Loading...
HomeMy WebLinkAboutMinutes - Futures Committee - 04/14/2014 - City Manager’s Office 300 LaPorte Avenue PO Box 580 Fort Collins, CO 80522 970.221.6505 970.224.6107 - fax fcgov.com Minutes City of Fort Collins Futures Committee Meeting Regular Meeting 300 LaPorte Ave City Hall April 14, 2014 4:00–6:00pm Committee Members Present: Committee Members Absent: Wade Troxell, Chair Gerry Horak Bruce Hendee Darin Atteberry Gino Campana City Staff: Dianne Tjalkens, Admin/Board Support Lucinda Smith, Environmental Services Director Katy Bigner, Environmental Planner Wanda Nelson, City Clerk Kelly DiMartino, Assistant City Manager Jeff Mihelich, Deputy City Manager Ana Arias, Public Relations Coordinator Christine Macrina, Publicity/Marketing Tech Karen Weitkunat, Mayor Invited Guests: Community Members: Kevin Jones, Fort Collins Area Chamber of Commerce Wade Troxell called meeting to order: 4:08pm Approval of January and February Minutes: Gerry moved to approve January 27 and February 10 minutes. Wade seconded. Motion passed unanimously, 4-0-0. (Gino arrived after vote) Chairman Comments: Wade introduced the concepts of the Think Tank items, the 30-50 year outlook, and the composition of the committee. He explained that the citizen engagement topic is to more robustly think about what citizen engagement means. Wade and Bruce will share upcoming items at the next committee meeting. Wade added that this will allow the committee to have ongoing topics that work together. • These topics will inform planning projects of the future. What are the long term investments and how do we manage them? • The committee should be catalyst to find a way to utilize the canal and ditch system to have more irrigation through non-treated water. • Population estimates say Fort Collins is expected to have close to 240,000 people in 25 years. Can the committee look at what Fort Collins will look like as a city of a quarter million? • How can we help facilitate changing how people use transit? • There is potential for bringing in some other future thinking people outside of staff to stimulate thought. • There could be a forum sponsored by Futures Committee. • Regarding electricity and power, and the distributed generation, how can the community become more self-sufficient? • We talked about infrastructure replenishment. That captures how we begin to think about our infrastructure needs and thinking of things organically. Think Tank Item 13: Citizen Engagement—Expertise and Input Structures, Update: Wanda Nelson Wanda’s team met with Futures in January and had a meeting with Board and Commission members in February. She said the team took the comments and boiled them down to a list of categories. One suggestion heard was to reduce the number of boards and commission and tie them to the key outcome areas. This will meet effectiveness, communication, and alignment with key outcomes that boards suggested. The intermediate step is to meet with chairs and train them on the Budgeting for Outcomes (BFO) process. Council will identify the key initiatives for Boards and Commissions to incorporate into work plans. The next step is to meet with chairs and vice chairs about implementation. The plan will come back to Council in July. Wanda asked if the team should work with board and commission members to integrate key outcomes into work plans or go ahead with reducing the number of boards and grouping by outcome areas. Comments/Q & A: • Council should do a better job of specifying what boards should be looking at and having in their work plans. We have been passive. • The Council Retreat sets our agenda, but does not inform boards and commissions. We could be more intentional. • It is clear we haven’t trained chairs how to be chairs and run meetings. There could be an orientation specifically for chairs. I like the idea of working with chairs to align plans and budget process. The chair needs to start asking what the board should be helping Council with. Most of the work plans are the same as the previous year. • The work plan part is easy. More difficult is the immediate need. When something new comes up, it should be communicated to the board how urgent an issue is. The ad hoc 2 committees I have sat on worked very well. Board members have said they wanted to feel like they were contributing, not just meeting to meet. • We need to empower the Council liaisons to do that part. Instead of it going through staff if it is a Council thing, the liaison has to meet with the chair, especially if there is an issue Council needs help with. The problem of communication may be with us. • The super board idea is happening without us. • We have got to pull our essential boards that are required from this discussion. For example, we have to have a Planning and Zoning board. How we differential and organize them is different from the conversation we are having now. These topics should be presented differently to these boards. The second piece is we have so many boards. As we talk about communication, it all goes back to their function, what they are doing, and what we want them to do. We are less communicative with some boards than others. Some are asking for empowerment. The issues of not communicating, not listening, not giving work, creating work, as well as the issue of who serves on them and criteria, based on what the board is and what it does, all need to be addressed. The Energy Board put together an ad hoc committee on greenhouse gasses. They were creating more work and didn’t go through a process with Council. If the boards are not feeling engaged, we have a problem that needs to be fixed. • We pull out the required, essential boards, then the rest we have outcome areas and people who are specialized or have a high interest, and you have a pool of people to use around a certain issue. For example: you have a neighborhood livability ad hoc board, you ask those who are interested and informed and have a finite amount of time to work on the issue. The people I spoke with thought this was a good idea. • You have these essential/statutory boards. What are they? Water Board, Planning and Zoning, Building Review, etc. There is something in their charter that expresses the essential nature. Then there is the other set; they have a stated mission. We can call them ad hoc for now and perhaps move them toward that direction. • There is so much overlap between boards; a lot of people want to have a say. We could pull from other areas and request input. • The Human Relations Commissions has on their work plan that they want to work on mental health, but there is nothing on Council’s agenda regarding mental health. They have created work. A board of ours has worked for a year on an issue that Council will not take action on. How does that align with Council? Is that an effective use of our board? • If you have the Transportation Board looking at the southeast community center, they are in a vacuum just looking at transportation issues. If you bring together many groups you get a broader view. We take their independent comments right now instead of having them work together. • Do you want the Futures Committee to look at structural issues and come with specific recommendations about the number of boards and commissions, or go with the second option that has a slower transition? The first option may be too bold. If we are the culprit in lack of clarity, training, and communication, maybe you go with option two that is more transitional. • We haven’t done a good job of saying what we want, so making a major change without getting people on boards understanding the BFO process and having Council members dig in and work with their boards is not a good idea. We don’t have good data to make 3 major changes right now. We don’t have credibility with boards because of these things. We need to spend a year on this. It’s a model that is going to change over time and is not going to be swift. Using the outcome areas, we should look at each board and evaluate: Is this board really important to the outcome area? Are they value added? We need to look really hard at that. Council members have to be willing to dive in and do the work. • I like the first option. The system we are using is broken and needs to be changed. We could have a few more meeting, but they will drive the dialogue to the reduction. We need to make sure there is buy in, but we shouldn’t have to keep using the system we have. • Over the last 30 years the boards and staff have developed a close relationship, but the Council and boards have not. It’s not the boards’ problem, but Council’s problem. • The way these are worded drive toward an answer. Perhaps we say, next year our boards and commissions align to the outcome areas. We can start changing the dialogue and changing the conversation. This could be a two to three year process. There would be natural consolidations in the process. • If we start to use more super issue meetings or ad hoc committees, it will spotlight how we use them. Right now we get competing recommendations. If all get the full picture it becomes more meaningful citizen input from a variety of sources. • When the Greenhouse Gas (GHG) goal people were trying to get boards together, it was a good idea, but there was no coordination with Council. • How hard would it be to try it out with a few issues? Let’s try it out and see how it works. • The GHG is a perfect example. • You could ask for volunteer representatives from a number of boards to discuss particular issues. • We could have a blend of both. We get our act together, get our communication in line, be clear about the end game and what the steps are, and start moving in that direction. • Another example is the Golf Board. Is it really working with policy issues? Does it help us move the meter forward? The liaison needs to be working with the chair and board to make sure they are. • The second alternative has an intermediate approach, but doesn’t say where we are heading. I like the idea of telling people what is coming. • The Golf Board, as an example, takes a significant amount of resources, and used to make policy decisions. But if you are looking at driving outcomes, then what? • Maybe the Golf Board could be just a group. • In Denver there is an ad hoc marijuana committee. There could be a fracking ad hoc committee as well. • We did have that for oil and gas. It pulled members from other boards. • Another dimension is to keep exploring other mechanisms for garnering citizen input, so we are expanding the pipeline, not closing it down. • We would get more people signing up if they could choose the projects they could work on and cannot commit to four years on a board. • I am supportive of the blending, but is there a possibility to begin working on engaging the boards this year? • We want to do enough to have a recommendation for next spring. 4 • There is a reality that the magnitude of education and awareness. People aren’t aware of the community dashboard, and other ways of engaging. • Some boards will not want to be engaged. They will opt out. • The Council liaisons should meet with chairs on current work plan to see what fits in with Council’s agenda and BFO. That is the kind of feedback the boards should be giving. • It’s important to let people know where we are heading. Let’s equip them and align. • Part of Plan, Do, Check, Act is continuously looking at structure. If you see one board is not giving input, they dissolve. • Our biggest user of the general fund doesn’t have a board working with it: Police Services. We don’t have anything that deals with safe communities. • We could say, “We don’t have boards; we have ‘Safe Communities,’ and who wants to participate?” • One suggestion to move forward is to peel out the boards we have to have. The boards that aren’t engaged now can have the option to fold into another board. Then start on the education with a goal toward alignment with the outcome areas. You won’t have pushback if people are involved. • Let’s draft this up and send it around between meetings, and move toward a Work Session. • Perhaps someone could pilot working with a chair on the work plan and the chair could be part of the work session. DO 13: Next Steps • Draft concept and circulate to board. • Pilot working with Chair on Work Plan to align with seven Key Outcome Areas. Think Tank Item 14: Climate Adaptation: Lucinda Smith and Katy Bigner Lucinda and Katy gave a presentation on Adapting to Changing Climate (see handout). Their activities have occurred primarily in Utilities, but have moved out into the community with planning workshops. The workshops were to identify risks to the City and raise awareness within the organization on implications of climate change. Mitigation is putting the brakes on climate change. The more we mitigate emissions now, the better we can avoid impacts of climate change in the future. Adaptation takes the considerations of future climate change and provides planning for averting things we can control and a cushion against impacts. Impacts are based on hazards, vulnerability and exposure. The risks are where these overlap. The science is pointing to a 2° F change with significant mitigation and 4° F with highest emissions. Katy showed projection models for precipitation for the Front Range, with drier summers and potentially big decreases in precipitation. There is a projected shift in the hydrograph, so the flows we experience in June (where we get our water supply) will move earlier and have implications to water rights. The general consensus is that you will get an increase in snow melt earlier in the year. Lucinda added that the air temperature predictions are less variable and model scenarios have differences, which make planning more difficult. But we need to look at all these scenarios. Katy added that the Front Range is the most difficult area to predict precipitation. Katy showed a slide of potential 5 impacts including declining water availability, higher incident of wild fires, increase of infectious diseases, decreased water quality, and forest stress. Comments/Q & A: • Showing the data and understanding it are different things. You could add a simple statement explaining the scenarios. It is meaningless to the average person without some more information. • The take away is that it is hard to predict, so you have to plan for a variety of scenarios. • The data needs to be constantly revisited. • Put adaptation and mitigation into terms of resiliency and sustainability. How would we project for those? • What does declining water availability mean? • A couple of examples are if we have a dramatic change in waterfall that will affect the forest as it is adapted to a particular pattern of water availability. More preparation for flood and storage will be necessary. Planning for wider variations will be necessary. In September 2012 we had a great example of how variability can affect us. • If you get less precipitation in snow, you get less snow pack; you can’t collect the water that goes into Horsetooth or Halligan. The quality is affected by heat and ash. • It’s important to partner with international organizations. You build more robustness into your infrastructure and change policy around water catchment and reclaiming and reusing water. So there is a lot more dynamism that should be going on. Forest management practices could help to make forests less stressed and reduce effects of infestations, etc. • If you look at the extreme heat study, it shows that we have been on an increasing trend line since the 1960s. There are much greater swings in variation of weather that must be planned for. • Looking at the 1930s to 1950s, some of the hottest years were then. We have more surfaces covered now. • The report corrected for urban heat islands. They revised the appendix for a longer period of time and the trends are still there. • On slide 3, I don’t understand the message. Slide 4, it would be nice to have earlier data as well. I am curious about the baseline. Why doesn’t the data start at zero? This shows a 2° F and 4° F variance, but the rest talk about 6° F. Is that Fort Collins? • Yes. • The hydrograph is confusing as well. Show it bigger to see the differences. • Slide 7’s message is challenging as well. • Are we talking about adapting to climate change or climate hazards? For example, the growing season will increase. Climate change is neither good nor bad, but different. Can we show the good things as well? This is showing cooler as better and warmer as worse. • In some venues it will be important to show the full range of impacts. • The increase in severe storms is based on what? • The task force is using all severe weather events. • The predictions in general call for increased severity and frequency of severe weather. • The hotter it gets, the more water you can hold in the atmosphere, so the more robust the storms can become. • One thing that bears this out is the number of insurance claims that have been made. 6 • But you must adjust that for inflation and the changes in where people live. Galveston has been devastated four times in the last 100 years, regardless of what people have built there. • The Big Thompson in 1976, Spring Creek in 1997, and the floods of 2013 as five hundred year flooding events and rainfalls; these are big flood events that have happened in the last 35 years. • CSU has flooded four times in the last 100 years. • Those are weather events, not climate events. Our data is limited on how far we can go back for weather. Temperature records go back longer. • When you think about the City, robustness is a good thing. We aren’t going to design for just one thing, but for variability. But, it is at a cost. We have to manage more variables for the desired outcome. • The challenge with the audience is that not everyone is aligned. If you show one extreme or another, you will spend more time defending your position than getting your point across. • The messaging as it is relevant to Fort Collins and the strategies we are trying to work with. Strong messaging will tell our story. • Some of the graphs were prepared by the Geos Institute. The report is more detailed and gives some analysis, but is still just the presentation of data without analysis. We didn’t come with messaging but with information. Katy continued to slide 8, showing a summary of the science for the area including up to 6% warmer summers with declines in soil moisture, increase in wildfire, impacts on irrigation, etc. • Slide 9 is critical in working with the City. How do we plan resources for these more extreme events? We know they will happen again. • We are going to have these events anyway, but climate change will impact the severity of them. The increased warming and drier conditions will increase the likelihood of these events. Katy showed slide 10 with increases in temperature and heat waves. If we continue to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions we will forgo some of the greater impacts. • How do we determine monetizing versus cycling? • There could be events that increase cooling, such as a large volcano eruption. • These models don’t reflect the correction factor of the system. The models are relatively simple as compared to the complexity of the overall system. • Part of that is a function of the period of record we are looking at, which is about 124 years. We are not looking at long term cycles here. Katy showed slide 11 which includes impacts on human health, air quality, increased pest and disease outbreaks, invasive species, and increased forest stress. She showed outcomes of two workshops. More fixed systems have low capacity to change. Identified risks include loss of urban forest canopy, wildfires and ozone exacerbating poor air quality, low income housing increased rates, impact on conservation of species, habitats, etc. Other risks with high sensitivity with higher capacity to change are water related issues, human health (elderly, homeless, outdoor workers, children, etc.), economic impacts with impacts on tourism, resource-based businesses, population changes, and increased demand on energy use 7 for climate control devices. Next steps include ongoing outreach to all City departments, developing collaborative relationships between the County, PSD, Health District, etc.; identifying adaptation strategies with co-benefits as part of the Climate Action Plan; ongoing peer-learning with other intermountain communities; submitting a BFO offer for planning and pilot projects, monitoring climate science for improved modeling and projections; and folding adaptive considerations into the Asset Management Program. • We’re looking at the heat side, but we need to look at the “not having cold” side. If we compare to El Paso, what are they doing there in the winter? Biking and walking could increase. Golfing could increase. No winter heating. In the summer you have a choice, in the winter you have to heat. If we look at this fairly, we have to look at the other side. • Does increased severity include more cold dips? • The science isn’t clear yet. The jet stream could loop down more, allowing more arctic air, but this is a theory. • Weather and climate change are different things. Weather has high variability. When climate gets in to weather we have problems. • I don’t know if I would try to strictly look at Fort Collins. We need to see what the effect of overall climate change will be on Fort Collins, not what the climate change will be in Fort Collins. • In a semi-arid region, our ability to adapt is different. Semi-arid and arid regions have a different way of changing based on climate change. • Our change, if we are the only ones who do mitigation, is not going to have an effect. What happens in the rest of the world affects us. If we can’t stop it, we have to be ready. • That is why Halligan makes more sense than Glade. When we had the flood it would have filled. • Others will argue that by doing Halligan we are causing climate change with more CO2. We need to message that we are doing this for resiliency. • The messaging should show what we can do about it. • We can do mass transit and reduce our carbon, but if the rest of the world doesn’t, how do we build resilience? • Some key take aways are messaging, and consistency of messaging, Some of the data could do more to confuse than orient. • There is a data analysis to look at it a couple of different ways to improve our resilience. • Stay away from unsubstantiated extremes. Focus on clear cut science-based claims that don’t cause you to divert the discussion to a debate. • The likelihood of drought is high, but the likelihood of more severe storms is questionable. • You could take the human cause out and say, based on climate cycles, how can we be resilient? For example, if you have a 10 year drought, how do you plan for it? • The comment of trying to make it more Fort Collins-centered is important. Discussions in my last position were related to heat and the water cycle and pressing for more xeriscaping. It was conservative but climate change was accepted. We saw the reservoirs dropping. 8 DO 14: Next Steps • Lucinda and Katy will revise the presentation based on member comments. Additional Discussion: None. Meeting adjourned by Wade Troxell at 6:01pm. 9