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HomeMy WebLinkAboutNatural Resources Advisory Board - Minutes - 02/15/2023Page | 1 2/15/23 - Minutes Natural Resources Advisory Board REGULAR MEETING Wednesday, February 15, 2023 – 6:00 PM 300 Laporte Ave., City Hall 1. CALL TO ORDER: 6:02 PM 2. ROLL CALL a. Board Members Present – • Lisa Andrews • Drew Derderian • Kevin Krause (Vice Chair) • Dawson Metcalf (Chair) • Barry Noon • Kelly Stewart • Matt Zoccali b. Board Members Absent – • David Bryan • Danielle Buttke c. Staff Members Present – • Honoré Depew, Staff Liaison • Kira Beckham, Lead Specialist, Waste Reduction & Recycling • Caroline Mitchell, Manager, Waste Reduction & Recycling • Carrie Tomlinson, Senior Specialist, Forestry • Freddie Haberecht, Senior Specialist, Forestry • Ralph Zentz, Manger, Forestry • Kendra Boot, Senior Manager, Forestry • Christine Holtz, Senior Specialist, Forestry d. Guest(s) – • None 3. AGENDA REVIEW 4. CITIZEN PARTICIPATION 5. APPROVAL OF MINUTES a. Dawson moved and Barry seconded a motion to approve the January minutes. Motion passed unanimously 7-0 6. UNFINISHED BUSINESS 7. NEW BUSINESS Page | 2 2/15/23 - Minutes a. Waste Hauler Contracting - Kira Beckham (Lead Specialist for Waste Reduction & Recycling) provided an update on the Single-Family Trash, Recycling, and Compost Contracting project. Staff was seeking board support for the staff recommendation and included an updated timeline and milestones, and overview of the draft contract and key program elements including frequency of recycling pickup (Action) • Discussion | Q + A • Dawson – Q – I am curious when thinking about the weekly to every other week on the recycling; did that come up as something that was significant by families as something they would want to add? Did that ever come across? Kira – A – We have a survey out now asking that question and so far, it seems as if, depending on the family, but it seems as if price is still a top consideration. People are considering everything from do I need it and how often do it I need it, how does that play in with an additional truck on my street from a safety, noise, and emissions standpoint. So, all of those things have come up. I would say generally it feels like so far, people are leaning towards every other week, but we are still collecting it. • Kevin – Q – Related to that, the numbers on the 78% increase for example, based on increased frequency, where does that come from? Why is the recycling rate so much higher with trucks coming more often? Kira – Comment – I am going to give a shoutout to Caroline on this one because she has done a lot of work on the diversion analysis. She has been closer to it over the last couple weeks. Caroline – Q – I guess I should clarify, when you are asking the equation was about recycling? Kevin – A – I messed up on the numbers, it wasn’t as much of a jump. I am just curious about the thought process around the jump. Caroline – A – Absolutely. As Kira had mentioned, we included a lot of different options in our request for proposals to the haulers and we included this weekly recycling option for a couple of reasons. One is Denver recently changed from every other week to weekly recycling. There had also been a local hauler Timberline Recycling that started up a couple years ago and one of their service elements was offering weekly recycling. When they closed there were a number of folks who had reached out to us saying they really liked that service and were frustrated they couldn’t get it from any of the other service providers in the community. For those reasons we included it to see what would happen. We all assumed the price difference would be high and it wouldn’t be worth giving more thought to, but when this price difference came in surprisingly close, our team stopped to look deeper into weekly vs every other week recycling. This is hot off the press, as it is work we just did in the last couple of weeks. In this sort of scale of weekly vs every other week recycling you have the greater impact from more trucks on the road to collect material and then you have that counterbalanced by more materials recycled and the greenhouse gas benefits of that. I was really interested to see that in the net there is a net greenhouse gas benefit to the additional recycling when compared. That takes into account the additional greenhouse gas impact so the additional transportation. I know none of which was Page | 3 2/15/23 - Minutes your actual question but some additional context into why here. When we actually get into the more recycling there are a couple different drivers for it. One is people don’t have to think about it, they can just put their recycling out every single week and so there is some element of that. There are some people who run out of space in their recycling bin and so they will just put materials into their trash bin instead. That is where you see doubling the recycling frequency, it doesn’t double the amount of recycling captured but this is based off national data over many years. When translated into Fort Collins specifically it would come out to a 9-27% increase in materials collected. I think also, as we have noted on the slide here, the other sort of trends happening across the world right now that are leading more communities to start to look at weekly recycling is the shift to working from home and the shift of materials generated to be more home based than in the past. Also, our increase in online shopping creates more cardboard. I think cardboard specifically is the material that tends to either get into the recycling bin if there is space or not if there is not space. So those are just some of the elements but again this is hot off the press. As Kira was saying we are getting feedback from folks. We have had an online survey on, but I think we have only had 35 responses so far because we have only been asking for less than a week. It is definitely a new topic for consideration in the community. Kevin – Q – Thank you that is helpful. I am making an assumption but is it still the case that if someone does have excess recycling they can put that in a secondary box or something like that with the contracted scenario? Caroline – A – Yes, so for the recycling service the base cart size would be the large cart size, 95-gallon cart and if we had weekly recycling collection each household would get one of those. If we had the every other week collection each household would still get a large recycling cart but if they requested they would have an option up to two large recycling carts for no additional cost. Right now we don’t have a default cart size in the pay as you throw system so that is one of the things that would change, is everyone would automatically receive a large cart. They will still have the option to request a medium size cart if that works better for them. The other piece that I just learned yesterday in talking to a different information source is in the difference between weekly and every other week recycling, for communities that have mostly medium size carts that recycle difference is actually greater than what is represented on the slide here and for communities with the large carts it is typically about the diversion anticipated here. It will be interesting to see which carts people choose, right now the majority of community members have the medium size cart. We can geek out to so many depths. I will leave it there but I am happy to go to any depth if anyone wants to. • Barry – Q – I have a question about recycling too. So we have the large bin and every two weeks we seem to fill it but our concern is as we fill it up is how much of the stuff that we are putting in there is actually being recycled and not going to the landfill. The recycling market is very volatile and is it possible to have a sort of real time insight of what is currently being recycled and what’s not. This was particularly true during take out during Covid where people would Page | 4 2/15/23 - Minutes give you these plastic clamshells and you would feel unbelievably guilty. I put them in recycling, but I am sure they went to the landfill along with all the other bottles. Is that even feasible to dynamically communicate to those of us who are recycling what in face is actually being recycled? Caroline – A – Recycling is one of those things that folks love to have the exposé about, like oh you thought all the material you put in the bin is going to get recycled but actually it tuns out its not. I would say that I would not recommend believing the hype on a lot of those and every recycling program is very local. While there maybe something happening in someplace impacting the recycling program there, on the whole it is actually far more consistent than those stories would have you believe. Specifically, I know about our program, our materials, where they go, and what the markets are. I can tell you that we take very seriously the recycling guidelines that we share with the community and all of the materials that are represented on the City’s recycling guideline do have valid domestic markets. All of the materials that are on the recycling guideline sheet get recycled into new material here in the United States. Barry – Q – Is that updated information as it comes about as the market changes? Caroline – A – Our guidelines used to include all the clamshells you are taking about as well as plastic solo cups and a lot of the lower value plastics. Those did get recycled back when China was accepting them because of the lower cost of labor to sort all the variety of plastics. When China stopped accepting those materials, we did a deep dive into figuring out how long term that situation was going to be and when we determined that it looked like it was going to be for the long haul, we changed our recycling guideline and took those materials off. You will notice that specifically for the plastics we list, we recommend focusing on the shape of the plastic rather than the number on the bottom which I know is a big shift for a lot of folks. We focus on bottles, tubs and depending on how specific you want to get jugs and jars . Those materials have strong domestic markets and the value of them goes up and down but they have baseline strong markets so if you put those materials in your bin, they will get recycled. I would ignore the exposés that take place. They almost never have any baring of what is going on in the industry and what is going on with our specific materials. That is a responsibility we take very seriously. Plastics as a whole is also one of those things where when people talk about all the materials that don’t get recycled the devil is always in the details, so maybe looking at a community where they are put a lot of materials into the bin that don’t have recycling markets. They would be accurate in saying a lot of that material doesn’t get recycled or if you look at all the plastics generated in total, how many of those get recycled. Depending on the story, I would be happy to talk about the details of anyone of them in particular but they are generally taking a very specific lens to try and rile people up. The baseline truth about recycling is far less dynamic. Honoré – Comment – I also put up the A-Z list and put it in the chat too. It has all the answers to specific materials. • Lisa – Q – I just wanted to understand the change. At the present time the City’s only involvement is approving the haulers and then they are hands off. Is that correct and this change they are deeply Page | 5 2/15/23 - Minutes involved? Kira – A – So to describe the current system a little, we have a licensed system today. We license haulers and they do have to meet certain requirements with the pay as you throw pricing for instance as well as recycling is bundled. As long as the code requirements we have on the books are met, then they can be licensed. We have pretty minimal involvement there. Lisa – Q – In this new thing, you are up to your elbows in involvement? Kira – A – To step back again, the contract is going to do a lot. They are going to deliver the service including billing and customer service. We will not be doing the billing or customer service. Billing is something that may come in later that the City may choose to take over. For this first contract that was not possible. They will certainly have a role in doing all of that. Our job will be to administer the contract, to help roll out the program, make sure those customer service levels are met, and also that they are meeting the other requirements in the contract. There are all sorts of things around contamination of materials and specific requirements that the compliance team has worked through. I would say big levels of involvement from the City will be the program administration, contract administration, compliance, and we will also handle escalations from customer service and billing issues if community members are not satisfied with the service they are getting. • Matt – Q – Does this apply to Growth Management Area (GMA) or City limits? Kira – A – City limits. • Matt – Q – The slide about the money you are asking for and the budget, does that include additional FTE staff on your staff to help manage this or is that something separate? Kira – A – It does include it. I talked about 2-4 FTEs is where we expect that to be sized and we would expect that to be on the Waste Reduction and Recycling Team. Matt – Q – So if Council approves the contract and to use Republic but you don’t get the staff through the budget process, which ahs been known to happen, then that burden falls on existing staff to manage this? Kira – A – It would and that could impact other work we are doing. Matt – Comment – So I am going to put out there to the Board if we move forward on this, we encourage Council to add staff along with it if they choose to go with this option. Kira – Comment – Or maybe to say that the administration fee supports the staff. That ordinance will be going forward for that $1.35 administration fee. That is part of the code language that is under approval. That is an important element. I will just add to that and say the goal is to make sure this program is self-sustainable over time. We don’t want it to draw down on existing resources and work that is being done. • Matt – Q – Thank you and then I can’t remember the exact language you used, something about them performing the contract up to snuff. Are there mechanisms in there to deal with leaks and spills in the community. I see Caroline smiling because that has been an important ongoing thing. Kira – A – Yes, it has got so many pages of detail, but it is in there. Caroline – A – Matt I have it off the top of my head because I know this will matter to you. We didn’t get to use the term garbage Duke but we do have a requirement that any leaks and spills are cleaned up within 24 hours and they must notify the City’s Page | 6 2/15/23 - Minutes spills email immediately. We worked with Susan Strong to make sure the requirements and penalties align with what made sense to her. Matt – Comment – Thank you for the presentation. I think it is a step in the right direction to have less trucks in the neighborhood. • Kira – Comment – One thing I didn’t mention, and I know we are short on time but there will be no more diesel trucks as they start replacing so they will be moving over time to Compressed Natural Gas (CNG). We don’t have them all out the gate with this new contract but that was another element that is probably important to the team. We will also have a pilot with one electric vehicle. So that was another sustainability win. Kevin – Q – That was going to be my last question because I remember talking about electrification potential there. Are their outcomes that they are looking for or we are looking for with that pilot program? Would there be a potential for the electrification to scale in the terms of the contract? Kira – A – I am not sure about in the term of the contract, but I think the intent is to see how it goes and see what the performance of that truck is in cold weather and what have you. Boise was a community that was doing a similar pilot so definitely to see ultimately if we can scale that with the electric vehicles as the technology is evaluated for a trash truck. Caroline – Comment – One extra layer I might add, so this is actually kind of a big deal. As far as I understand we would be the second community that Republic is bringing in an electric truck to. They do, as Kira has mentioned, have that pilot going in Boise but that is not a common thing in communities yet. It is still in the pilot stage as well. Trash trucks have great opportunity for electric with their stop/start nature. There are also a lot of needs they have that are very particular that still need to be worked out. The leverage of this contracted service enabled us to move to the front of the line for communities to pilot and I think there is a lot of openness that if it works well to seek grant opportunities to expand electrification as soon as the technology is ready. They are adding the electrical charging and the renewable natural gas/compressed natural gas capability. They are installing both at their current site. They are planning for the eventual build out of the electrification. It is all definitely very much on the radar that this is a strong interest from this community and the contract gave us leverage to make far more progress than we would have otherwise. • Matt – Q – In the analysis did you look at a municipal run operation and that landed you back to this option where you said we are not going to buy our own trucks and run it like Loveland? Kira – A – We did not do a deep exploration. • Dawson – Q – Question for action I think was a memo, but we don’t have time to turn around a memo in that space. I think the best option would be to vote in support of or not by the Board. A couple of questions when thinking about the vote of support, do we feel strongly about issuing a thought towards the weekly vs biweekly recycling? Kevin – A – It is hard to say. Matt – A – If the balance is between using emissions and making neighborhood safer by having less trucks vs potentially increasing recycling, I think that is the core question, right? I don’t have a good answer either. Kevin – A – I tend to think maybe retaining the every other week and really targeting a Page | 7 2/15/23 - Minutes new way is the ability to get a family that extra cart or make sure it is well known of what you can do with the excess because to your point, the trucks are gone those other weeks and that is a huge win from which a lot of it started anyway. It feels like maybe you don’t get the full benefit but maybe you can squeak out part of that just by targeting actions towards what would otherwise be a lost diversion. I don’t know if that is a naïve statement, but it seems like you can do something. Lisa – A – I would personally like to stick with every other week and maybe increase the education to build this confidence in recycling. Despite what Caroline said, I think a lot of the public feels like it all goes to the landfill anyway. I don’t think there is much confidence or trust in recycling. Encourage people to use less at the front end. If the City could have an education program to encourage people not to buy those plastic things as much. I don’t see why every week is good. Drew – A – Maybe also incorporating some of the education to the contractors like a website where you can see all those different recycled materials and that kind of thing. Kira – Comment – That is built into the contract, so that is covered. Kevin – Comment – That just sparked a thought for me. When your cart is delivered there is a thing right on it saying did you know you can get another recycling cart or whatever that is built in that may not have the awareness to it. There is a big change coming up and make sure everyone knows that stuff up front. Maybe eat into that because I tend to feel like we are landing on favoring every other week and it would be nice to say why and maybe get some tools out there. • Dawson motions and Kevin seconds to vote in support of the single hauler contract with the code change that includes the administrative fee because they want to specifically support that and to support continuing biweekly recycling. Motion passed unanimously. 7-0 b. Urban Forest Strategy and Policy - Carrie Tomlinson and Freddie Haberecht (Sr. Forestry Specialists) shared and update on urban forestry strategy and policy as it relates to Council priorities. This information was presented at the January 24 City Council Work Session. Staff was seeking additional feedback from the NRAB in Q3 2023 (prior to going to council for adoption), with more specific Land Use Code updates related to tree preservation and protection. (Discussion) • Discussion | Q + A • Dawson – Q – Thank you for the presentation. Great information. I remember when we first kind of had this conversation around forestry, is the tree canopy diversity, how much ash and everything. Could you speak a little more to the goals to what the diversity scale might look like as we go forward? Carrie – A – There are different guidelines as far as percentages go. It used to be that Maple Street had maples and Oak Street had oaks on it. Now we kind of want the more the better but a general guideline is no more than 10% of one geneious, like oak or elm but for some that is even too high because that means you lose 10% of your canopy if a disease comes through. For us right now in terms of site plan or new development certain species we are limiting to less than 5%. We have a really good new resource you might not know about called Tree Keeper. It is online Page | 8 2/15/23 - Minutes and is open to anyone who wants to look at it. It has a complete inventory of all of our public trees and has the species, size, location, whether or not it is an ash and if it is being treated by us for emerald ash borer. There is a certain percentage of trees in the public space of the inventory by this amazing person behind me that might be able to speak to that too of how many we are treating that are ash. Christine – Comment – About 2,100 are ash trees and initially we were going to be doing more frequent removals each year, but the EAB is moving a little slower than we thought so we are not doing too many preemptive removals. We do have a set number we are treating and that is going to be reduced overtime. We will be slowing down planting certain ash trees. We have a whole plan in place that we are shifting a little as it goes on to see what is actually happening. • Lisa – Q – You mentioned 14% as the canopy at this time. Do you have the percentage target that would be ideal? Carrie – A – That is a great question and one we were going to address as part of the strategic plan. There are different thoughts on that also in terms of canopy metrics being used as just coverage vs other metrics. Does the canopy coverage equate to more cooling, generally yes. There may be other metrics though like age of tree and things that could be put in there as a way to measure the health of your forest too. Right now, the metric is canopy coverage but 14% is not too bad. Everyone says Colorado Springs has 17% so why can’t we do it like them, but we are talking about a different ecology between us and them. We live in a semi-arid desert. The fact that we have an amazing forestry canopy is really an incredible thing. In terms of that being a metric, I think that is going to be in the strategic plan. • Barry – Comment – First of all, great presentation. I had no idea about all of this going on. One suggestion I think you could add to your list of benefits of trees is carbon sequestration and how that intersects with the City, County, and Nation’s Climate Smart program. That really puts an emphasis on older trees and there are metrics, as you are probably aware, in the Silvatics Literature about how to define accumulation of mean annual increment birthrates. To me that is an additional benefit. There is also knowledge of species-specific trees morphology of how different species of trees complement each other in terms of a multilayer canopy structure to fill a volume and their actual response variable is the volume of space that is filled by leaf area. You may know about Biden’s executive order on part of the 30x30 initiative to map, on all federal lands mature an old growth forest. I am a reviewer, not a doer of the methods that are being used to do that and they are actually scaling down eventually in this effort to look at the scale of counties and cities in terms of contributions to harvest seed sequestration and climate change mitigation. So, what you are doing is very cool. I mean I love trees. I’m sure everyone here loves trees, but now when you find out about the unbelievable value of particularly old trees…I wanted to give you just one final statistic that is a little big shocking. Just in the last few months there have been two peer reviewed scientific publications independently mapping the distribution mature and old growth forest wall to wall in the continental US and Alaska. The rest it is pretty close, but it is kind of shocking, on federal lands the estimate is less than 4% of forest Page | 9 2/15/23 - Minutes ecosystems are currently in old growth conditions. Then the effort yet to be published by the forest service and the BLM using slightly different metrics but these three groups are all fortunately talking to each other on how they are doing it but there will be maps and eventually they will allow you to scale down to the stand level, the scale of 100-1000 hectors. The goal is that you don’t build roads or cut these trees down, if Biden or democrats stay in the office but it is an amazing effort, and your work compliments it beautifully. Carrie – Comment – We are blessed to have an amazing community support this program and a Council workshop that was blown away by the support. People like you and this committee are essential to make sure we can do our jobs too, so thank you. • Dawson – Q – When thinking about the strategic plan areas of focus and conversations around co-creating a more equitable tree canopy, how are you approaching that? How are you finding the communities or actual locations? Carrie – A – McKale Study is a great resource for us right now. We are actually using original data layers from her study to find neighborhoods that we need to target for our canopy program. We are going to prioritize those communities in terms of giving them first dibs for that program. That is going to happen this year. Other things we are looking at is we are actually applying for grants right now that help with low income neighborhoods and low income household hazard tree removals. A lot of times a large dead tree will prevent the planting of a new tree. It is a danger for the homeowner and it is very expensive. A lot of times they stay standing dead for a very long time so removing those trees, opening up the ability to put new, healthy and good quality canopy is another strategy we are doing. Certainly, this is at the top of our priority levels and minds in terms of programming and what we are doing right now. Barry – Comment – That brings up another thing and I understand that in residential areas. For standing old dead trees in natural areas, a strong argument could be made that they should be retained. If you were to look at birds in North America, a group that has shown significant population declines are cabin nesting birds. Carrie – Comment – I am sorry to interrupt you because you are amazing and I love to hear you talk but we are looking at that exact idea with the guy behind me, for keeping trees for nesting birds. I didn’t mean to interrupt but we are going there. Barry – Comment – That is great, and I understand that you wouldn’t want them outside your house but in all the natural areas we have, I think retaining those is super important. Freddie – Comment – I don’t know if you know Dave Letterman, but I have been talking with Dave and talking about that exact concept. I am trying to utilize some of these urban and peri- urban spaces. I am curious at what some of the impacts are because it hasn’t been done a lot and to keep it safe for the community. Lets say you tack a sign to a tree in a park that you have removed or removed the hazard from. Maybe you can leave it as habitat value. How do we meld the urban and wild for that increased habitat because forest with urban forestry, what we have is a really clean forest right, you don’t have dead lands, you don’t have standing dead, you don’t have the brush on the ground. What impacts does it have on the habitat value? How do we incorporate that back as an urban Page | 10 2/15/23 - Minutes ecology approach to forest and to urban land management? Carrie – Comment – We love to hear ideas from amazing resources like you and anything you receive that you want to say, like hey why did we leave the trunk of that tree, call because we would love to have that interaction. • Matt – Q – On slide 34, prioritization of opportunities the high priority items you have escrow from tree establishment, improve mitigation standards to incentivize preservation, and consider increasing penalties for tree removal. I think you are probably finding an audience that is friendly to those suggestions in this group, but I am curious if you have presented that to the Chamber or any of those groups. How is the development community responding because that might be a difference audience. Carrie – A – In terms of development this particularly is mainly referring to after development, parking lot spaces, that sort of thing. What we are having is 20-30 years down the road after development we are seeing trees disappear that should have been there that were marked as preservation and are still healthy. The actual picture from that slide if you have it pulled up, is that kind of incident where these large cottonwoods were removed, were perfectly healthy and fine. We have had a few of these in the past year so we have looked at needing to have some code changes and enforcement in place to stop that from happening and education too. Once the tree is gone, you can’t bring it back so having that education is important to make sure it happens. We started that process with our licensed arborist meeting that we had a couple weeks ago, telling them do not take down healthy tree off commercial sites anymore. If you have questions, call us. We would be happy to do a hazardous tree assessment with you. If it is hazardous we totally agree it needs to be removed but if it is not or only a limb needs to be removed so we can keep most of the tree or even the trunk of the tree, something to that effect. We want to have them call us and interact with us. Matt – Q – The escrow idea is similar to your erosion control escrow you have, so you put down a security and if the tree hasn’t grown in 5-10 years for a certain height, then… Freddie – A – Colorado is a really harsh place. It is a great place to sell trees because you can sell it three times. We are looking at how do we better incorporate our long establishment time and match that with the time we see in new development with the money we are spending. Our efforts sort of go further and if we are going to have a lot of new development, lets make sure it counts so it is better in the long term. Honore – Comment – The board heard from Katie Collins in Utilities about xeriscape last year and one of the elements of that project and reassessment is around updating the soil amendment regulations and expectations for new development with compost and other sorts of things. Just speaking to the full ecology system. Matt – Comment – Thank you. I agree with Barry the work you guys are doing is amazing and awesome and create the quality o life we have here, so thank you for that. c. Board Elections - Designate NRAB Chair, Co-Chair, and Liaison to the Bicycle Advisory Committee (BAC). (Action) Page | 11 2/15/23 - Minutes • Discussion | Q + A • Kevin will be stepping down for the Board soon. Kevin – Q – It has been four years for me on the Board. It has been great, and I appreciate it. I need to focus elsewhere right now. Regard to timing, it has been wishy washy. Would there be a replacement that could come before the end of the year? Honore – A – Recruitment will happen on the same cycle. I am not sure if it will happen before the fall. Kevin – Comment – I will see if I can go a little longer. If there is not a replacement I would rather stay involved as long as possible. We will need a new liaison for the Bicycle Advisory Committee (BAC) on Mondays as there is no way I can do that. Kevin provided information about BAC and how it is expanding to micro-mobility as well. It will likely soon become the active modes committee, but that is not official. The group meets the fourth Monday of the month and is usually a couple hours long. There is an expectation or requirement for someone from NRAB to be on BAC. Nobody nominated themselves. Dawson stated they have two individuals who are not there tonight and will reach out to them. Kevin stated starting in April he will no longer be able to attend BAC meetings. • Dawson reviewed logistics of being chair and vice chair. Barry thinks Dawson should continue. Dawson is interested but happy to take a step back as well. Barry nominated and Kevin second Dawson as chair. Nomination passed unanimously 7-0 • Matt asked Barry if he was interested in Vice Chair but stated it was not his strength as he was also on the Environmental Advisory Board for the County Commissioners and was also deeply involved in the lawsuits against Northern Water to stop the dam from being built and contract work with endangered species. Lisa was willing to volunteer but thought someone else might be better. Lisa stated if Kelly wanted to do it this year she would take it over next year and would be happy for Kelly to take it. Kelly was willing to accept the nomination. Dawson nominated Kelly and Lisa seconded. The nomination carried unanimously. 7-0 8. BOARD MEMBER REPORTS a. Barry – Comment – I shared with you and Honore what is happening with the 1041 committee and the 1041 is having regulatory constraints on infrastructure projects and the big focus is on Northern Water and this project. I think it might be a good topic. I could talk about it in the March meeting to give more about how it is evolving. I am actually pleased the way it is evolving. The key issue that has been debated on back and forth just in the last week is whether regulatory constraints by the City of Fort Collins can extend beyond the boundaries of the City. The 1041 law has been expanded beyond the boundaries. A good example is Castle Rock that restricted activities that were affecting water supply in the City of Castle Rock. It was challenged in the Colorado Supreme Court and that challenged failed. The law was sustained that it can be extended beyond the boundaries and of course building the dam in Glade Reservoir is beyond City limits but what they do to the river will affect economic, social, and environmental factors in the City. That has been an important thing to come up for discussion recently. Dawson – Q – Coming from a Board member does it still make sense to be in the Board Member Reports and allocate more time or to be an actual agenda item? Honoré – A – Page | 12 2/15/23 - Minutes I think since it is not related to an immediate Council action or that staff brings in. Barry, do you know the timing? Barry – A – Timing keeps getting extended. The 1041 group or whatever we have representatives from a number of the City Boards, so I represent our Board on that committee. Honoré – Comment – I think if you want to add more time under Board Member reports or make it a new item. I think maybe it depends on how the agenda fills out too. Dawson – Comment – We can talk about March or April. Barry – Comment – I think things have been pushed back to May on the 1041 conversation. b. Kevin – Comment – From BAC I don’t know if you have all experienced the installation on Pitkin of the advisory bike lane. The road is narrow so there was not enough room for parking, a bike land and two-way traffic so they piloted this installation where it is like maybe a lane that is sort of a lane and a half in the middle with two dashed bike lanes going along the side and some insurrectionary signs on what to do as you approach. You have to corporate, cars have to get behind bikes and you have to slow down. You can’t all fit. The data coming from that is that it has been successful and does not increase conflicts or issues. I thought that was neat because it is a controversial type of installation. Sometimes people just go a little crazy about change and it is a unique experience but we can figure it out. Hopefully we see some more of those changes to slow down traffic. I mentioned it briefly, but we did get an update on the spin program and its really successful. I will see if I can get that and share it out. It is really neat how it is being used and growing certain aspects. The staff team is working on making it better from how things are being parked or perceived parked and allowing some areas or prop signs to allow areas of code to change to better support what is happening now. Technically in City code there is no where you can park them and they tell them to park them in certain spots but that is not in code. There are all these nuances that are not caught up in terms of City code. From our perspective it is really delivering. I will try to find the presentation. Matt – Q – From a natural resource perspective and personally, I love the program and think it is great. I would love to see more data. As a homeowner, I have spin stuff left, like I have had a scooter sitting in our yard for like two months now. If there is something I can do, please tell me. There are bikes around the corner that have been in the bushes for like three months. Kevin – A – If you text them there are different ways. They will be gone. They are super responsive. I didn’t know this but when they are done with the ride they are required to take a picture of how they parked that. There is a compliance thing where if someone goes and reviews all those pictures, you get dinged if you miss park it or say it ends up launched over there. That might not be how someone parked it. It could be someone else but part of what they are trying to do is evaluate opportunities to continue to educate and look for opportunities that is needed to penalize or incentivize. One thing I did get from it is they will respond fast. They want the input and don’t want you to move it. They want you to report it. Report it, they are there, they know the data and they know who rode it before. Matt – Comment – I don’t want to sound like a grumpy old man but… Kevin – Comment – I think it’s only better if people are more engaged and the company is supposedly awesome. 9. STAFF REPORTS 10. OTHER BUSINESS Page | 13 2/15/23 - Minutes a. 2023 In-Person Meetings • The meeting in March has been pushed back a week to be the 4th Wednesday due to spring break. Dawson asked about holding in person meetings vs virtual. Honore will check on the room availability for next month since they moved the meeting. They will discuss more about in person moving forward at their next meeting. b. Six Month Calendar Review • For March they currently have, sustainable funding update, downtown parking plan, economic health strategic plan with circular economy, and an update on NISP from Barry. Dawson recommended moving downtown parking to April for more time on the other topics. • Honoré offered a topic on the land use/development code. Honoré – Comment – There are linkages to Our Climate Future (OCF) and other environmental policies that are supported by the new land development code. What we have heard is that Council and the public have not gotten a clear message about the linkage between those environmental aspects and land use planning. Really the main “selling point” has been around housing affordability and that is a huge thing and even captured in OCF but in terms of the reduced vehicle miles traveled and other sorts of livability aspects of 15- minute neighborhoods, increased housing capacity, and density. I think there could be a really important role for NRAB to play in helping to advise Council who already voted to adopt rules but also the great community in trying to share a little bit about those linkages and what you all see as important. I would recommend something in this quarter if you invite Noah Beck, Meaghan or Paul to talk about that. Kevin – Q – Is that more feasible for April? Honoré – A – More for April than March. Although they are just going gangbusters. They agreed last night to do monthly work sessions on this topic because this is a tough community conversation. Council hit the reset button and now they really want to lean in. I am seeing general agreement. I will talk to staff to see what the right month is but will pencil it in for April. • Dawson – Comment – Regional waste shed was more of a point of interest from us not necessarily tied to a timeline. • Honoré – Comment – So that is two items for March and potentially two for April. Now I don’t think we have anything substantive going forward with he election changes. We have November elections so that fall will turn into a light time when Council won’t take as much action. They are supporting some life work balance stuff around taking an intentional recess in some of the summer months. My point being when looking at this calendar, it does get a little lighter. If you look at the gray rows, those are the ones marked for work sessions. You can see as we scan through some of the things you all have talked about previously like here is the urban lakes water quality management program under regular meetings. You will see some of those things pop up but generally your work plan and items align with the work sessions items. Hughes is on the March 14th work session. Council is now receiving staff reports during work sessions rather than regular meetings. It is a new change and just about a 10-minute overview with minimal questions. It is not a full work session item. Page | 14 2/15/23 - Minutes • Honoré went over some upcoming topics some of which the Board had already touched on. Honoré will check with PDT on intention on taking items to the Boards. Perhaps they can do a combined conversation with transit and downtown parking. Honoré also mentioned canceling a summer meeting to give the Board a break. • Matt – Q – Does the Board have interest in an update on Halligan? I saw it on the 6-month calendar. I don’t know if staff would be ready to provide an update because it looked like it was down the list. Honoré – A – It is on March 14th so that is sooner. I don’t remember the last time they were here. Dawson – Comment – It wasn’t that long ago. Maybe last semester right before you all joined. Honoré – Comment – I am not seeing it listed so it could have been late 2021. Kevin – Comment – It is good to have a regular touch point on it. • Barry – Comment – I just looked up the latest thing I got from Kirk Lonstein and apparently, he mentioned that Council is going to consider this on May 2nd so depending on when we meet in April, we might want to have a memo to City Council from our group and we would need less time. I could work ahead of time and have a draft memo to share with everyone and get comments and edits. I think it’s a pretty big deal actually. Dawson – Comment – I think it would be fine if we could make it an actual agenda item with the memo and those pieces. We do have March if we want to use a little time in the Board member reports to formally say we are going to do a memo in preparation and then vote in April. Barry – Q – I am a little paranoid about the open records. If I were to do an initial draft and share it with everyone to get edits and comments and track the changes can that be done internally in our group? Is that okay? Honoré – A – The current way the law is written says that you can’t conduct substantive business of the Board via email or text. It doesn’t explicitly exclude shared documents on google. I think the main point of it is that the work needs to be available to the public. The guidance we got from Davina is to say that we should include drafts in the packets that go out before the meeting so people can see them. I would recommend not doing comments or conversating through that means in substantive ways. Make sure that is captured in public record, but it is a useful tool. Barry – Comment – So if I send out the draft and ask people to use track changes and went back and forth with a few iterations. Kevin – Comment – Then that is brought back to the board to review and adopt the memo vs making substantive changes after saying yes, we are going to move forward with the memo. Dawson – Comment – At some point we will have to make those tracks available for the public. When the meeting came about, we would have to make the draft available. • Matt – Q – Am I miss remembering, didn’t this Board bring forth a memo saying we don’t have geographic boundaries attached to 1041? Are you suggesting something supplementary to that? Barry – A – Pretty much on that same theme because it has come up again and put out for consideration. Our 1041 committee and other groups including Save the Poudre have responded to it as well. I have been privity to looking at those different responses and all I have seen in cord with us that there should be geographic boundaries. What we have learned in the interim is about other cities doing it and about the Page | 15 2/15/23 - Minutes challenges that have been sustained in the Supreme Court in Colorado and cities can extend proposed 1041 restrictions beyond the bounds of the city. That has been the biggest thing that has changed. I don’t know who all is in Kirk’s group but they proposed as two different options; do you agree or don’t agree with the geographic boundaries. So, I did some research and came across this Castle Rock thing that had a challenge in court and prevailed and it was over water issues. I am not a lawyer but there might be better examples. It only took me a couple of hours on the internet to track it down. Dawson – Comment – Lets table this for March due to time and the need for writing a memo. Then we can make a motion if the Board sees appropriate and then vote in April. Barry – Comment – It is an issue we already address but resurfaced. Kevin – Comment – I think if you already have a draft in mind Barry, draft and sharing for discussion is not a bad thing. What are we going to do. Honoré – Comment – If you are going to draft something, we could include it in the packet and that would be most idea regarding the open meetings law. Barry – Comment – I could do that. Barry will join virtually next month. 11. ADJOURNMENT a. 8:43pm Minutes approved by a vote of the Board on 04/19/2023