Planning Commission - Regular Meeting

Good

evening. I would like to call the order of the infrastructure planning and sustainability committee meeting of 12/10/2025. Clerk, will you please call the roll?

Vice chair Diaz?

Absent. Councilmember Bushnell? Present.

Councilmember Pines? Here.

Clerk, has anyone signed up to speak virtually or in person? Neither. Okay. As always, if we feel like people pop in late and want to give public comment, we will circle back at the

end of the meeting, but we

will dive into our briefing items. We are gonna start with our Landmarks Preservation Commission application review, and I'd like to call on Nicole Emery, our city clerk, who is online.

Good good afternoon or evening, chair Walker, members of IPS. Today, you'll be reviewing one application for an individual seeking a professional position and two applications for individuals seeking reappointment to Landmarks Preservation Commission. At this time, there are additional positions available for a professional position and also an architect position. However, no qualified application applicants applied, and those will remain vacant at this time. Once you've reviewed the applications, you may make motions to the full city council your recommendation for appointment or reappointment. And Ruben is in the room and myself are available for any questions you may have.

Great. Thank you, Nicole, and thank you, Ruben, for being here. I just wanna make a note on the first applicant, Maddie Levesque or Leveque, probably. We did interview her previously for another commission, so that was why we felt comfortable appointing her without another asking her to go through another interview. So I will give everyone a moment to look through the materials. And if there's any questions for the clerk or Ruben, just please raise your hand, and we'll get it answered before we take the votes. Yeah. Go ahead, council member.

You, chair. Just wanted to make an observation and thinking about our outreach. There is very little folks from District there's zero folks from District 4, only one person from District 5. And so I think that maybe if there's opportunities to fill the vacancy that we do with the more targeted outreach and folks that those districts. Great.

I'll for your help on that a little bit. Absolutely. There will be two open positions as we head out of this meeting even if we appoint all of these. So if Clark, I'm correct me if I'm wrong. If we had a pool of great candidates in a couple months, we don't have to wait a full year to open this back up again.

No. We can accept applications at any time. We typically only do the recruitment process once a year, but we can we can work on that.

Great. Well, we'll circle back. I I don't want this to be a direction from the committee right now, but we'll circle back in the New Year and and maybe do a little more recruitment in the first quarter or something. So let's chat about that. Absolutely.

I'd love to help.

Any other questions, comments, Krista? If not, I'd be happy to take a motion.

Go ahead.

I move to recommend the appointment of Maddie Levesque to the professional one position on the landmark preservation finish to serve the three year term to expire 12/31/2028.

Second.

It's been moved and second. Any final questions or comments? Seeing none, all those in favor, please signify by saying aye.

Aye.

Aye. The motion carries. Is there another motion for reappointment?

I move to recommend the reappointment of Sarah Hillsen Hillsdenger Hills Hillsdenger actually at large four position on Landmark Preservation Commission to serve a three year term effective 01/01/2026. It expired 12/31/2020. Second.

It's been moved and seconded. Any final questions or comments? Seeing none, all those in favor signify by saying aye.

Aye.

The motion carries. And the final motion.

I move to recommend the reequipment of Anahita Buderick to to the architect to position of the Landmarks Preservation Commission to serve a three year term effective 01/01/2026 to expire 12/31/2020. Second.

It's been moved and seconded. All those in favor or sorry. Any final questions or comments on that one? Alright. All those in favor, please signify by saying aye.

Aye.

Aye. The motion carries. We have two reappointments and a new member of the Landmarks Preservation Commission. A big thank you to those who stepped up to serve again, and thank you to room with Snyder staff for both all your work on the commission and in the office, but also walking us through this process and making sure it was smooth. People will circle back in the New Year to work on a little bit of recruitment for the especially District 4, but maybe some other recruitment for those other seats.

So thank you. Alright. As promised, moving on to our big presentation here. We are this is our clean energy implementation plan update, and we have Omaz Nagash, our principal data analyst from Takoma Power here to give us a presentation, and it is informational only. We don't have a vote today. I am gonna ask you to move one seat this way just because the mic is right there just so we can make sure. So but take it away.

Alright. So good. I'm not sure if it's afternoon or evening. Yeah. Kinda dark outside. Chair members of the IPS. I'm on Masdigesh, and I'm in I work in the long term planning group in Tacoma Power within power management. Today, I'm gonna talk to you. So who's moving the slides? That's the most so I'll just, like, signal to you when I'm ready. Okay. I hope there's no animations in there. I don't think there are. So I'm gonna talk to you a little bit about our clean energy implementation plan. You can go ahead and go to the next slide because we do a little bit of background.

This plan is something it's it's a requirement that comes out of CEDA, the Clean Energy Transformation Act, which was passed about five years ago. One of the requirements most people know that CEDA requires utilities in Washington to serve, by 2030, 80% of their load with clean energy, and by 2045, 100%. Another requirement within, CETA is to ensure an equitable transition. And so this, clean energy implementation plan is a plan that spells out how the utility is gonna meet those, both clean energy goals of CETA as well as the equitable transition part. So that's what I'm presenting to you today is, our our CEIP.

So, we can go ahead. All the other stuff, we'll get into it later because I

tend to have a gift of gab, so I'm trying

to get through this in twenty minutes. So, so we'll start with the clean energy goals. As I mentioned before, we're required to serve, 80% of our load with, clean energy by 2030. And as we can see in the top table, we are already we're expecting to meet, through this compliance period 94%, so we are well above the 80%, minimum that we required. So we're really doing well in terms of our clean energy targets.

The second, table just spells out, like, in megawatt hours, how much renewable, how much energy efficiency, how much demand response we're expecting to use over this compliance period. But, again, the main idea from this slide is that we are well above the minimum 80% that we are supposed to meet in terms of our clean energy target. So if we go to the next slide, this slide and everything after it now is looking at the part which is the equitable transition. So for equitable transition, of course, we need to have some metrics and indicators to ensure that that everybody is benefiting from the the clean energy system. But I'll stop I'll step through this step by step.

The state requires us to have a a public process. Public processes are required as part of long term planning in general, but one of the the the things that they required through this process was that we convene our community and have them define for us who the most vulnerable in our communities are. Because, again, CEDAR requires us to have this equitable transition, and so we're supposed to be ensuring that the most vulnerable are unduly burdened. So we have to know who they are. And so if we go to the that was one of the main things that we convened the stakeholder group to uncover.

So if you go to the next slide, the this is talking about the named communities. And this is a this is a term that utilities have come up with. It doesn't actually exist in the law. What's in the law is the term vulnerable population and highly impacted communities. And so utilities use this term named communities to sort of collectively talk about all of the communities that were named in the law in CETA. But we'll now just step through, the the definition of vulnerable population. So that's one more. I guess we do have some animation. Sorry. And one more.

Yes. That second part is what we really are looking at. They when we convened our stakeholders, they came up with a list, honestly, a a much longer list than this to define, the characteristics of our most vulnerable, populations. But these were the characteristics that we had data for, that we could measure and track, and so we started with these. The first one you can see, I'm sure you're familiar with the Tacoma equity index.

And so they they said we should focus on two components of that equity index, the environmental health and the economic components. And if those two are very low, then that meets the criteria of vulnerable. People who live in a heat island, folks who are struggling to pay their bills, low income seniors, disabled, and then folks who rely on electricity for medical equipment. So those were all folks that we have data we can track, this stuff. The next step so that's who we define as vulnerable.

Someone with one or more of those characteristics. The next category of people, that the CETA tells us that we need to look out for are the highly impacted communities, and we don't define that. The state defines that, and it's defined as being one of two criteria. You are either in a census track covered partially or completely by Indian country, or you're in a census tract that scores nine or 10 on the Washington Department of Health environmental, health disparities map. And that environmental health disparities map is very, very similar to Tacoma equity index.

So as you can imagine, there's some overlap between the these two definitions. And so when you when we look at our service area, that pie chart just breaks down what percentage of our our population or our customers are highly impacted communities, vulnerable population. And that dark blue is where they overlap, but there's actually some overlap. But you can see it's over 50% fall into that category of vulnerable populations. So what are we gonna be doing to ensure that everybody benefits from the clean energy, that the benefits are equitably spread, and that burdens are, not unduly, borne by these named communities.

So that's where we get into the the next slide. We we came up with a list of, areas that we should be focusing on and tracking. This was in, collaboration with our stakeholders. We asked our customers, what are the things that we should be looking at and tracking to make sure everybody's benefiting? What's important to you? And they came up with three broad categories. Again, this was a collaboration. This is also some input from internal staff. But it was affordability, reliability, and then direct customer benefit. So and for direct customer benefits, that can be, like, conservation programs and electric vehicle assistance program.

You know, something that's, a direct benefit to an individual customer and not some of the the broad, like, reliability or, you kind of benefit to all. And so, what I'm gonna do now is just those are the the the the broad categories. Instead of defining the individual metrics, I'll just go through one by one and show you the data. We we looked, between 2022 and 2024. So we look even though this plan is our 2026 to 2029, we look back so that as we go, you know, forward in time, we can compare and see how we're, improving on this, metric over time.

So this is baseline stuff. This is these are just, know, we're we we look back over time and we measured these, a a few metrics. But if there's something that's not good in there, it's the baseline and the ideas are supposed to improve on that. Any questions before I, start digging into data stuff now? We're about to get to charts and graphs and stuff.

Question. Sure. Just on the process. What when did this start? Like, is this the past year or the past several years? Or what where are we in time?

Yes. So this we started this early this year, January, February, it was approved the plan was approved by the board in October October 22. And it's a plan that we have to do every four years. So this is the second CEIP. The first one we we submitted in 2021.

K. Thank you. Any other

questions? Okay. So let's do our first our first little chart there. So we have two metrics that we looked at in terms of affordability. So the first one was looking at customers who have a a service disconnection or whose bill had gone to collections.

So this is clearly somebody struggling to pay their bills. And we wanted to see because we by definition, if you are struck if you had a bill that went to collections or your your electricity got cut off, you're already considered a vulnerable population by our definition. So we looked even deeper and split split up between, tenants and homeowners to see if there was any extra vulnerable populations even within our vulnerable populations. And as we can see in 2022, this was a very turbulent time period. Right?

Coming out of the pandemic, all of the more the the shutoff moratoria had ended, so there was a spike in shutoffs. So that was an abnormally high amount of, shutoffs and bills that went to collection. So it was 10%, of the tenants and, of of these happened in the tenant, population and 3%, in the owner homeowner population. 2023 is when we got utility the utility got a huge influx of bill assistance and, and and was able to pay down some of this stuff. And so it went down significantly lower.

In fact, the the tenant population, which we know struggles the most, actually got a little bit more of that help. And so it went down, it was actually a little bit further lower. It was 1.5% versus 2.6% for the homeowners. And then, of course, 2024, so sort of like another, you know, recalibrating year if you if you wanna call it that. So, again, we're seeing the, tenants who have, are are more likely to experience a shutoff or their bills into collection.

And this is just something that we're gonna track over time. Again, like, this this was a very dynamic period of time, and we'll probably see something different moving forward. But the goal is we don't want to see any disparities where, renters are and and if we see that renters are are more likely to struggle to pay their bills, then the idea is that we wanna find ways that we can, create programs specifically specifically for renters. And you'll see a little bit of that, towards the end. Any questions before we go to the next, affordability metric?

Go ahead. Is that okay?

Assistance in 2024?

I know it's turbulent, but I wasn't quite sure why.

No. No. No. We back up.

No. No. No. It's it's just affordability is just overall hard. It it's just a hard time to Hard

timing effects.

Yeah. It's just

the environment. Guess.

Yeah. Years then. Okay.

Yeah. So, yeah, I I I understand why, like, you know, some of the things, why it went up a little bit and down a little bit, but, like, the the explaining away the 2024, I it's it's just times are hard.

Do we have information in the time period prior to, say, the the pandemic as a way to kind of normalize, like, the four years ending in 2019 perhaps?

Yeah. You know what? So, yes, we could we could actually do that. Do I think we would yes. So that's the short question.

Is should we expect that the normal noise or run rate is 5%?

Honestly, I I I I think what we see in 2024 is more likely to be what we see moving forward than what we saw at 2019. But it's always worth it to to go back and just see what 2018, '19, and '17 looked like. But I don't see, like, prices getting cheaper for everything, anytime. So, that's just unfortunate. But but to answer your question, yes, we can look at previous years. Any other questions? And, again, this is shutoffs and bills sent to collections. Alright. So then we'll go to the next one. This is just another, dynamic.

This was this was not the metric we wanted. What we really wanted to measure was energy burden, which is the percentage of a customer's income that they're spending on energy, and that could be electricity and gas, or both. However, we don't we don't we don't have enough data to calculate that for each individual customer. So this is just a a proxy for right now. And so we wanted to to see if, if you look at the the amount of money that a customer is paying per square foot of their home, are are named communities paying more per square foot of home than the nonnamed communities?

That was the question. So the first three bars, the blue, orange, and gray, those are named communities, either vulnerable population, highly impacted, or you fall fell into both categories. And then the yellow is just you're not part of the named communities. And what we saw is, the interesting thing that came out of this is, yes, they are paying more. That that we just see that.

But what's more interesting is that their bills are more variable. On the left side, this is what I should have pointed out. On the left, we have electrically heated homes, and on the right, we have, gas heated homes. So if your home is electrically heated and so much like, the bulk of your bill is is is heating bill in the winter, what you see is that the vulnerable the the named communities have a lot of variability. 2024 was the hottest year on record, and look what the bills were.

They were lower. Right? They didn't have a lot of heating bill. It was actually like, you can have your bill can fluctuate, but it could be twice as much next year than it was this year. And if you're a vulnerable population with a low income, for example, that's that that that swing can be, like, impactful, really impactful. So that but we noticed that it for the ones with yellow, they're not they're kinda steady. Like, it doesn't really change from year to year depending on weather. And most of that has to do with the type of home you live in. Is it energy efficient? Does it have a great envelope and it's able to keep the heat in or the the the cold out?

And then, of course, the on the right is for the, gas heated homes. As you can see, it's not so much variability because, again, at least in their electric bill, their gas bill might be doing all sorts of things. But in the electric bill, it's it's not as as varied. It's varied. Any questions before we move on to the reliability metrics?

Are you

sure you wanna ask your questions now, or do you think they might be answered on the next slide? Oh. Don't wanna I think it's on this one. Okay. Can Go ahead.

I was

nervous about you.

I'm happy to answer the question twice. That's not

fair. We

don't wanna be here all night.

Oh, you know what?

Go ahead, Kathleen. We just wanted understand if if Blue is supposed to be both highly impacted community and multiple populations, I would expect the metric to be an average of the two, not a number much higher. So I don't understand why that metric is so much higher. You're looking at a cost per square feet of heating. Right? Like, I don't expect to be $3.10. I expect it to be some number between a dollar 11 and a dollar 95.

Yeah. So we're we're looking at those folks as a whole group. I I probably shouldn't have even broken them out like this. So if you're in that dark blue category, it just means that you had some characteristic from that list of five that was vulnerable population, as well as some characteristic from the, highly impacted community as well. So it means you just you have characteristics from from from both of those. And it could have been like, there's there it's not I wanna say, it's just it's not as simple as just being between them. It just means

the best answer is if you can just send me the actual underlying data. I think that was Okay.

Okay. Okay.

How's my rent? It's probably

isn't isn't finance. So my

so I'm looking at these two charts. What I am not to assume is that it is cheaper to heat my home with gas than it is with electricity. It's just that my electricity bill is slower because I'm not you know, I have to to heat my

Yeah. It might very well be cheaper to heat your house with gas, but that's not what this is showing. This is this is just showing the other we're We're we're not we're capturing.

Yep. And someone whose home is probably heat by electricity and heated by electric heated by gas that has probably make a lot of sense your electric bill will be lower. Exactly.

But we're also what we're seeing is that that stark variability in the electric bill just doesn't exist when you're for a gas. It might be there for the gas bill, but, again, we we're not a gas company.

You're not.

Okay. Thank you.

Sure. We'll go on to the reliability then. So for reliability, we essentially are looking at two metrics. We first took a look at all of the customers who actually had an outage during these three years. And we wanted to see were our named communities more likely to experience an outage or no. Were they were their outages more frequent or did they last longer? So the the left hand side shows, again, the the first three bars. Should not have separated them because we are looking at them. It doesn't matter if you fell into vulnerable, highly impacted, or you fell into both categories. We see them all as one, one group, as our named communities.

So we do those three bar are those three bars higher than the yellow bars, what we were looking at? Are they do they have more frequent outages? And the answer was no. That they're just about the same as everybody else. And as far as the duration, which is on the right, are they more likely to have a a longer duration? The answer is still no. There will be a year or there where, yes, you know, one you know, a part of the population does actually have that, but this is not a trend at all. By and large, they're not more likely, to have a a outage, more frequent or more, or a longer duration outage. So this is actually good. This is a good result.

And then we got two more slides, and then you guys can get out of here. But any questions? Mhmm. No questions? Okay. So the the next one was looking at direct benefits. And and for we have two things that we're looking at, bill assistance and then programs that we actually provide to customers. This is showing our two bill assistance programs. And what we wanna do like, the goal is everybody who's eligible for assistance gets assistance. So our metric that we're looking at is participation ratio.

That yellow not yellow. The orange line at the top shows the number of customers that are eligible for for that particular program. As you can see for the bill assistance, bill credit assistance program, it's almost 40,000 customers that are, eligible, but only 20% of them are of that eligible population are actually benefiting from that. So we have a lot of work to do outreach to make sure that people are getting assistance that they qualify and are eligible for. And for the low income elderly and disabled, that it's at 55%.

But, again, it's it's well below what we want to to achieve. So, again, these are just metrics, and this is these are all baseline numbers, and we're gonna continue to track these over time to make sure they're not, ideally that they're improving, but definitely that they're not worsening over time.

Okay. I have two quick questions.

Go ahead, council member Scott.

Are these two is the low income elderly a subset of VCAP?

Yeah.

Or are they two separate? So I should think of those They're separate. Additive. Yes. That that the total real population of someone that can get some sort of help.

Because around I could

think of it in my head as 38,000 plus 10,000. Yes. Twenty twenty two. Okay. And and this you can give me separately. I would love to know what that is as a percentage of all of our customers.

Yeah. So we have we have about a 100 and ish thousand customers. Okay.

So when the 20 something percent range, 25 are eligible, and a much smaller population are taking advantage

of that.

And and was gonna say about 20,000 of those are businesses, and and and so I believe it's more like a 150.

And 50 is

So it's about 30. Yeah.

About a 30. So about 30 ish. Yeah. Percent could be eligible for one or two of these. And at most in one of those programs, we're getting about 50% participation. So there is actually quite a bit

of There's some room for

the kinda being left on the table.

Yes. Okay. Great. Thank you. Yes. And then finally, we go to the last slide. This is where a lot of the work happens in power management, which is where I reside. I'm not in the conservation group, but they're in the same, division as me. But this is looking at programs that we offer to our community. We offer incentives for, energy efficiency upgrades for, like, stuff for electric vehicle chargers, like, sorts of things that customers can, can participate in and benefit from.

And so, again, we wanna see, is the participation rate for our named communities about the same as it is for everybody else? And, again, got the first three bars that we're comparing to the yellow, and it's fairly comparable. It again, our main communities can be a little bit less likely to benefit, but, we're actually really pleased with, with how how large the participation rate is right now. We'd love for it to be to to to to get better, but this is actually a a really good a really good baseline. But, again, it's about three to 5% for for named communities as well as for nonnamed communities.

That I think that one's kind of self explanatory, just participation rate. We can probably go on to the the last slide. So this is this is the the, at the end of the plan, we're required to come up with some action items. And so the first one is around our stakeholder engagement. We actually had some really good stakeholder engagement. Actually, the first two are around stakeholder engagement. Recent changes in Tacoma policy allowed us to provide incentives for folks with lived experience that, like, can't afford to take off work, and so we were able to provide some incentives and got more, feedback and input. So that was great.

And we're gonna continue to

do that moving forward. We had, of course, remember, we've identified renters as being an extra vulnerable population within our vulnerable populations, and so we have some conservation programs that we're gonna start expanding so that more renters have access to it. And then finally, we're starting to we have developed over this year an equity analysis framework. So anytime we have a new, investment that we're gonna be investing in our distribution system or whatever, we wanna make sure that we're not, degrading these metrics that we've developed. So we've got a process to to now identify, assess any new projects.

And that's pretty much it. The last two slides are summary slides where I tell you what I told you. But if you remember what I told you, you can skip those two. You all can go home a little early. It's basically saying we're we're, like, we are killing it in terms of renewable energy. We're way above our our target, and we have an action for equitable transition. We've got an action plan in place for that.

Great. Well, thank you so much for coming with all this good data. I think I'm the the outreach and understanding the vulnerable communities and highly impacted communities. Such good work, and I feel like so valuable to everything. You kinda noted that at the end. Like, this isn't just about clean energy. It's we we learn things that we can implement across the organization. Help me tie this back to the clean energy plan, specifically clean energy implementation plan that I have not seen how it that ties together or ties into our clean energy goals. Seems like great community outreach.

So we are required part of the plan, remember, said it has

two components. There's how are

we getting a certain percentage of our load met by clean energy, and then how are we ensuring that everybody is benefiting? And so the the they require us to go through like, all of this that we've done is part of this it's a requirement of the clean energy implementation plan within, under CETA. So they require us to do this community outreach, identify who are the vulnerable populations, and then create metrics so that we can track whether or not they are, like I said, we're always comparing those populations with everybody else so we can make sure that nobody's getting left behind, and that is, in essence, a part of the clean energy implementation plan,

that that part. So because our energy is so clean, right, such a high percentage of it Yeah. We're basically taking none of these populations are receiving Dirty energy.

Clean energy.

I didn't know

if we were allowed to use that one. Because so much of ours is clean. So how does this help us then get to meeting our clean energy targets? It's just about making sure that what we are doing is spread equally Yes. Or equitably? Yes. Yeah.

Okay. Okay. Great. Thank you for that.

What other questions do folks have?

I don't really see one. Okay.

On on slide three, I just wanted an example maybe just for my education. What is a nonemitting clean energy type?

Oh, it's nuclear.

Nuclear. Okay.

And that's all only that?

I thought maybe it was solar, but I was like, it's such a large port. Okay. You got that.

And it's and we get that from our con our contract with Bonneville. Mhmm. That's the portion of it that's nuclear.

Got it. Great. What other questions do we have? Do have any? So

I think my

so my question would be around the affordability metric in part of this. Is that just baked into the conversation that our rates are gonna be affordable? Is that or is that just in a a single piece of this? We look at these because I I think it's a normalized energy cost to make sense, inability to pay bills, but we also have the B cap program, which helps shave some of that off. But I imagine it's probably I IRP process. The assumptions were we're gonna try to keep costs low for residents.

So that that is one of the the the goals of the IRP is, least cost planning, to make sure that rates are as low as possible. We don't actually have a the exception of the two rate bill assistance programs, we'd actually don't address rates in in this at all. Yeah.

Yeah. No. I it's a you know, it's a broader converse you know, I read I've reading this sometimes, the conversations about, you know, meeting the the increasing cost of meeting the see that we are not in a space, like, whatsoever because our power portfolio is by far exceeding.

Exactly.

But we do purchase power in the marketplace. I understand we're struggling to keep those costs too. I just I've always been curious how that translates into this conversation. But

Yeah. So it it's not yet for us. Yeah. So, again, so we are we buy and sell in the market, which means even though we're our portfolio was a 100% hydro, we get a little bit of Undefined. Yeah. From the market. And when we get to twenty forty five, getting rid of that is going to have an impact on rates because part of the way that we keep our rates low is by by buying and selling in the market. So it's just it hasn't reached us yet in the way that it's reached other utilities.

Alright. Any other questions? We got we got a number.

Thank you. This is really interesting information. I would just maybe send back to your outreach team anytime they need help getting the word out. Please let the council know so we can put it in our newsletter or get it out to our constituents, whatever platforms we're on. We'd love to help with that. So Awesome. Anytime they they have new information or just reminding folks about the programs, we're happy to help share.

Awesome. Sounds good. Are your folks super like, when you when you do do outreach, are folks super engaged and and responsive?

Depends on what it is.

Depends on what it Okay.

I mean, I think all council members have varying levels of different tools. I mean, I think all of us send out a newsletter on some sort of regular basis, so it differs. And, also, all of my colleagues are district specific and and citywide, so, you know, there's varying I certainly I guess, in all of them. Yeah.

I I appreciate that. So Yeah. The big part of my job is a lot of the stakeholder outreach and getting together stakeholders, and I I often struggle with getting folks into or and and interested in something as boring as I'm not gonna call it boring. But, you know, not everybody is interested in long term planning. So, yeah, I appreciate your

help. Yeah. We're we're your audience here. Well, thank you so much for coming to IHS and giving us this great information. Alright.

Okay. So our third item today is our 2026 infrastructure planning and sustainability committee calendar preview, and a big thank you to Anna for walking us through this. She and Ramiro and I have been hard at work, but mostly Anna. So we created there's a there's a memo that you can read, but the third page is the scheduling IPS presentations flowchart. Anna and I with Romero created this this year because we were just getting so many presentations that needed to come to IPS.

So as you know, we've started getting a few more memos on topics rather than full presentation so that the things that come before us are really things that really we need to see that perhaps have a decision ahead of them. So that's FYI.

Is a treat.

Yeah. This Anna created this, and it's been really valuable and just keeping the conversation going. What we've told people, it's never a a no. It's a let's make sure that this is the right use of everybody's time. So it takes a lot of staff time to get the presentation here and over to Anna and with a memo and da da da. So so that's an FYI as we look at things next year. And then we took a list of the here's a few things coming forward in 2026, and we sure filled up our calendar all the way for 2026.

Couple of things.

Of course, we can squeeze in there are some that only have one presentation, so we can add a second one always. And we are working really hard to limit it to two unless something comes up that we have to look at that's on a timeline. But I wanted to make sure you all saw this and took a look at it. You don't have you can answer now if you want. But if there are things missing there, things you have questions about, couple I'll note is that we are leading on that urban forestry priority action plan resolution that we passed back in May, and so that there are that does come back to us a number of times in 2026 because this committee is leading that.

Our transportation improvement program, the tip, comes twice as it always does, and there's a number of interesting environmental service projects and updates along the way as well. So take a look at that. Let us know if there are things that you wanna slot in. We Anna has worked with staff on all of these, so they are realistic dates. You know, some of the things that I wanna hear about or ready to hear about on January 1 when I wanna add them.

And then also just to note, we did go ahead and cancel the January 14 meeting assume because we're sort of assuming that we won't finish our appointments on January 6. We might on January, whatever, thirteenth. But we figured we'll just let that one go and and get started fresh in January or on January 28. So with that, I'll open it up to questions or comments from the committee.

A lot of interesting topics.

So many. Right? Councilman Remitt?

Yeah. I mean, my quest lots of presentations, lots of information. Do you, Chair, have any specific topic other than urban forestry plan that you want to dive into at

the committee level at this time?

So it looks like our our calendar is almost completely taken by staff led presentations. Is there anything you're hoping to work on over the year?

So it specific to urban forestry, a lot of that will be council led, actually. Actually. Christina and I are working on a number of policy pieces within that. A couple of things that I put on here that I am really hoping to push forward, the Fishing Warriors Memorial Bridge, the Shuster Parkway project. Both of those, we're looking at towards the second half of the year.

And then, also, you all have heard about the Mountain Division Rail Future Trail project that's been kinda hanging out there for a while. We've been working on getting some staff time on that. That that'll come forward in August to finally get that work done. So, yeah, there are a number of transportation things that I requested. Mostly, they're project specific updates, but you will see streets initiative two is on there. It will be oh, we did add it twice. So we have something at the beginning of year and at the end of the year on the streets initiative two. So those are a couple that I put in there. Yep. Go ahead.

I just this is just kind of an overall question because I only just started looking through this. If there's you know, I don't know what I don't know. I was just thinking that that next year is the budget year, and maybe there's some things related to budget priorities that pop up

Yep. That we need to move forward.

Maybe maybe that is part of why we have the tree and landscaping code things where we have them so that we are ahead of the budget process. But there is a little bit of like, February 11 and March 11 can both have items added if anybody on the committee has things that we should. So I think that's a really good point. We do wanna make sure we're ahead of the budget process, which, obviously, we're already in, but is in earnest in the summer. Yeah.

Let me think about that one a little bit, but I think that's good for us all to keep in mind. Yeah. So I don't I don't want this to be a don't bring anything else forward. This is just to show you what we put we've spotted in, and do let us know if there are things you wanna put forward. Alright. Anna, anything you wanna add to this to this conversation?

Nope. Just that, you know, we also asked TPU for topics. They haven't gotten back to us, but that they are looped in on this too because they are pretty regular feature at IPS.

Great. Thank you, Anna. And I will just toss it right back at you for topics for upcoming meetings if you

Oh, you already totally went over it. So, you know, the January 14 wait. Let's go back. December the next December meeting, whatever that would have been. Twenty fourth is canceled.

January 14 is canceled. But, hopefully, January 28, we can do the first official official action of the year, which is electing committee chair and vice chair, and then a couple tree related presentations. First, hearing about the urban forestry neighborhood council roadshow, the comments that you got there, and a presentation on what the results of resolution four one five five five, evaluating Tacoma's wood waste streams and circular economy potential.

Great. Thank you.

Also, you have a hand up, and I know that that might be a public comment.

So

Oh, great. Thank you for flagging that for us. So I did wanna note part of our packet was a letter from the Bicycle and Pedestrian Technical Advisory Group on transportation impact fees. I hope this is not the first time you're seeing it because we did pass those last night. And a big thank you and congratulations to the team that worked on that to to get that over the finish line. And with that, I

will just check-in if we do do we have a public comment? We do have somebody with our hand.

Okay. So we will circle back to public comment. And if you have your hand up, we're gonna get you off mute. When you're called, please state your name for the record. You have two minutes to make your remarks. Please be mindful of the time frame. And, Kirk, I'll kick it over to

you to call on whoever's there. Oh, that's Rob. Kravel?

Yes. Thought it might be.

Rob. It is. Hi. Hi. I I'll be short. I wasn't planning to make public comment. I was just planning to listen and creep in on the meeting. But, for the record, Rob Grable, he, him pronouns. I'm the chair of the planning commission. Just the last agenda item that you had on the calendar preview really caught my ear.

I'm getting ready to do some calendaring and scheduling with staff for planning commission over, the next couple of months. So I would just be interested if it is available for us to take a look at what you all have on your radar just to make sure that we are coordinated and synced up. And I think also, during the presentation that you all got from all the different, committee chairs, there was a big interest of joint committee meetings. So if there are any of those topics that are of particular interest to you all that you'd like to have multiple commissions meet up and create sort of a a joint set of recommendations for you, I would be open to hearing, where you might wanna see us, link up with other commissions to, to do some more, digging onto some policy options for y'all. But that's it.

Great. Thank you, Rob. And we will make sure that this gets to you. It is a public document, so you can find it, have it, but we will send it directly. And we did work with planning staff to create it. So they should be in the loop, but I am excited to coordinate on timing to make sure we don't miss any of those opportunities. So thank you for those comments.

Great. Thanks. I didn't see it in the agenda packet for your meeting tonight. So, yeah, if you can send it over, that'd be appreciated.

We'll do that. It'll also

be on Legistar no later than tomorrow.

Fantastic.

Alright. Any other comments with the good of the order? Alright. Seeing none, I'll take the last motion.

Moved adjourned. Second.

All those in favor signify by saying

aye. Aye.

The motion carries. We are adjourned.