Regular Meeting @ 5 p.m. - Aug 26, 2025

county commissioners at 5 0 3 p.m clerk mr chair that takes the only item on the agenda for this evening and it's the climate action plan workshop okay all right good good evening commissioner steve hofstetter lateral county's environmental protection environment director luckily i'm only going to talk for a few minutes introduce the item i have a little cold and i i suspect my voice will go quickly um i just wanted to cover a few things but before i turn it over to jenison kipp our resiliency specialist she's going to give the presentation um but to give you a little idea about what we're trying to do tonight is this is the first time the commission's seen the entire draft climate action plan in one kind of complete form and it's over 250 pages there's 180 action items associated with it so it's it's quite a large undertaking and we we obviously could not go through every one of those action items tonight and make it through tonight's meeting so the way we have this set up is um jenison's going to hit the highlights kind of the the big items for each chapter at that point if you'd like you can pause for each chapter have comments or we can run through it and then have a discussion afterward we're not looking for a motion from the board tonight but we would love direction and input from the commission um our strategy is that that have the board approve a climate action plan this fall um preferably at a commission meeting um and then have a possibility of maybe a ceremonial approval of the plan at our climate festival in on november 15th but you know you all can discuss how you would want to formally approve this plan and the reason i i'm using the word approve as a as a instead of adopt is that uh you're gonna you know with 180 different action items and probably more being brought in all the time um we want this to be a fluid document a document that kind of adjusts with the information we receive with the concerns that are being raised and so we want this to continually evolve as we're as we're going and all of these action items have some kind of need or action by the board or the staff prior to them taking place for instance whether it's a comprehensive plan amendment a land development code climate a capital improvement project there's going to be some kind of action associated with all these so from our perspective it's more like an approval than it is in adoption um but that's this kind of first time you all are going to see all of these things pulled together there is there's eight chapters but there's in the end there's going to be nine the one chapter that's not included is the circular economy chapter that is a chapter that will focus on economic and workforce development opportunities and we are still drafting that one so you're gonna you're not have one chapter included in our first first draft that you all will get to approve so unless you don't have any comments at this point i will turn it over to jenison to kind of give the summary presentation all right thank you so much steve and thank you for getting this on your agenda this evening i know you've had a long day so i will jump right into it so to start um i'm going to go right to the purpose statement and the overall you know objective of this climate action plan i know you've all seen this but for those members of the public who are listening i want to reiterate that this is a very integrated systems approach and a very you know local community-centered plan so there's a lot in here and it's been being built for many many years so what you'll see tonight um a lot of it is already rooted in the programs and the commitments that elettro county has made and we're looking at opportunities to leverage those to address environmentally socially and economically where we have opportunities to respond to climate change i also want to just reiterate and i think everyone here today knows this already but you know the realities of climate change it's not something into the future that we're looking at it's here today there are very real challenges um there it's bad and it's there are no easy solutions but there is hope and i think the strategies that you see in this plan that's been assembled are exemplify that hope because um it's going to take these human dimensions of climate change it's going to take our people in our community to to to find those best solutions so that we can survive and thrive in the climate that's here today and that's getting increasingly challenging to survive and thrive in this definition of resiliency i want to put up also mainly for the benefit of well for everybody everybody who's listening but just to reiterate that what we're trying to do is cope with the changes and protect the value of our community across all economic success economic sectors and also really prioritize the most vulnerable among us so we we've done a lot of local assessments very specific you know to the community today and where we are and where the vulnerabilities are to frame where the opportunities and the strategies should be um and so in public presentations i've been giving on this i've referenced um a ancient chinese quote that is the unbending tree is easily broken and i think of our community as being a bending tree that has these firm grounded roots and what we're trying to do is figure out you know at the margin where those best opportunities are to bend and respond and cope in the face of change so i think of it as opportunities and we want to look at the most marginally cost effective opportunities that can also give us the biggest impact so that's what this plan does this is the framework um around which this current climate action plan has been developed i just want to highlight a couple of things on this slide uh so this we alachua county are the first inland florida county to develop a climate action plan so this can serve as a model for for other inland communities and our neighboring you know adjacent counties but it's a very grassroots driven effort an engagement goal was set of having 20 percent of alachua county's population being aware of the cap and hopefully we can exceed that and you know continue to branch out and get to some of the um beyond the choir some of more of the most vulnerable communities who haven't yet been engaged or may not be aware of the plan and what's already happening to address our vulnerabilities to climate change uh it's aligned with the comprehensive plan and as we go into the next phase this year of the evaluation appraisal and review of the comprehensive plan um i just want to you know reiterate that this plan not only builds upon the existing comprehensive plan but it's also providing you know as steve said this is not policy and we are not asking for approval of the plan but it gives the broader strategies that can help guide that update of the comprehensive plan so it's intentionally very iterative as a tool and practical in that sense um and it's a living document so the climate target over the long haul by 2050 we hope to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent from the 20 uh 2009 baseline by 2050 this is a snapshot from the vulnerability assessment the climate vulnerability assessment that was completed last july and i just want to show this slide to emphasize that uh the threats the primary threats to our community here are extreme heat uh heavy rainfall sea level rise and that sort of um is a core route of climate migration which again as an inland county we are the compounding effects of climate change we are receiving migrants from neighboring coastal neighboring counties and coastal counties throughout florida who already have been migrating into alachua county so the plan recognizes the added um stressor that is coming from migrants coming from the coast of florida as well as those almost 1 000 new residents a day who come to florida all right and i just want to give again these are some snapshots leading up to the detail in the plan but from the vulnerability assessment we know extreme heat is one very real way that we are already feeling climate change today last year globally was the hottest year on record um that's from the world meteorological organization we're seeing the same increasing trends this map from the vulnerability assessment in yellow it shows where there are cooling centers that and then the the distance from those cooling centers the dot in the center of the yellow areas that's a 15 minute walk to the cooling centers the key on this map is the darker red areas show the extreme heat vulnerability so the darkest red areas are high extreme heat vulnerability and so just as an example i'm showing this because what what the plan is trying to do is connect the people who have the greatest need with the resources the assets the infrastructure that the county is putting in place to respond to those needs so that we can again i'll say survive and thrive is the simplest way to capture you know what the plan is trying to do also i want to note on this slide that a spatial vulnerability assessment another technical analysis that underpinned the overall climate vulnerability assessment and this is stated in the climate action plan itself that's been drafted but the number of extremely hot days are projected to increase tenfold by the end of the century in alachua county and then at the end of the day this all translates into very real impacts and so one of the new uh pieces of the this version of the plan that was not in the previous version that we've incorporated and it will tie into the new chapter on the circular economy but each chapter has a section on the triple bottom line so another way of phrasing that is people planet and profit but it affects us not only as people and our natural resources and ecosystems but it does affect our bottom line so this is a way that we can you know save money in addition to and take every dollar further in addition to protecting life and property and our assets um and in the plan itself uh in the introduction another new piece that we just highlight is the uh number of billion dollar plus disasters that have affected florida since 1980 there's a there are data that have been collected from the national oceanic and atmospheric administration on this last year there were 11 billion dollar plus events that affected florida 11 and in total the costs of just addressing those 11 events in 2024 exceeded 200 billion dollars so um it makes economic sense to do this as well this is the uh table of contents effectively for the entire plan so right now it has eight key chapters and then an introduction um and two appendices one of the appendices is the vulnerability assessment that you just heard about one of them is direct verbatim excerpts from the comprehensive plan that are used to be within each of the chapters and we pulled those out because those are not going to change but we added contextual information to each chapter explaining how the topical chapters tie to the comprehensive plan so i wanted to to reiterate that before i go into each chapter and then this is where right now all of the updated as of august 5th uh version we're calling it version two even though it's been through more than two versions of of of work uh this is where the climate action plan currently is housed for for anyone to view and provide feedback and i've highlighted on this slide where anybody can click and submit comments and when you do that it'll ask you which chapter you're commenting on there's also a a section to comment on the general overall plan and then there's a qr code there for anyone viewing that who wants to go to the website that's written out at the top of the slide uh you can also do that all right so i have two more slides before i go into the next uh to the main chapters of the plan so if you'd like to pause before i go there i'll i'll let you know when i'm there um so the next steps uh steve already said most of this so i'm not going to spend much time on here other than you know to reiterate that this has been a multi-year process with a whole lot of a whole lot of people and a whole lot of time invested and we'll continue to it's still a work in progress it's not final it'll be dynamic and we'll keep updating it as we go um we'll continue the public engagement we'll keep that dashboard or we'll keep the website open so that anybody can comment on it before it gets to the final approved version hopefully and then the climate festival we've got scheduled for november 15th in newberry okay so this is the last slide before the actual each chapter that i have a section for so i just wanted to and this is a new slide this is the only new slide other uh that was not included in the posted agenda um and agenda items so each chapter is laid out with an introductory context the narrative around how it ties with and supports the compre and is supported by the comprehensive plan past and existing efforts around specific county level programs and community partners who are involved with those programs we have some program highlights the triple bottom line section that talks about people planet and profit and how those these topical areas connect and then there's a community engagement section that used to be called the things you can do section and so that we will definitely be building out or you know the plan is to build out that section in a lot more detail once we're able to transition to a dashboard and then finally just from this slide um each of the chapters starts with a purpose statement and there are nine because the overall plan has a purpose statement there are 39 goals within that so it's like where are we trying to get to and then underneath that the next level we have it laid out as strategies so specific strategies to get to those goals and then the next detailed level is the action items so as steve said there are over 180 action items and tonight i have one slide that highlights what staff see as priority action items or opportunities and again these are a sampling of ideas that we're going to bring before you but we're happy to discuss any of the action items that are already currently in the plan um hear your thoughts and guidance moving forward so um any questions or comments before i go to the first chapter yes thank you um the um i've i've done a couple of presentations on the climate action plan and it's first and second iterations i guess and some of the feedback that i got um is about the full layout and and the introduction itself and i i one of our goals is to make this document as accessible to as many people as we can and to have as much outreach as we can and the feedback that i got was that you jump right into it being a very academic document and so they ask if perhaps each chapter and the introduction could start with something that is more readable like an academic paper often starts with like an executive summary introduction that you can read and sort of get the gist of it with it before you have to read all of the academic part of it i thought that was a really good suggestion i don't know if this is the time to suggest that or not but i i i suspect that if i were to do a grade level you know analysis of the document it would come back higher than what we would aim for for typical county communications and i don't think that's wrong i just feel like maybe we should start each chapter with something that's like you know here's like the gist of it and have you all thought about that or did you have you discussed it i i i'm gonna guess you have but i was just curious what your thoughts were there thank you commissioner alford yes we have thought about that and we've started drafting because it's it's a very good point and i want to be clear there there are almost there are several layers of this cap that need to be developed to be able to reach everybody in the community right so and and this current version is really directed for the board and the county manager because it needs that level of detail we've already begun creating so we have a a new intern ava of the lines who's here with us this evening and um she has already started drafting some one pager like very just to your point like taking boiling it down into the meat of and the substance of each chapter in very digestible and like you know actionable ways that you can leave it with an understanding what is it why are we doing it and where you know what are some of the key starting points it's almost like that executive summary for each chapter you mentioned excellent that was exactly i told him i said i'll make sure that i get that feedback but yeah i i figured this was the time to do it while you're talking about the whole thing thank you all right thank you no that's i'm i'm excited to hear the rest of it yeah and i i do just also want to add we are planning to review some drafts of those like sort of different formats with the citizen climate advisory committee next month when we have new members coming on so we're yeah we're thinking about getting we're already working on developing those various layers of content that do that in addition to an executive summary that we're updating i figured y'all were ahead of me on that oh no no but thank you for bringing it up any other questions before i go on to the first chapter or comments or i have a process question it's probably more for missy and the manager or maybe for steve but once this is um adopted accepted what's the word we're supposed to use anyway approved once we once we have a final climate action plan um i i appreciate the coordination with the comprehensive plan because i think that's obviously a really important point of coordination but how will this document inform the way that the county goes about the budgeting process and strategic priorities for the various departments in terms of their programming like what is going to be sort of that feedback loop for this action plan with regards to the way we're doing the other parts of planning in the county oh i'll take a first step of that steve hoffstetter again environmental protection department um i guess the best way i i can relate it's kind of like your strategic guide it kind of functions as a strategic guide for the county to um kind of focus in on on the actions that we're trying to take and whether we're focused how that matches up with our climate strategy so it's it's somewhat like a more detailed complex strategic guide so i guess just to follow up on that you know we have we now have a strategic guide that the board sort of is in the process of developing it's not 100 there yet but we're getting there and then we have the comprehensive plan which is a strategic guide and now we have a climate action plan that's a strategic guide and so i think that it's going to be important maybe for management to think about how all those documents feed together and how we as a board can be communicated to about how all the strategic guides priorities are feeding into the decision making and the planning that's going on in terms of departmental budgets and departmental strategies and then it helps us to also avoid scatter right because we have lots of our own ideas and we kind of throw our ideas out there but if we keep all those strategic guides in mind and we have some kind of like unifying process for how those things get vetted i think it will help our ideas to be channeled in the direction of the things that we're working on so we don't give you guys even more to work on than you already have with three strategic guiding documents so i know it's a big process question that maybe can't get answered today but i just wanted to highlight it because i know it's it's a lot to think about as as leadership so yeah mr chair um i agree i probably can't answer that question on the spot um but in terms of how we've been looking at it it is providing the guidance but it is not a legally binding document like the comprehensive plan but mr chair as they said a lot of it will be in the comprehensive plan so as you go through that update this year as well as getting this action plan you'll be able to feed it or that's the plan to have those policies a lot of them in there as well okay any other questions mr chair should i proceed all right so first chapter is agriculture and food security uh this one this purpose statement to ensure the continued viability sustainability security and accessibility for all to the food system in alatra county in the face of climate change and then promote locally produced foods and goods to reduce food distribution impacts reach those most in need and promote local economic benefits strategies and again i'm going to go through these very quickly and then end on the priority action item slide so uh strategy first one is strengthening local food systems second one building upon that workforce and entrepreneurship program foundation that's in place third commercial organic waste composting and local fertilizer use strategies fourth build a local food system culture through engagement and agro-tourism and we heard about the agro-tourism conference earlier today fifth expand the protection of agricultural lands some of the exemplary programs and program highlights in this chapter include the small farmer grant program the fresh food pathways or the food hub food hub project community gardens project the agricultural land protection strategy and the new agricultural land conservation board that just began meeting this summer the agricultural farmland trust transfer navigator program and then as i mentioned uh this these action items we discussed with all of the staff who've had input to the plan you know and the the primary chapter authors and i asked them to provide us with kind of a one-year and a five-year wish list in response to the commission's you know request that we identify those next priority action items and so this again is a sampling but i pulled out some of those priority action items for each chapter so for agriculture within one year and again this is a wish list it's it's aspirational but we tried to structure these as very actionable things that are also realistic to achieve within one year and five year five years from now so for one year um staff identified initiating an agribusiness incubator program and commercial food waste collection and compost pilot composting pilot program developing a template for agricultural easements and priority that prioritizes soil health in that template identify pathways funding and incentives for this is kind of a technical term but the payment for ecosystem services it is a you know there's a technical definition for that term on agricultural lands conduct a feasibility study or even initiate a feasibility study for soil carbon sequestration measurement on county owned lands and easements and i'll highlight there again a lot of these priority action items reflect the nature of you know leading first from the county looking at our own you know where we have the capacity to make changes at the margin here with county level assets and facilities and resources and then within five years um on that wish list for this chapter 30 of agricultural lands and waters are protected through a fee simple acquisition fee simple acquisitions and conservation easements so that's a goal to get there and actually have documented that we have protected and reach that 30 by 30 goal and then development and expansion of the regional food hubs and processing facilities so hopefully within five years we'll make real progress on that great do you want us to go chapter by chapter but it's a workshop so i mean if you have questions okay um thank you for the work on this i was excited to see this chapter added so thank you all um i think my only i had three comments one is um you have uh in the chapter somewhere you have sort of something about like educational resources the development of educational resources and sort of a lot like a number of goals that relate to sort of education and outreach kind of things and i would just ask that we also think about um education and outreach support for our community gardens and small and beginning farmers i think it's something that we could collaborate with ifas on potentially it's a small farm and community garden agent position or um you know there's been a lot of interest and need for support for community gardens things like coordinating to buy compost in bulk so that they can all use compost or thinking about the ways which they coordinate their harvest to go to local area food banks when they have abundance all these sorts of things that would help with community food security um and also from the small farms perspective your introduction talks a lot about it but we're losing our small and mid-sized farms at really rapid rates and so i think having a specific focus on our small and mid-sized farms in the way in which we can support them i think we're doing a lot of that with the food hub with the economic development work we're working on from our perspective but the ways in which our partners at ifas could help support community gardening and small farm initiatives um would be helpful to see how that kind of feeds into this plan and the only other thing is on page 37 you have a goal with something that's about a map it seems to be focused on agritourism and people you know engaging with agritourism which may or may not contribute to a climate action plan depending on how far they travel to get here but um but i i i think we have the food systems map that we've now we're now piloting and launching so i think rather than just an agritourism map like thinking about the food systems map how we can make that tool functional um and usable both for decision making and for the public to identify those kinds of resources would be something to target rather than just a separate agritourism map thank you um this is maybe slightly out of left field but with respect to food security one of the things that i've had a couple of people talk to me about is the ending of the funding for the fresh access food the double up food bucks and i you know would love to see us try to do something here locally to help support folks that are on snap benefits make those dollars go further and support our local farmers i think that that could be i don't know what your thoughts are about that anna but i i feel like um i've i've had so many people say i went to the farmer's market and they're not there anymore and i kept thinking they'd come back but they haven't and i'm like that that's probably not coming back anytime soon but i know that it's hurting local farmers too because that that you know and i don't think it was a huge chunk of money but i i would be interested to know what the impact of that would be yeah i mean that's part of i mean well one thing is we've asked now staff to look at like the impact of the snap cuts too so hopefully we'll get some of those numbers and realize what that impact could be and like you know sort of what the uptake might be so we have a sense of magnitude if we decide to do an incentive program like that but i do know and you all um you know voted on a motion to support our federal lobbyists working on legislation and there is legislation at the federal level looking to kind of reinstate some of those programs fingers crossed because a lot of the farmers are also pushing in that direction and i do know that the federal government is also making shifts so some of the programming is being reinstated under the make america healthy again legislation in looking different but still focused on trying to get local food and healthy fresh food into the hands of people so there's a lot of stuff like quickly coming out about that so i agree with you but i think we should kind of like get some more data and kind of like hold tight and see what comes from the federal from the i just want it on the radar because i feel like that is a food security aspect that supports um agriculture that we should you know have on the radar and not lose in this chapter i mean i think your point of just like incentives for local food systems development in connection with food security efforts broadly so food is medicine you know food banks yeah exactly would be a really important strategy so that it's not just spending money on calories but on healthy fresh food with our local farmers right and and all of the ways that that spreads out into the community whether it's the jails the schools individual homes and all of those things yeah yeah yeah okay at this point we're going to pause for a public comment at 5 30. it's a little past 5 30 it's 5 36 so if there are any citizens would like to make some public comments please feel free about the climate okay um no no no this is just public comment at 5 30. general public comments at 5 30. okay uh no i have you wait okay thanks okay if not back to the board back to the presentation thank you thank you okay so we'll move on to the second chapter energy security and efficiency so the goal here accelerate progress toward net greenhouse gas emissions net zero greenhouse gas emissions by transitioning from non-renewable energy fuels purchasing from renewable energy sources and increasing energy efficiency in buildings and infrastructure four goals in this chapter overarching focus on energy efficiency and conservation and again that's to maximize the cost efficiency as well and social responsibility electrification and again this is primarily starting at home here in the county where we have the capacity to do so renewable energy becoming an institutional leader in renewable energy adoption and energy infrastructure resiliency so this gets back to all of our infrastructure and assets that are becoming increasingly vulnerable to climate impacts some of the exemplary programs highlighted in this chapter are the alachua county energy efficiency program which i have another slide on next synergistics which is a customized energy tracking and conservation program for county facilities and this is critical kind of as a stepping stone to the dashboard that's very dynamic and capturing you know all of the broad metrics throughout the climate action plan the energy conservation investment program to construct county-owned solar installations with a goal of a hundred percent of the energy being purchased or produced for county facilities by solar photovoltaics by 2030 so that's not far off yeah it's an ambitious goal and then another program that we've heard about today project that we've heard about today during your regular commission meeting also project empower um so this is last but not least on the list uh through the department of energy's department of energy's community local energy action program or leap grant to develop solar projects in low-income neighborhoods through community collaborations uh and i i do want to interject here because i should have done this on the first chapter but many of the staff those 68 authors that includes staff and uh the citizen climate advisory members there are many more who contributed to the plan but many of the staff who did all of this work are here today or attending online and so questions specific to each chapter i may defer to those staff yeah and betsy riley dr betsy riley was the lead chapter for this author and uh sean mcclendon was the lead author for the agriculture chapter so i do highlight that on each of the first slides just i just wanted to make a point of that so highlighting the alatra county energy efficiency program i know some of you have seen this slide several times but i get to update it every time i share it because we now have 32 properties enrolled in this program it is an exemplary program that has been able to you know given the data we have so far save four hundred dollars in average annual utility bills for participating properties and again these are for rental properties not only in unincorporated alachua county but also now in the city of gainesville um and it's the the property owners agree to keep the you know rental at an affordable rate it's part of participating in this program uh so this highlights uh and this is a program highlight in the draft chapter for the energy chapter and then in terms of priority action items so we've identified for one year from now uh expand acp to include the power the project and power coalition neighborhoods uh to have all new county building and rooftop projects include a request for proposals to uh include solar installations so within a year you know staff we felt like that was a fairly realistic at least include that as an option that we're evaluating for any new uh rooftop projects and buildings county-owned and then for county-owned buildings develop a five-year strategy for energy efficiency improvements and 100 electrification of all new construction and then within five years by 2030 um on this wish list we want to make sure we have in place a long-term funding strategy for e-sip and connections to other um you know county-wide programs that are part of that like the community investment fund that you approved today through the lydia b stokes grant foundation making sure it's kind of a well-oiled machine that ties these priorities together uh second uh fuel and cost efficient county fleet vehicles so having you know strategic hybrid purchasing anytime those purchases and investments are made and then a strategic plan for hardening our energy infrastructure that and this is critical includes partnerships with our neighboring you know municipalities in the counties not just here in the city but throughout the county that we have that strategic plan and a highlight of this is that we want to ensure energy security not just during the event um a couple of things uh first i um i haven't read the new chapter on this so you may address it i just wanted to ask if you have made the connection in the chapter about housing security and energy costs because that you know one of the things i'm concerned about is this plan is going to be under a lot of scrutiny by other folks and so i when i think about who's reading it and and points i want to make i just wanted to know if we've made that connection in the in the new chapter about the carrying costs of home ownership and things like that uh betsy riley sustainability manager excuse me with the environmental protection department um the great thing about energy efficiency is that it is incredibly um short returns on investment um we especially with with the local energy efficiency improvements we're seeing with the ac program so in the second rewrite of this chapter you'll see a lot of references to sort of the triple bottom line benefits okay so for ac we talk about energy efficiency um we talk about the returns on investment of each of these um and sort of like uh vertical integration of our energy strategy overall as a cost-effective strategy as well i love the way you talk um okay and then uh the second uh question that i had um why is the strategic hybrid purchasing on the five-year plan i'm i'm currently driving a new prius i get 68 miles to the gallon sure um mr chair the biggest um question with that would be uh well i guess our ev strategy i'll have to find information about the hybrid specifically for ev strategy the question is infrastructure i understand that but hybrids i mean you know other folks have been doing that for years okay i'll see if i can find an answer for that okay thank you okay go ahead yeah um just uh quickly i guess under the all county buildings do we already have a requirement for all county buildings to be wired for rooftop solar that are capable like is that already something we already require that our solar so there's so so that's already happening okay yeah great and i don't need to add that um and then i just wanted to mention today you may you probably already heard we sort of channeled some money in the direction of sort of that revolving loan fund but i think it's addressed in on page 56 and page 64 so you may need to update those pieces i've noted the page numbers yes i'm carrying around one printed copy that i'm making all of my edits so to be efficient try to be efficient so yes mr chair any other comments or questions i don't think so not at this point for this chapter okay all right then i will we can all submit comments online too of course okay so the third chapter on flood management and infrastructure and um i do want to recognize going forward before i read to you the you know the purpose of each chapter the authors um so um uh shane williams who is now with the city of gainesville was the primary author on the first draft of this um and dr shane williams i should give him that and uh lilith lawani is a key staff and again the this is not comprehensive a lot of people contributed to each of these chapters um so the purpose of the flood management and infrastructure chapter um is and this is really business as usual as i think you all know florida has been a leader nationally in being progressive in terms of addressing flooding while also trying to address water quality impacts that come with flooding so we're sort of ahead of the curve and still trying to raise the bar so the purpose of this chapter is to reduce the impact of flooding and extreme weather events on citizens businesses and our critical infrastructure by developing a multi-disciplinary plan and an action strategy to maintain a resilient community so in this chapter the goals are focused on improving the physical infrastructure by expanding stormwater and flooding infrastructure throughout the county expanding the stormwater planning so again the human elements and the process elements i'm not going to read through each of the subs the strategies under each goal i'm just going to highlight the goals third goal expand stormwater and flooding policy so this gets higher level primarily to support um what i often call the capital l low impact development capital lid low impact development that really gets to the sort of top of land use planning to reduce the impacts at the at the source of new development improve the flooding communication and finance flood prevention projects and then for the priority action items for this chapter so within a year we're hoping staff are hoping that we can establish incentives for new construction to be outside of floodplains and there are a lot of nuances to what that actually means it's more complex than on the surface but but but i think you understand the intent of that um select a watershed for study uh that can be used to develop the watershed master plan develop planning strategies for protecting the critical infrastructure and then apply for florida resiliency grants so the office of long-term resiliency at the state does have you know significant financial resources to do that especially for our county that was is among the most impacted and distressed by the 2023 and 2024 storms and then within five years expand the green stormwater infrastructure and low impact development design in areas that are already developed including retrofits on county owned lands and private property owners investments create a regional stormwater basin in areas of historical flooding so again this couples the you know getting to the most vulnerable communities who are being impacted now with where those infrastructure needs are and then use a higher free board so that's essentially like a higher margin of error in the engineering design for the stormwater structures that are located near rivers and lakes that's the sum of those action items mr chair any any questions or comments will you learn in prisa it just it means everything's a fire do we do we run the risk of running into problems with the state when we try to regulate because we're pretty tight about this here and i didn't know if all the new legislation that we're looking at coming down the pike is going to affect the way that we can actually restrict yes our building here i mean okay so well but this is our goal yes so to come back to you know the earlier comments about this being a guide and there are a lot of aspirational goals in here um and and you know we're trying to think about how we can get to those goals within the constraints we're facing where we have the jurisdiction to do you know to do this and so you'll you'll see in the plan i'm sure you've seen but you know we've tried to phrase in the plan that's not as require and adopt especially if it's not something that's feasible because of either preemptions at the state level or you know there's just the jurisdictional capacity is not here it's not something we can manage within the county so there are this sort of comes to my comment about that first one year um priority action item how i said you know establish incentives for uh this slide actually originally said require but the devil's in the details and that would be an unrealistic goal to say that we could just require it and make it happen within one year so um so i think we have to operate within the bounds of and um mike kasteen made a comment about this during the day session in his presentation but you know the water management district environmental resource permitting rules apply for the stormwater management so there's all these processes outside of the realm of what alachua county has the capacity to to change and so those rules are going to precede and overarching we still have to operate within those rules but there are ways that we can be creative in the stormwater design at a local level still meet those rules but find ways to for example you know in the engineering design to make sure this is on the radar that we're incentivizing protecting those floodplains and finding you know the best opportunities possible to avoid them when we can well maybe a word education in there somewhere too because see giving people information you know up front you know might help them come on board with us you know understand what it is that we're trying to protect them from um and so most reasonable people don't want their properties flooded most people don't want you know to have to worry about working in swamps i would think but you know maybe somehow that we can educate people to the point where we don't have to you know let them do what they want to do regardless of whether it's the right thing to do or not i don't know so maybe incentives in educating and incentives you know there are two of those things that need to be not just doing incentives but somehow i don't there's another word you don't have to use the word educate but but you know somehow warn people you know we need to warn people that there are consequences not only to flooding but to um one of those things sinkholes too commissioner prisia dan cornell and dan alfred sure um i think one of the things like to your point around education i mean i think one of the things that i saw missing from this chapter is how we intend to communicate the updates in the flood maps and in these changing flood zones and flood threats to the community i mean we have in our in the list of numbers of parcels we've got 73 765 residential structures that are going to be impacted that's a lot of residential structures in my opinion every single one of those homeowners should get a postcard letting them know that their floodplain maps have been updated and that their properties are at risk and i mean because they may need to get flood insurance you know like we i feel like we have an obligation to communicate to the public help them understand the risks that are they're facing because to your point then if they're educated if they know what's at stake then they're more likely to be advocating for the kinds of policies that are going to protect protect their properties and um so i i guess just ways in which we're going to communicate on these changes in the flood maps and the floodplains and um and what the risks are to the to the public you know rather that's just a postcard that goes to them or what else we could develop but staff are much smarter that those ideas than i am but ways in which we could do that would be a strategy i'd like to see um in there and then the only other thing is on page 83 there's this weird i don't understand what this is saying so someone else needs to tell me it is says find it 83 it says adopt rainfall and require future conditions change factors when available for critical duration analysis like i'm like what it sounds like greek to me so does that can somebody i'm gonna have to get i'm gonna have to find it okay it's under goal 3.3 i think or three point yeah 3.3.1 and it's just a i don't know what it's talking about adopt rainfall and require future conditions change factors are we talking about like how much rain is going to fall like adopting new expectations for 24-hour storms 48-hour storms mr chair correctly yeah if you if you read that in totality you have to put it all together adopt rainfall and require future condition change factors it's rainfall factors and future condition change factors okay so we're going to be seeing different rainfall patterns into it yeah to look into adopting recognizing that and modifying that as we come along okay i will so to right but to that end i guess what i want to what i want to be mindful of is i want stormwater infrastructure that handles the 24-hour floods the 48-hour floods we already have insane requirements for stormwater in terms of size like our our basins are huge and like at some point we start getting to the point where like basins aren't gonna cut it anymore right if we're gonna at some point you you just overburden a development with the size so i i think we have to think about that and then if that's the case and we and it gets even bigger then we need to have other strategies that the water management districts and other groups are going to come along with for us because otherwise it's going to bump up against sort of like how much land is even left or if it even makes sense and i mean maybe it doesn't make sense to do the development at that point but i you know i just i'm i'm i'm cognizant of the fact that i think sometimes we're over building stormwater infrastructure in some cases and under building it in others and i'm not sure that just updating the rainfall patterns is going to like change that in fact i think it might exacerbate it so i just am mindful of that and i'll shut up now commissioner cornell well i'm just going to add on to what i what i've heard what what struck me on this chapter was um irma and being in in in the uh operation center and having our gis people tell us in 12 hours that's going to flood like they know and it's mostly along the santa fe river and so i think one of our strategies has to be um under the 3.4.1 how do we communicate these risks prior to the storms happening and i love your idea about i don't know if we can communicate with 73 000 homes but there has to be some way that we can everybody we can let people know um and then another strategy for mitigating that has to deal with our targets for wild spaces public places the lands that we're trying to acquire um to help mitigate those uh flood risks during these storm events um and i i will say i don't know if that goes in the planning section or what but that's that's kind of i mean that's that is one of our strategies uh wild spaces public places acquisition of lands and kind of back to an original comment that kind of hones right into this is why we're acquiring this land in these places um for resilient purposes you know long-term protection purposes well and i think that that may make the case for some acquiring some smaller parcels in our urbanizing areas in order to protect i mean i know those can be fragmented and they may not meet our strategies and i don't want to undermine those strategies either you know like we don't want to start trying to do everything with that one bucket of money right but but maybe there's other strategies where we need to be looking at where there are strategic green fields within our urbanizing area that aren't developed yet and maybe it's not wild spaces public places money but it's other acquisition money that we're acquiring that for stormwater capture right exactly but like instead of doing right and then and then we've got all these properties we're having to buy the houses and everything on them and tear them down you know maybe there's other places where we need to just make that investment from a stormwater infrastructure perspective and it saves us money in the long run and from having to buy pumps and all the other stuff and build more infrastructure the pump thing was the other that's you just reminded me um if we know that a certain area gets x number of inches of rainfall in a 24-hour period we know we can move pumps and that's one of the things we did was we bought mobile pumps maybe that's another strategy is where do we position these things where do we buy more of them where do you put the water when you pump them you know those are i guess more details but i think that's where this goes in that area a lot oh and one thing on that front too i think we have to think about is um is like if we if we are going to be investing in some of those things like what what is the how do i say this what is the sort of um short-term versus long-term opportunity like does it make more sense for us like i i guess i'm thinking particularly about the pine hills strategic um the strategic area study that we're doing right now you know that's an area where we have historic flooding in certain parts of that part of our county and like if we develop a large portions of the area what happens and like it might be part of our strategic area plan that like a large stormwater you know protection area is purchased or is a part of that plan um in order for us to avoid that up front rather than having to fight it on the back end with pumps and and stormwater ponds with the with the developments that would come in so yeah it is uh i'll finish and go to um commissioner offered is gold 3.2 and 3.3 is this where public works really jumped in yeah um because we've got expand stormwater and flooding policy but the strategy seems more like a growth management one you know low impact design and i'm i'm thinking more hard like like pumps and she didn't put all the strategies up there there's an installation of flooding it's a strategy that's in the big plan okay page 78 but a couple of things um you well let me start with um i i had to go to valdosta last week to a meeting about the um swanee river um sewage or the task force where you know valdosta's uh wastewater plant is always dumping sewage in at swanee because they don't have good stormwater in georgia they don't have stormwater management and it really hit home because as i drove into valdosta they were having a rainstorm and i was driving through giant puddles just to get to the meeting and they were so proud of all they had done but their stormwater systems in in in georgia are nothing like what we have in florida so even though we might have these big stormwater ponds it is it it's it's effective um i was i was really shocked and the uh impact to their their wastewater system because they can't manage their stormwater is absolutely huge all that being said i you know i was thinking about um one of the problems with um lid is that you can incentivize lid all through a neighborhood and have people put you know stormwater swales and all these things in their yards but that's private property so we have no control over whether or not that infrastructure is managed in in perpetuity so you can't really give them credit on their designs for stormwater retention because we don't have control over that even though it's it's useful and it's helpful it can help in a big you know 100 year flood situation it's not um or can sometimes help it's not you know something that we have control over private property so i i i you know wonder about places where we do have control like things like parks and places like that so i really like some of the suggestions that i'm hearing about other green spaces being utilized for stormwater um another thing i i i saw in the um in the goals was about communication of of of floods and and and sort of i saw that as a safety kind of thing like letting people know and that really hit home because you know there was a child that was swept into a stormwater system here in florida this past week and that was kind of a freak accident but that's always been something that's been a concern to me that that that could happen at any time we have huge creeks that go way up over there their um uh their boundaries especially in east gainesville in places that could easily cause all kinds of problems and not only that people do not realize that that water is filthy it is dirty water it is so nasty and that you know flesh-eating bacteria and all of that so my i guess my um question concern suggestion is that we prioritize some sort of communication system about flood water and in concert with that um include when we are talking about floods we talk about the safety aspect of flood water and the health aspect of flood water i think i really like commissioner prissey's point about you know as we um share this information with our residents that you know we're bringing awareness and therefore hopefully some action that they might take to tallahassee i think it's a really great strategy yeah and so you know but but if we can throw those safety aspects in there as well and um maybe work with our um emergency operations to um also include flood flood risks with respect to events that might not be a hurricane i that happens fairly frequently where we have large rain events but we might not be in a hurricane situation but we are still dealing with um what could be emergencies for many people so i don't know if that's something that we strategically we have to think about because you don't want people to stop reading emergency messages because they're too frequent but on the other hand i think that there's a happy balance there that we should we should think about um yeah i think that's all i want to say right now thank you okay mr chair if i could just respond to a couple of those um i think these comments especially really drive home that this plan while it's right now written by chapters and we intentionally tried to eliminate redundancy so that we could we kind of had to focus in before we can come back out and take it as a broad plan i think the comments are highlighting how the and i see this as this is the opportunity to really like do something very actionable and practical through transitioning this plan into a dashboard because uh we speak to the need for integrating additional um emergency alerts into alacha already you know to let people know during extreme heat events for example in the heat and health chapter um but thinking about like this is where a lot of my mind has been for the last six months that i've been here it's like how you know weaving all these things together into something very simple and at the end of the day functional i think taking this to a dashboard is going to help us do that and a lot of it is about gathering and that you'll see especially in the land use and transportation chapter where we highlight we don't have a lot of the metrics to create the baselines against which we want to measure performance and so some of the action items are just about beginning to collect those data points and understanding our awareness at the same time we have a really strong foundation of understanding through the vulnerability assessment of where the greatest vulnerabilities are in terms of people and infrastructure and those asks you know critical infrastructure and assets in the community and we have a good baseline already of where the assets and the opportunities that can help us respond to reduce those vulnerabilities are so at the end of the day what like pulling all this together in a way that's not redundant but it give it can give us time sensitive signals i mean with all of the technology we have and the advanced you know computer like ai all of this i mean we have a real opportunity to to strategically um and in a stepwise way integrate all this information we have about our own community at a local level and connect those it's about the timing and the signal being there and being able to get that communication out in a strategic way so all of that to say that i i think that the next step as we move toward implementation you know upon hopefully approval of the plan we're already thinking about moving toward that implementation and i think building on the foundations that we already have with our emergency operation centers the connections with the communities organizing community organizations active in disaster you know our faith-based groups out there in the community who are saying we want to know how to help during an event and leading up to an event to make us more resilient i mean i think the pieces are there it's about how we weave it together in an efficient cost-effective way and i i think we have some real tangible opportunities here as we move toward implementation to kind of pilot perhaps in the zen city dashboard some of these like very um incremental and concrete action items that are that are in the plan so i just want to comment on the redundancy thing i mean you know one thing government's good at is redundancy um but um i i i am concerned that some people are going to pick this plan up because they only want to read one chapter and so i i you know i i don't think we should be too afraid of talking about things in more than one place even though it's a lot more work and a lot more stuff yeah it interrelates you know and um i just you know just just want to make that comment but i love the dashboard i can't wait for that i can't wait to see that because i do think that that's where a lot of the things that overlap that go across because a lot of things do they go across multiple chapters mr chair so the question was what is higher free board so that's um i have a degree in agricultural engineering but it was from a long time ago and i am not a store this is a yeah i'm not a stormwater engineer but it's a differential so it's it's it's an engineering factor it's basically like it's a margin of safety that you factor into the calculations so that you know if the storm event is higher that the water level comes higher than what we're expecting it to during a hundred year storm event you know what it's measured to you have to put in that margin of error that safety factor and calculate that into the actual it makes everything higher yeah it makes everything higher to the top of your boat for the base of your boat to the dot deck of your boat so this is from the high water mark to the base or the deck of the house essentially is probably what they're talking about is my guess nothing free about it no and and i i actually like looked this up because i wanted to make sure i was understanding yes it's like that differential between the highest the level that the engineered system is designed to be at and how high the actual storm event like can go so yeah does that any other okay so mr chair we should move on to the next chapter all right so chapter four is heat and health um you'll notice this originally this was mental health heat and mental health uh and we pulled in what were already references in other chapters to our effects on our physical health i mean it's health broadly and the primary author of this is lara coley from community support services at the crisis center so the purpose is to build collaboration and advance awareness and capacity to address the climate related public health impacts and implement solutions that improve community health outcomes i'll go through just the goals high level again and then go to the priority action items so increase citizen awareness again you're seeing recurring themes in these so increase the awareness of heat and heat related illnesses um increase the amount of cooling centers in alachua county and expand those prevent the spread of vector borne diseases that are increasing in frequency and the type as climate change is shifting our climatic zones and then the crisis center phone line so increasing the preparedness and the capacity for the crisis center to respond during these um climate exacerbated you know extreme events and then for the priority action items so within one year at extreme heat outlooks watches advisories and warnings to the alachua county ready alerts develop an integrated information campaign that's focused on heat and health best management practices i apologize for the acronym there and resources including an interactive map of the cooling centers so the draft cap this chapter has the list of the existing cooling centers but this is a you know suggestion about again coming back to the dashboard making this interactive expanding the crisis center and the alachua county coad or community organizations active in disaster trainings for staff and community partners and then within five years two specific items on the wish list from staff for this establish nighttime emergency shelters for emergency shelters for extreme heat and add two new cooling centers to the south and the west of the i-75 corridor and then establish a mechanism for shuttles and again we have to be creative in a lot of this i know to leverage you know the infrastructure we have establish shuttles between the cooling centers and emergency shelters where they lack access to the public chance transportation and again you know there was a discussion today during these issues transportation transportation transportation it so often comes down to you know the person needing access to the resource needs to get there somehow and they may be limited in various ways so this is a critical another critical sort of you know timing and connecting the re the resource with the person or the person in need so any questions comments you know how how we would actually help a workforce be protected in this i don't i don't know if that would just fall under you know general health or not but i don't you know we've got farm workers and we've got and we got builders and i just didn't know if we needed to address workforce heat yes mr chair no no go ahead go ahead okay yeah um you got a question i yeah i didn't i i mean it's like a workshop yeah yeah okay i had my hand yeah i think she was going to answer yeah i just yeah no i'm just wondering if anybody feels like it you know do we well i just thought we were i thought we were preempted by the state from dealing with i'm seeing nods on the other end yeah we are but we do have i think in the plan staff have included like educating employers and employees on the best management practices around shade water rest like those things so we're preempted from regulating it but we're not preempted from you know educating and promoting it and incentivizing that so it may be that in the long run there's opportunities in that realm and i think it's in there as a strategy i was going to say i do think right now we say we're doing it by doing advisories which i don't know if that was just sort of like that's what we're doing right now but there's a plan to increase that but i do think that i wouldn't call that success i'll just say that like i mean our heat advisories are important and they go out but those are really like warning it's really hot outside take care of yourself you know and i'm not sure that those always reach the intended audiences at the times when they're most ready to receive the information like if they're already in heat stress or they're already dealing with these issues may not be the time to communicate i mean yes that's a time to communicate what they need to do but the more proactive we can be so if we can think of other strategies to your point health department or medical you know doctors you know something you know that that we could include resource centers you know we're working on the resource center stuff to the extent that all this education stuff could end up at those resource centers that we're talking about the flood maps and the bmps for heat stress and where the cooling centers are and having those at the ready for resource centers so people that they already trust and are talking to on the regular also have the same information we're providing in a press release that would be really helpful i have a few other things but i'll let you go okay um i guess i i appreciate that i think that education is a big big part of that but um i do um think that we should start by um putting our own employees on the list on the hottest days of the year i you know do we have do we have coolers do we have ice do we have all those things on our trucks you know making sure that we're we're taking care of our own folks when they are out in the field on the hottest days of the year um then i i have to say that when i was doing those the the presentations that um this chapter actually ended up causing the most discussion and a lot of it is because of the climate despair that people are having and i was so glad to read that in your revision you you have a good paragraph about that in there but one of the actions that i i think that we should um take or embrace or add is uh adding that mental health strategies for dealing with with climate disruption into our into our um some of our events maybe even having a climate summit that deals with mental health because i do believe that this is actually a huge huge problem um one of the presentations i did was at um was at uh um okamuk and i um yeah man i i could not you know some of those folks have seen such change in their lifetimes and they are just mentally devastated by it and so and a lot of our young people are just saddled with so much dread about their future that you know it's hard to think about so i i really you know wonder if that should be something that we we lift up in terms of a strategy and in taking care of our community yeah i love that i think this stuff did a good job capturing it through the crisis center but i like your idea of incorporating it into our events like if our climate senate summit had like a you know a table or a or like however they're organizing it like an area that was specifically about your strategies for dealing with that kind of stress and a chance to vent and and voice those frustrations or even a quiet room or a group to just go to yeah yeah you know they have that at some conferences now like a retreat room where you go and you sort of like you know can decompress gain your mental health back before you go deal with with more with more horrible things i've been to two conferences that have had those and i was like really impressed actually that they did that yeah yeah but um i i just uh i i think that that is needed i really do i was um i was surprised that it generated as much discussion as it did you covered some of that in this now yeah yeah mr chair thank you mr chair um so i really like the adding the workplace heat resiliency for all our outside workers public works yeah county fire rescue aso land conservation everyone that works outside what are we doing to address keeping them cool and and you know finding areas where they could cool off and then you know i know it's in our conservation area but on hot days when you're driving and you got to go to the store what do you do you look for the tree where do you park and so i think shade tree canopies and um parking lots parks and all over public spaces somehow should be in here under the heat piece yeah i know we have it a lot under the land use piece but i agree with you i think having the strategy of shade trees and encouraging that sort of that overlap between public spaces in public spaces yeah i think that's a great one i had two other quick comments that just under the um health piece we talk a lot about vector-borne diseases and about mosquitoes and ticks and things like that and increasing um you know it could be other animals diseases that start to transmit you know as we change our climate and animals adapt i i i guess i just wanted to highlight um the importance of unintended consequences because this is the one thing that made me think about it and like you make one decision because you're trying to fix one problem and you cause another problem right so we're trying to solve vector-borne diseases from mosquitoes and we start spraying all the time and we sprayed ddt everywhere and then the birds started disappearing right so i think we need to be really conscious and make sure that we talk about unintended consequences with these decisions and involving you know the best science we have out there so for this integrated pest management strategies for dealing with these and talking with um you know low like low against like low impact development low impact strategies for dealing with these um vectors in order to not proliferate insecticides and in areas that we don't need them or where we might wipe out other species that are actually helping to solve some of these problems and i know and it does talk about like education for nurses and other things like that i just wanted to mention that ifas does have an integrated pest management team and a team that works with like schools and other groups on how to handle pests and disease and things like that so they might be a group to channel in here and then i you talk a lot about in this chapter about like outreach and coordinating with other groups and telling the stories helping people deal with the stress of this and help people connect to what this all even means and how it works and i just wanted to point out we have a collaboration with the icc the um institute on climate change at uf that terry harpold and others are a part of and i think they would be a great group we link with them through our tree plantings they help us with a lot of our tree planting work with lacy and others but linking with them and other groups arts groups and community groups like spark that are able to sort of connect the dots in everyday life with using arts and culture music dance storytelling to help people understand these issues and connect with these issues in unique ways it's going to be really i think really important way that we don't drive people to despair with a bunch of really scary numbers but we also tell the stories about how everybody's dealing with these things so i love it yes sure go ahead is there anything in there about screen porches oh yeah that's land you put that one in the screen porches you've heard me say that everybody who comes through to put screens on their porches when they're building these things you know when the electricity goes out during the storm you still need to be able to sleep on the porch without getting eaten up by something you know they're beginning i'm seeing more screen porches on some of the developers i don't know if you all have noticed going through or not but there are more you're in somebody i have a question in reference to uh when it's extremely hot and everybody in a neighborhood has their air condition at full capacity and then a breaker goes out and then it stays out for maybe an hour two hours um how do we educate the public about not putting your air conditioning unit as low as it can go because it draws more energy and all of that stuff to cool the house off and so if everybody in a big neighborhood does that then a breaker blows and then you have to wait and then you have to let up all your windows in your house or either go outside and sit on the porch and so how do we educate uh the public about you know keeping it at a certain temperature so that it doesn't overload the system and it without air conditioning so it makes it even worse for but but i can tell you the day it got real hot in lodgewood county uh the breaker went out in my neighborhood and that's what happened because everybody had it down low and i'll admit i'm the guilty party too because i had mine too so where do you keep yours where do you keep yours well that day i had it at 65 65 i was hot no it wasn't no it was not trust me start by example no well i'm just telling you you know i'm just saying you know it's just that point that you know it was like wow now i'm in the heat for sure yeah i'm just saying so well but that's what happened i know that's what happened yeah oh yeah my neighbors said they did the same thing so i i just knew that everybody in the neighborhood did it and you can always be like no it's my neighbor he puts his thermostat down to 64 not 65 so yeah and that day man well 78 wasn't doing anything even 75 wasn't doing anything that's not working 75 it's not gonna help so great question mr chair all i mean this i mean just educating there have been dissertations written to like answer that question and i don't know what the answer is except that it's complex it's what we call a wicked problem right so there's no easy solution and it's a lot of layers the the hopeful part of my answer and i was gonna speak to this in responding to all of the comments for this chapter is that i think all of the dots are there already or we have a lot of the foundational key dots it's connecting them and so getting to that awareness and education and understanding how you know you're affecting your community with your individual choices but also not guilting people into feeling like they can't turn the air conditioning down if they're uncomfortable in their own homes and they you know what i mean it's this balancing act for sure and i think um we have i i wanted to mention um tupelo hostetler who was an unpaid intern who worked with us this summer specifically this is a chapter she's very passionate about she's a local youth member of our community who is involved with a local climate cafe where they have these community conversations about climate change and our mental health and how we just keep going and lift each other up and that's just one example of the dots the so-called dots in our community who are you know and and the groups who are working to raise the awareness every day just by having conversations is one way to start it you know talking with our neighbors and so the cap can help do that and again i the dashboard i think that awareness if we can find fun and affect fun is not the best word i mean just interesting like easy ways to invite people into the conversation where they're learning but they're also realizing that they have an opportunity as individuals to do something that's where i think the cap also gives us a good foundation to start from to start building that awareness yeah i just wanted to say and this is something utilities would typically do not a county but there is so much misinformation and and in education that needs to happen around air conditioning and how air conditioning can be managed and what there are newer products out there that for much less money can keep people comfortable in their homes that you know that aren't central heat and air that put a lot less work on the grid that manage humidity so much better we could have you know a half-day workshop on air conditioning and help a a whole lot of people and you know and connect them with uh some of the industry folks in in our community that that do that work and i think you know and and let them know about any rebates that might be happening at the utilities or whatever that might be a way to deal with the the heat stress to do some to do some education and to you know help business all at the same time i'm thinking more like mini splits yeah i mean you know they're you know if your your big air conditioner isn't keeping up you can install a mini split for a lot of folks that will and well they don't even have some people install them and they find out for during the shoulder months of the year they don't even running their central heat and air and people have cut their bills in half it's it's it it makes a huge difference but this is you know this is a technology that's new and unfamiliar to many people you could do the same thing with a window unit it's just not as efficient but um it's just something to you know it's these are i think things that we could help our community help understand because i i see people and they go and they they go and they spend all this money on a brand new air conditioning system it's like ten twelve thousand dollars now and their bills don't go down sometimes they do but sometimes they go up and and it's and it hurts my heart that they don't have that background information because um yeah some people could can't we don't talk about fans either and yeah and fans fans if your air conditioner's on your fans should be on if you're in the room yeah yeah i guess just on that front and to your point i think what couple things one is we can i love your ideas and that maybe that's a strategy we consider is like in addition to this big summit like either i don't know every couple quarterly or semi-annually we have events that are more like targeted on topic issues and areas and that are just framed around like a specific issue like energy efficiency and your home and changing in the in in heat issues and then people might it doesn't have to climate change is the topic so but it's more in like specific to how people can manage their homes and also i would say through our partners with rebuilding together and community weatherization coalition if they could start including that in their education because they do a ton of homeowner education and renter education on generally how you manage your home and to make more energy efficient but if we ask them to please start including like specifics on really hot days and on heat stress they would be a really great like you know person who could vector for information into our community so again it's another strategy leaning on our yeah education sorry we're making you right we're gonna we're gonna be up to about 300 by the end of the workshop i promise strategies action items specific action items so uh mr chair may i just make one comment to the unless there are other okay stop no no i i i just want to make sure we have time to you know the go through by due of alphabetical order which is how the chapters are ordered often the water gets you know we do so good with that yeah we do so great i know it's solid so i just want to make sure you know i do want to make sure we are able to cover all of them and give them yeah but i but i also would like to um you know respond to the again coming back to the connecting the dots and the timing and the signals right so um this is something well two things staff we have discussed um to commissioner prissy's point about potentially doing smaller events we've we've already um steven has recommended we've talked about doing next year instead of an annual one big annual event doing a series of smaller events in different parts of the county that are focused on a very you know narrow but actionable like part of this implementation plan so that's one thing the second is um coming back to the signals i i um i myself was on this climate advisory committee from since it was founded and so i've said this so many times but i think you know the part of our job my job as staff now and part of our collective jobs as staff is to lift make sure we're lifting up and um ensuring the uh the stability and the ability to continue to operate of our community partners who are essential for our county county programs to run and to commissioner prissy's point about the community weatherization coalition and rebuilding together north florida um you know they are like the ambassador and full disclosure i'm on the board of the cwc also but um they are on the ground being invited and welcomed into the homes of in many cases the most vulnerable members of our community to the impacts of climate change and they spend the home energy coaches who go into those homes spend hours in these homes and not just indoors but outdoors so they're seeing where there might be a tree that's a hazard to the point about like you know trade-offs right a tree can be a great thing to provide shade it can also be a hazard if it's past its useful life and it's going to fall you know in the next storm it could fall on that house and so part of the action items and strategies here that we're kind of trying to tie together is is very concrete things like adding to the checklist of those home energy coaches like if you see a hazard tree or an opportunity to plant a shade tree that could you know a beneficial tree like get it onto a property that needs it and could benefit the most from it in terms of reducing its um utility bills its home energy costs and its survivability during these extreme heat events let's do it so just you know incrementally adding to the the data set and the knowledge base we have about where those needs are we're trying to capture that in this chapter specifically but in the broader plan as well shall we move forward okay so chapter five is land use and transportation which is essentially two chapters in one there's a lot here uh primary authors for this are mike castine jessica klutz and allison moss who isn't here with us this evening so i will defer questions to the experts i am the generalist in this presentation so the purpose of this chapter increased housing density while conserving undeveloped land and maximizing transportation choices to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to climate change impacts the goals so again i mentioned this earlier that this is one of those chapters where we really like need to start there's a lot of foundational work that's already there that the county is doing but the metrics acquiring metrics is going to be really key for this and beginning to build those foundational data sets so acquiring metrics and developing timelines and targets for all of the strategies and action items that are in this chapter second focused on the sustainable future land development element so this is where it gets into more of the low impact development green stormwater infrastructure strategic planning around new and existing developments transportation mobility districts uh electric vehicle infrastructure so increasing the use of evs and the supporting infrastructure there fifth goal expanding the integrated natural historic and scenic resources so again this is getting to the multi-functionality and integrating those networks of routes throughout the county the sixth one focuses on the bicycle and pedestrian transportation strategies so that we have safe and um accessible routes for everyone that also have the added benefit of reducing our greenhouse gas emissions seven develop and maintain the transit um and here we're focusing on the mass transit through a lot of uh again it's people work and coordination and connecting dots through coordination informational support and participation in planning efforts rail transportation is another goal and again reminder these are asked you know these are long long-term the goals so investigating the possibility of rail transportation in the county and then uh number nine increasing telecommuting and remote work alternatives so in terms of the priority action items for one year and five years i have one each for the transportation and land use broken up so for transportation finalize and adopt the county-wide bicycle pedestrian master plan and then begin the implementation of the implementation of that within a year and along with that develop a connective connectivity index standard so that we have that sort of baseline for measuring how it's performing land use finalize and adopt the pine hills forest special area study and the comprehensive plan amendments that would enable implementation of that and then incentivize higher residential densities and across both creating a work plan for acquiring those necessary metrics that we mentioned that are already mentioned in the previous strategies but some of those metrics include things like vehicle miles traveled transit ridership mode share etc and again this action item is to create the work plan so within a year it's just to create the work plan to do all of this not to actually do all of this and then this would be integrated with the cap and the climate dashboard and then for five years out for transportation continue the implementation of the multimodal network following the adoption of the plans and provide a low stress bicycle facility within one half of a mile of all urban cluster residents so within five years staff feel like that's an attainable goal for land use um have by 2030 a long-term strategy to implement findings of the forward focus for eastern alachua county it's getting at that comprehensive you know triple bottom line people planet profit benefits and really a focus on on affordable housing employment etc thank you thanks for your work on this i mean i i really appreciate how this really ties in some of the other as i mentioned other plans and sort of strategic guides that were in the process of developing like the bicycle pedestrian master plan and the safe streets for all plan um so thank you for that i guess um i was interested in the possibility of a strategy and i don't know if it lands here but i feel like one of the things that we could do and maybe the dashboard will allow us to do this or our new mapping and data analyst person could do this but it would be um overlapping the new floodplain maps and heat island maps that we have available to us with the green field areas within the urban cluster to identify areas that could be targets for strategic investment around green spaces for storm water management for heat island impacts for parks those sorts of things because we're looking at parks from a strategic like how close are people to a park but maybe we're not looking at it in terms of the other things that those parks might provide or those green spaces might provide so i don't know if that's something that we have done but i'm sure other minds would think of other things we could incorporate into that analysis but i'd like to see us looking strategically within the urban cluster at the green spaces the what's left of the green spaces and how um we might strategically target those um and then um the other is uh with regards to um the or the storm water management i mean i'm sorry yeah storm water management and open space i'm not sure i'm not sure if i guess this is a weird question but we've tried to have developments have their open space on the outside of their development so that they connect with other like open spaces right to create networks of open space and i and that but then we we sort of leave that open space to their management is that correct we are not necessarily managing that so i guess within that analysis my other comment is like looking at even where those are parts of existing developments perhaps there's opportunities where strategically where it makes sense we might like we did we're doing with this development in hawthorne we're talking and on hawthorne we're talking to them about getting act to manage it or finding another entity to manage it if we could manage those open spaces in the county for multiple benefits and it makes sense for small investments by the county to do better management in those spaces to get more advantageous uses out of them you know negotiating with homeowners associations or groups to that end i guess that's sort of natural resources and sort of land use but i like it and if i could um add something i was really glad to see the um you know all the discussion of safe routes to school and walkability and things like that in here um one thing that um i i can't remember what our standards are but when we're doing neighborhood planning what do we require for shade trees and areas where we're putting walking and biking areas i need to defer to staff for that question and i also want to wreck jeff hayes i'm you're also in the key author on this chapter correct yes i want to wreck you know i just want to i just want to make sure that we don't lose you know when we're putting in bike paths and we're putting in walking areas i just you know we just talked about heat stress and people aren't going to use those if they're you know too hot so i i couldn't remember what our standards were so um alice moss transportation planning manager for the county um much to the chagrin of some of the development community anything that is a street is going to have shade trees um so anything that is a street has a pedestrian facility and we have shade trees now those can be incorporated within say the parking lane to not take as much space but um and they're going for a canopy at a certain point and um i think former forester um jesh could probably elaborate on that um but we're looking to get you know a comfortable shady environment for all pedestrian facilities within the neighborhood within a certain number of years of development and so with when we're putting in our own trails and our own uh any pedestrian facilities or bike facilities do we also incorporate those same standards for shading i would say that we endeavor to um where we have limited right-of-way and where we're not planning to acquire right-of-way as a part of that project it gets more difficult if there are existing mature shade trees and canopy we're trying to protect them wherever possible so for instance in the kincaid loop project that was my next question yeah there is not budget to landscape the project but they have looked strategically at first citing the route in an area that is more shady and comfortable and then protecting trees where they can you said we don't have money to our landscaping but we have tree mitigation funds that could fund canopy trees along that entire corridor so i don't know i mean maybe we could you know look at that as a avenue it wouldn't be full landscaping but at least it would provide shade trees at a certain interval maybe we could explore that option is there um maintenance ability within that as well or does that fall back just a clarifying question to establish yeah to establish the trees i don't know the answer to that question that'd be the only thought are we allowed to use our tree mitigation fund for establishment or is it just for another expert that's awesome i'll say so yeah getting the trees established and then also clear zone requirements so having them not be too close to the roadway mr chair andy chrisman land conservation program manager and um the county tree planting program falls within um my management so uh one of the primary barriers that may exist for establishing trees in these transportation corridors is underground and above ground utilities as well as setback requirements the the utility factor is a significant factor that's already affecting many of the potential tree planting project sites that um our arborist is looking at within that urban heat island and more developed area of the cities in the county so that's a real factor that has um it's a significant challenge to answer the question about establishment and maintenance trees that are planted through the tree planting program by the county arborist on public lands or lands where we have an interlocal agreement or a tree sponsorship agreement with the entity that owns the land are maintained for typically three years after planting to ensure quality establishment occasionally there's additional maintenance that extends beyond that three-year period if something happens to the tree where it needs some additional support but that three-year mark is the mark that is the standard yeah question with regards to the utilities is that i know some of that is a negotiation with the utility providers and their rules or requirements with regards to distance from easements is there um would you recommend a strategy in our climate action plan that would open conversations and negotiations with local utility providers to consider amending those utility easement requirements i mean are they are they i have heard this from others that they tend to be bigger than they need to be and thus it's causing challenges for all sorts of things in terms of efficiencies of scale correct and and i am not a utility expert so i don't want to speak out of turn in terms of what specifically should be recommended but it is a chronic issue that affects our tree planting program and limits the space and the opportunity for what's available and occasionally results in after an agreement has been made and trees have been planted the trees being then needing to be removed because a utility entity may change their plan for the area and expand their needed footprint for their utility installation i will say that the needed footprint for utility installations is grossly overestimated in many cases and that there are and they're just i i need to stop talking um but i i do think that that is something that we should add i i because it's i mean it's a strategy it is aspirational but at least opening those conversations again both with we have seven utilities in our county we can start talking to some of them and if we can get one of them to bend then we have leverage for the others and and that that i think is the strategy is because i think some of them you know i think an interesting thing to do would be to compare the needs for that that all of them have and and and then you know see which one has the smallest and then use that as a basis for pressuring the others thank you mr chair um okay so these two chapters are you know when people say what keeps you up at night this is it for me at least this is like the comp plan i was gonna say but it's our comp plan it's our company right so but but one of our primary reasons for doing this is is coastal migration like they're coming here and so um under goal 5.2 i i assume this is our urban cluster you know our our comp plan i think we should add sustainable and resilient future land development because we have we have to prepare for not only people but the change in the climate and then i think under goal 5.7 we should um based on the mtpo change that chair offered kind of initiated we should really say county-wide transit yeah and maybe even a strategy is exploring the feasibility of a regional transit authority uh yeah i mean i think that's i don't know if that's is that a strategy yeah that's a or an action plan yeah it could be i mean i think so the strategy was to form a county-wide mtpo that we have done and now it's to start thinking about transportation county-wide as opposed to just within the urban club yeah sure you go on to natural resources next chapter these are the easier chapters for me because we've done such a good job for so long there you go all right so chapter six natural resources and conservation uh the original primary author emily rodriguez is no longer staffed with the county uh and andy christman and um jessica hong jess and uh we've had a lot of other authors on this chapter as well like everything overlaps a lot of great expert minds working on this so for this chapter the purpose is to protect restore and properly manage natural areas trees and landscapes and conservation lands in the county while enhancing their resilience and improving their capacity to support climate adaptation and carbon sequestration this has all your tree stuff in it rod yeah it's back of all your trees so trees all in here they're in every chapter in some way effectively but but this is kind of the home in this draft is um for the trees so first goal continuation and i do want to state here it's um as as the comments have been made a lot of these you know foundational programs that have been around for decades in the county the county has been investing in they're a very strong foundation and and a foundation to the strategies moving forward for any of these is to continue to support that foundational investment so some of these may seem like no brainers but we also were deliberate about including them as strategies because if you overlook them and then we have a loss of funding or a transfer of funding or something we can lose that foundational you know the value of that fan foundational investment so i just want to say that on this goal in particular to continue and expand the land conservation efforts through the alachua county forever program so continuing to keep that investment strong second one the tree protection code update to increase the tree canopy retention percentage update the specimen tree list and potential tree permit changes goal number three is focused on the community and it says slash urban forest management plan so community is county-wide urban obviously in the urban areas so a starting point for that the fourth goal is focused on landscaping and so this is throughout the county county-wide creating those resilient landscaping landscapes through sustainable landscaping practices and then number five developing more climate and resilience related maps so again this crosses other chapters as well but a foundational goal here in terms of the priority action items for one year and five years we have uh within the one year fund and support development of the community forest management plan including an ecological analysis a tree inventory and a phase one urban forest management plan yeah so just like the cap there are a lot it's a big thing it's a big initiative as you're aware of so that's the one year goal is to fund and support that development uh the second one pass a board resolution authorizing and adopting the 30 by 30 and 50 by 50 land conservation goals and again that's passing the resolution that would support the already yeah we could do that next week yeah you could do that tonight no uh third prioritize construction of the land conservation office and field support facility at four creeks preserve which is currently in the capital improvement plan to ensure that continuity and the efficiency of the program operations going forward i know there was a lot of discussion about that today already for five years looking out to 2030 continue to support the alachua county forever program priorities by maintaining the budgetary levels staffing priorities and administrative uh efficiencies so again that's the time treasure and talents is the quick way to say that keep supporting that uh fund and support completion of the community forest management plan um add a fee simple alachua county forever add all fee simple alachua county forever properties to the registry of protected public places so that will ensure some you know continuity or we have a standing policy to do that right it's just add it to the registry specifically yeah that that so that's an administrative policy we already have it i guess we just need to do it yeah i think that's i think it was okay this is great um i really i really like uh you know the one year goal i really like the inventory tree inventory um and the urban forest management plan um like in the previous one where we talk about the urban cluster i feel like here we used to talk about the emerald necklace and then andy brought up the crescent and the and i feel like um that should be in here because it kind of it's kind of the it's not the opposite but it marries the previous chapter and and when ava is it ava the intern ava yeah when she starts to create the the images you know the 90 second youtube video and the cartoons and all the one pagers i think this is where it really it's a real visual for people to understand um i also uh think that this is the area where we we really talk about the two different types of um well maybe that's in the water but the landscape yeah i think that's in the water chapter yeah never mind okay that's it thank you i don't have a lot i mean i i feel like we're i i think where you guys went with these is is spot on i love your idea ken of creating that visual and making sure that they tie together like where we talk about something in one chapter in terms of narrative if there's a flip to that the flip side of that is the emerald necklace that's protecting our ag lands and our conservation lands and the hard work they're doing to do that so i really like that climate migration like when people are coming here like this is where people live and this is where the animals and the water and the forest is but this is where people live and so it kind of it really is a real planning tool that ties right back into our comp plan well and it helps us to have the hard conversations with people about why are you increasing densities around my neighborhood why do i need to have a multi-family apartment complex next door to my single-family housing why are you allowing adus in in single-family neighborhoods well this is why because we have limited amount of land left on our planet and if we want to protect our land and conserve our land we have to have a strategy and our strategy is urban densities and the areas where services exist to provide efficient services for people and protecting the natural resources that allow us to live on this planet 30 30 50 50 yeah simple it's clear it's the commissioner just a quick question about the word resilience we've used it twice on 44 the the slide before this one i don't know if that's the right name that resilient landscapes resilient related maps how are we using the word resilient um i could go all the way back to the first slide but i think you don't have yeah we will but i think it's a good point that we as we transition to the dashboard and kind of the final prettied up version of the climate action plan we want to pull out little insets of what exactly does this mean um and so one of the first slides i provided was the national climate assessment definition of what resilient what climate resiliency actually means and so here you know resilient landscapes again the devil's in the details depending on the topic we're discussing but here it's like the ability to survive and thrive and cope in the face of our changing climate right so the landscapes themselves it's like we want to create landscapes that are able to survive during extreme heat events droughts yeah intense rainstorms don't require you know huge investments of our natural resources like irrigation fertilizers you know that are then degrading the foundation of our economy the reason people love love this county and want to live here and why they're coming here but in the past we focused on you know native native plants and native landscaping and that sort of thing so i i was that's why i was thinking resilient maybe was not as specific as what we have trying to be in terms of landscaping requirements i think you make a good point because you know also in terms of resiliency we also need to address things like pollinators and all those other things that support a good um agricultural um nature around our uh around everything that we plant but i do think that i think resiliency covers it but i i think that and it may be just me you know i just no i think no i think it's a good point you know though i think i think we just need to clarify that for for the for the reader because not everybody's gonna like you know go to that place in their head i think to her point in this chapter highlighting the things that we do really well as the conservation stuff but where it ties back to the land use pieces like the landscaping pieces like encouraging pollinators encouraging diverse landscapes with edibles and native plants and xeriscape plants like focusing in those specific areas which i think the pattern book and some of the things that they get to the strategies that staff are starting to go down actually hit those marks but they just it's not spelled out in the big picture goals so maybe just highlighting those things yeah because we could all just plant ligusterman to be resilient and if i if i could just speak directly to that because it's also it in the water chapter you'll see on that final slide it gets directly to a resource that is included and referenced in the plan that is a it's a a new guidebook for sustainable the pattern book by the outside collab which again for full disclosure i'm on the board of that outside collab also but a lot of great work went into that and it's florida specific and it's a guidebook it's not policy it's not for land development code but it a lot of private sec great minds went into defining it very clearly to your point commissioner wheeler you know to your question defining what it actually means to have a resilient landscape it's there's a great resource out there that um is integrated here and in some of the action items and strategies moving forward that you'll see on the last slide on the water chapter we're getting there so yeah um yeah real quick wetland protections do we put that here or do we put that in water both i mean that's what our maybe both it's in both yeah it is in both too it's in flooding it's in it's yeah yeah mr chair steve hofstetter again it it's probably more focused in natural resources section but it's in the flooding and it hits um in the water section as well but though the wetland protection is mainly in natural resources okay thank you thank you any other mr chair any other commissioner comments or questions or okay two more to go you're doing a great job not to yeah we want to give due and okay so we're on to chapter seven which is waste management and resource consumption and we have our primary author staff gus almost is he still here he's still here sticking around yes so um the purpose for this chapter ensure high quality waste management services to alachua county residents and minimize the amount of waste directed toward landfills and the environment so the goals increase intergovernmental collaboration and lead by example so establishing that solid waste reduction goal and formalizing by adopting a resolution on zero waste and the zero waste initiative second goal establish public private relationships between alachua county and private entities to facilitate those zero waste goals so partnership building focused on the private sector third phasing out organics from the waste stream and then this focuses you know the strategy is both residential and commercial opportunities uh and then recycling so expanding the recycling programs and opportunities within the county and again that's for resident it's for everybody so residential and commercial and within the county itself and then for the priority action items for the waste management chapter uh one year continued development of a robust or organic diversion and composting pilot program in the county so we know that's already been that's already underway um expanding that development revising future contracts and franchise agreements with collections and processing vendors so that it includes again there's the word requirement but also incentives for addressing zero waste and developing partnerships with the private sector to implement a larger scale reuse program and then within five years establish the processing processing facility infrastructure that's necessary for diverting those organic materials from the waste stream and closing that loop on our our waste cycle establishing a uniform infrastructure processes and mechanisms for multi-family recycling specifically um and there you have those efficiencies of scale economies of scale if we can get to the multi-family properties expand food recovery networks to include food pantries this one yeah um so i guess um a couple comments on this one is i think i know again like you said a lot of these are aspirational and there's you know there's pieces of this that we're already working on but i guess one is that on the sustainable or on the zero waste it's not just zero waste but it's bigger picture procurement policies i know that was supposed to be coming back to us soon for discussion do we know when that's supposed to be on the agenda it was i think it was actually listed for this meeting but it didn't happen so yeah so it got pushed to the next meeting okay so we'll be talking about it the next review so i'm assuming it's coming back at the next one okay great awesome um with regards to the organics i guess i just wanted to i know economic development kind of goes across all of these strategies we talked a lot today about the work that we do around um community and like empowering our smaller local businesses and the grassroots folks to like engage where you know we're closest to the issue and so you know i would really encourage we list a lot of really big operations here but i hope beaten path compost is a part of the conversation they've worked really hard to build a sustainable business model that has been supporting residential composting in gainesville and i think they have a model that could be replicated to serve residential areas across the county if done well so i just want to encourage us involving the small local businesses as well as kind of the the big dogs if you will in the conversation about organics um in the ways in which we approach that that support supporting growing our local businesses and economic development in that regard and then my only other comment was i made a comment earlier about ifas the small farms community gardens pieces and i think it could tie into this piece especially around the organics as well because there's a lot of opportunity you know we give out bins and wire bins and things like that but coordinating with them to get back to more to incorporating that again more in workshops and classes and programming um both with some of our non-profits like working food who's doing gardening workshops um giving garden and ifas extension and others who do gardening workshops to know that that resource is available and to begin help incentivize or support their efforts to do more compost education um because really the most sustainable way for us to get rid of organics is for just to stay on site and not have to truck it all around um so those are my comments commissioner wheeler and then commission yes thank you um i've spent some time talking to gus about this because i'm really concerned that we are kind of stuck in the way that we have dealt with our our garbage for um for a while since i've been on this board which is will be eight years soon and we really have not engaged in conversations with people in from the university or people from the community who are doing private research we have really not opened our minds to uh new processes i know that the community has been adamant about not burning but i know that they are new there there's there's work being done all the time i just recently this weekend i met a gentleman at our uh lake dwellers meeting who is doing research on pfas and it's and he's retired so there is a whole community of people that are working on these things that we don't know about and don't know what's happening because we have uh set our sites you know on one way of processing our refuge refuse so and we're sending out our stuff to other communities who are doing the things that we don't allow here and you know the air is the same the water is the same across county lines we're also wasting a lot of energy and money sending things across these lines to other places that take them i recently ran into a place in tennessee that is processing glass recycling glass into tile you know i mean there are industries out there that we don't know about because we have not allowed ourselves to expand the conversation enough to um you know to to make you know just to to have a bigger conversation that's all i'm saying because it bothers me a great deal that we send our stuff across county lines to someplace else just because we have the idea that we're not going to burn here even though there's there are industries um new technologies that are available that we don't know about and and it bothers me a lot that we're not willing to have that so i was going to the next time we have a topics for um like what do we do when we have a workshop or whatever it is we get together on to open this up uh to talk about possibilities and that means inviting people um maybe from the university who are doing their own independent research asking folks to let us know what's happening right here in our own academic community that we may not know about so i it i guess the closed-mindedness i think for me is hard when there are resources out there that we could possibly tap into the cordial commissioner alfred is in yeah i um i'll quickly respond mariel and i think that that industry is um got a lot of history to it and um if you look at other communities that have gone down that road it's a it's a wall street deal as opposed to a technology deal and i hear what you're saying um but that's a that's a really big big conversation uh with regards to if you're talking about waste to energy if you're talking about new technologies that may be different but waste to energy as a whole i think is a is a place i'm not really interested in pursuing at this point um based on what i know about it what what i was going to bring up on this topic was what i think is the 800 pound elephant in the room that we're not talking about in this area and i go back to the guiding the guiding principle to guide develop and cultivate environmentally socially and economically economically resilient strategies and solutions and and i i just think about our cnd facility that's located in the wrong place and so i feel like we need to have a goal of relocating that facility closing that facility finding the right place to put our cnd waste that's not in conflict with east kainesville and i and and i didn't see that in here maybe it's in the details i don't know but that yeah that to me is the the big omission in this chapter well may i just just go back to one more just to finish before i feel i'm gonna be fair to everybody i understand but i wasn't finished this is i wasn't no what i'm trying to say is that we're waiting we're spending money to send glass out of this area when we could be grinding our own glass here well that's what i'm saying that there are other technology i'm not i'm just saying that we have yeah yeah i understand and that's where i'm headed with all of this that there are that there are that there are industries that we have not talked about that we need to talk about because that ego loop's been out there now for eight years sitting there and we need to be creative in terms of looking for ways that we can use that ego loop and at the same time save ourselves money by using industries that we should be open to that's all i'm saying now i'm finished thank you mr chair interestingly uh mary helen when i i made a facebook post about this meeting tonight to let people know that we were talking about the climate action plan and um you know if you have a photo with your post it gets more views so i used a photo that i took in um villano beach last week of a sidewalk in villano beach that is decorated with uh recycled glass tumbled tumbled glass and i first saw this probably 15 years ago in albuquerque where they tumble their own glass in albuquerque and they use it to um decorate their medians and interesting stripes and things like that so you know that's that's a that's a cool what's that yeah yeah i can't do that here because the green book right that's too funny um anyway um interestingly oh wow we could really expand this chapter um interestingly this was the second most talked about uh chapter when i went um did the thing and the the most interesting um comment was folks did not understand what zero waste was they found zero waste to be such a scary thing and such an unattainable goal but they didn't understand the definition of zero waste and so i feel like this is a real education opportunity because i think we're alienating a lot of people in our community by by saying what's that i second that by saying the term zero waste that that you know they just think oh they're just ridiculous because they think we're never going to have waste so i i wonder if this is um i i i i wonder if we need to think about using that term here and and anytime we use it maybe put the definition with it because i do think that um i had a bunch of people walking in like ready to argue because they're like i understand environmentalism but we're never going to get to zero waste and i'm like well let's talk about what that is so um i i don't know i just i mean i i i love the i got there after the community gave you the whole definition and you guys talked about the whole conversation i gave up i said mercy you guys went i said you guys were all against me on that i'm with you now i got two i need one more well i'm not saying we should get rid of the term necessarily i just feel like the that the that we have to if we're going to use it we really need to have a lot of education about it because people don't get it we alienate people with it and it's really um i i uh you know had two or three people that walked in with chips on their shoulder talk about zero waste you know so um anyway i i thought it was kind of um i thought it was telling and i uh i just feel like we should uh expand on on on that and and you know maybe this is an opportunity to come up with something a term that nobody else has come up with yet that's even better you know i don't know what it is but um on that can i yeah i guess i have a couple things i guess first mary helen i think to your point i'll say this i think um you're 100 right that we need to think outside the box i think that we you know i've had some conversations with staff with our economic development folks especially now that we have that department and i i do think that we are trying to think out i think we are trying to think about those different industries i actually think that those conversations are being had like glass tiles or countertops you know things that we could make with unique things that we can make with plastics like recycling plastics into lumber all those are things i think the challenge is there's limited numbers of those companies a lot of them are startups they don't have funding to buy a facility yet and that's why we haven't quite had the momentum on the eco loop but i think now that we have a dedicated department and we're the edo maybe we have a little more control over that so i'm with i'm all with you on thinking outside the box on on new industries and ways that we can create a circular economy and i would be totally willing to change this to circular economy from zero waste because there we go because i think the circular economy piece is really what we're trying to get to we're trying to get to a fully circular economy where we have it's not really waste right it's only waste if it's wasted and we're trying to not waste it we're trying to create a space where everything is a feedstock or an opportunity to use it in a new or a different way so i'm just going to throw that out there so i can play around with that i'm not but i do think i i will say that i'm with you i'm not interested in opening up the conversation i'm not i i'm with both ken and mary on the front that i you know i'm not interested in opening the waste to energy conversation because once you burn it it is wasted because you can't do anything else with it it's gone and so you know there's going to come a time i promise you it may not be in your lifetime it may not be in my life but we will be mining our landfills it's going to happen we're going to run out of fossil resources and we're going to and metal resources and other resources and in some countries it's already happening and out of out of unfortunate necessity to make money and find metal they can sell things like that it's more of an economic reality than it is a societal reality right now but we're going to get to that point in our country in our world and so i think burning that once you burn it it's gone it's gone forever and it becomes like just carbon and it goes in our atmosphere and you know and we can't ever recover those resources and so while i don't think we have a circular economy yet i think we'll get there and i think as resources become more scarce we'll realize their value a lot more and i think we would kick ourselves if we burned it i think that in the long run we would we would look back on on that moment and say why did we do that and secondarily i think right now we are trucking our stuff out and i hate that but we are committed to a landfill that's not burning right our waste is that correct that like we take it to a place that's not burning it the the landfill that we used does not burn trash and no so i you know i i will say like yes we're trucking it out but right now i think it's still a better option than burning it and i hope someday that we'll have all the strategies and we'll have a circular economy and we won't have to have the conversation about should we burn but i'm with you 100 on all the other all the other options of technologies and all the other sort of opportunities for shifting where our resources go and i had two comments on that and that was one is what are where are we with regards to the bulky waste facility and i think it gets to your cnd conversation too you know repurpose project now it has reuse planet and now has their building recycling facility and if we had a bulky waste recycling space then we could probably be diverting a lot of the cnd waste to better and higher uses mr chair goes almost solely waste director hopefully i won't regret saying this but going back to the eco loop you know we've been closed several times no cigar we are back in conversations with the company that originally wanted to to build a cnd transfer station and material recycling facility i think we solve all our issues in principle we're at the stage of drafting a lease agreement for 10 acres but like i said we've been closed before so no too excited about it so we're working on that as far as uh new technology i mean we even you know we keep talking i'm actually meeting in two weeks with somebody who has some new technology which is not uh waste to energy we kind of briefly talked about this stuff a couple years ago these are the chemical recyclers that take the plastic and make sin gas and they can make fuel which is not what we want or they can make plastic again uh so it's kind of like a circle closed loop so i'm having a meeting with them in two weeks they're still interested so we keep working trying to get things resolved as far as uh the bulk storage facility we tied that up to the new house waste facility and that's tied up with the epa grant that's still alive i mean that hasn't been closed it's being evaluated so we're waiting for those results uh so that's kind of holding on there we're still working on the reuse side we got the uh waste reduction zero waste circular economic grants still out there and one of the projects we're going to be funding if approved by the board is uh reuse project so okay okay yeah well what do you think about zero waste it all yeah you just hit all the points i'm with anna and mary so i'm joining them and changing zero waste to circular economy yeah it's not my idea it's their idea i'm with them 100 percent um and mary helen i also agree with you that if we're talking about glass and reuse products um the repurpose project and the reuse planet and what you just said we talked about six seven years ago and i'm ready to do that so that's right in line with i think what you're saying um so i'm good with that yeah it is yeah and i would just remind everybody this is what james coates was doing over at the armory in terms of taking plastics and turn them into shields you know police and um firefighters and they were he so you may want to talk to him about what what he was doing because he was taking plastics and turning them into armor i wasn't aware of that yes that's what was happening at the armory that we've got now thank you thank you guys and mr chair i just want to make two comments before we move on to the final if i may um to this so circular economy i get really excited about because that's as as you recall you know when when i started in this position and where the draft the first version was at we were looking at and i've gone out and spoken with members of the community about what the green industries chapter is going to look like and we've evolved and gotten feedback on names for that chapter but we we've settled on the circular economy chapter and i'm i'm an environmental economist so i'm like i get really excited about trying to in simple ways communicate what that actually means um and so i think the waste and i was looking at the title of this one too i mean even it's right now this chapter is called waste management and resource consumption but we could also just call it resource recovery because it's closing that loop or circular economy the circular economy involves all the chapters and so that's kind of the chapter that we're writing we're writing now we're writing the circular economy chapter that really ties all of this together and gets to what that triple bottom line is and how and the only other comment i'll make and i i honestly don't know if this is from my hometown or if it was here so i'm not stealing but there's a huge event called trash to treasure that in my hometown in pennsylvania um that the community has organized and it's where penn state university is but they like it's now become of a big event that they have there that that closes that loop and helps highlight the value of every resource in our economy that it's not waste that flows through and then needs to end up done or you know in a landfill but it can come back around and it's value there's still value in it so so i love i appreciate all of your comments and your feedback because i i think it it will it reinforces like the strength of this chapter but also how important the semantics are they're really important so that we don't alienate people which can end up alienate alienating opportunities to take this to the next step so all right with that i'll get off my soapbox and move on to the last chapter uh so water and last but not least water is our lifeblood um so water water and aquifer protection and stacy greco is with us still i believe yes thank you stacy the primary author for this chapter so our water program manager and epd so the chapter's purpose is protecting alachua county's aquifer springs and surface water resources by implementing integrated water quality and conservation strategies and making infrastructure improvements to mitigate the adverse effects of climate change this chapter wins the prize for the most action items and it started it started this format you know originally this had its own separate excel table with all of those action names that we've now well anyway so um water uh i'll go through the goals and then get to the priority action items so first goal reducing water use um second increasing water quality and quantity um so that's the positive frame so avoiding the degradation of quality and our depletion of our supply and then third increasing water efficiency and new developments as a primary strategy or primary goal and here are the priority action items for one year and five years um that stacy identified for this chapter so uh requiring within one year and here's the word require again but requiring the use of soil amendments in new construction for residential and commercial landscapes through the landscaping code in order to increase the adoption um in unincorporated areas second finalize and implement an lid so it's a low impact development checklist for new development projects and then go through that checklist and review with project applicants very early in this in the cycle because that's where you can be creative about actually doing it and implementing it in a cost effective way that's aligned with the the requirements within five years um have completed a model neighborhood in alachua county that applies the principles of the new yard pattern book for florida's sustainable single-family homes that's the outside collab resource that's referenced in the plan in a couple places and ideally this would uh as the guidebook says it would use native vegetation and would have no permanent irrigation or fertilizer use second implement projects to increase aquifer recharge using reclaimed water or storm water and third expand monitoring and analysis of water quality stations for surface water and groundwater and then integrate those with the water supply and climate dashboard metrics that will be in the larger yeah i i look through this chapter it does have the most actions by far um and a lot of them are i what i appreciate i'll say about this chapter is that i feel like it highlights the opportunities that exist beyond our regulatory boundaries which i think is important it's important for us to understand where we have not just the ability to apply regulations or incentives or opportunities or education but where we have the opportunity to have dialogue with our other institutional partners and have influence right and and or conversations and dialogue about the ways in which we have to we need to change and i feel like that's something that our water resource department's done really effectively is have difficult conversations with the water management district with dep with our landscapers you know it's not easy work to do but it's really important work to do and we've gotten a lot of results doing that and being that collaborative partner that just keeps coming to the table and embracing those hard conversations again and again and again and not taking no for an answer but just keep keep trying keep finding new ways to address that concept so that you finally maybe get to yes or at least get to maybe um and so i just appreciate that that work is being done in our department thank you stacy for all these years of that work and i hope that you know we think about that in these other chapters if there are areas that we've missed that are those opportunities to have conversations about things we're currently preempted on but we could still have conversations right work with our lobbyists at the state level or the regional level or the federal level to have those dialects that's why we have lobbyists right so um i just want to point that out and thank you and i wanted to say um i'm really excited about the outside collab resource i introduced that to um adams homes and they are getting ready to build at hawthorne road as you know we just approved the rezoning and the comp plan amendment and so i just wanted to highlight that they might be a willing partner for your model neighborhood in alachua county one it's a perfect location given its proximity to the lake two they had a real interest in the idea of the composting amendments and and of native landscaping and utilizing this but i know they're also trying to keep their houses affordable so there was this weird right sort of like how do we do this and that and all these things and so um but they were open to the dialogue and conversation so just encourage our staff to reach out to them about that and yeah i'm just i'm excited about this chapter i think it hits on all the cylinders commissioner alfred um i actually talked to adam's homes about uh florida water star and i think what florida water star and the um outside collab resource would go very well hand in hand and so one thing that i didn't see much of in this is florida water star as a as an option in this chapter i'd like to see a little bit more emphasis on that because if if a developer isn't installing landscape uh irrigation it's a very easy certification to get and one that we could very much incentivize without a whole lot of work and it's a great way for a developer to get sort of going down that road of more sustainable building practices um you know without without a lot of cost or or even real effort if we could you know help promote that so i think that um because a lot of the things that are required are becoming more and more standard practice in terms of uh low flow because low flow fixtures are becoming more standard and they're way better than they used to be so but the big thing the big hard part about florida water star is the irrigation part of it and if you take the irrigation part of it out and you're installing all um you know native plants in your yard then you're you're three quarters of the way there so i just thought you know it's an opportunity so i just wanted to point that out and um otherwise i think this is one of the chapters like land use that our um our staff has really got their arms around well because we've been doing it pretty good for a while so you know yeah yeah commissioner wheeler anna do you see up there does that anywhere up there that we are looking at now talk about what you were saying for advocacy and working regionally and statewide with is that or is that something you're recommending no it's it i think what's up here is just like some of the highlights of and that they're sort of like immediate goals but in the strategies that are in the full document they're there they talk about like it talks about the fact that we would like to have a conversation about consumptive use permits and how those get increases and those get approved right and that's something we don't control that's the water management districts but it's in there as a strategy of having that conversation so there's a lot of strategies in there that are either at the water management district level or dep level or um but we still want to be able to be a part of the dialogue and conversations right so they're highlighted okay well that's right because even working through fact you know those are the agencies that we have that we can have a political impact you know with okay yeah i think that's all i need yeah thank you just real quick i want to reiterate what um commissioner alford said this chapter's you know excellent stacy great job i mean guys we've got you know a statewide leader that other counties look to in stacy and her department when it comes to kind of um action plans and what we're doing and so i just uh i think y'all did a great job really great job everybody did everybody did yes we should clap for everybody all these authors yeah okay at this time i guess we have uh public comments any public comments thank you i just want to express gratitude that you're giving this this level of attention it's tragic that we are living in a condition where we have to focus so much on mitigation because the causes the roots are at the national at the scale of whole nations and large multinational corporations and with this country like pulling out of the paris accords taking down two orbital platforms that give us the best real-time comprehensive measurement of carbon in the atmosphere it looks like we're headed nationally for a policy of sticking the head in the sand and pretending it's not there if you stop measuring it it's not a problem so that means it's more burden on local governments uh on state governments and local governments to deal with this and i'm not real confident about our state government either we we do a great thing on one hand with uh uh restoration of everglades and then we put a stick of prison in it so where are we headed with that we don't know but um i guess we can just keep trying to clean up in alachua county and and hope we can keep our air only here how about that yeah you can come up to this one though yes yes ma'am yes ma'am yeah yes hi um okay now here i've been on a lot of appointments today but i had to listen on the phone and all that there's a lot of good topics being covered today so i wanted to comment uh on one thing not on the agenda and then on this climate action plan first so i of course i'm from the best place on the planet the west coast as some of you know and i would like to continue this conversation with some of you outside of here to base on zero waste that seattle did and also the east bay the east bay does exactly what commissioner wheeler is saying and i know locally uh i work with a church we i'm going to try to reel her in she's collecting all the plastic over wrap and they make benches when they get to a certain like a thousand pounds so we could do there's there's groups like that and then there's also like the terror cycle and people think i'm nuts here like i'm like get your your paper towel over wrap you know like i'm teaching that and i'm also wanting to share like there's a roofing thing going on and i collected i'm still carrying it around and i actually would like to bring it in for a presentation the amount of materials that was just thrown all over the ground from this roofing job and you know roofs are going up like you know the maggots are going up right now some of you know what i'm talking about but we need to really get on these developers about this because i'd like that circular economy and really teaching because i know when i say zero waste here they look at me like i'm from another planet and i'm speaking japanese but as somebody from the west coast we've been doing this a long time so i'd like to be able to have a productive conversation with you and refer to some models that i didn't create but like was part of it as a community member and secondly i want to applaud the lateral county board of commissioners for not acquiescing to dodge and i am very upset as some of you know i called in earlier with the city right now just crossed over the rainbow crosswalk i mean this is just getting ridiculous now i'm sorry um but i was in peru for the fuji mori thing i was in bolivia for that thing i was in africa like this is fascism and i want to thank you continue to stand up to it please we don't need to acquiesce we can be like jacksonville we can be like chicago we do not need to let fascism take over the things we have worked so hard for and i'm really getting sick of fighting for like literally everything it's kind of like over it but um i would like to thank you and i think we need to continue to fight and coalition build but i really don't want to fight but just like strengthen ourselves and i like the thing that mary alfred said earlier please we need mental therapy for what is going on right now a lot of us are being affected by just all of this and i think we need to have some models like lady gaga does justin bieber does they've come out very clearly that they have mental health issues and create a model that is helping our people thank you thank you my name is janice gary and jay rosenbeck and i several months ago started a um a a campaign or um communication channel called what you can do seems to be a very uh catchy title these days doesn't it we send out every week or two we send out very concise messages that include national state and perhaps most importantly local uh information about what's going on they're very concise statements and they have very specific actionable things to do we call it activism for busy people and we promise that in 10 minutes folks can read something and take action last week we promoted um the climate action plan and let people know that it was coming out let people know to listen for it sent the link to the the climate action plan and we will continue to follow that with you you can consider us a resource for public outreach most of you know my email address and i also want to just with such deep gratitude the volunteers the staff and the leadership of alachua county for putting this together and asking such intelligent detailed questions because the devil is in the detail and uh we're here with you thank you thank you janice i read that and thank you very much and i did see that you listed the climate action plan last time and she's she needs help so if you guys have an action item to add to the list if you can write it up and send it to her she'd be very very grateful are there any closing comments you have some okay i was going to get her to go first and she gave the presentation thank you mr chair i want to defer yeah yeah i just had one uh closing question i guess um in terms of approving the plan are do you think are you comfortable with us moving forward with with bringing back the final version for a a board meeting approval and then have having it as a ceremonial approval at the summit or the festival nice idea okay that's a great idea yeah yeah it because it's more challenging to have a have it set up at the summit to do that kind of formal approval step okay thank you thank you steve yeah thank you mr chair so um i just want to really talk to my colleagues for just a minute you know this all started um after irma but really from the standpoint of i remember one of the discussions was we need to come up with the plan because there's going to be state and federal money available and grant applications and i view the climate action plan as one of the most non-partisan things that exists at every level and so i am so grateful that our community has made this a priority uh and all you had to do is go to the blunt center when we had the summit to see our entire communities there i know we were all there at different times but that told me that at that moment we are definitely doing what our community is instructing instructing us to do and um i really do think that we should be touting it every chance we get not running from it like like talking about it again as a non-partisan thing and i'm going to share with you um i picked up the alligator when i ran over to get food for 10 minutes that we had today and sometimes you have a student that just writes something and so this came out yesterday abigail trachtenberg wrote a very i don't know if you know her but she wrote a very succinct article and i'm just going to quote a couple things number one on august 4th you have closed the office of sustainability for nearly two decades the office of sustainability has been the heart of the campus climate action every dollar spent on resiliency and mitigation saves both money and lives the u.s chamber of commerce there is not a more conservative group the u.s chamber of commerce reports that every one dollar invested in resiliency and disaster preparedness saves thirteen dollars in economic impact damage and cleanup costs sustainability isn't just an environmental priority it's economic common sense the cost of inaction will be much greater than the cost of maintaining that office she says while uf may hope to live in a world without climate crisis hope is not a plan now is the time to learn educate and advocate for sustainability because climate change is not a partisan issue it's a matter of life health and justice and then i will conclude with what she already said the u.s chamber of commerce reports every one dollar invested in resiliency and disaster preparedness saves thirteen dollars this is basically an economic plan and it's not partisan and we should when we are done seek state money to help fund our action items and the state should fund these items and fund them throughout the state so um again thank you to the 69 six how many authors 68 plus 68 authors and i got to say hundreds of community members and advocates and um staff and staff time this is a good investment of dollars because every dollar we're investing again is saving and creating 13 that's what the u.s chamber of commerce says thank you mr okay commissioner alfred and then commissioner when i go to naco not so much fact but mostly to naco and i sit down with people and they're like what cool things is your county doing one of the things that i talk about is climate action plan and it's amazing the number of counties that aren't doing this and so i'm just so proud of our county and our staff and our you know this this whole thing it's it's it's it's really really um forward thinking and you know while we might while there might be a lot of coastal counties that have done this i don't think they've done it as well you know many of them have done it as well and as thoroughly as we have and i'm i'm just uh i'm i'm just i can't i couldn't be any prouder so thank you thank you all a lot and um you know we we nitpicked about stuff that we talked about today but it's overall just an amazing document so i just wanted to to thank you all and say that okay commissioner yeah i i just i echo my colleagues you know i was i was the first coordinator of the office of sustainability and the second director of the office of sustainability under presidential leadership that saw the importance of at the time the word was sustainability then it was resiliency and really it's about survival i mean really this is ultimately a survival guide like if we want to stay on this planet as human beings we need a survival guide because we've rather you believe it's human caused or not the climate's changing and and we are impacting this planet in so many ways and so you know it is really unfortunate to see our institutional partners undoing years and years of work and commitment from people across those institutions and it was heartbreaking to see the office of sustainability disappear but i will say that it also was sidelined a long long time before it disappeared and and that's something that's happening a lot and so you know i just it's easy for us to create a plan it's also easy for it to sit on a shelf so i just i thank the staff for creating this plan and creating ways for it to be actionable right now and to link it to the things that we're doing in our regular everyday strategic plans and our everyday work as well as giving us aspirational goals that we can work towards and just say hold our feet to the fire so we keep going with it and it doesn't become something that just sits on the shelf and collects dust or gets sidelined when we're you know busy focusing on other things thank you if there aren't any other comments then we adjourn