Sustainability and Resiliency Committee - Regular Meeting

Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Sustainability and Resiliency Committee and Youth Council Joint Workshop. Today is September 2nd, 2025, and it is 5.32 p.m., and I'm going to go ahead and call the roll now. Chair Daniel Deitch? Here. Vice Chair Patrick Mamos. Committee Member Tiffany Cannava. Here. Chair Lucia LaCour. Here. Vice Chair Ella Garcia. Here. Council Member Sophia Budoni.

Here.

Council Member Sophia Chavez-Syphon. Here.

We have a quorum. Fantastic. Thank you very much. Thank you for the members of the Youth Council and the Sustainable Living Committee and staff for doing this today. I really appreciate what the Youth Council is suggesting that we get together and talk about our journal priorities for this fiscal year and give us the opportunity to share some of our priorities and more importantly initiatives that we can work on together. We've put together a few discussion items. We've identified a few discussion items. One generally ends with it. So it's actually three items that are rolled into one.

The three items are

support staff on the cycle education outreach program. So I think we can talk about that as a committee. And staff has been working on other reports on that as well. It's basically, it's both, we're interested in looking at the town operations, but it's also an engagement with the community as well, probably what we're doing is looking at how we can handle the establishment so that we can better connect the right way to the cycle and how we can get better students. years ago I appreciate the solicitation that you asked for on the community side of it. I found it was . And I was hoping that we could activate that to lead by example. There are some solar installations around town that are . And it's been able to catalyze interest in others . Chief Residency Officer. So our commissions and budget season now are a small amount of time left because the Chief of Department of Clearance is not going to be here in a few years time. But, as stated in the agenda item, it is a role and a responsibility that there is a standoff. So I'm just going to place some staff members, travelers to the supplement. So if there is one person that has one point for any sustainability response initiatives, I'm going to have to get into the parents' departments and make sure that they're within the town and also beyond the town. So those three answers are in the agenda package. Hopefully everybody had a chance to read them. Just going to run up to questions. If these areas are of interest to you, then we would be thankful for the opportunity to talk to you about them.

Thank you so much for introducing this item. Just starting with the Recycling Education Program, I think last term, one of the senior union owners, I think it was Sherrill, had talked about having youth ambassadors or something at different social events to sort of deal with recycling. Has there been any other brainstorming coming from the sustainability committee around ways to, like, disseminate the information regarding recycling, or is that just sort of .

It has not yet been determined yet, so at our last meeting, we had a right-of-way association engage with us and our right-of-way management. That's the company that processes all the cycles.

of opportunities to both focus intimately and remotely on what could be done.

The investor program is an easy one, and it's going to activate just a few towns and towns in the same building, and perhaps other volunteers around town. So we meet people where they are, and we suggest that we attend broadly. Anytime that the town has an event, it's an opportunity to

with the event that was organized to celebrate the opening of the non-existent park, I know that there was a big question of what was it to make everything recyclable and compostable? Which was it? Recyclable? Like compostable? Okay. Like is there any, like, how do you sort of make up the standard at town events?

Like, is that... Yeah, so yeah, I think it's a matter of advocacy.

What we do as a committee is we make recommendations.

That's what I'll ask Molly, but we do research and... We take notes on matters, and sometimes it is through staff, so it's our liaison. We're fortunate that we have two officials that take each other to meetings, and vice-chancellors that are commissioned liaison. So we try to carry it through that way. So affirmative recommendation, and then we make sure that it's actually done. So even if the answer is no, we want to make sure that once it leaves our committee, it goes to the commission and we'll do that as soon as we can.

I think as you said, that with count events, it's one of the best ways to inform the public of the recycling initiatives, also just by having that separate recycling bin and stuff like that, and when people are selling and giving out food, just making sure that everyone is aware of the fact that there are those two options for the waste. But then regarding recycling education, we kind of had this similar issue with the Youth Council in terms of disseminating information with the first option that we thought of was the Gazette, but really the only people that read the Gazette are either just adults, and they don't really talk to their kids about it, or teenagers who aren't in English, for example, just people who actively take that step to be involved with town news. So, I don't know, any regret of education or just awareness? I'm not really sure what idea we would have for just information-wise, like flyers, you know, the most effective. The Gazette, I guess, you know, it's gonna tell our kids. And then, I mean, my first thought for at least for the kids would be Ruth K. Broad. I know that they have composting. I don't know if they still do, but when I was in elementary school, they had composting. So maybe we could do, try to reach out to them in some way or collaborate with . But yeah, just a thought.

If I may, I already talked about ambassadors for events and I think this is a great opportunity to get involvement from the kids and if it's possible to almost, do a sign up event and use it as maybe a time for kids to earn community service hours and tie those two together. have ambassadors for each event that way, coordinate with parks, stores, and whoever's hosting the event to have ambassadors.

If the idea is not to force this all on the youth, it is for it to be a collaborative initiative. So, you know, the same, anything that would be asked of the youth is also going to be asked of the community, and it's going to be defined in a little more than two years. But I would speak specifically to one of the ways, you know, Because that is old school. I thought you'd be surprised how many people read it. Maybe, obviously, the elders. But we also have learned that social media has very rich, and we probably have very different senses of that than the other subjects might know. And it's sort of about what it means to have troops and what it means to have troops. So that is a great way just to get a message out and pass it down to other students to communicate important messages.

The former Youth Council did some really nice work. Sorry, so Gerardo Bilostegui, Commissioner. The former youth council did some really nice videos as well on scooter and bike safety, and I feel like that's a great resource. I'm sure the communications department would be willing to publicize anything like that on the town's social media. That definitely helps with the younger crowd. I just want to put in a

We did, at our last meeting, we had a 400 beverage. Association. She was going to print stickers out for all the recycling bins and that was going to be a cost that they were going to incur. So that's a start that they would, so that's in the house section. And then we were discussing how do we now educate people in the condos and the hotels and things like that. That's probably just a little bit more work, but I did like the idea of at least getting that out. And she did, she was open to What else do you need? What information do you need? What flyers do you need? What stickers do you need? Because she seems open to printing whatever we need for education purposes. So that's something to think about, too, beyond, when I say recycling bins, I mean the canes, the big trash canes.

commission can do for this but i'm noticing if you look behind board member canada there's a blue recycling bin with a black plastic bag in it that i'm sure is not sorting recycling it's being used as a general waste bin and that's i think the practice throughout town hall i think you know i can talk to the manager about this but i think we should be able to at least start modeling the right behavior ideally it would be nice to get like composting going in town hall. That would be the next step, right? So that people who visit the town hall can sort of see some best practices, but at least, you know, looking in the corner there, I mean, we have some work to do at home here.

There's been a rare enough point, and it's something that we've also discussed. There are some things that the town can do, and sort of harking back to what I mentioned about the solar panels, the town can lead by example. We've had presentations from local composting companies that offer a subscription service. We've discussed that in the town. So at least within town hall and the different town facilities, we're showing the community. We take it seriously as a town, and I'm asking them to . So as it relates to the education program, we've asked, presented the idea of outsourcing, management of that, the decision of the direction it's given to us is that it's going to be managed in-house, and we get support for our senior manager or for our consultant. We have a little bit of time, so base management or our processor is down with the completion of the recycling facility. I think just by talking about the ISAT and social media, I do think that those would be useful tools, but I also think that

to your point earlier, like meeting people where they are, especially at these kind of events and being able to communicate with them in person is gonna be a little bit more impactful. So I liked Ella's idea, at least for the youth of going to Ruth K Broad and sort of talking about these things with them because there is no program there at the moment to teach them about recycling. And then I think, the modeling of the correct behavior should be definitely done at these times, and that can definitely be done through the ambassador program. So I like those ideas a lot because we're able to interact with them, but I think that also I know that a couple of our members were really passionate about the film, and they did the scooter safety and the bike safety, so creating a PSA about the recycling or something for the Instagram would definitely be something that we would be willing to take on. Last fall, I went...

Actually, Ms. Duvall helped me organize this with Gigi Gutierrez, who's a resident who's often at the sustainability meetings and who writes the Gar-Metal column in the Gazette. She and I went together to visit waste management's recycling facility in Pembroke Pines. And it's really eye-opening to go there and just to see how it works. That could be, I don't know, I mean, I'm just off the side of a permission slip and something, but it could be a trip for the council. I think it would be very eye-opening. The two big things that I took away from that meeting that could be little videos or blips in themselves is to try to keep plastic bags out of the recycling. This is a major thing that dubs up the works. If they get any bag full of plastic, a lot of it ends up going to landfill because they don't even open the bag. I'd say the majority of the bins I see driving around town have plastic bags holding the recyclables. People put propane tanks in the recycling, and then they often explode, and they create fires in the facility, and this happens very regularly. So if we can just get people to stop doing things like that, you know, that have a big impact, that goes a long way, you know?

Sorry, am I interrupting? Going off the direct view about the plastic bags, I don't think we can necessarily get people to completely cut off into CVS, Publix, Rowe, All these supermarkets, I don't think any of them would be completely willing to switch to paper bags. But I think it needs to be done. It's a completely different thing. There's these machines that my father has been proposing for a while in which you can take these plastic bags and transform them into things such as benches, chairs, all of these. And the machines themselves certainly owns them. So what if we would get the town to create a separate bin? And so we could have recycling, regular trash, composting, and another bin in and of itself for these plastic bags, which could be used for these machines to create vengeance tricks, et cetera.

I love that idea. What I was saying, though, is people bundle their aluminum cans and things in the blue bin to recycle. They're putting them in plastic bags. And that's the problem. And they can show you this at the facility. Those bags gum up the machine that does the sorting, and they have to stop the machine. That's a huge problem. So I just mean to keep people from putting plastic bags in to bottle their recyclable containers.

So, yeah, just on that topic, because I was at the sustainability meeting when the waste management representative was there, and he spoke about very few items that are actually recyclable. So, and I mentioned, I brought up about the condos because I see it every time I go to throw out my recyclables and I bring a bag that I take back with me. But the bin is full of plastic bags. So that's one thing, is that people put their recyclables in the plastic bags and think that's okay. I mean, I've printed out from the town website and posted it around my building where the bins are. Nobody pays attention. But he mentions very specific things that are recyclable. And the problem is a lot of people just He brought, you know, he introduced us to the representative from the company, but now she sent an email that I think we're gonna discuss on the sustainability committee because she wants a pledge from the town for something about the plastic bottles being, you know, how they want the plastic bottles back. What was interesting was they actually said that the cardboard cartons that we have at our events are not valuable in the recycle chain. The cans are much better or the plastic bottles that people bring back. So she sent a bunch of material that came right out on our agenda deadline, so I didn't get a chance to review it all. But essentially, they want to give us funding for educational purposes, but they're also looking for support from us. So something we'll be looking into. But I think I like the idea of the tour of the voice management facility, and then you also get a better idea of You know, if it's only like three or four things that are recyclable, that's the message we really have to get to people. And the fact that the contamination just messes up everything. So, yeah, it was really interesting having, you know, those representatives and everything.

I just had a question. When, like, the recycling is contaminated, is there like a fine levied on the town? Is there like a way, you can't like privatize recycling, right? So with the condo complex, do you get funds instead of the... No, because it's co-collected.

So it's collected from one family.

So what typically happens is there's a small cycling vehicle. It's driven just one of our clients. It is deposited on the floor. Some of the pathways management makes the determination whether the entire load has more than the minimum amount of recyclable material. And if it is, is there a choice? Do we need to pay to the town to dispose of all of it? Or will we get it back? Neither or is certainly a good option. But yes, we pay the determination. So one of the problems is As part of the program that the town is working on, just as we have a map of all of our regional cities, we put together a map of all of these sites. As most folks don't know, you can recite the values downstairs, you can recite the comments on that. We partner with other jurisdictions to have medicines. There's a lot that's happening. There's a misunderstanding. There's a misunderstanding. and if nothing's happening, which is not the case, but folks don't understand that even when it's a material recycling process, there's still going to be some amount of material that is non-recyclable, and it's not going to work, and it doesn't even have to be recycled.

For the collecting of the recyclable materials, I think I brought up this. But generally, I was going to ask, to what extent was the company that came to you guys willing to fund things? Because I heard you said education stickers and things like that. But then you mentioned letting people know what they actually can recycle. And I feel the most effective recycling bins that I've seen are the ones that you kind of like pull down and they have little pictures of each item that you can throw in there, like a little plastic paper. Would that fall upon the town to purchase those new bins completely?

Yeah. Okay. Thank you. they will hot-stack the bins, and when the bins are being manufactured, they will actually create an impression that one is essential and one isn't. The next best thing you can do is have separate wood pictures of what is acceptable and what isn't. And that's what we thought about these solutions. that's offered to pay for it. Again, with the new facility on our mind, it's integrating a lot more artificial intelligence, new sort of technologies. So if they're able to accept more material, we don't want to get stickers that speak to our program today. We want them to learn how to use it for the next year. Okay, so we've talked about a couple. I'm interested in those interests. My experience is that we can engage the PTA president, if you've got a good person that you need to work with at school, to leverage in social media, whether it's through PSAs or videos, type 2. and just one more thing i think that it would be helpful for especially if like there are there are nothing with ambassadors at these events

A lot of the things that we're really doing is having a QR code to a link where everything is there, so if there could be a way to add something to the Surfside website, a page that has the map, has FAQ, has the PSA video that we create, so just everything is in one place, so those ambassadors have an easy time of sharing the information with people, I think that could also be really helpful.

Sorry, it's a bit of a derangement. I don't know if you have an idea. No, I want you to talk about the PTA, but the National Junior Honor Society as well. When I was in eighth grade, we managed to get an entire event going for the school, and we offered all the members of the middle school who agreed to participate to help out community service hours, as Francis said. So we could definitely do some sort of miniature festival for Earth Day, working with both the PTA and the National Junior Art Society in order to get this message out to the young ones.

Because hands-on activities are definitely the ones that most work for the younger kids.

I would go a year and talk about it. But it's also on a period of time. It's also a period of time. It's a period of time. It's a different life. I think we're okay.

Just so that you guys know, we're still working on creating a community workshop in terms of education for community on those residential

and not to rain on the lake. We've done that before, and turnout was not great, which is why we needed people where they are, and then we created them. I think the case council gave it out for that. Awesome. In terms of solar PV on town facilities, is that something that you have to get behind?

So,

One of the challenges has been parking has been for each of those . We have a parking problem. We don't have a parking problem. The parking problem is there. The parking problem is . It's a little tricky. I would like, and I'm not sure if this submission has Maybe you've been smart enough not to deal with it. But congratulations on your history. Seriously, I have a fantastic memory of my family. It was the first thing that I ever learned about history. Very important. Very important. I thought you were going to say you. No, no. When I spoke to her years ago on this situation, she said, maybe we can just put a second, put a gap on the law, on the business system, on that one, and then add the silver panels on top, because that's what we want to do. It wasn't a lot of interest to me. It made it more complicated for me to do the paper. If the commission is looking for a relatively straight forward planning solution, then I would say that let's put it in the next. I mean, it should be put in the next anyway. But in a lot of minds, there seems to be a fear of return on investment. Return on investment is sort of When we were looking at it years ago, it was a new focus. The tax credit of federal government bonds is going away, but that doesn't matter because the tax credit is going away. So I guess what I'm seeing in the community is to do what we've been doing, which is discussing how the community responds to the level, and then advance that through your liaison. That's something that you support.

So I just wanted to come in on this. I've heard of that, putting it by the parking lot, I like that idea. The commission has not discussed solar panels at this point. Because it's come up on the sustainability committee, I thought the 1960 park might be the right place to start because it's a new park and it's already, what is the goal? So that would make sense, but I'm curious about this idea of the parking lots, because I mean, Personally, I prefer the surface lots. So would this look something like Bayfront Park, how they have all the solar panels? Would we be able to do that without losing space? Because I think that's the big concern. The town is going to lose lots.

I don't think it would be a loss of space necessarily. I know there's huge front parts, so I can't really comment on that. But I'd like to think of it as the roof of a gas station, right? It's just a massive roof with it.

I think this may be what's partly inspiring the comment, which I think is a great one. In France, they've taken a kind of nationwide initiative on putting solar panels over parking lots, and it can be on a surface lot, so it doesn't require any additional structure. pictures of how they do it. And I do think it's something that could be done with minimal loss, maybe, of parking spaces. You might need support columns. There's a lot of precedent out there. If you just sort of look into it, I think that country is sort of leading the way.

I mean, I hear what you're saying with the business district parking lot. There's a lot of other parking lots. So maybe that's where they can go until the business district can figure out, is that going to be a second level or not? Because I understand that investment. But the others, why not? We're not looking at building parking throughout this theater or... There.

And it can be done without the town being established. The structure has to be designed well. There's time to design and design and build it. And even if you want an operation phase, so somebody else would get the revenue, offset the cost. There are lots of ways to structure it so that there's less impact to the town. Again, it's visible. We're selling a segment that we're not.

How, like, just a question, how would you, for what would the energy be used for that we're getting from the solar panels?

You have two options. You need to be very tight, so you have to reduce a lot of times the distortion out on the grid, or down in the middle to the south. So, for example, in the case of the Amazon Street Park, it occurs for a lot of time.

So it would be, like, kind of geographic? Like, wherever the solar panel would be, that would be where it's powering? Or it would be where it's powering. How much, like, just in general, if you want to make this an actionable item, once again, the money aspect of it, you said it's a good return on investment. But for the budget, for example, the budget, wasn't this year's budget already determined, more or less?

More or less, but it hasn't been put out. So we'll keep it recorded here in September.

Just to talk about the budget, the budget gets finalized at the end of September. However, throughout the year, we do budget amendments, you know, There are things that come up or funds get shifted around. So just because something isn't in the budget doesn't mean it can't happen. If there's funds there that are available in the reserves or elsewhere, it can happen.

So I think, generally, the council is in support of the solar panel and also the resilience officer and ship. And then I'm curious about just the best way that we can support people in our capacity. Does that look like pushing, like talking to our liaison and just advocating in that way? Or are there other ways that we can help you outside of it?

Initially, those are the two actions that I'm out there in being most beneficial. I would say to the Youth Council, if you pass a resolution,

calling you know asking the commission to do something that carries a lot of weight you know and then so you can formally ask us to do things and then that'll be it on our agenda and that you know it's nice too if you can come to the meetings uh but you don't have to in order to that's a resolution but um this ties back to the third bullet which is the chief resiliency officer which are all great ideas we can talk about all the dream ideas

but who's pushing them forward is tricky. If you don't ask that person, and you talk to their side, that this is their job to push them forward. Who's going to communicate a lot?

Who's going to talk to them about this program?

Is it you?

Is it me? Is it you? We haven't determined that. We'll agree, yay, but who's going to put it in action? Same thing with getting the events, people at the events, the volunteers. These were all wonderful, wonderful ideas, but I don't think you want to take all of this on, you know? So, or you, or you, so it's kind of like you're in support of it, but you've got it all on your plate. So that's why a third bullet is so important, and I think you're going to talk more about it, but you have to ask when you question all these ideas, and that's what it's interesting about.

One thing that I've learned about serving in office is simple, you need two votes. You have two votes, not for all banners, but I think the chair is saying, to the issues that we're talking about and if you could take them on. And we need to set the scale so that we can .

Where exactly is the, in the budget meetings, is there room right now for the Chief of Science Officer? Is that looking like it's going to pan out?

Oh, it's a long report. Just because we advocated and we're not successful yet, it doesn't mean that it's not helpful. All it takes is one more method to say no to that. This is good research. And it happens. So we've been talking about this for months now, and we've listened to our administrative leadership, and said, well, we really want a grant writer. So what we incorporate a grant writer into is a job searcher. Sometimes you have to take multiple runs. What we believe is this is the right initiative for a job searcher.

Just about the chief sustainability and resiliency officer, in terms of like the youth council helping you just with getting that one extra vote or just getting more support in general, like surveys, Just kind of looking at public opinion, because if the vote depends on whether or not it's good for Surfside, then why not ask the people who actually live in Surfside? Because obviously if it has to do with money, it has to do with taxpayer dollars, and if people think it's a waste of their money, then obviously it shouldn't happen. But if we get some sort of survey or evidence of public opinion being in favor of the officer, we don't have to make it sound fancy in any way, just be like, if you care about sustainability and you want to have a designated position in your local government pushing those ideas forward and not having them just be ideas, but actually having them be actionable things that you're going to see in your community play out, then express your support for it. Like a survey is the most basic idea, but if there are any other ways to gauge public opinion, I think that would be helpful with securing that last vote.

That is awesome. I would suggest not next order. What we have shared is not sufficient.

Please consider it.

The issue with that is that it went nowhere.

I even put it on the agenda for discussion because it was under discussed. You know, people filled out the survey. They wanted to know what happened. And basically, the commission voted to rent out the property. I did not support that, but it went by the journey.

Do you have, like, do you have, like, the data from that survey? It was successful to answer? It wasn't from us. Yeah, we have the data.

It was sent out. I believe it was e-mailed because I.

It was e-mailed? It was e-mailed and I missed it. Yeah, yeah.

And a lot of people filled it out. But, you know, sadly, it went nowhere. I mean, people voiced their opinion, and their opinion was ignored.

But, yeah, I mean, if that was actually, like, if people actually, I know the youth council planners put out a survey on youth's Instagram. We have flyers, we have other stuff. It didn't get great traction, but I think this meant that the ground number was very persistent. A lot of people lost a lot of Instagram. And I think if that actually helped people get the votes, then I think what Ella's saying is really important, like showing up to these meetings and being like, the people are behind us, like we want this in our town, like it's part of the same thing. And we can help design that survey and like, help with the social media aspect of it, if that's helpful to the town, or I don't know if that's something that they want to take over.

If we, well you said the manager had to approve that certain survey, but if the youth council wanted to go out and knock on doors, would that be something that we need permission for, or is it something we can just do and then present at the next commission meeting?

Well, it really can go in a different way than a survey. And what we don't want to do is just say, well, I have access. Maybe not. I'm not going to do it. It's just a current thing. And I have been using the platforms that have regularly used this information. I don't have any specific information. If we do that broad, then counting out, saying, hey, did you know all this? Yes, you can do whatever you want to do. But we wouldn't want to run contrary to what we hope will be a successful outcome.

So I'm going to try to... Can the survey be like at the town event where...

I just want it to be coordinated and message appropriately because we want it to be clear and we want to express the values of the statement. Why are we advocating for this? Why is it good for service? Because that can turn a public perception.

So if we came up with a wording for a survey and a strategy and presented it to Tom and Eric,

I would want to first see if the administration was wrong to it before we invest the time and energy. I think it's great. It's a great idea to say, we'll do it and do it. Are you open to do that? What does it mean? What does it mean? We're going to do it, but at the end of the day, you guys are going to go through with it.

Does that come with, like, going to, like, commission meetings and asking, like, can we do a survey? Like, is that what we need to do? Like, would you be, or go to the town manager?

Yeah, I would start with an official action on the council, an official action on the system authority committee, and see what reception is from the town administration.

As in, like, passing a resolution to, like, do a survey? Yeah.

Okay. I would frame it as Chief Resilience Officer. This is an initiative that we're supportive of. What we think would be valuable to have the most of the customer. We can engage that through the survey. We are willing to draft the survey question and champion it to the end.

Jackie, you're going to join the press section.

So whatever vehicle is just the most important.

Just to be fair, is there an alternative to a resolution?

Like, would that just be, like, going to the commission meeting, or?

Well, it could be having a discussion item on the point. We'll have a meeting, and then the action item is to send a message to the manager for this meeting. So you're saying, just to be clear,

You're saying they should present at a commission meeting. No.

At a youth council meeting. At a youth council meeting. How many total members of the youth council are there? Okay.

I was like, oh, okay, got it, okay, got it.

And if a ladder is drawn to a commission meeting with representatives of the youth councils.

I mean, resolutions are how we speak at the commission when we want to get the attention of other levels of government. So we want the US Postal Service to bring a post office back to Surfside, so we pass the resolution asking them to do that. That's not the only thing we do, but it does create a formal record of our request. one tool among many. So just keep in mind that that's a tool that you have.

Hi. Okay, so I'm the client at Walk & Talk.

I don't have an agenda. This is a group that does these climate walk-and-talks already.

They're headed by, do you know if I'm resilient?

Which we are.

Awesome. So anyway, I saw this was happening in Miami Shores. They are willing to come to the one that's really tight. So we need to... say we want to do it, and then, you know, and then who we're going to have to deal with. The Chief Resiliency Officer.

We would advocate that would be an administrative engagement and would offer our support to help. Okay. There's a challenge. We don't want to get out ahead of our electives. We want everything that we do to hopefully either be in alignment with their own end or change their mind about what we're going to do.

So in the case of this climate walk-in talk, this more of an event which generally a lot of the events are done through the Resort Tax Board is that community wants to make to the Resort Tax Board?

It makes a free event, so I don't want to do all events going through them.

No, not necessarily. So it's something that the board itself could put on.

Yeah, of course it does not, but this one, it really is an interface. So it's an engagement opportunity for our town, rather than for tourists.

Right. So that's something that the board itself could put on.

Yeah. It is making a recommendation to our liaison that the town engage with the commissioners, the directors that support it, they give directions to the manager, and the manager makes it happen. We make ourselves available.

I mean, I guess that's my question. Something like this, does it have to be approved by the commission? Or can it be an event that happens?

It would go through the manager, yeah. Especially if, forget that.

I mean, the town manager has a discretionary budget. So something like this would only really probably cost staff time and whatever, you know, water bottles or whatever. So I think that's something the manager can do.

And is this not something that would go to Parks and Rec? Or it would just be like hosted independently by sustainability? Don't you guys organize the 5K and stuff? Would this be something that Parks and Rec helps with, or is that something we can do independently? Because for our event, we did collaborate with Parks and Rec on it, so I just don't know if... That was just before we had the budget, so I guess we need... That's why I was asking if you wanted to go through Resort Tax Board.

And actually, it's not a bad idea for tourists to participate. But essentially, do you want this to go through a department or put on a plan?

I guess the question is, is there a cost for the speaker? Well, I'm sorry.

We have no problem if you guys give us a few days. I already have my calendar for the whole year, for the next fiscal year, for all of my events. So as long as it's not, I think I'll be able to meet more than ever. I have the staff, I have the locations.

Hey, guys, here's Tiffany's number. Call her. Send it up. Well, no, actually, I was going to say,

I'm sorry, if you could please speak into the mic. So I'm getting my flyer over to you. So if this is something Parks and Rec can do, then I would just put them directly in touch with the food processor and they can just do it.

Yeah, I just thought, I don't want to get into the needs and efforts. Let's bring the idea, the endorsement, and then let staff do what staff does, which is assign them to the food processor. Get the food commission engagement and the administration to sort that out.

Yeah, this is just an item that I just wanted some clarification on because I know that we set out a list of goals and priorities of medical indicators and I'm just wondering whose responsibility it is to be keeping up with each of these goals, making sure that we're meeting these goals. If that's something, I know that one of the indicators, I know that one of the indicators, it explicitly says something about sustainability, and the council following up on that, but there's so much of it, and I wanted to know if that's something we need to be doing in our own term this year, or if that's something that the town manager takes care of, and then also just, I guess the town manager's not here, but I wanted to ask if there was an update on why, like, so it's like, is it on YWO City's website yet, if anyone knows.

No, I was hoping we were going to get an update from you on the biofitted cities. The manager said we were accepted to the program, and that's all I heard.

Yeah. There was that one email that was a little, like, we did get in contact. I think either Angie or Genesis reached out and asked for the youth council to help create, like, a bio for... on some initiatives that we'd like to highlight, and we provided that, and then SurfSight created their own page talking about why we're the cities, and that's up to date, but having SurfSight on the back of the cities network officially hasn't been done yet, and I thought that was, I know that there was a little bit of hesitancy because we're the first town to join the network, but we provide the components necessary, like the town manager emailed us and asked us for the components and we sent them, so we just wanted an update to see what the whole of it was, I guess.

Yeah, we weren't updated. I remember we were asking at a commission meeting and the manager said, oh, I have good news, we were just accepted. So beyond that, I was hoping to get updated today. I'll get into it, yeah.

So that's something, okay, so is that something that you would be able to reach out to the town manager about, or is that something that we should be reaching out to the town manager about?

Yeah, both. You know, if you were communicating with him for the, you know, whatever materials were needed, I was left out of that conversation, so, you know, it's just okay, but, you know, I would just send a general follow-up, but you're welcome to send a follow-up as well.

Ella Garcia. Maybe we could just ask the time manager to get in touch with whoever communicated to him that the time was accepted. Because whoever said that must also know what the deal is with the website.

And then just in terms of the general, whose responsibility is to keep track of these things? Is that the town's? Is that the commission's responsibility?

It's not manager. Okay.

And I can forward you the email thread if that's helpful to you, just so you can have greater contact and reach out. But we'll also reach out to you kind of in the draft and update.

That's really all my input, just looking for clarification. Okay, so this is my chance to talk about quality of your audience.

Okay, if you don't mind, I have a few notes on my phone about this. Okay.

Well, to start off, if you hold a look at the zoning map, you can see that on the left side, you can see all these openings to the town, right? These are areas where I've been before. I walk my dog, and I look around, and I'll see half a little reading area, and this is where the class is. There's a lot we could be doing with these areas, such as pollinator gardens. I know we have them in the community center, but I'd like to see if we can get more, and specifically pollinator gardens with native plants. Native for pollinating plants. After my research on a lot of these plants, I have a list of seven right now that are not poisonous to any animals or children, and they're all very salt-tolerant, so they could survive the salt spray and possible flooding from the king flies. As a matter of fact, looking at the next item over here in our city survival heat, these pollinator gardens would actually help with the urban heat island effect, which definitely affects our site, due to all of our pavement, our buildings, everything. Having these gardens could also help with biodiversity, which I feel we're lacking when it comes to pollinators, so it would be really nice to have these. And it would benefit the environment, but the town in itself. It would improve the aesthetics of those areas, because from what I've seen, they're completely littered, and the only green to stay half are grass, and that's not exactly the best for the environment either. And, for a lot of interested residents, this would create a learning opportunity. As I talked with this whole recycling team over through Katie Rothman we were talking about, we could actually bring in and talk about these following-over plants and thinking about these seed packets. Because a lot of these plants are cheap. because they come from lower universities, or because they need seating practice. And they don't require much to work out of here. I have some research on this. I have a whole lot of thoughts. But they don't require watering from us alleys. Only some of them, which are really aggressive in their seating, would require occasional pruning during winter.

So I want to say, as a member of the authorities, plants. On this topic, there's some very good news to report. I don't know if you're aware, but the garden at 92nd Street and Bay Drive, it was recently built down, the curb there. We got a grant last spring from the Florida Wildflower Foundation to fund a redesign of the garden with just native plants. We put them in the ground two weeks ago. That's happening. I'm going to be working with the manager to get signage so that when people visit the garden, you can know what species it is. Because of the grant, we were required to do everything at the highest level. Just to tell you, we hired a native plant landscaping expert to design it, and then the design had to be approved by the Florida Native Plant Society. They actually rejected one of the flowers because they said, even though it's a Florida native, it was not in the 33154 zip code area before the arrival of Columbus. They were that strict about it. So we have the plants in place now. They look great. Every time it rains, I'm delighted because it's helping them get established. It is a lot of work, though. And so actually, one of the things, I mean, right now, I'm kind of going to be weeding the garden myself. So I'm going to try to put together a volunteer group with the community gardeners. identified volunteers. So that's going to be kind of a pilot project. I'm also hoping that the same landscaper can come in, and they have designs for some of those traffic islands that were recently built on Bay Drive. I don't know if you're familiar with them at Garland Avenue. Yeah, there's some new, right, not exactly roundabouts, but like triangles where Bay Drive hits an avenue. the asphalt was replaced with a planter. So we want to try to put the same kind of native plantings in there with the same signage to create a little network. It's a lot of work, though, because it does require a lot of meaning. And so one of the things I'm trying to work on, and we have that demonstration garden, is to make sure that can work. So we've got to scale it up. And I would love to talk to you about this. And just to give you a sense of what's involved, because I'm learning about this as I go, the town has a landscaping contract with this company, Brightview. And they do all the maintenance of all the plants on town-owned property. But it's like, they're a totally different kind of landscaper. They're like corporate. They come in and chop palm fronds and they leave. They want to spray pesticides. They don't put in weed killing chemicals. It's all hand weeding. You have to get that going, especially if you want pollinators to thrive there. I love the idea. I want to expand it, but I'm working really hard to make sure that it can work in that corner garden, and then maybe we expand to the traffic triangles. And then I hope it can build a momentum for more. But I would love to talk to the council and to you in particular if you have an interest about this. I can also put you in touch with some organizations locally that specialize in this. But yeah, I'm really excited.

Is it just for that park? Because I was wondering about the different traffic circles that are sitting without plants. Right.

So the grant was just for the park because the budget for the park exceeds the grant. So we kind of spun that off as a separate project. For the traffic planters, that would be separate, something that the town would fund. But it shouldn't be that expensive. So we're still talking about that with the manager. But we wanted to get those plants in the ground ASAP, and so we broke off the garden from there.

So Sophia, what you're talking about is the street ends by the bay. So this would be like a little kind of garden there? Absolutely.

I'd like it to be on the side so it's not just starting to stop in the path. but on the side, so people could learn about the science as long as it was themselves, it wouldn't get in the way of people walking there, because I'm right in the piece, and if it would be, you know, to me, I wouldn't want that. So if it were on the side, it probably won't show up to people's paths.

Right, so it would be on the side, but on the public property, yeah.

So, well, we have some good news.

I don't know if you heard. Commissioner Steinberg, she's our district county commissioner, She's giving some funding to Surfside. So, yeah, it's $25,000. So we want to do something, you know, the mayor has a lot of plans.

That's a lot of plans.

Well, the mayor has a lot of plans and the idea is to do something that would be, you know, for the community and also to recognize her at the same time. So, you know, that escaped from her. So that's a possibility because he was looking at those empty traffic circles and I wasn't sure if it was gonna duplicate the project that the Mission of Obustity had started. So, you know, I don't wanna duplicate that, but I thought that was a nice idea and this is maybe a better idea to extend it into the street end. So that's something they could look at.

I do want to say, I think just as a big fan of pollinators, I don't think you or anybody who might be attending the meeting or listening to it should fear the bees. They are not a threat. And actually, a lot of native bees don't even sting. It's just honeybees. And even then, that's rare. So when people make pollinator gardens, you don't have to worry too much about keeping them away from people. It's actually, I think what you want is places where people can go and see the plants and experience them. So in that vein, I want to maybe mention another site in town that I'm eyeing for a possible future project. Just to give you a sense of it, if you're traveling around town, you might have a look. You know where the Top Lot is? I'm sure some of you played there, perhaps. I did myself once. On 90th Street, outside the fence of the Top Lot, there's some landscaping. There's some sable palms, and there's some lilies, I think. And that's classic bright view landscaping. It's meant for people to drive by. There's nowhere to sit. Nobody goes in there. It's just big sculptural stuff that you see. That kind of space could be really nicely used for a butterfly or pollinator garden. So we have to rethink how we use those spaces. But really, it should be. Ideally, we want pollinator gardens that people can be in, too. And there's really no conflict there, I promise.

Sorry. My idea about the size was also to prevent children from rampaging over them. It's not only a matter of keeping the pollinators away from the people, because some people aren't as courteous to plants and animals as most of us are. And they might end up rampaging or trying to eat the plants.

So, I mean, I can have some thoughts for you. So, thank you for acknowledging that the Pauline Garden is at the community center. That was an issue many years ago. Was Neely Jackson the speech therapist at the K-Rock? I had her. So it was part of the line. I mean, they're from France, but they're a big part. But it was their initiative to have a series of pollinator gardens themselves. and that's how we . The town still supports the Surfside Urban Gardeners, so it is not inappropriate to ask them to carry some of the sway here. Communicating the value is incredibly important in moving these initiatives forward. So connecting the two, while we have the connector on the ocean side, here's an opportunity to activate those locations. Do you have one or other last names? You're right. They do the job that they're told to do. They're not going to care for only a garden. They're not going to be in that location. They're going to do other work, but they're certainly not going to do that. I think they're probably not going to do that. When the Northern Garden was established, the landscaping contractor at the time donated fruit trees and dug holes and it was an activity that was sometimes read about in the sources that were returned to plant the fruit trees at the student house. So the whole idea was to activate a tournament for community amenity in a different direction. The last thing is, another mechanism, something that I mentioned earlier, we have a person, a portion of us, which you can qualify for a reason to be on sustainability, but you still play an active role by preparing the sustainability program that you're using. Do you have a youth council?

We don't have a monthly section, but we've asked you. You've contributed before, yeah.

It's just last time. Is it quite new? So, on this, how can we help you? Honestly, it really depends on funding and assistance actually occurs in place. I know it would be cheap and not be very expensive,

and there's a bunch of nurseries across Florida that sell foreign native plants. And actually getting this done because I know that a team of eight people will be able to.

And with that sort of come, I think maybe what Jerry was saying was that the test run is

happening right now and so maybe we can support him with that before starting our own initiative and like branching out into this and just show our helping with the community garden and then branching out to these other basements that process is already done so I think that if you need volunteers we can like I don't know if that's a good So I think that sort of being involved with what you're doing, learning more about the process before we branch out into doing it in these new areas.

I'd love to invite anybody here, if you ever want to do a walk through the garden, I'm available. I'd love to show you what's happening there. But I would also, yeah, maybe I'll talk to the manager about organizing an event with the youth council or something. We could do like a little gardening morning and I can kind of show you what's going on and talk a little bit about it. Because it really is about, there's a lot of, you know, just general public education. And that's the point of the grant. This is a demonstration garden from the Florida Wildflower Foundation. They want us to use it to educate people. And so... We do kind of have to start small. I don't know if any of you ever go to Miami Shores. I don't know if you know the Brockway Library on Second Avenue in Miami Shores. They have a garden there that is kind of like the model for this one. That's kind of what inspired me to apply for the grant. It's small, but when you think about it, a lot of work goes into that little space. It's just like the side of the garden there. If you're ever in that area, it's the Brockway Library. It's like they have their own city library. It's just called that. B-R-O-C-K-W-A-Y. But if you go on the south side of it, they have the whole thing done with native plants. The same landscaping firm that did our 97th Street Garden. So you can get a sense of what the scale is. And then we try to ramp up from there. I should also mention another nice event that we might be able to collaborate on. I have... I even have, well, when we redid the garden, we had to take out a lot of plants, including some natives, because they were not planted well. So I'm actually babysitting some potted plants that will be ready to give away in about two months. They said they need about two months to reestablish their roots. So I want to have at least a giveaway of those, and then maybe the town, I don't know, we can find a way to kick in some extra money and have a plant giveaway of Or if you said passion vine, a great butterfly flower, something like that would be very cheap. But it could be a really nice opportunity to spread the word. So maybe that's another thing we can look at.

So I guess we can move on to the last demo item. Can our city survive the heat with documentary screening? So just to give some context on this, after our Youth Environmental Summit with Senator Sharpen Jones, one of his legislative aides texted in our group chat for organizing about this short PBS documentary called Can Our City Survive the Heat? mostly about the urban heat island effect. And we're mentioned in it as one of the three main cities in the US that suffer from this. So it's really only a 25-minute documentary. So one of the A's, he just suggested that we find a way to implement this into our community, especially because we're trying to be more and more focused on sustainability after we've done with our state's network and all that. He mentioned a documentary screening, but I think for something that's 25 minutes long, creating an entire event for it is not as productive as we think it would be, also turnout-wise. So I was just thinking maybe we could link it in the Surfside website. Like we were mentioning, we could add this entire sustainability section, talking about all our updates Or we could put a clip on the Instagram or something like that. But that's just something I want to bring to the table. Maybe even we could watch it in another joint workshop and discuss it. But yeah. Any thoughts on that?

I actually have an idea for that. Just listening to you now. The climate walk. How that... Tell you what, the climate walk, like, you know, do the climate walk and then maybe have the screening afterward with refreshments or, you know, so that's, you know, it's going to be just these two committees, yeah.

Community center. Yeah. So, yeah. Where would I email that to? Like, who would you guys want me to email the link? Because it's on YouTube.

Okay. Well, I was just going to say that once we finalize the walk and talk, the date and the timeline, understanding the planning, that that would come up. But I think that if, are you the point person about that walk and talk?

I mean, I've been communicating with the person, but Daniel knows her. I mean, yes, both of us know Tiffany Thompson, the counselor, so we have... If I can introduce her to somebody to set it up, she'll set it up. Is she a member of the Sustainability Committee? She works for FIU and she's the founder of Resilience.

If you could speak into the microphone, please.

She's one of the founders of Resilience 305, but she's also with FIU. I don't know her long title, but it's Resilience and Sustainability.

Okay, let's see if we're, well, whenever, I guess as we get to know more about when that climate walk and talk is happening, we'd love to contribute, and especially, I think, if this is something we want to pursue, especially helping the documentary scene.

Right. Maybe we can have even a question and answer kind of discussion, you know, what can we do on this first side? What's next? So I was kind of thinking of

since we're in the exhibit, maybe having it in the visual of the community center and then if there's some sort of common walk-and-talk or swimming, like do a little walk on the beach path and then just bring it back into the screen and like you were saying, it's just kind of all tied in there. I don't mean to be too much of a big event, but big enough that it can still happen. We can go to the demonstration. We can walk to there. There's already a map of recreational spaces, but we could then walk along the bay and have a discussion of the importance of the bay and the opportunity to activate these underutilized spaces in a sensible way. We're really all good at creativity. We're totally in line.

Do you love all these blocks? Are we proving it's a fun size town? In December. Yeah.

Sorry, just some more points that we can do. We're at the Omni in your garden. I remember we were talking about composting around here. Would it be possible to use that compost as fertilizer for gardens? Because assuming we actually get these pollinated gardens done near the bay, we can't use fertilizer. And we're getting a little bit of nitrogen and phosphorus from the technology pool, so could we use the compost as an actual fertilizer?

Awesome. I have a statement.

about composting too if there's an interest in that that's another interest of mine and i've been um having some conversations with the north beach compost hub on 85th street about some possibilities for programming so this is still early stage stuff but just mentioning in case anybody wants to talk about it you know or follow up uh ella garcia actually

With my ecology club at Miami Beach Junior High School, we're trying to make our big project this year that we're going to start collaborating with the Miami Beach Botanical Gardens with composting. I'm actually meeting with them on Thursday for the first time, trying to figure out what would be the best way to get high school kids to contribute. Instead of setting up an entire composting system at our school, probably what's going to end up happening is that we're going to create a place where they can put their organic waste in one place, and then monthly we bring it to the botanical gardens. But like you mentioned, North Shore, we could do something like that.

So that is a project of the Miami Beach Botanical Gardens. So I don't know if you've seen it. There's a compost drop-off site on 85th and Collins, on the west side of Collins. The NBBG runs it. My understanding is that they are temporarily having to pause the composting at the main garden. They're doing all of it in North Beach. It's three blocks from Surfside. There's a lot of opportunities there. Actually, there is an agenda item on the September 9th commission meeting. I was going to ask the commission for a donation to the North Beach Compost Hub that could help support programming with us. So that's something, too, where I could use, you know, if people are interested in that and they want to support it, that meeting would be, you know, a good place to mention that or talk to your commissioners about it.

Regarding the composting, Compost for Life came to the sustainability committee and spoke about their program. We found their program to be a little on the costly side, and we need to find out who before the 1960 park and had great results. So I think if there's a way for the town maybe to partner with them. I think we need to look at a few different options because compost for life is great. They have these cute pink buckets but it's costly and I don't see that going over. I'd love to get a compost program in the town because it needs to be Listen, people are about convenience here. So, you know, I think it's something we need to explore more, what would work best.

And then just a bit informational for anybody who's new to the topic. So with composting, a community compost site like the North Beach Compost Hub, which I encourage everybody to check out, is really just for food scraps, like vegetable food scraps, and like house plant waste, not even yard waste. very narrow kind of thing. I have a little bucket in my freezer and then every once a week I drop it off there. Yard waste doesn't go there. Cardboard doesn't go there. It's very narrow. There's many levels at which you can try to implement a composting program. One is like, can we do something with pizza boxes? That's going cart it off to a facility that does it. So one thing for you to think about if you want to make recommendations in this area is what's the scale of the composting? The North Beach thing would be just for people to drop off their food waste mainly then. And no meat, nothing like that, just vegetable scraps.

So just so that we're clear on the option items, Can I just go over what we have? Just make sure we're on the same page. So for the 2A, we are going to be making recommendations regarding the chief resilience officer as well as proving our, also the, okay. And also trying to, to come up with a survey within that recommendation. I think that we recommend that there be a survey conducted and we're willing to help. Also, maybe starting to work on a website page that includes FAQs, starting to lay the seats to go to the Pembroke County facility to get footage for a PSA video that we can potentially make in general social media. for the second item is making another it's making a recommendation that we support the kind of walk and talk and that we want to do this documentary screening afterwards third item is just reaching out to town manager for an update and the fourth item is sort of collaborating with commissioner will to say he is more about these polyamorous and how we can help him

so that we don't have to unpack for information if we can copy on the youth council's agenda what we're doing, that we just stay in close communication so that we maintain alignment, so that we're supporting the willingness, the initiative. We've already got five in the last person. I think it's going to be helpful. Maybe in other ways. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. They could.

It's not because each number is voted by a different commissioner. It's Commissioner Velazquez. So it's really up to her when it gets ratified by the full commission. But it's up to her who selects.

Thank you.

Give me your motion. It's a workshop. It's a workshop.

So, you know, during like 6.59 p.m.