Nov 02, 2020 Committee on the Environment on 2020-11-02 9:00 AM

good morning everyone welcome to the committee on the environment my name is Keely Briggs and we do have a quorum today councilmember Meltzer is out there has been a death in the family so we can send our condolences I do have a question before we get started on our agenda it says my name is Kelly Briggs do we need to city attorney do we need to address that now or can that be made up in the minutes next time we can correct that the minutes next time okay all right thank you so it is November 2nd and we are getting started at 901 and we will go ahead and start with our items for consideration item a consider approval of October 5th 2020 minutes councilmember Davis yes I'll move approval of the minutes okay and I will second all in favor say aye aye all right so we'll go on right down to item B receive a report and hold a discussion on the 2019 greenhouse gas contribution analysis yes good morning council members this is James Douglas conservation programs coordinator and let me pull up this screen here and how does that look for everybody right we can see it awesome all right so like you said we'll be talking today about the 2019 greenhouse gas contribution analysis results so this will be building on our October presentation the last presentation which was the results of the 2019 greenhouse gas inventory the contribution analysis tool was started in 2018 so just this previous year we did a few analyses for past inventories going back to 2011 and so this will be the second year that we're using that for sort of our more current inventories this will be the first year that we've completed this analysis for the municipal inventory if you remember from our previous presentation and we do two analyses every year one for municipal operations and one for the Denton community as a whole and so this will be the first year that we have had the resources and the data to complete the municipal analysis along with the community analysis and just a brief background on what the contribution analysis is it's an assessment of the variability between two years which we have greenhouse gas inventory data for and the way that I really like to summarize this is it outlines what worked well what needs improving and what is outside of our operational control so as we said and we'll be focusing today on the results of the 2019 analysis which will showcase the difference between the 2018 results and the 2019 results and we're going to summarize those and have a few highlights there just a quick recap of that October presentation and you'll see here on the top chart the results of the municipal greenhouse gas inventory analysis and the bottom chart has the community side of things and what we'll be focusing on today if you take a look briefly here at the last two inventories 2018 and 2019 if you take a look at the scale here it'll give you a good reference point for previous years as we move into the contribution analysis itself you'll see a change in the y-axis and so I just want to point out here what the the difference between the two years that we're talking about and we will get into those results so you may remember from last year the sort of style of these results as a waterfall diagram the red we have are the increases in greenhouse gas emissions from 2018 to 2019 and the blue shows decreases and obviously the two gray bars are our totals for 2018 and 2019 and they are representative of the net change between those two what we have here is on the far left and right sides will be the greatest changes and as we move closer to the middle you get smaller and smaller changes on either one of those sides and so we'll take a quick look at this and then I do have on the next slide sort of just the highlights there but you can see on the left-hand side we have emissions from the debt and energy center as well as landfill emissions and on the right side I did want to point out that the analysis itself highlights transmission and distribution losses the tool itself doesn't know that that's an electricity driven number it's one that we input on our own and so just keep in mind that those decreases from transmission and distribution are the same as the decreases from the electricity fuel mix and that they are improved because of that improved renewable energy in the portfolio and so I did just want to point that out and here just lists a few highlights from that analysis and on the increased side we also had an increase in vehicle miles traveled and number of employees and so that is built into that and a slight increase in building energy use intensity also could be a factor from an increase in the number of employees there on the decrease side the biggest factor once again is that increase in renewable energy and in the DME portfolio we had decreased waste generation per employee which we talked a little bit about during October's presentation but we see that here showcased in the analysis itself and and then we have an increase in vehicle efficiency from the employee commute and we also had some some favorable weather conditions in a slightly cooler summer comparing 2018 to 2019 so we're gonna switch over now to the community as a whole the Denton community as a whole some of the larger increases were due to an increase in vehicle miles traveled per person and we have a growth in population which I'll talk about here in more detail in a second but that's a really important factor to consider when you're talking about the variability between any two years we have increased waste generation per person as well and then on the decrease side some highlights once again you you'll see that transmission and distribution loss and change also an electricity driven factor we have decreased on-road emissions per vehicle and the same increase in vehicle efficiency that we saw from the employee commuter vehicles is going to have a larger impact on the community as a whole obviously a lot more passenger vehicles there when we're talking about the entire Denton community and a very large impact from the change in the electricity fuel mix the increase in renewable energy there is the the largest factor there on the decrease side and so once again we'll just kind of highlight those in in words make it a little bit easier to see than it is on that x-axis we also in the increase side I did want to point out that it was a little bit of a cooler year 2019 was overall and so that colder winter we put in the increase category because the need for increased heating is going to have a little bit more on the emission side but the cooler summer obviously we don't need to use the AC as much and so we'll have a little bit less on the on the AC cooling side like I said I wanted to dive a little bit into the population growth obviously population growth is going to touch a lot of different sectors and so built into that change that that red bar in population growth is all of these different factors and so an increase in population is going to impact your waste generation your vehicle miles traveled your residential fuel use and your residential electricity use and this is just diving into a little bit more detail into what what all goes into that factor and so we can kind of you know imagine that this is all built built into that slight increase there this is important when we go to take a look at the efficiency of our programs we want to make sure that we are taking a look at metrics such as kilowatt hours per household because that gives us a really good sense of for example energy efficiency education if the education is going out and we're seeing in it an improvement there we want to make sure that we take out the variability of something like population growth to effectively judge whether or not those programs are working and this is a really good tool to showcase that so that wraps up the presentation and I will take any questions I have to take this down give me one second you can take this thing down so we can see yes thank you thank you thank you for the presentation Councilmember Davis do you have any questions or comments no just to express appreciation for using that tool and especially applying it to the municipal analysis it's a it's nice to be able to see a little more granularity and know where we can target efforts you know we know some things that we want to keep up and things that are beneficial but it's nice to be able to see where we can put efforts and resources and get good benefits so thank you yeah I agree I would like to ask though is this something that we will look at or the implementation committee as we look to the sustainability plan to try to tie these two together if you could speak to that a little bit for those watching yeah absolutely the besides just tracking greenhouse gases you know for doing it it's also a very wide-reaching metric in terms of all of the different sectors that it touches and so having this tool in combination with the greenhouse gas inventory every year is going to be a really important cycle that we're going to run through as we go through this decision-making process not only to help us set those strategies but to continually make sure that we're on track to meet whatever those goals are okay thank you and is there anyone that can answer the question when we do our waste analysis that's coming up or the the contract the consultant comes in will they be looking at the the emissions from the landfill in their study going forward to kind of look at that to see what we need to do and whatnot or is that something separate miss Briggs this is Brian burner director of solid waste for the city of Denton that is a separate activity that we are currently doing as you may remember we as part of the whole landfill gas to energy process project we did a significant analysis on how much landfill gas the the landfill is currently producing and we're actually working on an RFP to go out and turn that it you know see how we can turn that into pipeline grade gas there will be a marriage between that project and our solid waste management strategy as we evaluate the amount of trust balls you know the material that can rot that is currently being put into the landfill projecting that out so we will be able to look at that but I think it all comes back to really that the slide that talked about the increase in the amount of solid waste that residents are generating and this is not just a Denton centric variable that has been identified this is this is happening nationwide in most cities across the nation you're actually seeing residents producing more waste so part of the strategy will be not only to identify what kind of what we're throwing away but then also how to encourage and and ensure that from a front-end standpoint we are reducing the amount that we are acquiring so at the back end we can really find alternate ways to manage that that minimal material and then decrease the amount that's actually going to the landfill perfect thank you so much for for letting us know all that it is connected and I like the word you use their marriage because it's gonna be a marriage for sure okay the only last comment I have is that seeing the increase in the emissions from generation it is nice to have those renewable contracts that we have there to to pull those down and balance that out it's good to see that it's working in the way that we thought it would and if go ahead councilmember Davis thanks sorry I just thought of something I was in my mind trying to remember what you said about transmission and distribution losses and if you wouldn't mind maybe a staff report or an email whatever is easiest if you just put that down again because I'm not sure I'm going to be able to correctly repeat it and remember because it I remember what you said about the tool didn't have it built in that we needed to add some values ourselves but I'm not sure I understood completely what you said so if maybe we could just get that in writing someplace so I don't misquote you somewhere I could be helpful for you thank you all right awesome thank you James I appreciate that so we will move on to our next item item C receiver report and hold the discussion regarding the FY 20 annual report for the city of Denton sustainability recycling and learn to conserve events you you I'm not hearing anything if you're speaking Sarah yeah sorry about that I was on mute so we are here today to talk about the events that were hosted during the 2020 fiscal year for the sustainability division so in total we were able to host 96 events now most of these events took place before the pandemic in March we stopped hosting events about March 13th and then went into virtual engagement only so we'd like to talk about just the objective to increase sustainability awareness and the personal responsibility of hosting these events and doing that type of engagement we want to provide the Committee on the environment data regarding these public events as well as discuss how we plan to move forward in this current fiscal year so in total we hosted 93 events 32 of those events were community events 20 were volunteer events 30 were outreach events and 11 were tours so of those community events mostly consisting of workshops and education we hosted a lot of events focused on local food which is more of the gardening style workshops we are also able to increase the number of locations this year to 12 different locations across the city of Denton and then we also a lot of those workshops were focused on how to support pollinators so the class average actually increased so we had a little over 28 people per class with a total of 105 attendees this does not include major events which pushed the total up to a little over a thousand for events here's some of the classes that we were able to host last year prior to the pandemic and then one or two of these were also hosted virtually we also with during the pandemic there was a lot of wonderful virtual engagement classes where they were talking about native plants some of my favorite were from Water University and rather than we try to promote a lot of those through our Facebook and through our social media which has a pretty substantial following and so we hope that people were able to still get that education that they like and enjoy through a lot of those experts that typically we would bring in ourselves to teach these classes but they were hosting free classes online so we we opted to promote a lot of those experts as far as volunteer events go we were still able to host several volunteer events we did host a few in April because we had we still had a lot of plants to plant prior to the pandemic we had applied for a grant to get more milkweed and they ended up sending us three over 300 milkweed plants and so when we got those at the beginning of April we still need to get those in the ground so we are able to do a couple of socially distanced planting events and get those in the ground in time for them to thrive last April so we still planted I think it was close to about a thousand different native plants at Clear Creek this past fiscal year and so those volunteers were incredibly helpful a lot of those were in the form of Master Naturalist which as you can see they donated 2300 over 2300 hours of their time and this is just at Clear Creek alone which altogether the volunteers that's about see $92,000 of value that they were able to contribute to our department so as far as outreach events we were still able to host several but these of course stopped after once the pandemic hit we were no longer doing tabling or one-on-one events with individuals we're hoping that at some point next year those can resume but we will also we're just waiting for things to get for it to be safer for us and the public we also hosted 11 tours there was 241 people on these tours that attended and were able to get some education on solid waste and recycling those who have also been put on hold indefinitely and then as far as social media goes this is where a lot of our focus was placed during this time period and like I said we were promoting a lot of great webinars that were going on and we were able to increase our followers so that total following count below that does include next door which is about 34,000 people however our other social media accounts we had about 11,719 followers and we were able to increase that over this past fiscal year by 10% so overall we've had a pretty positive response with social media and we've been able to connect with new people and still relay some information other forms of data that we thought were relevant last year we're still at our last fiscal year we'll still able to do 330 energy rebates and the audits have been put on hold so prior to the pandemic we were able to do 19 energy 9 water we handed out almost a thousand different seed packets and then 600 different native plants were planted at Clear Creek now we did do also several hundred spider wart plants and so that those weren't factored into there as well so that's why I boosted those numbers and then we also did we're able to do field trips last fall at Clear Creek but they were canceled in the spring and they have also been put on hold this fall and I believe the master naturalists are working hard to try and do some virtual field trips so that they can still get that education to those different grade levels with that so we're hoping to increase community partnerships improve tracking especially with social media and virtual engagement just because that is still something that is very safe and is proving to be a really great way to connect with the community during this time period with that I will see if you guys have any questions thank you for that presentation and thank you to the volunteers that is fantastic to see councilmember Davis do you have any questions or comments on that presentation no questions thank you but you know that this is a weird time for everybody but I know a lot of people took the opportunity to get their hands dirty and get out in the yard and do a lot of gardening projects a lot of home projects and you know some of those were right in the wheelhouse that you're talking about so I really appreciate you providing the service to our citizens that you did with connecting with the experts I know I googled about 13 different things during the pandemic of how to do things I didn't know how to do so what a great resource and then to still be able to get that kind of volunteer turnout even in the midst of the pandemic that's that's pretty great good work sir I have a question I know that when we received an update before there was an issue with some people signing up and then not showing up I'm sure with that going online it's probably not an issue as much but when we weren't meeting online was that still an issue or did that seem to kind of work itself out so with my workshops a lot of times we would increase the size so that even if people signed up and they didn't show up we would still we weren't turning people away so those people that were reserving a space weren't taking the place of someone who was gonna show up the registration because they're free classes you always have people that are gonna sign up and then don't attend but we tried to really mitigate that by making sure that we were allowing enough people to sign up we I believe we only had one or two instances where those classes actually filled up but even then I would start a wait list and I don't think that we ever turned anyone away during last fiscal year the fiscal year before I had to turn two people away during a workshop because it was so busy that we actually were meeting the fire code in the room that we were in wow that's that's that's great I think just because people are so interested in in your classes I appreciate that the last question I have is you mentioned virtual tours for the school at Clear Creek is there a way that we could do the solid waste tour virtually so that they can show that to the students I know that when I went on those tours with the kids they were really fascinating it may already exist I'm not sure you know but if we could do that just so the students can see and continue to learn about our operations it would be helpful definitely I will start working on that and coordinating with solid waste to see what we can put together I know with Pratt that there is some limitations on what we can record or show however I'm sure that there's some way we can provide some virtual education about recycling to those students awesome thank you so much I appreciate it thank you y'all have a great day you too all right so we are moving right along to item D management reports and future action items good morning committee members the we have no management reports in this particular packet and three items on the matrix the first one is the solid waste item that is pending the solid waste management strategy the second is a revisitation of the idea of the notification for the mosquito spraying and what we're planning on doing with that is we've got a number of changes that need to happen with the mosquito surveillance and response plan that's going to come back in the early spring to to be considered and so we have for example the the newer generation insecticide that we used we want to be sure that's added into the plan there's a few odds and ends so that should be coming up in the early spring and then looks like the update on the green business program is slotted right now for January to come back in front of the committee on the environment so that's all I have all right and we will move to concluding items councilmember Davis and for me today no okay well I don't have any specific items I just want to say thank you to everyone here the committee on the environment all the staff for your care for our community and all the work you've done for the presentations and and everything it has meant a lot so I just wanted to put that out there I appreciate it and we'll with that we will adjourn our meeting at 928 thank you everyone