of these processes, and oftentimes the government we're seeing is not able to always meet all the demands. We can see that maybe through our 411 requests. So I was thinking that to solve both of these, let's think about ways where we could engage the community and take some of the pressure off the government by having the community step up. Here we show the stormwater master plan as something to really think about and how tree canopy coverage in Miami could also be used as a nature-based solution to think about stormwater master planning. Next slide. A couple of examples of districts and areas that seem quite vulnerable and could really have a lot of need in terms of canopy and the canopy goals. We want to be at 30% canopy by 2030. Here we can see in District 1, for example, 7% in District 4, 10%, District 5 at 13%. And canopy coverage, so these are different areas to show where we could really jump start with community programs or school programs. Next slide. This comes out of the Google Environmental Insights Explorer, by the way, that the city of Miami has. And here we see a local example of another program called the Grove Relief, which is a citizen science initiative led by Dr. Chris Paraloto, which came to present to us a few months ago down the street. He's at the International Center for Tropical Botany at the FIU Institute of Environment. And this is a program I think we should think about scaling. It's already New York City is one example that we could also point to as a success of a million trees planted two years early in terms of the goals. And we're really behind in our goals. So this could be one way to think about what were the best practices from New York as well that we can adopt. And then I put on the right here the Miami Grove Relief could support with a million trees program. There was over 15,000 trees mapped and measured and many other species. And this database is available to the public. Next slide. So meeting that dashboard. From New York City, we can think about these green gorillas. So 1985, there's some documentary on this tree corp that was set up by Mrs. Carthan. And so this is a tree matching program that came out with a local nonprofit that helped work with kids, the Boy Scouts, the girls to get involved in this tree corp. And they made these things called seed bombs, which are really, really fun. So in areas that they were not able to get to. They were able to make homemade seed that they could put into making these gardens. Next slide. And so the idea here is to replicate the same, similar goals. So local engagement and forestry was the acronym that we came up with. To work with local community neighborhoods, districts, precincts, and schools. Engagement of local nonprofits, for-profits, academia, and for multiple residents. Replicating the success of what's known as citizen science. to require hands-on involvement and collaborating with everybody, residents, organizations, government, to support green infrastructure, nature-based solutions and urban tree management. Next slide. And we have a couple more minutes. So I guess here the idea is let's recruit, let's train. There's a lot of opportunity and training offered and grants at the state and local level. FIU and others like UF IFAS would probably be ready, willing, and able to lend support and training to stand up this type of support and deploy into different communities like Overtown and Alapata, as well as offer on continuous monitoring. Next slide. These are different organizations that have identified in terms of academic, nonprofits, government, and community that would like to get involved. I included Logos Impact Foundation, my nonprofit, which has been really focused on thinking about ways to connect all the dots here. Next slide. And here's an example of the 305. If anybody has had their cafecito later in this afternoon, you guys might appreciate this joke. But the idea is, yeah, to turn the 305 dashboard into 305 and to ultimately enable better citizen science and real-time data. So a lot of questions that city and staff and ourselves are being asked could all be referenced directly in one dashboard to know exactly what is happening in real-time. Next slide. And we can take this further by doing the community gardens and doing tree banking. This is something that Ian Wogan has been talking a lot about at Tree Sources. Next slide. And how we might be able to explore implementation plans. I'll stop there because we're out of time to have time for public comment or any other questions. Next slide. So yeah, Million Trees goal. Let's do it.

Thank you for the brevity. definitely bring it up again in these additional future agenda items and appreciate you guys making it tonight and to most meetings thank you and uh our next meeting will be hopefully mid early august for us to vote and after that our next uh meeting would be september so um hope you all have a nice summer stay safe during the storms and thank you all for attending in the public as well and sitting through the whole meeting and participating. So, appreciate that. And with that, we will adjourn tonight's meeting.

All right, thank you.

Before you leave, please don't forget to bring me your nameplates.