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HomeMy WebLinkAboutAir Quality Advisory Board - Minutes - 11/28/2006MINUTES CITY OF FORT COLLINS AIR QUALITY ADVISORY BOARD REGULAR MEETING 200 WEST MOUNTAIN AVE. November 28, 2006 For Reference: Eric Levine, Chair 493-6341 David Roy, Council Liaison - 407-7393 Lucinda Smith, Staff Liaison 224-6085 Board Members Present Jeff Engell, Nancy York, Dale Adamy, Eric Levine, Gregory McMaster, Kip Carrico, Dave Dietrich Board Members Absent None Staff Present Natural Resources Department: Lucinda Smith, Tara McGibben Guests Tom Chaffin, Transportation Resource Manager for PSD. The meeting was called to order at 5:36pm. Public Comment • No public present. Agenda Item 1 Poudre School District: Presentation from Tom Chaffin, Transportation Resource Manager. Tom Chaffin presented information about the transportation component of Poudre School District's new Sustainability Management System. • Dietrich: How many buses does Transfort have? • Chaffin: Transit buses? 19, not on route at all times, but 19. • Dietrich: Are they all the 35 passenger? • Chaffin: I don't know that, I just know they have 19 buses. • McMaster: Haven't they added a couple smaller ones? • Chaffin: They retired one when they got that, new CNG bus, but they remain at 19 last I heard. I work with them a lot. • Levine: In keeping with our goal this year of bringing partners to the table, we have Tom Chaffin from Poudre School District here. Tom Chaffin proceeds to discuss Poudre School District bus schedules, bus maintenance, area of service, equipment, special pick-ups, travel distances, policies of bus replacements and requirements with the EPA. • Chaffin: Thank you for inviting me. I've worked with Lucinda a little bit and helping look at what's happening in the City of Fort Collins and Larimer County because we do Air Quality Advisory Board 11/28/2006 Page 2 of 29 cover a lot of area. Just to give you a few facts about this school district. We're 1856 sq. miles, that's one and half times the state of Rhode Island. We cover from the Weld County line to the Wyoming border to the Continental Divide and then basically Trilby until you get to Timberline and then we go down to the Windsor Road and we go clear across the Windsor Road over to County Line Road. When you go to Windsor everything on the north of the road is ours and everything on the south is Windsor. • York: County Road what? Over across to County Road? • Chaffin: I can't remember; it's not Highway 34; I think its County Road 32 to Windsor Road. So that kind of gives you the area that we cover. In the district there are about 24,000 students. There are 30 elementary, 10 junior highs and 5 high schools within the district. 3 of the elementaries are out in the remote areas; Stove Prairie, Rist Canyon, Redfeather and Livermore. We have Tinmath.out there and -then we go way south. When I say 12,000 students are transported daily, I do about a little more than 12,000 students in the morning, and 12,000 students in the afternoon. If you look at Transfort when they say they do 5000 trips; I've got that done by about lam. So what they would call trips then I have 24,000 trips a day and that's just the to and from school. That's not talking middle of the day field trips and all the other activities. We have 180 school buses. 140 are on the road everyday with 40 back up units so we can have some in maintenance at all times and some on field trips at all times. Along with that there's 154 other support vehicles and that's not including the trailers and the heavy equipment like the back -hoes and front-end loaders. Just for the school buses we travel about 2 million miles and on top of that; that's about 250,000 miles in field trips a year. So, for northern Colorado we are the largest single transportation unit. A little bit bigger than the county and bigger than the city. That gives you some idea of what PSD is. One of the things that we've been doing for the past 6 years now is trying to bring the fleet and the dept into the modern age. When I got there, they had early 80's models buses and didn't have a real replacement policy; they were working on them trying to make them more efficient and effective. One of the first things that we looked at was the EPA's suggested idle policy for school buses. You have a copy of that in your handout. The first one was 2001 that we started, then we did another one on Feb 4, 2003, then the EPA August 1, 2005 adjusted some of their time limits for idle policy so we just copied the EPAs. One of the things that we have to look at is the cargo that we're hauling. We're not hauling freight that can be cold or hot, buses don't have air conditioners. We do have basically a no idle policy if it's 20 degrees or above no idling for 5 minutes max. 20 degrees or below try to keep it to 5-10 minutes at school keep it off. At 0 keep the bus running and keep the kids safe. We shared this policy with the City of Fort Collins and Latimer County, I don't know if they've adopted it. We've given it to both of them to say this is what we have, it's open and it's on our web site, it's one of the things that we've been working on. The other thing that we've been working on for the past couple years is full fired engine heaters. These are the Wabasto, TSL Units and Scholastic. It's a unit that mounts on the side of the bus or under the bus that pulls fuel from the tank, fires it and the circulation pump circulates the hot water that goes through the bus. This allows the bus to shut off the engine and maintain heat in the bus and keeps the engine temperature warm. When they're ready to go they're starting a warm vehicle. On cold mornings like tomorrow morning, these buses will be right up to running temperature and not worry about 5-10 minutes of idling; they'll be at operating temperature and ready to go. The difference between the Scholastics and the TSL is the Scholastics are a big unit. I put Scholastics Air Quality Advisory Board 11/28/2006 Page 3 of 29 units on my Wellington and mountain routes. A lot of the reason why I do this is because #1 they're colder out there. I store all these buses out of town at individual homes; the other piece is if that bus ever gets stuck or the engine dies, the heater can be fired up, it'll circulate hot water and turn on the fan as long as you have battery power, and we can still keep the kids warm until we can get help there so it's a big safety area that we're looking at. • Dietrich: What does the fuel -fired engine heaters run off of, does it run off of some electricity? • Chaffin: It runs off the battery because of the very low draw on the battery. • Dietrich: How long can it run on the battery? • Chaffin: It will run on the battery for about 6 hours before it gets the battery to 13 volts. There are three large batteries in the bus and they'll sit there at 13.8 to 14 volts standard. So for about 6 hours it'll only pull them down to 12.8 to 13 volts then it'll shut itself down. The TSLs just keep the engine warm but that helps us at schools because it just pulls that in. It uses less than a 1/4 cup of fuel an hour to keep the vehicles warm. The district is purchasing these. The Scholastics are about $2500,the TSLs are about $1300. All the new buses will have this as standard equipment. • McMaster: Does it run when the buses are running? • Chaffin: It can, when it's cold. • McMaster: Is that an efficient thing to do? • Chaffin: Yes, the engines will keep the buses pretty warm especially in tomorrow's 18 degree weather. They can fire those and help keep the bus warm and on field trips. • Levine: There's about one of these for every 3 '/2 buses. What is the policy of allocating these units? • Chaffin: I put them on out of town busses and the buses that haul the special needs children because they have less tolerance of the changes of temperature; and the newer buses. • Levine: Is there a policy to get more of these? • Chaffin: As every new bus that comes in, it's standard equipment and as I can afford to buy them as money permits. What this also does is, prior to using these units, every bus had to be plugged in every night and ran all night long. We're having a huge savings of electricity at a small cost. We're using the savings from the electricity that we have to fund some of the units. It's slower pay back but that's what we're looking to fund some of the units. The other things that I'm real excited about and you're the first outside group to hear of this. Two years ago I applied for an EPA grant to Clean School Bus America to help retrofit our current units to really make a difference in what is happening with the pollution outside the bus and inside the cabin for the diesel school buses. The first year I didn't get the grant, but the second year I did get a grant and that bid was just given to us the Monday before Thanksgiving. People were here doing some testing yesterday and they'll be here to start installation tomorrow. The second piece of paper that you have gives you information on what the different units are on the buses. Overall, we'll get a lot of the vehicles basically from 2000 forward that we have on the buses. There's several different pieces of equipment that we're putting on the buses. Part of the grant was to study how they actually worked in high -altitude cold climate. We're the first ones in the state to use many of these pieces of equipment on larger vehicles. You'll see that we use several different pieces of equipment. The first one we'll work with is the catalytic converter. Cars have them, buses have had them on some of the 2005. I'm retrofitting Air Quality Advisory Board 11/28/2006 Page 4 of 29 some of the buses with the cat. converter. Cat converters alone are about 20 -30 efficient on reducing the particulates. Using it with the new electronic ignitions the buses are pretty clean now but it still helps reduce it. Then if we get into the particulate traps that is the piece that I think is real exciting. We're looking at 90% efficiency. I've seen some of these buses with particulate traps on them and the one thing that just really impressed me is that I held a white handkerchief right up against the exhaust and held it there for a bit and when I pulled it off and I couldn't smell any diesel fumes. Basically what's coming out of there is cleaner than the air coming in, many times. You can run it in a building and not have any problems. There's another new technology that wasn't on the market when I first started. That's what they call a DMF or diesel multi -stage filter muffler. We're looking at giving that a try to see how that works on our vehicles. That's 71% to 75% efficient in cutting down particulates in what's going through the system. The next piece you can look at is the closed crank case filter systems. Many of you've seen on cars or trucks the tube that comes out of the crank case, that's just a breather system and you'll see hot air or smoke coming out of it. Basically that is combustion air that goes by the rings of the vehicle, gets down in the crank case, forces it back out and dumps it back out into the air. One of the things that we're really looking at is the health of the air in the school bus. Most of them have engines in the front and you're sitting there with the engines running in stop and go traffic and you're dumping these diesel fumes right down on the ground at the very beginning of the route. You open up the door to let the kids on and off, you're sucking those fumes right back in the bus. We're purchasing 33 of the closed crank case filter systems. Basically that traps the air that's coming out of there 100%; drains out any oil or water that's coming here, returns the oil to the crank case, burns the water and takes the other air and puts it through the muffler systems. Those systems will be combined with each one of the units above, particulate traps and the multi -stage filter mufflers. And so if you look down on this part you'll see that (referring to the handout) for the particulate traps it takes it from 90% efficient to about 95% efficient. We're looking at how to make these buses more efficient. That's the one thing that we have in a press release with the EPA to get that out in the paper showing people that we are concerned with what's going on in the industry. • McMaster: I would think you would get a lot of traction by emphasizing also the quality of the air inside the cabin. I'm sure parents have not thought about that. • Chaffin: Yes, that is a concern to us. There's a lot of reports, I imagine many of you read them. There was a CARB report in California that took 1970 model buses and said the air inside the buses were horrible compared to the air outside, even in LA. When you take 1970 buses, yes they probably can be especially bad when you have one bus following another bus. The second bus is going to suck in everything from the first bus. We're looking at everything we can do to help increase efficiency with the schools and school buses. With the EPA funds of $253,875 the district is with the labor, some of the testing, purchasing of the fuel fired engine heaters adding about another $100,000 in time. • Smith: Can I ask you about the testing? Is that testing emissions difference or is it just testing the efficiency of the engine, what kind of testing will the school district be doing? • Chaffin: Doing several different types of testing. One is to make sure the vehicles are compatible with the equipment that we're putting on there. For some of these they have to have temperature of 240 degrees, 40% of the time in the muffler to activate the catalyst. • Smith: I see. Air Quality Advisory Board 11/28/2006 Page 5 of 29 • Chaffin: We have to make sure the buses are capable of doing that, pretty much every bus is. The other part is we do an emission test on every vehicle once a year. We're not required to but we do that for our records, as of January 1, 2007 we're not required to but we will continue doing this. The other part is we've been working with CSU and we have their NOX meter and some other testing equipment. We want to see just how much are we really cleaning up regarding emissions on our buses. We've done the testing pre - use of these and we'll continue testing these afterwards and that will be part of the EPA report. It looks pretty good if we do a good job with this, that we'd be able to get more money to continue going back. • Adamy: This amount of money seems to handle 57 buses, did I count right? • Chaffin: Yes, it handles about 57 buses. • Adamy: And you said you're starting with the 2000 models and working up and if you get more money you're going to go backwards? • Chaffin: Yes. • Dietrich: If you buy a new bus, what kind of emission controls are on the new bus? • Chaffin: On the new 2007s it will have the particulate traps and the closed crank filters. The 2007 engines will have those units. It's very interesting that all the engine manufactures really put out a big build of 2006 engines so you're not going to get 2007 engines until about July of next year. However, you can order them and that's part of our order. I tried to get them last year, it is about a $10,000 surcharge. The other piece requires the use of ultra low sulfur diesel. We've been using ultra low sulfur diesel out of Frontier Refinery out of Cheyenne for the past 3 years. Frontier Refinery got the credit points for getting ULSD early and they needed a market to sell it. It was a quarter of a cent per gallon premium to get that fuel here, but we've been running on cleaner fuel for the past 3 years. • Adamy: That's good to hear. • Chaffin: I have to be wise with tax payer money but a quarter cent for ultra low sulfur I think was well worth. • Adamy: There was a question that I had here back on number 1, how many gallons of fuel do you use here? You have all those numbers, I'd sure like to hear that. • Chaffin: I'll have to go back and give that information to Lucinda. • Carrico: Have you had any experience with bio-diesel? • Chaffin: Oh yes. I'll go into our bio-diesel experience. I'll tell you it wasn't a very good experience. We have two terminals that we run buses out of. One is the north terminal here on Laporte and the south terminal south of down on Portner, next to Transfort. We fuel out of Transfort, we have a cooperative agreement with Transfort. They switched to bio-diesel. We tried a couple buses and everything seemed to work. Last winter when it got cold, to 20 degrees, one of the first mornings I lost 19 school buses that just died when they were on the road. It was pure gelling. • Levine: This is 20/80 I'm assuming. • Chaffin: Yes, it was 20/80 mix. We had the diesel gelling. Transfort said they didn't have any problems. I said you keep your buses inside at 60-70 degrees all night. I keep my buses outside. If you lost 19 buses you'd be down completely. I lost 19 buses and I was still able to have enough from the district to get those kids back to school. We worked through that for a while. The supplier got them a couple of bad loads of fuel with a lot of bacteria. Bacteria got in there and plugged our filters. Again it grew in the layer where Air Quality Advisory Board 11/28/2006 Page 6 of 29 there's water at the bottom of your tank then there's a layer that the bacteria grows before it gets into the bio diesel, and it grows in the cold weather, not warm weather. • Adamy: Is that a bio diesel problem? • Chaffin: It was a bio diesel problem specifically for this bacteria. The vendor at that time wasn't really willing to work with us because we weren't the initial purchaser. The City of Fort Collins really helped and supported it so at this point I treated my whole fleet and pulled it off of bio diesel because I want a guarantee. I can't start loosing 19 buses and leave the kids out there. • McMaster: Could you use it at the beginning at the year and at the end of the school year when temperatures are much higher? • Chaffin: We could. It's something that we're going to look at but when you get a bad taste once we're really being careful this time. We've looked at Littleton Public schools and they've been using 20% bio diesel pretty much year round. Different supplier and we're working with him on what does he do and see if somehow we can buy from that supplier. Team Petroleum is very active in working with us. • Adamy: Are there any issues with the emissions retro-fits? • Chaffin: No. • Carrico: You couldn't do a fuel additive with the gelling problem like you do with normal additives? • Chaffin: We did at that point but everything was gelled so we had to push everything into a shop to get it warmed up so it quit gelling then get the additive through there. What they found was that they had a fuel that didn't have the additives so it was good to about 30 degrees and it was 10 degrees that morning. I'm not against bio diesel; we just have a bad taste right now so we're being very careful. The City of Fort Collins and their fuel people were right on top of it. They opened up their shop to the 19 buses and it wasn't the city's fault, it was the fuel supplier. The other piece that we do with our fuel is working with Team Petroleum and the ultra low sulfur diesel is they put in an additive and a lot of times, I'm not sure if you're aware of diesel fuel. Diesel fuel has a winter blend, which is a mix of number 1 and number 2. Number 1 is pretty much kerosene and doesn't gel until 30 degrees below; number 2 gels at about 20 degrees. They mix it, the problem is with number 1 the cetane rating is very low so you loose about 10-18% in power with that blend. With the ultra low sulfur Team Petroleum puts an additive they guarantee runs at 30 below and we run number 2 year round so we'd never have that power loss and keep fuel efficient. We work really well with Team Petroleum (TP). • Smith: So they're doing that just for PSD, I mean that was a special agreement or arrangement? • Chaffin: Yes, that was a special agreement that we worked out with them. TP is basically Schrader's; it's just the other piece. The other piece that we look at is when I bid buses. One of the things that I've found being in transportation is you don't want to buy the smallest engine, the bear bones bus. If you buy some of that, what, in talking to some people say basically what you have to do is slam your hand in the door if you get in there because you're going to be mad and drive the bus mad all day. Put your foot on the floor and just go. I don't have bare bones buses. I have good high horse power buses with good acceleration and 6 speed auto transmission. I have them road speed governered about 79 miles an hour but that gives me 75 miles an hour on the freeway and gives extra passing speed. The other thing is the drivers don't have to put their foot to the floor and you get this big burst of exhaust, you don't have to. On some of the real small buses if you get a Air Quality Advisory Board 11/28/2006 Page 7 of 29 little wet and you hit some of those wet pavements, I've seen one chirp the tires, but they don't have to do that. By watching that, I'm getting 12-13 miles to the gallon on these new big buses and on the older lower horse power buses I'm down to 8 miles to the gallon. We buy them for fuel efficiency and that also will get us longevity on the buses when you're not running them at the governor. The other part that we work with in conjunction with the entire operations part of the school district is they have the sustainability management system and we're one of the only school districts that does this that I know of. It's a program to look at everything you do in operations from operations to building maintenance to build sustainable guidelines and follow them throughout the time. What is does is, we're going to continue to expand all our efforts to make sure that we get sustainability in what we do and purchase. The vision statement for the transportation part of that is to become recognized as the leader in the Colorado school district by implementing strategies to increase efficiency, reduce demand and encourage alternative transportation. And a lot of that of that encouraging alternative transportation is getting people out of their cars and into our yellow buses, or if they need to get them into a Transfort, if that's available. • York: Into what, Transfort? • Chaffin: If it's available and there's not a lot available. I work with them as they're working with us. It's just to look at what we can do in the long run. Is there anything that we can do to join forces to help. They're really regulated by the federal FTC. We're really regulated being school buses and they're so far apart but what can we do. I can not run a grid system running up and down College and Taft. I can't run a grid system like that because if you can imagine a school bus stopping every two blocks, flipping on its red lights, stopping traffic while people load on the bus, go another two blocks, stopping all the traffic. That's why you notice a lot of my school buses run on the off streets; we're off in the neighborhoods because we don't want to impact traffic. We're looking at how we can run a grid system on the minor collectors. The other piece that we're looking at is how we can become a no boundary district. Right now about 35-40% of our students are school of choice. They choose out of their attendance boundary to go to another school. How can we provide transportation for those students to the school that they're choosing so that we can get some of the parents off the road. We do provide school of choice transportation, parents have to get them to the closest bus stop that is available, but they have to get them to that stop and then we'll take them to their schools. About 1,500 kids take advantage of that. 1,500 out of 8,500 take advantage of our transportation. • Levine: That's much higher than I would have ever guessed. • Dietrich: There's 24,000 kids in the school district. Can you give me the percentage like elementary, middle school and high school of kids that take the bus; obviously more elementary school students than jr high than high school. How many total of the 24,000 students in the school district, you serve daily,.how many? • Chaffin: I serve 12,000. • Dietrich: Of the 12,000, what percentage is elementary, jr high, high school? • Chaffin: High school is way low and it vanes from the beginning of the school year to the end as kids get their drivers license. We saw a big increase this past couple years when they did the change in the drivers where they couldn't haul friends. We saw a big increase in ridership when gas prices got to $3 a gallon in all those buses. Elementary I think was 65 — 68% of the elementary students. Jr high is about 50%, high school maybe 10%. Air Quality Advisory Board 11/28/2006 Page 8 of 29 • Dietrich: Do you provide any service to charter schools? Do any charter schools buy buses? • Chaffin: No. The only service we provide to charter schools is field trip transportation. • Dietrich: So everyone going to a charter school, no one takes the bus. Do you know how many total that is in the school district? • Chaffin: No I don't. • Dietrich: If a charter school wanted and could buy a bus, would you consider pulling them in your fleet in any way, shape or form? Has that ever been brought up? • Chaffin: It has been brought up. Right now our insurance company —we would have to purchase it then rent it. Right now all the contracts with the charter schools say we will not provide transportation for them. It would be a change in all their contracts, I don't know why that is, I'm not part of that group. For school transportation there are only a few things required by law and basic to/from transportation is not required by law. The things that are required by law are transportation of special needs students that are physically unable to get themselves to and from school, homeless. As of the new IDEA Rule, English language learners were added to that as required transportation. • McMaster: Is that the bi-lingual kids, don't they get some busing? • Chaffin: Some. They're not ELA. Some of them aren't. A lot of Harris is school of choice. I think mostly where we have mostly ELA is Putnam and Irish. • McMaster: Perhaps we can get on to the subject of school of choice because that's something we've struggled with a great deal. With school of choice so prominent we have at least two high schools that have no Transfort bus. I know you've said you tried to do what you can with Transfort. Can you give us any hope or ideas on how maybe we can join the fray in getting something to happen there along with the Transportation Board. • Chaffin: I think we need to get the ridership for Fort Collins High School; that was one where they pulled transportation because the ridership was not there. One of the things that we did to help students go to Transfort is we pulled all of our buses, if it was away down the main corridor, we pulled all of our buses half to 3/4 a mile away from the main corridor, making it easier for students to walk to the main corridor to get on the Transfort buses. We tried to help their ridership but it was only there during school times. When they pulled them, I've been talking to them, in their 10 year plan, they're not looking at Fort Collins High School or Fossil Ridge. • York: This is Transfort? • Chaffin: This is almost a year ago they still were looking at that whole area of Fossil Ridge in Fort Collins. They'll go down to HP but they're not looking at restarting those buses. • York: They're adding a Timberline Route bus route now. • Chaffin: Yes, but stopping at Fort Collins High School is ... I'll talk to them again. I usually try about the first of the year so I'll talk to them about Timberline. • York: It's going to be delayed about three months to about March. What do you do with your special needs students? • Chaffin: Well, one of the things like I said efficiency and effectiveness. We have about 3,500 special needs students that have special transportation needs. Most districts will have special ed buses and regular ed buses. So you can look at a neighborhood and there goes a regular bus and here comes a special ed bus. We do other things. We also do head Air Quality Advisory Board 11/28/2006 Page 9 of 29 start students so we're transporting students in the head start program from age three up. And so you can have a regular bus, a special ed bus and a regular bus and it happens in a lot of districts. Over the past 5 years we've gone to total integration. I have one bus trying to service a neighborhood. I got away from the real small buses. You'll see the medium size buses that are 47 passengers. That's what I'm using for my wheel chair lift buses. They can go into a neighborhood, pick up the wheel -chair student, pick up a couple of the special needs students and pick up school of choice and other kids in that neighborhood and go in so I don't have multiple buses going into a neighborhood, if I can at all help it. • York: That's a wonderful thing, it saves the pavement. • Chaffin: It saves the pavement. • Adamy: One driver. • Chaffin: One driver. I've been able to service Fossil Ridge, Bacon, and Kinard without the addition of any school buses. That's one of the things that we've worked at. Transportation is growing about 13% per year; impact to the general fund since we've been able to do this we're down to about a 3% per year, impact. It just makes sense, these kids play with their neighborhood kids, and they're out there all the time. Why can't they get on that regular bus and go with them. A lot of parents want the special ed bus but I don't have that special ed bus. They all tested fine, none of them are handicapped. I have buses with special equipment now but lets get all the kids together. There are some kids that yes, we have to have single pick up. • York: Do you have regular discussions with Transfort, do you meet and talk equipment? • Chaffin: About once a year, sometimes it's twice a year. Equipment is quite different because we have a lot more rules than they have. Our piece of equipment would be $70K to $80K and theirs is $300K. I still can't figure out why, we go the same mileage for everything else. I just can't figure out what the difference is because our is so much safer and it's got the roll over protection and everything else. • York: Can you see with added cooperation from Transfort that efficiencies could be built in, or are you just fine all by yourself. • Chaffin: I can see some efficiencies somewhat being built in. The problem that we have with Transfort and the FTC that they have to fall in. They can not add routes or stops to totally service a school district. It has to be a normally scheduled route. They can't deviate from a normal route to say I'm doing this just to service a school. That's part of their rules and regulations. They have to make sure that they get it on their route. The one in front of Blevins has been great. They had it down the street and up the street. Finally we talked to them and asked them to put it right in front of Blevins. So we worked together with them and we do that where ever we can. • Levine: It sounds like another problem; when they site schools in fringe areas not near any place. These regulations kick -in and make it even more difficult. • Chaffin: Right, and the way the land is out here you have to site schools where there's land and where's there's kids. I've added one bus in the Windsor area this summer and four buses in Wellington just because that's where the growth and the kids are. Down in the middle of town central Fort Collins it's older neighborhoods, the kids aren't there. Those schools in central Fort Collins are really low in kids. Schools on the peripheral are packed. • McMaster: One more thing and I know you don't deal directly with this but it obviously has to tie into the bus thing and it's important to our board is the driving at the high schools. What kind of discussions are there in dealing with that; because everything from Air Quality Advisory Board 11/28/2006 Page 10 of29 the parking lots to all the traffic to everything that happens there. Is there any vision for how to... • Chaffin: I wish there was. I'm part of a group that goes out and we do traffic studies at all the different schools. And high schools are a big one. We have parking lots that we know can not meet the demand of the parking for the students. But it's been proven nation wide that if you make a smaller parking lot all that you're going to do is impact the neighborhoods. You're not going to get these high school kids that just got their drivers license out of their car until gas is so prohibitive. When I saw gas up to $3 a gallon I started seeing ridership pick up. Bad days like tomorrow morning I'll see my high school ridership really jump. We look at the minimal number of parking spaces that we can get by with at a high school. But basically it's about half the student population. They try and work with Transfort and their ride pooling. We tried to get car pooling into one of the high schools and it didn't fly. If you're going to ride, you're going to ride with friends, but then the new state laws said no you can't ride with friends because the age requirement so that blew that away. They tried to do parking stickers but again if you force them there, all you're doing is forcing them into the neighborhood and we're trying to be good neighbors and not really impact the neighborhood. • Engell: So to piggy -back off of that point, when new schools are getting developed, do you get to weigh in on those conversations, say on the effectiveness of you being able to provide transportation to say new junior highs, or even high schools seems like it's kind of... • Chaffin: If you notice most of the new schools, for instance, Kinard. The bus loading zone is in the back with teacher parking in the center. Fossil Ridge the bus loading zone is completely off of a different street then where the students are, with teacher's parking in the middle. Zach isn't as good because there's only one area for one driveway. Bacon has a parking lot for buses; we try to separate buses and cars as much as we can. We put the buses up front making it closer to the school, maybe we'll get one kid more because they can't walk that extra 30 feet to the parked car. Yes, I'm part of that group and that's part of this system, the management group. We go out and look at every item; if the school says hey we have a parking problem. There are four of us that go out there, one from security, director of facilities, director of security and one that's part of the bond funding. • York: What about CSU and Front Range? Is there any way to inter -connect with those schools? • Chaffin: I worked at Front Range for four years. We do take students to Front Range for classes that attend. • York: From the high schools? • Chaffin: Yes, there are a lot of classes and we do provide transportation. But then again, it's not cool to go to college on a yellow bus when you can have your freedom to swing through McDonald's on the way in and out. But we do provide transportation until no kids ride. By spring break everybody's got a car so we pull the bus. If any kids say hey we need it then we'll put it back. CSU we don't do a lot with because there aren't the classes. • York: PSD students don't ride to CSU? • Chaffin: There are a few that go to CSU but it's so few. • York: I was thinking more of hauling CSU students if you're already on the way or something. Air Quality Advisory Board 11/28/2006 Page I 1 of 29 • Chaffin: The one place that we do haul CSU students is the Rams Express for the football games and our insurance company says you can do it this year but we need to shut it down because we're not sure that that's the proper use of public funds for school buses hauling you know; but its community effort and we're keeping thousands of kids that have had drinks off the road to run them back and forth, can't do it, so. • Dietrich: The school district does not self -insure its buses then you buy a policy? • Chaffin: No we're not self -insured. We're through Colorado School District self- insurance. All the school districts in Colorado are. We were with State Farm and they were going to shut down the Ram Express. We changed to the insurance pool and they allowed it to run for the year and we're talking to them some more. • Levine: It seems like you're doing a great job. Before you go, this board has worked on and you have in our 2007 workplan we're doing work on diesel which we've looked at a couple of times, a lot of this is from 2001 and a lot of EPA references. (Referring to hand-outs given to Tom.) The replacement policy, how many years, on these 2007 buses when you purchase them, do you expect to get out of them? • Chaffin: About 23 years. I'm getting rid of my 86/87 models now. • Levine: That also means that any purchase you buy you're going to be stuck with that technology and that level for the next two decades so you've got to be careful on as I'm sure you are... • Chaffin: I'm very careful with it. And I need to thank everybody here. Several years ago when the district went out for a mill levy. Part of that mill levy gives me $1.1 M per year to purchase new school buses and that was the new piece where I got standard $1.1M every year. • Adamy: How many buses does that give you? • Chaffin: 13 to 14 buses. • Adamy: So that means you decommission 13 to 14 a year. • Chaffin: I try. Some buses go to Mexico, farmers use them for storage and some go to rafting companies. • Levine: I noticed you're really hot on the particulate filters. I noticed the cost seems a little more than some of the other technologies. Fort Collins Transfort at one time had particulate traps in the 80s. There was a lot of problems or something as they cracked. Last I heard they were removed from the Transfort buses. • Smith: I believe that's right. • Levine: I remember that and it seems like Fort Collins was going down hill at that time. • Chaffin: I'll find out about that. These are guaranteed for 5 years. • Levine: What I'm getting at is how does Transfort and Fort Collins diesel fleet compare with your fleet. It seems like you, just listening to what you're doing, it seems like Transfort and maybe Fort Collins fleet can maybe pick up a few rips. • Chaffin: I work very closely with Tracy about every other month and discuss grants. He helped me out with fuels and the bio diesel problem. • Smith: Just a quick note here - the City of Fort Collins is partnering with ICLEI for a grant to upgrade some of the Transfort buses possibly with particulate traps or maybe some other technology. This is just unfolding right now and the application deadline is Nov. 30 and it's in the works. Perhaps I'll call you and see if it might be possible to get a letter from PSD for that grant and maybe talk about sharing technology/experiences or something like that. Air Quality Advisory Board 11/28/2006 Page 12 of29 • Chaffin: If 1 see something in a newsletter do you want me to email them to you? • Smith: By all means yes. • Chaffin: The more newsletters you get on to, the more newsletters that you find that have great opportunities. • Smith: Sometimes the funding is just for school buses and not for other buses. • Chaffin: Now there's one for transits and buses that just came out. • Levine: One last question. What do you see as opportunities that we haven't done yet? What do you see as barriers to getting more people out of cars, more students out of cars? Also, getting cleaner technologies on buses. • Chaffin: Technologies. I work very close with international IC bus. They have come up with a hybrid diesel. They have 17 of them and are testing in NY and CA. I was at a national conference a few weeks ago and asked that they bring one to CO and test it in high altitude cold weather climate. I've tested a lot of their stuff here, some of it doesn't work, some of it does. The bus is about $230K, a normal bus is about $80K. • Levine: But our Transfort buses are about that price aren't they? • Chaffin: They're about $200K. • Adamy: Is that a bus that will hold 45 riders? • Chaffin: It's a 77 passenger bus. Most of mine are 77 passenger buses but that's three to a seat. • Adamy: How did I get 45? • Chaffin: 45 are the smaller units that I use for special needs and for small areas. But most of my buses are 77 passenger buses. But that's three to a seat; I do three elementary, two and a half junior high; that means I can fit three 7s' graders and then two 9 h graders; high school is two kids to a seat just because. The opportunities are that I see the industry looking at hybrids; that being the next step right now. The next step after that will be fuel cell. • Levine: What about on the transportation end of things? • Chaffin: How to get kids out of cars? • Levine: As far as citing of new schools, has anything such as increased congestion of Fort Collins region, affected you? • Chaffin: Yes, it's affected our routes. I'm working with the schools and right now each bus does three tiers. It does high school or junior high, then an elementary and then another elementary. It services 3 to 4 schools in the morning and 3 to 4 schools in the afternoon. Between that I have a half-hour between schools. So if you think you've got to stop at a high school, then travel at least 2 miles out because that's the walk distance for high school, drop off a bunch of kids, and get back to the next school on the half hour in Fort Collins. We do it, I can't say very well but we do it. I need 40 minutes and I'm working with the schools. That means a major"shift in school times; some of them will have to go earlier and some will have to go later just because of the traffic in town. • McMaster: That in itself from a planning standpoint has always been an issue because that argument has been we ought to start high schools later and elementary earlier. • Chaffin: The problem is that the high schools are so huge. I start picking up kids at 5:15 in the morning for Poudre High School. As well as schools located on 287 at the Wyoming border. • Levine: The problem is we have probably fairly good predictions of future levels of service and travel times and they're not getting shorter. Air Quality Advisory Board 11/28/2006 Page 13 of 29 • Chaffin: I know it. I was working with a group that met down at The Ranch, that whole urban transportation group. We talked about how you spend your money and what travel times really are here and we look at college and some of those things. • Dietrich: Do you do anything to educate new parents into the schools like elementary parents about bus and safety in buses and all this other stuff and how to keep kids off the road? • Chaffin: We don't do it to all parents. What we do is we have an "I Walk/Ride Safely" program for 3, 4, 5 and first time students prior to school and we advertise that. That's in cooperation with the state patrol/sheriff or Fort Collins Police. I encourage parents to come ride the bus if their children had a bad experience. Before the end of the year we get the little kids out there and get them used to the bus, getting on and off. We have a little robotic bus: Buster that we take out to the schools for safety education. We go to daycares all summer long. Woodward Governor's picnic and REI has their big deal we go to and promote school bus safety. We try to promote riding the bus. There's so much more we can be doing. But we're all looking at man power and money. • McMaster: Do you think not having an open campus, if that was even possible in high schools, could that help in getting kids on the bus? • Chaffin: Could be, I don't know. I think so because it doesn't give them a reason to go to lunch. • Dietrich: Just don't allow kids to drive to school and that gets everybody on the bus. • Chaffin: But how do we do that? • Dietrich: They do that back east; it's a whole social issue. • Levine: Thank you Tom. • Chaffin: Thanks for inviting me. • Levine: We have Mike Gebo with building inspections and Brian Woodruff to give a presentation on the radon study. Agenda Item 2 Radon Study Update: Brian Woodruff and Mike Gebo present the finalized results of the 2006 radon study and discuss the handout. • Woodruff: Thank you. This is my colleague Mike Gebo from Neighborhood and Building Services department. He's the head of building inspection. Mike is here to answer questions about the inspection part of our radon study, should you have any questions. This is a quick update on the radon study basically because you've had a presentation on this before in the early summer when we were half way through. The results that we have come up with are really not different than the second half of the houses than they were from the first half. The average radon reduction from the passive system we calculated 49%. We found that the distribution of houses when you put the caps on they approximate houses that didift have any radon system. We found the distribution of those houses was roughly similar of what we had expected from previous testing we know that about'/4 of the houses are above 4 pico-curies per liter and that's pretty much what came out of this study too so we know we're not testing unusual houses. We found that the higher you start; I mean the higher radon you have in the house the more effect you have from the passive system and that's consistent with what we reported in the summer too. For example if your house was above 10, the average change was 58% with the passive system, 58% down. But if you started below 4 you have a moderate reduction an average of 20%. What I passed out here on the front and Air Quality Advisory Board 11/28/2006 Page 14 of 29 back of this one sheet called Supplementary Statistics it's just to answer questions that the board may have. I know that there were some statistical questions earlier particularly the paired T results and that's at the bottom of the page. • McMaster: But you didn't do a paired T test? • Woodruff: That's right. This material is not reflected in the report, it's extra stuff which could be incorporated at a later time. The paired T test shows that if we assume that the houses are really the same before and after the application of the passive system, that's the null hypothesis and the chances of having our results is .000. Which I interpret to be less than half, less than 500s of a percent. That's a very strong result. There's very little chance that the radon systems aren't working. On the flip side of the page, we did have a question about how many homes, I reported how many homes were above and below 4 but the question was how many fall between 2 and 4. That is about 37%. You have a 40% chance of your home being above 4 pico curies with a passive system, 60% in excess. But a 37% chance that it will fall between 2 and 4 which is an area where EPA says if you consider that radon has; there's no threshold effects for radon we recommend that you take action below 4 pico curies but you may want to take action below that level as well. Finally the effect, I had a question about the effectiveness by the date of the test. In other words, could I discern anything in the time sequence of these tests having to do with the effective temperature. We started in March and we ended in May and so I just averaged the test results by two week periods and I don't really see a trend there. It was sort of an exploratory stab and I don't think there's much to report there. That's really all I had except later in the discussion I might talk about how we might change this brochure that we require to be given to people at point of sale. It has information about radon levels in Fort Collins and we want to add information from this study so that people have better understanding of the passive system that's in the new houses and what are the chances of it actually getting you below 4 or below 2 and basically reminding people to test their homes. It's necessary to test them even though they have the passive system in there. • McMaster: This handout said that 93% of the people contacted had not tested their home. Basically going with the original concern that once you put this in, people are not going to check. • Woodruff: On the inspection side of the study we basically found that that the builders and the inspectors were doing better and better over time. • Levine: So there was no screen on most of the vents? • Woodruff: Yes, there's a lot birds screens missing but that's a lesser concern item. What we worry about is caulking because that can reduce the effectiveness of the system a lot, or running the pipe through a cold area instead of a warm area because that reduces the stack effect. We did find in the run up to this, meeting that there were about a dozen homes that technically were completed in 2005, but their building permits were actually pulled prior to the date that the ordinance came into effect. What that means is they were following a different set of rules than the other ones in the study. That means that we have to go back and make a revision to this report and withdrawal those 12 houses. I don't expect that the results will be any different. I guess I'm saying it's not over until it's over. If there's anything major to report in that re -write I'll certainly advise the board. Do you have anything to add Mike or do shall we go to questions? • Gebo: Remembering that 2005 when this went into effect, January 1. The building department also had a brand new residential code and brand new mechanical and fuel gas Air Quality Advisory Board 11/28/2006 Page 15 of 29 and lots and lots of code. I think that my staff probably focused early on on some of these other codes; particularly the energy piece which was a major change in residential construction than what we were doing energy wise. And yes, we're supposed to bring all of these codes on line all at the same time. What we found looking at some of the earlier permit numbers, and VO5 is how we'd recognize that. A 2005 permit is a VO5 something. So a much smaller number is early in 2005 and a larger number is later in the year. We are seeing, how I understood looking at some of this, is early on we probably were missing some things radon -wise as inspectors. As the year progressed; we kept saying lets not forget radon, lets go back and make sure. As we identified the house number that they did the survey on we referenced it to a building permit number that it was built under. And we organized all the results based on that permit number. That was able to give us the sequencing in time, when did that permit get issued. So when were we looking at that little bit closer. Part of the 12 permit numbers thht were issued in 2004 even though they were filled in 2005, that shows me that the program that we were under at that time was if you install it as certified. It wasn't a requirement. I'm thinking from what I'm seeing from the 2004 is that the self certification didn't work as well as what we were doing even beginning doing inspections. They uncovered quite a few things missing under the 04 permits that people were self -certifying; not self -certifying, but we had certified people telling us that it was installed properly and it was installed correctly and we were taking that certification and obviously they were missing more than we were missing. • McMaster: That partly explains about the caulking. I would think it would be a pretty easy thing to see in the inspection but if it's just a mater of getting that into the inspection process. • Gebo: I think it's getting it into the psyche you know, what do I need to look at and in the first few months of 2005 there was a lot of new things to look at. That's not an excuse it's just what happens. I think my inspectors tend to look at what they're more familiar with. They're more familiar with mechanical and I know ducts need to be sealed now and we're paying attention to that and radon is something that we haven't been looking at for the installers and the builders as well as my inspectors. I think we've well overcome that. • Dietrich: Your inspection process, do you inspect pre -pour and then post -pour? • Gebo: Yes. We did not set up a special inspection for radon. What we said was anything that us under the slab has to be in when we do an underground plumbing inspection. We're there looking at the plumbing works, the drains, the waste vents and those things under slab; you should have in place what you need for radon whether you do the gravel base or whether you do the T spot coming out of the ground, that needs to be there. It doesn't need to be staked out, it just needs to be there knowing that when you pour you're going to set it. That's how we look at the underground. Through the pipe and through the building we look at it rough plumbing. Because we're there and it's not insulated yet and it's still wide open. I should be able to see the stack and all the caulking and sealing is done at the final inspection. There is no special inspection for radon. It's incorporated into what we're looking at. That was part of the learning curve too, pulling in this additional thing to look at. It's all in the process of why we're there already. We're there for something else. • York: Well my read says that this new law is beneficial to home owners. I'm awfully glad that is study happened because the proof is in the pudding. Air Quality Advisory Board 11/28/2006 Page 16 of 29 • Gebo: I totally agree with that. My wife and I built a house in Rist Canyon a few years ago. I was part of some of this radon involvement early on. I'm up here and it's all decomposed granite; there's got to be radon in there somewhere. I built a passive system into the house. It's not activated when I did the test it was 2.4 so I know it works. We sealed all the caulks and cracks. The builders are accepting it. There was resistance at first for the cost of the caulking and time involved to do the caulking. You do a few of them and it was not that bad. It was not that bad for us to do our house. And we're at 2.5 or something. • Levine: When did you do that? • Gebo: About 3 years ago. • Levine: Larimer County has had for all planned development projects it has and has had for about 8 years now, a sticker standard than Fort Collins has today. • Gebo: Not where I was. They weren't requiring anything. • Levine: For sub -division development at the county level, for about 8 years they've required a full passive system. The other component is they require before certificate of occupancy is issued, they require an inspection, a radon test of the actual pico-curie measurement at the lowest level and if the slight discretionary component but if it tests high and if the county people determine high they'll send a letter to the home owner or perspective purchaser telling them the results of the test and encouraging them to activate the system. I guess there's some holes in that general practice. • Gebo: I have some acreage. • Levine: This is for all sub -divisions. • Gebo: They never said anything to me about it. • McMaster: As positive as this was, which I think it was and I think you mentioned that. Do you think it's good enough or do we need to some further... do you see it moving. • Woodruff: Do you mean policy wise? • McMaster: Yes, I have a couple things in fact I was following up on. • Levine: It sounds like we're in the policy phase of this. The study was good and it had good information in it. • McMaster: Yes, and I think that was very good. The way I interrupted the graphs; expectations around 83% of the homes are above 4 pico curies and that 93% of the people move into a house don't test. If you look at the last graph on the main package, the curve on the passive system, it just seems like generally, there's a wide variation, the passive can get you down to around 5ish pico curies and then after that you're just at the luck of whether your site is below that by and large. It says to me that passive is going to be good at reducing it; four pico curies is not, just because you're at 3.9 doesn't mean it's healthy. I guess the question is do we need to do a policy adjustment like incorporating a test afterwards, notifying people. We still have a lot of houses even with the passive system that are above four pico curies. It's almost suggesting to me that there needs to be something that needs to get it down below that is going to the active system. I'm throwing that bomb out there. • Levine: That's the obvious question. I would suggest as the first thing Brian has already introduced it. Obviously this information is not incorporated yet into these (referring to the Radon brochure pamphlet). Incorporating that is a big educational component. • Woodruff: And we have some grant money this year to revise this brochure. I don't expect it to be revised a lot.I think the brochure is working just fine it's just that some of Air Quality Advisory Board 11/28/2006 Page 17 of 29 the paragraphs can have information added. For example, why is Radon a concern? We call out EPAs recommendation about 4 pico curies per liter, but we left out what EPA actually says which is there is no real threshold and you might want to be looking at doing something down to a level of 2 or even beyond that. We can add information like that. hi the section on new homes and radon, which is in the middle of the fold -out, that's where we would put in results of our testing. You have about a 40% chance that your house still has levels above 4 pico curies even with the passive system; and something like a 60% chance that it's over 2. Do test, testing is an essential part of moving into a new house. • McMaster: I guess what concerns me, I don't know how much we take on the responsibility of the individual, but when you buy a new house often you're strapped financially and have other things to be thinking about. I think an awful lot of people aren't expecting; and it might be lulled into the false sense of security by knowing there's already a passive system installed. Pamphlets and education is great but, I don't know. • Adamy: Are you suggesting something be built into the system to require testing at the completion of construction. • McMaster: At the very least. • Adamy: I'm seeing that too. • York: Upon sale, or how? • McMaster: Once the house is built; I don't know whether it needs to be occupied to be fully effective, I think it would. So maybe a month after, sale/entry into the home there needs to be a test. It doesn't cost very much. • Levine: How does the county do it before they issue a CD/CO? • Woodruff: They require evidence that a test has occurred. Or if a test has not yet occurred they will issue a certificate of occupancy if you prove that you've purchased a test kit or hired a testing consultant. The results are supposed to go to the county office. You can't move into a new house before the building inspection department says it's ok to occupy and one of the requirements is this radon test if you're in a sub -division. • Dietrich: If the original owner is a developer, he can get the radon test and get the certificate of occupancy and the first person who buys that house doesn't necessarily see anything and so on with the second and third buyer. Often times from a developer's perspective you're not going to have the house occupied when this test is done. Just to follow up a bit more, it's good to know what you're base level is. It really doesn't say what it's going to be when you live in a house. Some people live in an open house, some people live in a closed house. We don't require VOC testing when you put in new carpets and all the other things that affect air quality issues in houses. • McMaster: That's a good point. • Dietrich: Where do you stop? It's a personal responsibility and the radon is relatively cheap. It's how you live in that house as fb what level that is. How efficient is it to activate a passive system? Can you do it just by putting a fan on it? • Woodruff: It required the installation of a fan and that's running about $350.00. • Dietrich: Do you mean under slab and everything and afterwards it will plug right on and it will work fine? • Gebo: We require certain spaces for that fan and certain location for the fan. I have to think my inspectors are getting better because I am getting calls periodically from framers finishing the basement so they've finished all the walls and they haven't caulked Air Quality Advisory Board 11/28/2006 Page 18 of29 the wall to floor, but they have a piece of stud there so they can't do that. The fix to that is we have to activate the system. If you give me an activated system and caulk everything else and now activate that system. • Dietrich: That is another option to the regular test and say they're above 4 so they better activate it. • McMaster: That's what the plan currently does. They have the passive system, but if there's no check , if somebody doesn't check ,then you don't know where you're at the easy way to do it is to follow through and have the fan and the active part. It's not that expensive. • Woodruff: I've had the same concern that you have. People are moving into these houses and they're not testing. Probably the second person who moves in will do a test. Testing becomes common when the house changes hands. I struggle with how do you get people to do the test. I thought maybe you can send them a friendly letter from the city stating congratulations new home owner, you need to test and maybe give them a free test kit. But then I thought also, that would be a very nice thing to do for the brand new home owners, but what about everybody else who buy houses. Why would we single out the ones that have a passive system and say you need to test. • Levine: And what we've heard a lot of times on disclosure agreements if you have a record of the test, legally it has to go into any problems that you know about that house. Sometimes its actually not legal if you know something and you don't deliberately disclose it. That's an incentive for not testing it so you have nothing to disclose. That does happen a lot, I've heard of that. Don't ask, don't tell. • York: I think it's an interesting thing to ask because something else needs to be done like maybe require a test at point of sale. I hope that you do a press release about your findings because just based on this it is of education value. • McMaster: That's a great idea. • Adamy: We'll expect to see it and we'll watch for it. You talked about a letter. I don't know about this brochure; is this one of those things that you can only get a city building? What about putting it in the utility bill with a comment that refers to our on- line radon document and that we sell test kits. • McMaster: Haven't the test kits been free from time to time? • Woodruff: Yes, we've given them away at events and we sell quite a few of them at the senior center. • Levine: These days a buyer is going to insist on a radon test, if nothing else for a good negotiating point; if it tests high even with the passive system and especially without one, in the 3 out of 4 homes, that buyer is going to be required to put the system in for the purchaser. Yet that buyer who has lived in the home for years in the home is going to have none of the benefits. They pay for the system and have lived with radon. • York: When you get a new house, you sign up for the utilities, could there not be a little packet then and there that welcomes you and tells you this is how it's done and this is what you get for your money. I think people don't know about radon and that's why they don't test. The only reason I know about it is because I'm on this board. • Levine: Maybe it depends on the region. A lot of the east coast people know about it. My brother passed up a house due to a high radon test. It's been done there for a long time, it probably depends on the region. Air Quality Advisory Board 11/28/2006 Page 19 of 29 • Engell: Does anyone have a cost number to retro-fitting a passive system into an existing home? • Adamy: I looked into that. One of the company's in town quoted about $500. • McMaster: That's a good price. • Dietrich: That sounds pretty cheap. What would they do, do you have a single story? • Adamy: The house has a passive system already. • Woodruff: Your question was starting from scratch, what's the cost to put in a retro-fit passive system. • Engell: Yes. • York: $1200? • Woodruff. Most of the time they don't put in a passive system; they'll go all the way. I've heard as little as $800, there's one company that puts in quite a few at that price. It goes up as high as $2,500 depending on what's under the foundation and how difficult it is to install. If there's a good gravel bed then you only need one pipe. But if it's real tight or if it's laid down on clay soil there's no ability for the gases to move under clay soil then they might have to put in two pipes. A lot of them come in under $1000. I think $1500 is a reasonable budget. • Levine: I've never seen above $2500 as far as the estimates go. All the reputable companies refuse to put in a passive system; they all insist on an active system. The original as invented and approved by EPA was for an active system. The passive system is just really the active system minus the fan. • Woodruff. It turns out I put in a passive system in my house because I didn't want the fan running 24/7 and it worked. The guy I worked with was willing to install through a couple of closets and we had to have a straight shot through the roof and we happened to have it. I thought maybe we can make this work and it did. We got it down from 7 to 2 %2 ; I was lucky. Most of the time they put in a fan; that's the standard retro-fit. • York: Do you think it would be at all palatable politically to have; you know when you sell a house to have a mandatory test? Or proof of a test or results of a test whether it was 10 years earlier or 5 years earlier or 3 days earlier? It's a small detail, but it would insure that all houses are tested at some point. • Engell: Are you talking new homes that are coming out on the market or? • York: Any house. My house, your house. • Engell: At the prices that you're talking, $800 to $2500 shouldn't be a deal breaker on a $400-$500K home sale. • York: You know I'm not even saying that. If you have a house and test at a high level, its not that you have to fix it, it's just that people are informed. • McMaster: Usually the buyer will usually say I want a radon test done if it's not available and then that enters into the negotiating price. Where it becomes more problematic is a home around the $200K price range then it's ­a bigger percentage; if it's a $400 or $500K home then the seller almost always does it, sure. • Levine: What are the statistics? What percentage of home sales new and especially pre- owned homes; is the test conducted? Or radon level put in because it was known before hand. • Woodruff: If I understand your question, we don't have detailed information about that. We have done some surveys in the past but we inquired as part of our air quality surveys. For example, in one of themwe asked did you buy a house in the last year and did you Air Quality Advisory Board 11/28/2006 Page 20 of 29 remember getting information on radon and did you test. There is some information like that but I don't regard it as very reliable. I think 40% of the houses have been mitigated. We could get more information like that but we haven't been trying to get it. Anecdotally the real estate community tells us that testing is almost universal. The buyer almost always says they want a radon test. We don't know what the follow up is. Some realtors say it's a scam because the buyer will negotiate down the price because of the radon system he's going to have to buy and then just pockets the money and doesn't even put the radon system in. • McMaster: But will loose it then if he sells the house. • Woodruff Yes. We don't have information about that. The system we have is designed to inform people and give them the information they need to make good decisions but we're not forcing them to decide one way or the other or to test. • Dietrich: Do you know if the inspection service on homes, do they almost always do radon tests? • McMaster: Yes, I thought they did. • Woodruff The only one I had done did. • York: So then back to the question about if it would be politically palatable to have a requirement that the radon level is reported at the point of sale? • Gebo: With any code I think what's difficult is enforcement. What is the mechanism that requires a house that's completely out of our system, it's an older house and its transferring ownership. I have no axe to hold over them to do anything. That's going to be the question, what' the mechanism that enforces it. • York: If there was some record of that. If we knew, you know if it was tested if it was reported. It's preventative health information. • McMaster: When the title is transferred, would that be the way to do it? • Gebo: That would be the assessors office. • Woodruff: You'd have to make a policy decision and an ordinance that the house has to be tested and that information is public. Like the gauge of the wires or the size of the plumbing, it's a matter of public record, what the radon level is. We're pretty far from that right now. In fact, we, to encourage people to participate in our study we promised confidentiality. Most people want that and expect that; and you say well if I'm going to test the house I'm going to be in control of the information. People have their own reasons for wanting to keep that information out of public eye. • Levine: So Brian, is the city going to; what percentage of passive systems, 40% that test high, will choose to activate the system? Does the city have any data on that or does the city have any program or out reach to encourage that? • Woodruff: We don't have data. I could figure it out by looking at the building permit records. If somebody activates a system they're supposed to get a building permit for that. They don't always do it. • Gebo: I couldn't use permit activity for activation of systems. I don't know that anybody's permitted any of them. I think they activate them, I think they just don't do the permit part. • Woodruff: They're supposed to get a permit but they don't; so basically we don't have a good way of knowing how many of them are activated. We could ask the local mitigators and see if they would share some numbers with us but this is all very informal. Air Quality Advisory Board 11/28/2006 Page 21 of 29 • Levine: The city could do a dedicated mailing like you did to get some of this data. It would take another effort like that? • Smith: We probably have an air quality survey just a general citizen survey coming up next year; we can ask that question there. There's always the case that people don't always remember what they did. It would be one source of relatively inexpensive data; if we're doing general survey to 1500 residents and getting a 60% response, that's one source of information about it. • Levine: The main concern of the policy discussion when we all the years leading up to passing this ordinance this requirement was that if the large percentage of the passive systems, my estimate at the time was 20-25% were tested above 4 pico curies based on very conservative average levels of radon which is the high 7 pico curies rather than if you made an assumption based on 8 % it would look different; a lot of them were right on the line. I wrote a letter to council with that conservative figure so this data that we've had since the summer is pretty nailed down now shows that that conservative estimate really was conservative and reality is on the high side with 40% as opposed to 20 or 25% so, the concern was that all of these people are notified that they have, the new home purchases, have radon mitigation systems built into their new home. So, people are just going to assume, either they're not going to read anything and just not assume anything or think about the radon; or assume that the system is taking care of it whereas we know in 40% of the cases people would probably want to know this is that EPA recommended actionable levels. • Gebo: That's the information that we're placarding on the duct system itself; that this is a passive system and you may want to test. • Levine: People need to know there's a 40% chance that it's going to test above the EPAs recommended actionable level. I think we need to at least verify or have some data that people are informed and maybe considering taking action and how many do. When the city asked the county for a cost benefit estimate. Bruce Cooper with the county high lighted a DC study. It was a big educational effort in Washington DC which has high radon levels, to get home owners to measure their levels and to do tests and everything. The entire educational effort was found to be very cost ineffective. The percentage of people that actually purchased the test after hearing all of this out reach was 6 1 /2 % and the people that actually used the test were about half; and a quarter of those actually mitigated if the test showed that mitigation was needed. That's about .9% effective. • McMaster: I guess all I would really want to advocate would be to make sure we get the information to the individual. • York: I could see what Neighborhood Resources provides such as a test kit with a number they can call with questions. Maybe those questions could be written down and there could be some documentation. It just seems like we should go a step further from a public health point of view. • Gebo: Would the next step be activation of all new homes? • York: It would be test it, know it's there and when you sell the house that information is passed on. Then people can choose and make choices themselves. Although it would be great to have the houses that are high to be retro fitted whether it's an active system. When I pick up an information sheet for a house that's being sold, on that sheet they have things like any problems or where people haven't gotten a building permit. It could become routine. Air Quality Advisory Board 11/28/2006 Page 22 of 29 • Levine: So since 2005 we've had this requirement, the county's had this requirement for 8 years so why do we have this requirement, what's driven all of this, what's driven the mitigation technology the passive and active technology; it's the whole human health equation that's driven this. The way I look at we have ,ok, maybe 1/3 of the homes to be built, '/4 to 1/3 of the homes of total Fort Collins build out; that leaves us with still maybe 2/3 of the homes that are pre-existing. 3/4 of those have high radon. We know that a fair amount were mitigated but there's a fair amount to go. We know that 40% of the homes will test high with the passive systems. So, I don't if it's up to us to solve all of these problems or not but certainly if you look at the wider picture, just societally hasn't done it yet. We haven't as an aggregate of individuals and government this problem is a serious problem it hasn't been solved. • Woodruff: What would solved look like? • Levine: Solved would be no one living in, a home with EPA actionable levels of radon. If that's the solution I don't know how we'd get there. I would think next steps would certainly be; we have information that is important for the new home purchasers as part of our program so these need to have that information in there. Then we should encourage people; we should have the city send some kind of encouragement to get the levels down. If no one is required they should certainly be encouraged, that's what the EPA does so that should be reflected in there. As a second step we should get some data on how this is working and how many people have digested the information and what their choices are. Those are my suggestions. • Smith: There's more that we can do at a low cost to encourage people to test. We haven't done a lot of radon out reach since this ordinance passed; but every piece of out reach always said test your home. It was discouraging to hear Eric mention this study by Bruce Cooper that apparently showed education is so ineffective. • Dietrich: That was in DC. • Smith: Okay, I wasn't aware of that. Press release, the web and updating the radon brochure and getting it into the neighborhood services welcome packet; possibly giving away temporarily free radon kits; there are more things that we can do pretty easily. It may not do a lot but at least it would get more out there in the public; that would be a start. We could gather data on it via the survey. The question is how solid is that data that we would get via the survey. I have some question about that especially for radon where they have to rely on their memory about that. • Levine: That's a really cost effective way to get a lot of answers from a lot of people but I don't know how we sift and determine the quality of those answers. • McMaster: We know we're progressing on the problem because eventually homes are being retro-fitted it's just what rate is acceptable and do -able. I think the biggest hurdle at his point is education; but it comes for a lot of,people especially for the lower income, middle class down, if you start talking about a bill of $1500 a lot of times that's ... the long term perspective you'd say of course that's what you want to do, but there's a lot of people that's a lot of money. • Engell: If you educated people that were buying homes to say okay, go ahead and require and as a buyer you're going to want all the negotiating power you can; if for nothing else to drive the price of that down so you can buy it for less. Then if you required to publish or track what their findings were on that house, it's kind of a one shot deal. You go in and ask for the test; you knock the price of the house down $2500 but now the next person that goes to buy it from you; you're held accountable for it, you're going to have Air Quality Advisory Board 11/28/2006 Page 23 of 29 to report the levels to the next person and hopefully they're going to the same trick to you. Or you put in a system yourself • McMaster: Some people will be putting in and some people will be pocket the money. • Engell: I think that would be one way as a buyer that's a pretty thing to be educated on. As the home owner, that's difficult. What is their incentive other than looking at a long term perspective of their health; but really for a lot of families I think that the $2500, $1800 or $800 for a system is a big dis-incentive to pursue a topic. • Levine: It is. The only point I could make if I were trying to be a sales person, I'd say people are getting more and more educated and this is something that the perspective buyer is going to have tested so you're going to have to pay for this anyway so why not get the benefit out of it. Spend a little money now and have your family get the benefit of it not just the person who purchases the house. • Woodruff: The thing that I would really long for is for more people to test their homes and fix them while they're living in them rather than waiting for the home sale transaction. • McMaster: But then the person that buys if you could get them to say okay, they haven't seen the money yet rather than pocket, that'd be the time. • Levine: Obviously one good step forward was requiring the passive system in the new homes. It's cheaper to have them in than to retro fit; it gets inspected by the city. It's had a good process that it goes through, it's there Cheap to activate and once it's activated the level of efficacy is 80 maybe 89/90% reduction; 85 is the low numbers that I've seen. The amount of radon drops to a high degree. Even with the passive system a lot of the high homes dropped a fair amount. With the active system almost everything drops by a factor of 8 to 10; which is tremendous. And it costs very little more compared to the total cost of the system to do that. • York: The time issue. • Smith: We're running out of time. • Levine: We just have our yearly plans. • York: One strategy could be that offering free radon kits to people who are willing to reveal the level of radon, the results of the test. And just to raise the... • McMaster: The problem with that is if you have the home owner do the test, A: they may not do it right and B: there's things that you can do to make the results look better. I would not trust that information. • York: Nonetheless they will still have tested. • Adamy: For their own benefit. • McMaster: Yes, if they did that. I'm thinking about the part about making the information public. • Adamy: For the benefit of proceeding to the next level on our agenda I was wondering if we could pursue these questions amongst ourselves in part of the work study and let these volunteers that have assisted us go home. • Levine: That's exactly what I was going to suggest. • York: But a press release and a report to council? • Woodruff: Yes, I think we can do a letter report to city council, it doesn't have to be a big splashy thing. The press release, they'll want to see that before it hits the press. We already have on our work plan to improvise this (Radon brochure) and reprint it. Au Quality Advisory Board 11/28/2006 Page 24 of 29 • Levine: Brian the study is excellent, thank you for doing that. This looks good now and it will look better when it reflects the data that you got. And the policy decisions are policy decisions for the city and its residents at large. I'd like to continue this as a discussion item amongst the board members at our next meeting. Thank you Brian. Agenda Item 3 2007 Workplan • Levine: I'm going to suggest that we move the minutes; we need to go into the workplan right now. I don't expect anyone got it and it's not going to be on the agenda right now, but the transportation board just came out with the 2007 workplan about 3:00 this afternoon. I waited about a half-hour and I sent it out to everyone. Lucinda got it and I highlighted a few things. I noticed they had a retreat and one of the concerns is they were disappointed by the joint transportation/air quality advisory board meeting. They gave that one bad marks and of course we gave it bad marks as well. What I'm wondering is did we give it bad marks for the same reasons, because they didn't elaborate. I think we thought the meeting and the dialogue was positive; it was just the subject was something that we both already heard. We never heard any more information on the mobility management. • Smith: Should I see if I can get a little more insight? I'm sure Mark Jackson was there, I can ask him. • Levine: Sure, thanks. We're shifting around. We need to do the 2007 Workplan as the transportation board did two weeks ago. Dale, Lucinda said you had an addition? • Adamy: Being on the agenda I thought that it was incumbent upon us all to contribute. I did give it some thought. (hand-outs given to board). I organized the workplan ideas a little different, to organize things into groups that maybe we could measure our success by. Or to concentrate on depending on what is important at the time. Miscellaneous came out of the rest of the bulk workplan, which is picking up things that didn't fit into categories. • Levine: Interesting, ok. • Adamy: The other side was goals. One thing I thought was redundant in the old workplan was all those words that said what we should be doing evaluating, encourage, recommend. I would like to have as a goal some action items that are measurable and that we can achieve over the course of our term. We can all say we are successful at evaluating, encouraging, recommending, studying and monitoring; but I would like to be successful at some other measurable. That's the general direction that I had in submitting this for people's input. • Levine: The City Plan itself has a measurable goal: Goal #1 the air does not deteriorate and it gets cleaner even as the population grows; that's supposedly an overarching goal right there and is certainly quantifiable. I think that's good. The transportation board has its little logo, it's very measurable; set of metrics. Which one does city council several years ago has agreed to kind of drop for now. Hopefully some real definable metrics will be put in. I think everyone wants it put in. • Adamy: Does anyone have any questions about what I submitted? I wasn't real careful about being all-inclusive or considering different things that I didn't know much about. It's a first stab at things. • Smith: The air quality plan which was adopted in 2004 has several indicators, maybe 12. It has units and a desired direction. We're supposed to report to council at least twice in a Air Quality Advisory Board 11/28/2006 Page 25 of 29 5 year period, so that would be 2007. 2007 will be a good year for doing that because we're going to do the air quality survey next year. We're going to get information on wood smoke and the other information is fairly readily available. That's along the lines of tracking progress in a more quantifiable kind of way that we don't do every year. We do report progress on just ambient air quality criteria pollutants but this is looking at more things like VMT growth rate if we can get it, wood smoke emissions, number of non -certified wood stoves etc. I don't know if that would serve in the place of your desire to set measurable and attainable goals or if you wanted to look at more. • Adamy: I would think for instance, if we wanted to look at diesel emissions and the PSD school buses and we set ourselves a goal to not only invite somebody here to find out what they're doing but say what are the measureables now and if we could influence something with them and then society so that it brought it down and have that measurable at the end of the course of the year, we would say -gosh with our input we've changed it from this number to this number; let's move on to a different subject and work on that one. • Levine: We now have a radon policy for new homes; 60% instead of 75% testing above. There are almost 80% testing above the action level; we are 60% testing below. • McMaster: Those are the kinds of things that we want to say. • Levine: It only took 10 years to do. • Adamy: There are maybe some small things that we could do in the short-term. • York: I think focusing on the trash hauling trucks would be good. To find out how much fuel they're using. I don't know what we could do as far as emissions tests. • McMaster: I thought we were going at the idea that we really wanted the city to re- address this issue with the idea being that it effects road maintenance, air quality, economics sort of things. If we could have input that would help drive the study. One way to do that would be to get an estimate of emissions from the truck. Then you can say if you reduced it instead of having three companies going down the street, it's one. You could make some estimates to say this would be a way of showing progress on emissions reduction. Help them do that study so that the best decision is made, policy- wise. • York: Something that Dale said last time was prioritization; having easy things and shorter things vs. the long term; I thought that had a lot of merit. • Adamy: I think it would be helpful to know and help stay focused at meetings. • York: And I agree with Eric about the metrics and trying to come up with metrics even if we don't do anything about them. • Smith: So having input into that FC Moves, whatever Transportation Services does with that, I think the air quality board should be involved. I mean that's their effort to update the whole metrics tool kit. Mark Jackson indicated he wants to work on it; they have reduced resources and no director right now, Mark is the interim director. What ever they do, to me it would make great sense fo't the air quality board weigh in on that and that's something on the transportation board work plan as well. • Levine: The problem is, when is the new transportation director get chosen? Because Mark is the lead person on that FC MOVES and he's having to oversee the entire department so he really has no time to do that. He's the point person for the Fort Collins Moves. Unless some of it is shifted off of him, he's not going to have time to do it. • York: What is FC Moves? Air Quality Advisory Board 11/28/2006 Page 26 of 29 • Smith: I wouldn't call it a model. I would call it a process to develop new mobility metrics. So whereas previously the city looked at VMT, now it would be a broader suite including delay and other mobility metrics. It would be looking at those and I would imagine setting a desired operating threshold. • York: PSD should be involved with that. • Levine: I have a very limited understanding of it. It goes beyond air quality; obviously transportation mobility goes to levels of service and various times it takes to get from one place to the other. It's certainly a large step forward from "a comparable job in similar cities" which is the policy language we have right now. You can't get your arms around that; that just doesn't work. This is the right step. I'm just concerned that needing a new transportation director and all of that right now doesn't bode well in the near term. You can write a recommendation to city council to foresee that. - • Smith: Maybe this is helpful, just the transportation board paragraph on FC Moves from their work plan. They said "The transportation board feels strongly about the use and importance of clear and accurate metrics of transportation system performance. T-board is supportive of the FC Moves which is a mobility index program to be undertaken in 2007 by transportation services. The board desires regular updates every one to two years of transportation metrics to better understand the dynamics of transportation modes." That's how they handled it in their workplan. • Levine: We're certainly in agreement with the transportation board. • McMaster: They're just asking for the metrics and they want to be updated periodically. • Smith: Right. • Adamy: What's the corollary to this board? Would it be to ask for the air quality metrics to be reported? Is there an air quality metrics that we can receive similar to the transportation board metrics? • Levine: The two metrics that we have for air quality at least in terms of the transportation component of the metric is the tailpipe emissions and the VMT. We can only do limited actions on the tailpipe. We can do something and we can only go so far. We're not Detroit and Japan I should say designing the vehicles that people use. Travel behaviors is the largest opportunity we have to address that. What would you like with this? • Adamy: It was just a contribution but we got one from Lucinda that I haven't had a chance to look at. Did you get this information from the old one and eliminate some? • Smith: I took these points simply from the discussion last time, right out of the minutes. These were the points that I got from you all; I did not add a lot of verbiage around it because I felt that was somewhat up to you. I knew that there was an interest in having more action -oriented words and more quantifiable metrics. I started to write things some things down then I thought well really it's for the board to say what you want to say about diesel emissions. This is more of a skeleton list of bullet points. • Levine: It's almost unfortunate that I didn't; there were three attachments I had from the T board. The first attachment I brought was not as appropriate; I didn't include it. The first attachment was a very wide kind of view. It had some similar methodologies rather than actual points that they were going to address; actual program elements. It had some methodologies like strategizing and look at some of the big pictures first. That's included in their workplan, as the first sheet. The second sheet high lighted program elements. Some of that can almost, this is how we work and how we sit and prioritize and here are some of the elements that get prioritized. What is the timeline for giving this? Air Quality Advisory Board 11/28/2006 Page 27 of 29 • Smith: This is due on November 30 to the clerk then it goes to city council for their review. • York: Our efforts to work on the mobility management recommendations; surely that should be on this. • Smith: The priorities that I heard last time had to do with green house gas emissions and transportation. That's the first bullet point under transportation: Follow up on select recommendations on the mobility management best practice study. • Dietrich: We have to have this ready by the 30ffi? Right? • Smith: Yes. • Dietrich: How much detail do they really need? • Smith: That depends on you. Some work plans are one page, some are ten pages. The T board had a long workplan last time and it was too long. They didn't get to it and they decided that it was crazy. I think something along the lines of what you had before is adequate. Someone commented that even this past workplan had something like 22 items and it was really too many. Practically speaking you have 12 meetings a year and things always come up that are unexpected. • Levine: This is not a contract signed in blood that we're obligated to pursue all of these points and it's certainly not a contract signed in blood that we can't add any more important issues that come up at any time. This is just a general kind of overview. At this point in time we think we're going to address these items in the next year. • McMaster: There's two things to the this work plan. One is for our purposes and the other is for council's purposes. Does this adequately address either or both of these purposes? • Smith: That's a good point. The November 30 deadline is to get something in front of council to see if meshes with their priority. You could work on flushing this out more if you wanted to. It would make sense once the workplan is approved to figure out the timing and go into a little more detail. • York: I don't see the idling vehicles on this. I was impressed with the PSDs idling policy. Perhaps there's something we can do to get the city of Fort Collins to embrace that. Energy conservation should be spelled out under green house gas issues. • Levine: Jeff sent me an interesting article about algae fuel and another article about Salt Lake City using sewer waste for heat transfer for buildings. All of that goes under green building as one of the issues that we should look at. I was also thinking we're going to be looking and tracking the Fort Collins Sustainability Group and that's on council's workplan agenda in January. We should probably have a presentation this year from Judy Dorsey and the Brendle Group on the Northern Colorado Clean Energy Cluster. • Smith: I think it's fair under track ozone issues recommend action if necessary and it could be added included oil and gas well emissions. • Levine: I don't have any problem with this or those additions to the work plan. I don't see the workplan as a set in stone kind of thing; I see it as an evolving kind of thing. • McMaster: Well the immediate goal is for council by November 30. So it's sounds like we go with your plan that was put together here. Maybe put a few more of these items or not, depending on what the group thinks. See if we need to flush this out a little bit now to get it to council. I like what you brought Dale, now lets really start to think about what this really means and prioritize but that we can do. Air Quality Advisory Board 11/28/2006 Page 28 of 29 • Levine: And the criteria that the board uses to prioritize and then move on these issues. Lucinda you had that written down. I see that as probably more important for us internally, how we work, rather than the output of the issues. • York: I like including prioritizing. Dale has a wonderful recommendation. • Dietrich: We don't have anything about enhancing education on air quality issues. • Smith: There was something about providing input to marketing effort so you could word that any way you want. • Dietrich: There's been a number of things brought up at the table. What I worked on here is...." enhancing education on air quality issues education for example idling, wood smoke, radon, ride sharing, energy conservation, renewable energy." A lot of these track ozone issues, it's big and there's a lot of items under. Did you want to fill out some of the items? • McMaster: I was starting to focus on the November 30 going to Council. • Dietrich: I don't know how much time we have to do a whole bunch of sub -bullets. • Levine: If we track those and come up with something good; we get some information, we distill it and give them a one page. That's a real output, not here just telling them what we may and may not do. You can't get that level of detail. • McMaster: Yes, this is just the topics of the general things that we'd discuss, for the council. • Levine: The real importance of the board is the actual recommendations, resolutions with the information as to why we are making this recommendation. • McMaster: I would like to see the detail there after the fact. • Levine: This is for council but this is also for us; we don't want to loose track of anything at this point in time. I'm happy with it as it is just about become. • McMaster: And as we approach this the idea is the metrics and all that. • Smith: Do you want to mention anywhere something about sustainability. • Board: Yes, all want that mentioned in the workplan. • Smith: Okay. • Dietrich: Do we have to go into it a little bit or sustainability just the word enough? • Smith: I think it would better to say more. Last year you said "work for funding of air quality goals and sustainability action plans." So it could be something like track progress and promote air quality related sustainability goals. • Dietrich: Yes, something like that. • McMaster: I would get rid of the italics and just add it to the list. • Smith: On both of them? • McMaster: Yes. • York: Sometimes we talk about connecting witll.the general public. I think it's a fine goal and an important thing to report to the public on air quality issues. • Levine: Just as an aside we'll approve the minutes next month. • McMaster: I had a few minor edits that I wrote down. • Smith: I'd like to discourage you from taking action by email. It's just not the best way to get all the votes by email. If it's necessary like last time due to the time constraints then alright. You can do the edits by email or you can wait until next time. • York: ... connecting with the public...... is that something that we'd like to do, to report to the public on status of our air quality and to get input from the public, their concerns? • Engell: Do we have a way to do that as a board or do we facilitate cities correspondence. Air Quality Advisory Board 11/28/2006 Page 29 of 29 • Levine: I noticed on the Transportation Board's plan, they had a big educational outreach component, a whole section on it. I don't remember hearing anything major about that or being informed about any major transportation programs/policies/problems. I guess we can do the same thing. • York: We can do such a thing if we choose to, but I don't think we should write it down unless we're going to do it. • Adamy: We can write it down and do it anyway. • Smith: That's true, it's in the bi-laws. • York: Then we should write it down: Communicate to the community the state of air quality and get their concerns and input. • Engell: Your suggestion to the press release is a good way to communicate effectively. • York: I guess you can say community outreach or public out reach, • Smith: I'll update the work plan with your points and you can review by e-mail. Then I will send to the Clerk by Nov. 3e. Meeting adjourned 8.28 PM Submitted by Tara McGibben Administrative Secretary I Approved by the Board on T�Jg4 , 1 9 , 2006 Signed C- Tara McGibben Administrative Secretary I Extension: 6600 / A�/ Ay Date