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
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