All right, we're going to call this meeting to order and we're going to proceed according to the agenda that was published. We do not have quorum for voting items. So item number one and I under approval of the minutes and see an item D1, I believe we will move to a future meeting. If you were here because you are applying for the system, is there anybody who was applying for the citizen climate advisory committee that's here and wanted to speak? Oh, great. We have four of them. Never mind. Back to things the way they're supposed to be. Never mind. Scratch that, reverse that. We're going to go back to the beginning. And I'm going to look for a motion to adopt the agenda. So moved. Exit. We have motion to adopt the agenda. Does anybody in the audience have any comments to the agenda? Okay, hearing none. All those in favor say aye. Hi. Excellent. All right, the agenda passes. I apologize. I'm pretty late. No worries. Next up is approval of our minutes. We have minutes from the June 3rd, 2024 meeting. Did everybody get a chance to review those in other any comments? No, no comments. Madam Chair, I'd like to approve the June 3rd, 2024 minutes. Okay, we have a motion to approve the minutes. Do you have a second? Second? Okay, a second. All those in favor of the motion say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Like, sign? All right, motion carries. We have minutes. Excellent. Next up, the real meat of our meeting, our business discussion items. The first up is our climate. Citizens Climate Advisory Committee appointments. And I will turn it over to Mr. Hothstetter. Thank you. Good afternoon, Steve Hothstetter, Electric and Environmental Protection Department. I just want to describe a little bit about the applications we have in front of us. And we do have at least two members in the audience who will speak. So before you vote, they will have them speak. So what we have is we have six positions to fill. There are three year terms. So this is normal. We typically have every year, we have three positions that open up for another three year terms. So this is normal. We typically have every year, we have three positions that open up for another three year term. So if you look at the first page, you have all but one of the applicants on this first page. This is again would be for the three year terms. There is one we turn in applicant who has applied and that is our current chair, Jenison Kip Circe. Following the selection of the three three year terms, we have two two year terms and these were due to vacancies. We had one member move and the other one unfortunately was not able to keep up with attendance requirements. So we'll have two positions there. It's the same pool. And then finally on the one year, we have one one year term available. And one of our current members, John Nix, who is currently filling in as the vice chair has asked to, if you're willing to consider him for a one year extension basically, it'll be his third term. So we have the two current members who reapplied our Geneson, Kip Cersei, and John Nix. They were two of their original members, and they are willing to continue to stay on to the on the team. Geneson's willing to we apply for a three-year and John is willing for a pie for the one year. Okay, thank you so much. Do we have any of the members that applied for the outpatient here that wish to speak to the board? If so, please come to the mic and you can introduce yourself and you'll have a few minutes just to tell us a lot about who you are and why you're interested. Okay, not a big line here, so I'll jump up. I'm Terry Clark. I've applied for the Citizens Committee. I'm a resident of the City of Gainesville and have a background mainly in environmental and water resources planning. Having worked for four of the five blood or management districts in the state, either as an employer or consultant. Also for local government, as a consultant and an employee, I'd say about half of my 35 years experience has been in a government and half has been in private sector consulting. So that's why I was interested, resident of the city. You're probably gonna see more people like me moving up from South Florida to Latvia County, the environmental and climate issues. So that's one of the reasons why I think this is an important committee. It's not just the climate issues affecting the environmental issues affecting the county, but also land use changes, decisions, migration, patterns are going to, I think we're going to see more and more of that here in the live show county. So that's one of the things I'd interested me and I'll be happy to answer any questions you may have. Thank you so much. Did anyone have any questions for Mr. Clark? I did. OK. Hi, Mr. Clark. Had you looked at our backup materials and have you read our climate vulnerability analysis? I have not read the entire thing. I skimmed through it. I did read some of the items, a particular interest, the water resources one. I think I looked at the presentation, I think, that you're going to see today. And then also interesting one about the impacts to mental and emotional aspects of the population, the impacts of climate on that. So those kind of peak my interest. Yeah. Okay. I was curious how far you diled into what we're doing and if that interests you the the level of our our work I think is probably better than a lot of counties and not as good as maybe a couple but I I'm really proud of this stuff. Yeah, no it looks like you've done really good work yeah and at the regional scale. Yeah yeah. Thank you so much. Thank you. Is there anyone else who wanted to speak to us? Please come forward. Speak your name and tell us a little bit about yourself. Good afternoon. Thank you for accepting my application. I just wanted to make a statement first. Humans are successfully adapting to a wide range of climates. But there are limits to our total and climatic conditions beyond which we our bodies can control and sufficiently adapt to. While the dangers of excess heat in certain populations except like the elderly are well-known in effects on pregnancy, infancy, and childhood reserve less attention, have received less attention. Extreme heat affects infants, young children, and more adults, then more adults. And the potential impact on our children and their development could be lifelong. Because all of our children should have the opportunity to thrive, to be strong, safe, and equipped youth, it is critical that we understand how climate, how extreme heat affects our children and then determine how the best take action. And I'm not sure why I'm nervous, but I'm Pam Lawton's. And I am the founder and holistic health facilitator for restoring the matter's holistic wellness in president of the nonprofit entity, Grace To Overcome. We're both our organizations advocate well-being and wellness for individuals and families to improve youth wellness. Climate change in youth in general and greater disparities in black children is one of our five areas of concern studies. This emphasis crosses and is intertwined in all other climate change focus areas because they involve human beings. People of every age, every population, every race, every socioeconomic status, as an advocate for children at my core, I am reminded by a quote by Dr. Bob Block, former president of the Academy of Academics and Pediatrics. Unfortunately, not every child, not every adult, not every child will become an adult, but it is certainly true that every child, every adult, was once a child. We are, we have not paid attention to that simple statement that phase that phrase often enough We are better together when I becomes we even illness becomes wellness Climate change affects all of us if selected I Invested in serving in doing my part to achieve the climate Committees mission and vision and thank you for your consideration, and please excuse my not clarity earlier. Any questions? You did great. You were wonderful. No reason to be nervous. Thank you so much for being here and for your commitment and an interest in the committee. Does anyone have questions for Miss Hawkins? I just have a comment. Thank you so much for coming, because your application does not really impart the passion that you just shared and the fact that we should be paying attention to that part of what we're doing here. Children focus on what the climate changes well impact. What impacts they will have on our kids as well. I think it's an important thing for us to hear. And so thank you very much for clarifying your application with the passion that you brought today. So thank you for coming. It makes it a big difference when people show up to explain. Well, the research is extensive evidence base and I'm vested in making sure that we are aware and if we are aware then ask, well how are we actually disseminating this research, this evidence base so that we can intervene so that we can have prevention so that as our precious jewels grow up their brains are going to sleep because of the heat and that 85 degrees and me and you is different from a child and we need to know that and how it affects all of us and climate change affects all of us and I'm vested in this committee in making sure that we don't forget our pressers' jewels and that they are able to thrive. Thank you so much. Do we have any other members that have the public who have applied for this committee? Okay, seeing none, I will take nominations. Can we do roll call nominations for the first we'll do the three seats that with the term ending August 30th, 2027. You should go to or I can just go down the line. Sure Mary or I can go to Mary Mary you want to go first? Usually our clerk calls out for us to okay well let's let the clerk do it. She seems like she's got her. That already looked for three names. Three names. Yeah, the first, the first three or two. And then we got six. How you doing? The way that we've all usually done it is we just mark, because there's so many more people than what applied as they just sort of add it up and then they say here's who got the most amount of votes and we take a motion after that. I mean you're the chair. Let's do the three two and one. It just works out easier. I feel like when we do that way we end up getting a lot of having to do a lot of creative math. Yeah it's been my experience. You guys will see all this. Okay so um push ahead we learn. Okay um Clark, Hawkins and Kip Circy. Cups, Cups, Cups, Cups, Cups, Cups, Cups, Cups, Cups, Cups, Cups, Cups, Cups, Cups, Cups, Cups, Cups, Cups, Cups, Cups, Cups, Cups, Cups, Cups, Cups, C true, Pricio. Uh, I will, we'll make it even and we'll make it over around and Terry Clark, Pamela Hawkins and Janice and Pixir see for the three-year terms. Do we have a motion for Terry Clark, Pamela Hawkins and- So moved. Second. We have a motion in a second. We've already had public comment. So all those of you who are the motions are going to be saying aye Aye, aye, any opposed like sign. All right now we will move on to the two-year term ending August 30th, 2026 I'll start again with Commissioner Wheeler. Oh my okay Because I've taken off these folks. Let's we usually more How many do we need? Two, two, three. More and Jacobson. Commissioner Alfred. Jacobson and Lawson. Commissioner Eastman. Jacobson and Lawson. Commissioner Williams. Jacobson and Moa. And, Jacobson. Jacobson and Lawson. We have Jacobson and Lawson for the two year term. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. Any opposed like sign? Motion carries. And then last but not least, we have a one year term. And we did have an existing member who isn't on your list. Ask, apply, Lee. And as to be considered, that is Mr. John Nicks who isn't on your list, ask Appliedly, and asked to be considered that as Mr. John Mix. He is on the list. Oh, he is on the last list. Okay, so he is the former chair of the committee asking for a one-year term, which I personally want to say, I think would be really valuable because he could pass on a lot of the work that he's been doing to the future chair and things like that. So I just wanted to put that plug in there for Mr. Nix's application. Okay. Miss Clark. All right, we'll start again with Commissioner Miller. John Dix. What you're offered? Dix. What's your Eastman? Dix. Dix. Dix. Dix. Dix, Dix, for one year term. Second. Thanks. Thanks. Good afternoon for one year term. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. We have lots of new members. Welcome to our new members. Mr. Clark, thank you. Ms. Hawkins, thank you. Thank you for being here. And thank you for your applications. We're excited to have you join. And I'm sure you will have a very rapid fire to fire orientation to climate action planning in Elantzo County, because we are full steam ahead right now on that. So, these applications were amazing. They really were. We had great people, and it's so wonderful to see so many people apply. Hopefully, we keep them on fire. Do we keep those applications? Yeah, Madam Chair, what I will do is next year I'll contact everyone who did not get selected and ask if they're still interested. That can be an on the team. Great. Excellent. We have those still plugged in. We have lots of ways to get involved with lots of community engagement programming and things that are going to be happening. So even if you did it make it into the committee please stay plugged in and engaged with us as we continue to do this work. All right. Madam Clerk, we are on to business. I have eight one, Electric County Climate vulnerability analysis report update with a recommendation that committee hear the update from staff. Excellent, thank you so much. Okay, we will turn it over to our team again. Again, good afternoon, Stephen Haster, Electric County Climate Protection Department. Actually Actually this is a very short presentation. I came to one of more detail but my suggestion is if you want more detail about the vulnerability analysis report and what we're working on in that area we might want to have that at the end if there's time permitted. I think one of the city commissioners were interested in a little more detail. She's not here so we can, if you'd like, we can avoid going into that detail to see if we have time at the end to do that. So I know that we did. We have had the presentation about this in like in previous meetings. It was just that this is now the final final report, right? So we have had the presentation of the overview and the general findings of the report at our previous meetings. Okay. That is correct. Nothing but a lot hasn't changed in the report since then, is that correct? That is correct. But one thing, and I'm trying to get to the next, there it goes. We do have the report as well as all the attached or technical reports that help put together the final report on our website at this link. It includes over a dozen reports that will put together to accomplish that final report. So we have it available on the county website on the electrical if you look at Environmental Protection Department you'll see something that says climate initiatives on that website you click on that and all these reports will be there including the greenhouse gas report as well which is something we hope to renew next year. So if you want I can click on that but I think it's pretty straightforward. Yeah, I my only question, I guess I have two questions. One is, how is the information that's in this assessment, dovetailing into any dashboard or communications about the data that's going into our climate action planning? Like how are we going to translate this with public? Because most public isn't going to read a 200 page report about climate vulnerability. But they do want to know is my neighborhood prone to flooding in 2050? So how are we going to be translating that? Yeah, Madam Chair, we're going to do that in two ways. We are going to create a dashboard. That'll be something we'll be working on at the beginning of this coming year when we hopefully get our climate as specialist on board help us with that. But we are integrating the results of the vulnerability report into our chapters that we're gonna be releasing as well as part of our climate action plan. So you'll see that the results in the mapping and the visual impacts from this study integrated into our chapters for the climate action plan as well. So you'll see them in two ways. Great. Do we have other questions, plan as well. So you'll see them in two ways. Okay. Do we have other questions? Madam, yes. Thank you. Thank you. I, I, I, every time you read something, you see something a little different. And so if we see a word that might need to change, just to be more clear, is that are you still open to making minor changes like that? And my example would be under ensuring county own assets have air conditioning it says that including affordable housing have adequately sized and efficient air-conditioning adequately sized encourages over sizing because that's something that as an engineer I've seen happened over and over and over again on average they are conditioning in allotted counties 20% oversized because that's industry standard. Could we change that to properly sized? You know I mean that's just one example I just if I set you a list of things like that would that be something I would consider. Madam Chair yes we've actually made some minor tweaks since we received the report and so we'll continue to make those. To me, it only makes sense that we keep it updated. Yeah, I hate to wordsmith something that's stuff like that jumps up at our properly or necessarily either. I mean, maybe in the industry, but I don't think adequate is a bad word. Attiquate makes it sound like you might need more than you have and that is I'm gonna tell you I've worked with our conditioning contractors for a long long time so I just want to I just want to make sure that we're clear that we are looking at you know actually being very careful about our sizing of our conditioning units it's something I've spent a lot of time talking with our building departments, about things like that. So, anyway. Yeah. Oh, yes. Is there anything in there about screened? Couraches? No, I feel like this isn't the action. This is the bulletin. This is the bulletin. This is not the action that this is. Looking at the data and what it looks like. If you are doing that kind of words, moving, just, you know, I notice that there are more apartment complexes coming on board now with screenforges, and I'm going to appreciate it that folks are paying attention to that for sure. There is a lot of discussion about cooler surfaces and green and for screen. And screens keep outboards too. But anyway overall I think this is really awesome. I just, I have, I really, I'm sensitive about a few, few things that's wonderful. Okay, any other questions or comments from the board? Okay, thank you so much. And I hope the community will dive into our climate vulnerability analysis located online. So the last thing I just wanted to put out there was we are having a climate summit November 16th. We are going to be pushing that out within the next two weeks and so being a lookout for being able to register for that event November 16th and that'll be at the Blount Center downtown and that is on a Saturday. In addition that I do want to let people know about a similar event in two weeks on September 28th in Hawthorne. They also have an estimate and we'll be talking about our vulnerability analysis at that summit as well and having a presence at that event as well. Excellent. Thank you. We really hope that everyone will put this on their calendars and show up for the event. I think there will be a lot of interactive opportunities and tibalign as well as presentations at that summit. Yes, Madam Chair. There's going to be a combination of presentations as well as breakout sessions in response to presentations and information to hear about our climate action planning. So we really want to get public input on their ideas, concerns and strategies so we can incorporate that into the county why climate action plan. Great thank you so much. Any other board comments or questions about that? All right we are on to our next item which is Madam Commissioner we are on 2024-5A2, the Climate Action Plan. With the recommendation of the committee, hear staff updates and provide direction as appropriate. All right, thank you so much. All right, well I'm Stacy Greco, I'm the Water Resources Program Manager with the Counties Environmental Protection Department. Rick Hutton from GRIU will be popping up and helping out with some slides, and Mike Kessie, Margaret Management Office also helped with this. So this is a sneak peek into our water chapter of the Climate Action Plan. This presentation has a lot more detail that I'm not going to go over everything today in interest of making sure that there's time for my colleagues that are coming after me because they've got four chapters that we're trying to dive into today. So if I gloss over something that you want to talk about, please interrupt me. So the scope of today's presentations, we're going to talk about protecting water quality and water quantity. Some of this is things we're doing now. Some is things that we want to be or need to be doing in the future. Some recommendations are beyond the jurisdiction of us that are in the room today, but we feel that it's important to highlight and continue to work on those. This is not gonna include agriculture because that is covered in a different working group. So the big picture, this is my new favorite slide to kind of put everything into context. In December of 2023, the North Florida Regional Water Supply plan came out and this is looking at a large area in North Florida and population is projected to increase 49% by 2045 and our groundwater pumping is projected to increase by 135 million gallons a day, which is a 32% increase and we're already in a constrained system. The real eye-opening part to me of this report is it has a roadmap of how are we going to get there, how are we going to provide that water to all of this new growth? And it identifies over $2 billion of projects to get that water. Conservation is in there, but at a much lower funded amount, but at a much greater return. So for every, so $3.4 million for every million gallons a day in water conservation risk compared to 15 million for projects. So I'm really seeing it catch the attention of policymakers and leaders that water conservation really makes sense that it's fiscally responsible because if we can do meaningful water conservation, we can decrease how much water we need to provide to accommodate that growth, and then it's much more fiscally responsible. And the hard thing is we are at a point that the low hanging fruit is gone. The turning the water off while you're brushing your teeth great, but it's not going to get us there. We're at a place where water conservation, it has a little bit of pain in it, having to change the way we're doing things or having some budgets attached to it. So again, this is looking at the future projected growth. Right now we do not have enough water for our current uses and to have healthy springs and rivers. That's the minimum flows and levels, which many of you know that I'm spending a lot of time on. So that is going through rulemaking now, and I will be talking to the County Commission about that later this month. So our vulnerability analysis that Stephen was just talking about that's now available on our website, this is showing that we will have changes in precipitation. Really just a small increase in the average total annual precipitation, but really changes in how we're receiving that rain. I think we can all say that we're kind of experiencing that, getting those really intense, more frequent, heavy rainfall events that are problematic for our stormwater systems. And that can mean more runoff, so more pollution getting into our water bodies. And perhaps longer dry periods between storms, which can affect our water use in agriculture and in our urban landscapes. This is, well, it might seem outdated because it's 2015 groundwater pumping data. This is from the last report that the USGS did. This is no longer funded. But basically, it is showing that in a Latua County public supply, that is the majority of our water use. So, that is water that people purchase from a utility like GRU or the City of Newberry. It is metered water and it is largely residential. It is also our commercial, our businesses, restaurants, but really what drives that is residential. If we looked at some of our neighboring counties it would be different, right? You know, Gilchrist is going to be agriculture is the largest use. When we drill down further, how is residential water use occurring? When there is an irrigation system, 50 to 60 percent is used outdoors. And why I have this slide in here is to justify why I'm going to talk about irrigation for so long. So this graph looks scary at first, but this is showing 2021 water use and it's broken up into the age of the home. So each one of those blue dots on the far left, that is homes that were built between 1915 and 1920. Those homes are using less than 150 gallons a day. If we go to the far right, that's new construction. So those are homes that were built between 2015 and 2020. So in 2021, those homes are using almost 400 gallons per day. We would expect a different trend, right? We've had a lot of changes in our plumbing codes. We're getting more efficient. But unfortunately, this is what we see. That newer homes are using more water. And the reason is that orange line. That is the percent of homes that are built with automatic irrigation systems. So we're overshadowing all that indoor water conservation that we're doing with the plumbing code and now since irrigation is pretty much standard, we're really seeing that increase in water use. So to help this in context especially for people that don't look at water use data all day, when you turn on your irrigation system, and this is an average yard and average system uses about 1,000 gallons each time. So that would be like being in the shower your whole work day of eight hours or doing 37 loads of laundry. So that puts it into context how much water we're talking about. OK. So now we're going to get into these are, the way this is set up is the number, so create new resilient landscapes. That is the strategy. That's what our goal, what we want to accomplish with our climate action plan. And then these different components are kind of getting into the details of some things that we could do. And in the chapter that we are busy drafting, really the action items are gonna be in a table format like that. We've changed it some, but since we've been adding more and more, it just was not gonna fit in a PowerPoint slide that it would kill your eyes. So this is what we're presenting today, but we are continuing to refine it. So we know a goal is that we need to create new resilient landscapes. We saw that trend of what new landscapes are doing to our aquifer, so we need to find ways to reduce it. And, you know, so an example of that would be, you know, maybe requiring soil amendments in new construction. And that's something that we could do as local government, whereas another one prohibit new permanent irrigation. We know we're preempted from that. So that was something that we would need the water management district to do. And in these tables, we put the pros and cons. We have changed that in the report that it'll be benefits of doing the behavior and barriers of doing the behavior and then we've also started to add a column on impact so that really what we want to be doing is we want to do things that have low barriers and high impact so that we can really make a change. Oh this is just showing some of our outreach because I have to in every slide just highlight some of our great outreach that we are doing. The second idea is to reduce existing landscape irrigation. There's a whole bunch of existing irrigation systems, so how can we get them to reduce their water use? So things like limit irrigation to one day a week year round. That's something that we would need help from our friends at the state. There's some things that we could do. So WMD is water management district. There's some things that we could do with our utilities and some that we can do as local governments. So public education, that's something we can continue to do. I do want to digress and talk about irrigation wells because the next strategy is addressing that. This is obviously a map of the county. The yellow section is the Soani River Water Management District. The red outline that is the part of GRIU service area that intersects the Sohni River Water Management District. We got a GIS layer of wells within that and unfortunately when people put in a well a lot of times they just call it a domestic well even though it's an irrigation well. So we overlaid it with who is paying for GRIU water but they also have a well and then we know it's an irrigation well. So we overlaid it with who is paying for G or U water, but they also have a well. And then we know it's an irrigation well. And the problem with that is those homeowners are no longer receiving the price signal of paying for their water. So they tend to be very high water users. And then we have no idea how much water they're using. So everything I've showed you about our projections of water use, these are all not accounted for because we are assuming that they're using a utility water But they really have a well so they've got an ATM card and we have no idea what they're doing And this is we found about 150 just in that small area So there's probably more within all of our other municipalities and within the St. John's portion unfortunately We do not have good data on wells for the St. John's portion. Unfortunately, we do not have good data on wells for the St. John's portion. So this is just indicating an area. And actually, I am proud to say that this map has motivated the Water Management Districts or actually doing a study right now trying to figure out how much water we're talking about there. So this is one of our strategies. Reduce water use from landscape irrigation wells. And I think I just explained why. So we want to try to prohibit new wells. There is draft language in the minimum flows and levels for the lower Santa Bay and itcha-tuckney that would help us get there. So we are still working with them to refine that language. I ask a question. Yes. So I guess I have a little bit of a challenge with this one because I do understand that irrigation was our problem because they're not metered and because we don't know the water they use. However, it does make a lot more sense to draw the water where it's being delivered and deliver it untreated on our landscapes rather than running water through treatment, spending the money the time and the energy to treat it, pumping it, using the energy to pump it to somebody so that they can dump it on their landscape. So I kind of wonder if our goal is really to get rid of irrigation wells or to meter them so that they're paying for that water. Yeah, I mean, great point when you do look at the big picture and like the energy demand of moving water, in that way irrigation wells do make sense. And there are some utilities that actually promote that. And they used to call it water conservation. They don't anymore. I think the challenge is in there is a great resistance in the state to metering wells. And I think it's because of that fear that we'll start charging for water and really to get people to start reducing it, you need to charge. You need to charge. I think that there's significant barriers to get there. Yeah. And then setting up a mechanism, a billing mechanism, who's collecting that water. But I do, when you do look at the big picture of transporting the water and treating it on that level, I do think it makes sense. Okay, thank you. Yes, of course. Revise our consumptive use permitting rules. So that's what drives. How much water any user is allowed to pump? That is all done by much water any user is allowed to pump. That is all done by the water management district. So if you look at that jurisdiction, not something that we can do currently, but definitely something that we want to continue to push. So for example, trying to change that their implementation of demonstration that water uses within the public interest and that's a beneficial use. You know, can we encourage that those definitions get changed to something that's easier to measure and to enforce? Because I think there's uses that we could all argue don't really seem to be what we would think of as beneficial use at this point, I'm going to turn it over to Rick to talk about some concepts from the utilities perspective. Thank you very much. Good afternoon. Good to see you, Rick, cotton, gain solar region utilities. So changing years a little bit, improving water quality protection. And I think we all all we don't want to take for granted that we have clean safe drinking water to drink and so this is an area to we've had a lot of success and collaboration between different agencies, GRU, Elatria County, the city, citizens, state agencies but examples include enforcing the Buffalo protection and hazmat ordinances to keep contamination out of our drinking water. The Cabot Copper site at one time we thought it was the imminent threat to our water supply. There has been a number of steps that have been taken so that we no longer feel as an imminent threat. There's one more major step to finalize the cleanup of that site and of course clean them of other contamination sites. Again on improving water protection on the water supply side, Stacy talked about tiered water rates. We have had our tiered water rates get well they've been in place since early 2000s but they started to get more aggressive starting around 2007 and since that time that combined with other water conservation measures we've seen like a 40% reduction in residential per capita. So that's been very effective although as Stacy described one of the limitations of our ability to send more of a price signal as the ability for people to say, well, to heck with that, we're going to get on it. I'm going to get a private while. Led and copper rule is something, and if you read about that much, but we, along with other utilities across the United States, are verifying that there's not led and copper lines in our system. Fortunately, in Florida, led was really not used nearly as extensively as in other states. And we don't have any lead lines in our system, although we're presently involved in the efforts to make sure that the customers don't have lead service lines. And then of course our ongoing replacement of water infrastructure. Rick, we still include adequate hardness of the water to line most lead pipes to provide a reasonable amount of protection. That's correct. That's for the public that might be concerned, yes. That's I'm glad you made that point. So, you know, where you've had, where they've had issues with people getting lead poisoning, is where some of the, I shouldn't say a lot, some of the areas in the Flint, Michigan, where they had lead service lines that were commonly used, and then their nature of their water supply was what they call a aggressive water, it's low in hardness, which tends to leach out pipes, whereas here in Florida Florida our water has high cows higher, calcium more hardness than it tends to to cope your line. So we should be at very low risk of that issue because we never really used lead service lines and our water tends to be what they call passive that tends to coat the lines. I appreciate you bringing that up. Thank you. See, on the wastewater side, continuing to do water quality improvement projects where you have opportunities. Of course, our flagship project is a Sweet Water Wetlands project. Public education to prevent people from flushing materials such as flushable wipes and other in floss and whatnot down the toilet, it tends to clog up our sewer system and can cause sanitary sewer overflows. And then of course, in ongoing investment and upgrading, replacing our wastewater infrastructure. We've got about 800 miles of wastewater pipe and 170 lift stations that we're keeping up with. We spend about $25 to $30 million a year in our capital budget. That's our total capital budget, but most of that is replacing aging infrastructure and about half of that is in the wastewater collection system. And so it's something important for us to keep going on. Sceptic dissuers, where there is opportunities and where there is a benefit looking strategically and doing septic dissuers conversions. And then also looking at waste reduction. So one of the areas that we've been involved with is of course recycling our wastewater biosolids. So that's the residual material that comes from the wastewater treatment process. It's a high organic nutrient rich. We are working with a company now called LifeSoles. It takes that and compost that with wood waste to produce a compost material that can be used to offset the need for fertilizer and as a soil amendment. We're also working on a study right now looking at anaerobic digestion of food waste and those bile solids and fat soils in Greece, whether or not it could be feasible to do a project that would meet the city in county zero waste goals that would involve anaerobic digestion that could produce renewable energy and then also produce a byproduct. So we're doing a feasibility study right now. One of the challenges is how much is it going to cost to capital? Is it going to be, can we make the numbers work? So we're working on that right now. And along with that, you know, continuing to improve coordination between the different agencies and government entities on handling our waste materials. And lastly, aquifer recharge. There's some we have a great opportunity in Gainesville area that because of our geology, we're able to do aquifer recharge. So a lot of that water we withdraw and serve our customers, the water that comes back to us as waste water. We can treat that water, produce high- us as waste water, we can treat that water, produce high quality, reclaim water, and then use that to recharge the aquifer, which helps to offset that pumping. So I think a lot of you are somewhat familiar with the Southwest Nature Park project that we're working on right now that will put 3 million gallons per day of water back into the aquifers that we're in the design and permitting process right now with that. Reclam water the other use we have for it is it is used for irrigation and they want to things we've talked about as well over time we need to be increasing the price of that sending a little more of a price signal for people to conserve reclaimed water too where they're using it for irrigation. That's the concludes my slides. Do you want to take questions? I'll be happy to. Sure we could take some questions. Let's see I didn't look at who's like came on first but we'll go with number four. That would be you. Commissioner Wheeler. Maybe, please. I was interested, the Cabot Copper site. You said there's one more stage or one more. Where are we with that? Because that's a lot of land right there that everybody's been eyeing for a few years now to do something with. So good question. So the very last step in the remediation of that site is they are going to construct what's called a subsurface barrier wall. So it's basically going to be a, they will dig a 65 foot deep trench around the areas of the site that are where the contamination is and basically put a clay slurry wall around that area. So it's kind of a belt and suspender. So they've already done things to treat the contaminated material in that area. And so this will be a barrier wall and they put around it. There was a hold up in that process because there is a stormwater ditch that runs right through the middle of the site and that's a DOT stormwater ditch. And that will have to be relocated for that barrier wall of work and there was a really long, a lot of back and forth between the beasers of responsible party and DOT about what they're going to do about the ditch. And it took quite a number of years for them to kind of get that resolve. So we're told they're just about got resolved and we're told that in the next year, so they're going to be able to complete that remediation. And then as you said, once that's done, then hey, there is, it is a, I believe, 98 or sites that would be right for redevelopment. Right. Thank you. Thank you. Is that going to be enough to alleviate citizens' concerns about contamination? Is that what we're counting on? Well, when you say citizens' concerns about contamination on the site. Right. Well, they're building on the site using the site. So there will be with sites like this, there will be some ongoing, like, these are always have responsibility for that site, and it's not really feasible to just remove all the contamination. Some of it you're just freezing in place. And so there will be certain limitations on what types of development can happen where on the site. So it's not likely to be a site where you can do like a residential single family subdivision, for instance. But it would still be capability to do mixed use. There's type to think there would be some restrictions on who can dig, particularly if somebody's digging. You have to have some protections in the life. Yes, lots of pickleball courts, I guess. There could be pickleball courts. I have another question too about collaboration with municipalities in terms of water quality. I realize there are a lot of folks that are on well systems throughout the county. And from what I understand, the only way the water quality can be tested is if a sample is brought into the health department, is that true? And my concern too is that folks will not take that time to do those things. And the quality of the water, I've heard in a few communities, I've just recently in Archer, where the water quality has changed so much even in last 50 years. If there's some way that we could collaborate through the county with GRU or whoever to have sites within each community that could help get that water to the right processing place so that we know what the water quality is in the well systems in the surrounding areas outside of Gainesville. And I don't know if that's something that you all are watching or you know are even concerned about because the water is all connected. It's all connected and I know my friend Commissioner Williams of the high springs you know they're right there at this place where all that water is happening. Right. So in high springs in Newberry, archer, all of those Western communities out there, I don't know if there's a way that we can monitor as a county wide with GRU to make sure that the water quality is good for all of us. That's the state that you're indicating. It's not a news lives later. Okay. Okay then. good for all of us. I'm staci-educated. You said you were- It's not a news slides later. Oh, okay. Okay then. Alright, an education in the schools. That's another thing. Oh, you're- And you are getting into the schools to educate our students as to water conservation and what it is they need to know. What is it? Peep, poop, and paper. That's right. You know, kids like that stuff, you know. But I didn't know if you wanted programs to go into the schools. Good. And like you said, it's like your best path is to educate the kids because they come back and tell their parents. It's opposed to the other way around. Exactly. Well, and I think the sense of urgency is important. I think that, you know, our times tend to be very calming and assuring and problem. You know, we've got this under control. Whereas maybe we don't. And maybe we need to, you know, change the tone of what we're telling our kids and telling our community so that they understand the urgency of what we're looking at. And that would be my thing. At this point, it gets more urgent every year. I've been on our board now for six years and I have heard the very gentle tones you know but water issue has been one of mine for the last 20 and I don't see us changing the rhetoric even and the tone even because it's got to be more concerning every year. But our tone is not changing to meet that concern. And my humble opinion, thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you very much. Thank you. For your time. All right. Commissioner Alfred. Hi Rick. A couple of questions. I haven't heard an update lately. Where are we in terms of capacity and population growth with respect to our water supply from GRU as well as our wastewater treatment capacity? How much population growth can we accommodate before we have to look at expanding those? And I know that conservation is a big part of all of that. That's a big part of it. Well, we are we have a water use permit now that we obtained in 2014 takes us to 2034 we're actually planning to renew that a little earlier so we would be renew through like 2044 and so we're right now we're looking at our forecasts and trying to give you know refine our forecast for population and water demand. Right now our permit is for 30 million gallons per day. We're now pumping about 22 and a half million gallons per day. And our infrastructure would support that growth? It will. Yes, we're going to have to continue to make upgrades. But as far as our infrastructure being able to handle that, we should be able to do that. I mean, we'll have to make those investments. I think making sure from a water supply planning standpoint that you know we have enough permanent allocation that we're planning for the right amount for how many people are going to move here which that's right challenge that we did talk about is want to make sure we understand. To have good estimates on how much growth we will have. So we are in the process right now sort of refining our future projections on both water and wastewater. On the wastewater side, we are going to be needing to do some wastewater treatment plant upgrades. We're refining our timeline right now on, you know, when and what we have to do, but over the next decade or so, we're gonna be of course continuing to make upgrades there. Okay. So it's always an ongoing process. Yeah, I do, I do it was, but I'd heard updates, but it'd been six years or so since I'd heard an update on what our capacity looked like and growth and all of that. Can I just follow up here? So you're saying you don't have the numbers of approximately how much you're going to be asking to increase that 30 million gallon a day permit? Not right now. We haven't refined that. Right. So right now our permit goes to 2034. We're going to extend another 10 years. We haven't made it. We haven't made, we're still working on, well how much do we think, how much population do we think we're gonna have? How much water are we gonna need? We haven't refined that yet. And for the public to be clear, just because you have a piece of paper that tells you you can draw that much water out of the aquifer, if the water's not there, it doesn't matter what the piece of paper says. So that's why work is so important because at the end of the day, that slide that I think Stacy showed at the beginning really tells us the real truth, right? We, at the end of the day, we don't even have enough water to maintain minimum flows of levels and give public water to our current withdrawals, not just GRU, but across all of North Central Florida. I do think GRU should be commended though. Murphy water plants have been there a very long time. It's been very well managed. And I don't know how many cities can say that they've done as good a job as GRU has done with water supply. Thank you. You're working on water conservation for quite some time too. Yes. That's just my background. I get to put those plugs in when I get a chance. What can we talk a minute about? We've talked earlier about soil amendments, right, and the usefulness of that, and reducing irrigation, reducing overall water use. And I connect that with biosolids, and I know you're already working with biosolids company. But nationwide news is talking about PFAS contamination and wastewater. What are we looking at in terms of PFAS content and our wastewater and our biosolids? Is that something the public here is to be concerned about? Is it something we're watching? Well it's something we're definitely watching because PFAS is, as you said, it's in the news a lot because it's in so many different consumer products and there's been some areas of the country where there's been some serious health issues related to that. One thing that's fortunate in our area for us is we don't have a lot of, what we don't have manufacturing that uses like high concentrations of PFAS is some of the areas where they've had some really acute issues that sort of make the the areas where they've had some really acute issues that sort of make the headlines of where you've had, you know, manufacturers and waste materials. Although also the firefighting foams, in some cases where you've had some ground wound contamination from use of firefighting foams, we're not facing those issues and it's not in our drinking water supply. But there is the ongoing which we're watching very closely as well. People do use these materials in consumer products. So they're going to end up in the wastewater system. They're going to end up in low concentrations in our bile solids. We don't expect them to be at high concentrations, but it is something we're watching very closely and we'll be evaluating whether we need to do some additional treatment or whatnot for that. Yeah, I guess if we're going to be pushing biosolids or soil amendments, which often include biosolids, is something to increase the water holding capacity of our soils as we build new houses and things like that. I see this as sort of a circular problem and so I'm wondering when do we start educating about the use of those products and how they may affect our local environments there? This is a really good point. I think one of the issues that we would say in our, as our industry says, is we don't use PFAS and our any of our process. That comes to us from consumers using consumer products. But then as a consumer, and this would be even true for myself, I'm not necessarily sure I know which products have it and which products don't. And so I know there's some upcoming changes in legislation that would hopefully reduce the amount that manufacturers put in products. And with the awareness that the manufacturers will have to, presumably they'll be a desire from their standpoint. Why put something in a consumer product that's considered toxic if you don't need to? And so the desire, hopefully we'll see industry-wide as the use of these compounds in consumer products will hopefully go down so there'll be less of a problem. All right, my last question has to do with flooding events and lift stations. So I know in the past we've had several lift stations that are in areas that are highly likely to be flooding but we I know as a county we've been working hard to address some of those areas. What what's our challenge there? Do we are is that something Jerry is focusing on now or we? Yes and it's a good question you know I mean it. I mean, as we know, particularly we're talking about the climate vulnerability assessment, we have certain areas in our system, particularly in the wastewater collection system, where if you have surface flooding or a lot of rain, it unfortunately gets into that wastewater collection system. And if you get stormwater getting into your wastewater collection system, it can overwhelm the capacity of your pumps. So we have, I talked about our ongoing capital investments in our waste water collection system. So over time, we're going in and areas where we hold our pipes and replacing them, we're lining them to hopefully reduce that amount of inflow from stormwater getting in. But that doesn't happen all of a sudden. So over time, we're working on the problem. The other part of the problem too, we are making a lot of investments in upgrading our pumping facilities too. And so... But then that overwhelm your wastewater treatment plant at the other end, if you end up with a lot of infiltration from flood waters. Well, it could, although our systems, our wastewater plants are adequately sized and they're just like, we'll handle that. We've had some places, other places in the state where this has been a real problem. Oh, yes. So I... Yes, we've been able to, it hasn't been, you know, an issue that the plants can't handle. Okay. So it's really more of an issue in our collection system. We still have certain areas that are particularly problematic. We're doing a project we're working on right now is our biggest lift station. We call it lift station one, it's over there off a 34th street and university avenue where the public is off course. And so we're doing a $4 million upgrade there to replace the pumps and whatnot. That's a big one. That's a big one. Yes. All right. Thank you for that. And I guess I would just potentially on that front. Perhaps there is an action that may want to be added to this. Number seven and six and or seven around that idea of assessing the impacts of flood prone areas that were identified in the vulnerability analysis for stormwater impacts on utility infrastructure. I don't know if you're already doing that, but that may be something. I think you talked about that. Yeah, so they know you're doing it you know that we're on top of it so thank you yeah that's an excellent point all right next up is Mr. Eastman I hate it right if you see again the I had some questions about the I mean one of the big things that we were working on last year was the South Maine oh waste what a treatment plant and you said that you guys are going over all the numbers and all of that. Where are we exactly in terms of that construction project and all of that? So that project, there's a phase one and a phase two. And one of the challenges that we faced with that project in general is the cost of construction of gone up so much over the last several years. So at one point we thought, hey, we can do this plant upgrade for $65 million and now we're looking at, well, actually the first phase is going to be about that. And then there's, it will be a second phase later. So when I'm talking about the two phases, the first phase was that we're working on right now is doing some upgrades and replacement to the front end of the plant and you know a lot of that had to do with some of that infrastructure just aging and feeling like hey we don't get this you know these front-end tanks and pumping systems upgraded you know we're gonna have work we're gonna get overwhelmed with stormwater flows and we're going to get overwhelmed with stormwater flows. And we're going to have problems. So working on that right now, the second phase is upgrading the actual biological treatment part of the plant and actually increasing its capacity. So this first phase doesn't actually increase capacity. It just really replaces sort of aging infrastructure and improves those systems to make them more reliable. The second phase, we are reviewing closely like when do we actually need to do that? And so part of that is we're pretty engaged with right now is forecasting well, you know, how much growth are we getting and where are we getting it and how quickly are we going to see increases and flows to the plant. So the plant right now, it's rated at 7.5 million gallons per day. Flows we're seeing now are about 5.5 to 6 million gallons per day. So we're not like an imminent threat of not having capacity, but we want to make sure we're planning ahead to make sure we have capacity. There is the ability too that we are able to shift flows between the plants to some extent. So again, we have our Main Street plan and then we have the plant in the west, the Canal Pom plan. There is an interconnection that we have some ability to shift flows. So we're pretty highly engaged right now to try to figure out what exactly, I mean the question you asked, very important. When do we need that capacity increase? And do we do a capacity increase in Main Street or do we maybe do that increase in Canapahon, Ship the Flow? We're really engaged in that quite a bit right now because that phase two is going to be a pretty expensive project. In the grant that we got, that $22.5 million grant from the federal government, that was only on phase one. That's correct. So we're using that right now to do that phase one work. And we were very fortunate in getting a $22.5 million grant to help us pay for that. Yeah, that's really important. That's for folks that don't know the, that wastewater treatment plant goes directly into sweet water, wetlands park, which then filters through and then goes, is the water that goes into pain's paring that goes directly onto the aquifer. So the cleaner that plant is, the cleaner, the ground tool of our environmental lands within our communities. And so making sure that we're doing that while it's important so I'm glad you guys are. We're looking at that and I hope we can find a way to make sure that you know that gets the investment that it needs at the South Main Plan. For sure. Appreciate it. And that's 7.5 million gallons a day, that's for both plants or that's just for the Main Street Plan. rated at 7.5 million gallons per day. The Kanapah plan is 14.9 million gallons per day. And what is its current? About 11. So we're not at a point where we're imminently running out of capacity, but we are a point where we have to be making plans and refining our forecast to make sure we put the right things in place when we need them. Need a little book. Excellent. Thank a little book. Excellent. Thank you. Yes. Does anybody else from the SCREEN County Council? Okay. My only other question for my, this is probably for the county staff is how are we working with the other utility providers around a lot to a county with regards to their infrastructure and responses to climate change? Are we, do we have any kind of intergovernmental coordination on that front? Yeah, so thank you, Rick. Thank you, Rick. And I was actually going to remind everyone that, we work really closely with GRU, but with the Climate Action Plan, we are being careful to write it that it is opportunities for all utilities. I mean, there might be some specific GRU programs being our largest utility in the area but the idea is to definitely be sharing materials with our utilities. You know everything is voluntary with our utilities. I mean we do have a wastewater program where we are monitoring wastewater plants and we do help with compliance with the state permit that those facilities have so that might be a good mechanism for us to be working at least with the wastewater side with our other utilities. Okay, thank you. So I'm gonna fly through some of this so if you have questions, if you looked at it let me know because there are three presentations after me but I did want to mention that you know one of our strategies is going to be to have new development requirements. So what can we do to minimize impacts from new development? So ideas like minimizing site clearing. And then low-impact development. We are working at our looking at our stormwater code, how can we, what can we be doing to improve what we're seeing in new construction? So we're very much in that, of looking at that. And Rick mentioned, you know, septic to sewer, there's also places where we don't have sewer availability. So what can we do with enhanced septic systems so that we're reducing pollution? Can I say a quick question? Yes. On the new development, I've worked on multiple houses where we've installed extensive rainwater catchment systems. And I'm not talking about rain barrels, I'm talking about you know 3000 gallon storage systems. And I can drive folks around and show them to them, but they've never ever had to use any backup water to maintain their yard at all. And so that's a higher upfront investment, but I didn't know if that was something that you all had ever discussed in incentivizing. Not incentivizing, but definitely something we can put into the climate action plan. Most of our incentivizing happens with grants that we get from the water management district, so it's really dealing with existing users. We've had a hard time getting funding to kind of stop future things from happening. Oh, that things from happening. That's also can be a retrofit too, but I was just curious how much we looked at using those or intensive outward catchment systems, which also have their own impacts. But yeah, anyway. All right, thank you. Thank you. Also, how can we reduce impacts from existing development? So we'll have strategies for that. A lot of that, again, is like the septic to sewer connections. Many of you are familiar. We do have a grant right now where we are helping property owners upgrade existing septic systems to these enhanced septic systems. Right now, it's up to a $10,000 rebate. They are not flying off the shelves. It's a voluntary program, so sometimes getting participation is challenging. So what are quality monitoring? So it's important for us to be monitoring our resources to know how are we doing. We have an extensive monitoring program within the county's environmental protection department, and we've got recommendations to how we can Make changes to that so that it can be more robust and really getting at that groundwater quality monitoring That was the question of Commissioner Wheeler so to monitor groundwater You have to do it through a well or you could look at spring water because that's coming from our groundwater So we do have an A-well network. We actually, this past year, hired a contractor. Actually, a scientist who used to work for the state and now Aqua for Watch has a nonprofit, and they did an analysis of our network, and they made some recommendations of some areas that we should be including in our network to look at regional trends. And that is something for next year. We're adding a few new wells. If we're going to go further with that, I'm going to have to either stop monitoring some more else or we're going to have to look at additional budget. But we are trying to expand that network. We also have special projects where we get grants. So we just finished one where we actually monitored, I want to say like 150 wells, like around the Santa Fe and we partnered with aquifer watch so that some of those wells could be outside of Ellatua County's borders so that we could get a big picture and that's something we're currently analyzing that data. We did pilot test a few years ago, the idea of providing free bottle kits for people to sample their own wells and then we had drop-off locations. We had them in high springs. We partnered with the Springs Institute with that and then we would have staff go and pick them up because you got to hit them to the lab within a certain amount of time. At that point in time, it was not that successful, but definitely something worth us investigating again, especially in the future if we can find grant funds to help with that. Okay, I think we have a question on that and I just want to say on that front, if we do do that, I think perhaps having it be an event like a once a year, we do this thing and you drop off your bottles and I think sometimes when things are ongoing programs like that people are like, oh, I'll get around to it and then they never do. But if we did it, like we do our hazardous waste, clean up collections and maybe even in conjunction with that and they could drop off their well water and their paint and chemicals and at the same time that maybe a little bit more successful in terms of getting participation just with thought. Commissioner Wheeler? That's a glad music for trying to see the past. And I'm thinking because we have more informed citizens now moving in the area or our citizens who have had a past history with water and know the differences now a few years later, that some of these folks we could pull into that circle, have people throughout the county who would participate on a regular basis to kind of keep track up what their well water is doing kind of as a gauge for what's happening in their communities. That shouldn't cost anything if you've got a group of people who are willing to work together you know sampling water like we do in our lakes you know lake watch you know you're gonna have a well watch group and it exists it's called aquifer watch and that is the new thing that has happened since we did our well sampling a few years ago. So this is a new nonprofit in our area. It's called Aqua for Watch. And they are going out and sampling a lot of wells because really the cost is in the staff. I mean, citizens can collect their own sample. It's better if someone this train does it and then the analytical costs so the lab. Because what the health department will do is typically a presence absence of bacteria and then a nitrate, but we're doing it for a little bit. We do some other analysis and we've partnered with Aqua for Watch. So they are actually a great organization. They just spoke at one of our springs forums recently and I don't know what their funding source is right now. It's a nonprofit, but this is a really timely discussion because I should look into potentially partnering with them because if they have a network and infrastructure that's already there, perhaps it's just us finding a way to financially support them in their efforts. That would be great because along with one of our applicants was saying about children drinking from the well water that we don't know what they're drinking you assume because it's coming out looking clean that it is clean but it may not necessarily be. And so I don't know if there's is the health department the only place that we have this water evaluated, you know, is it overpowering? So citizens are encouraged to have their wells sampled every year or so. I mean they can, the Health Department is only free option unless they're partnering with us any of our, you know, we've got our monitoring well network and we have our special grants. People can collect samples and bring them to a private laboratory for analysis also. Okay, okay. Well, I think that was all ag, because I could see people taking their samples into the publics or someplace like, I mean, that's in everybody's neighborhood, the pharmacy through even to drop off. But if we've got folks that are setting up a system to do that, I think it's really more important every year that we monitor what's in the water because we don't, we just don't know what's in there and what's being filtered out. And I'm really concerned about our rural families that are drinking water assuming that it's good when it's really not. And just because it looks pretty doesn't mean that it is. So thank you for that. You know that's my concern. We got really real people to follow. Okay. Yeah, I just want to be mindful that we have three more chapters and we're already an hour into the meetings. I just want to be mindful with some of these actions and I'm really glad that everyone's really engaging. I'm not trying to limit engagement at all. We need this kind of feedback. I'm just reminding folks that as we go, I don't want anyone to feel truncated. I don't want us to treat mental health like it's not as important as waterfalls. Are we moving away from water? Because I have one quick question. Yep, because this is the next steps and this is just that we've got here that talk about the cons in terms of political resistance. Political. Is that state? We're talking state. It really depends on which but it could be. Do you know which one it is? What's the number on the top? Revise, consume the consumptive use permitting. 4CUP's 142 over that's it isn't it? Yeah political and utility resistance political you know how can we have resistance to clean water this is what if it's state you know then we need to work on a legislator right or is it local? That would be at the state level. That's for anyway that's a whole conversation yeah no I'm, I just want to point out that I noticed. Thank you. Okay. Do you see what I'm going to finish up with here? Act steps. I am done. So, okay. Thank you very much for the time and for the feedback that was really helpful. And then next up, we're going to have transportation and land use. Okay. transportation and land use. Hey. Hey, transportation. Hello, sir. Good afternoon, commissioners. Chris Dawson, I'm principal planner for development services at Alachor County Growth Management. My previous job was as a transportation planning manager. So it's kind of been rolling sort of in my wheelhouse for a little while in both of my wheelhouses, I suppose. So today I just wanted to give a little bit of a background about what Elatio County's sort of thought process on transportation and land use has been. Certainly for the last 10 years years but really for the last 30 or 40 years almost. And then some thoughts about certainly for transportation. One of them might be looking at for some strategies in the future to help deal with climate changes. So again, we're really going to talk about sort of these focus areas for land use, which is to minimize low density use of land to provide for appropriate densification of existing land uses, and to allow for better distribution of non-residential land uses. And I'll talk a lot about why those things are important and have an impact. And then our transportation focus areas really to support multiple modes of transportation, reduce private vehicle miles travel per capita, and identify infrastructure improvements for resilience. So the growth management vision in our conference of plan, in our department, I'm sorry, is to facilitate a built environment that supports all these things that are here efficient use of land, multimodal transportation, protects natural resources with social equity and economic prosperity, and provides for safe and affordable housing. And I wanted to sort of start there because that's really in our department and growth management, that's really where we are focused is doing all of those things. So our comprehensive plan has some competing goals in it sometimes and I think that's really important to look at and we'll talk about some things that are in here as it relates to the climate but we do have other focus areas in the county that sometimes can compete with those climate goals. And so I think that's one of the things that the board of county commissioners will be dealing with during the evaluation and appraisal report coming up is that there are going to be some changes and there'll have to be some decisions made about what's most important. Because you can't have it all always. So really there's two big future land use principles. I wanted to identify one is to promote sustainable land development. This has been an our comprehensive plan for as long as I've been working as a planner, which is near 20 years now here in Elatio County, that provides for a balance of economic opportunity, equity, environmental justice, and protection of the natural environment. This is one of those principles that all of our future land use policies are built around and built towards. And then a second principle, which is that we base new development upon the provision of necessary services and infrastructure, focus urban development in a clearly defined area and strengthen the separation of urban rural and urban uses. I think there's a perception sometimes that county development just continues off into infinity, out Newberry Road or out Hawthorne Road. The truth is that the county has had a growth management, an urban cluster, generally a growth management boundary in place for 40 years. And so what the county's been doing is infilling that growth management area. And that's generally the map that's up now is the county's future land use, map, municipalities in gray. And you can see all the green and sort of darker green areas that's our agricultural area and our preservation land uses. And then really that area that's in yellow to the west and just east of the city of Gainesville City limits, that's the county's urban cluster. And that's where the county promotes urban development and has again for the last 40 years. That line hasn't moved that I'm aware of maybe in one or two very small places. It shifted back and forth but generally that line has stayed constant for 40 years and the county has been busy in filling that. And the county does that through land use policies that encourage urban and intense development within that area, whether that be traditional toward a sort of single-family neighborhoods, or transit oriented traditional neighborhood developments. So developments have higher intensities with a mix of uses. Again, with our urban cluster, that area surrounding the city of Gainesville to the west and the east, there really is a focus for urban type development around the city of Gainesville itself to provide urban infrastructure and services only within the cluster. So we're not providing sewer and water kind of everywhere. We're really focusing where those pieces of infrastructure are. If you're outside the cluster, we're really promoting development within the other municipalities, so not in our agricultural area, but within the municipalities themselves. And to remote the preservation of natural resources and agricultural land. And that's agricultural land outside the cluster mostly, but our natural resources both in the cluster land outside the cluster mostly, but our natural resources, both in the cluster and outside the cluster through adoption of lots of different policies that we have that affect not just sort of conservation projects where the county might be or preservation projects, where the county might be purchasing land, but also land development regulations that protect those natural resources within our developing areas. So this is not in Elachio County. You can tell because it's got hills and stuff. But this is sort of that 1980s sort of land use pattern that the county was kind of approaching. So you can think of this as an oak mull and there certainly were proposals in the 90s for more of these kinds of mulls in Elatua County and the question is really, you know, is how do we get from sort of that mindset to something that really promotes mixed use more dense Provides for environmental protection, but still provides for all those same kinds of needed uses that people have. So whether that's a live work or play in the unincorporated area of Latio County around the cluster. I wanted to sort of talk about our transportation mobility element in the comprehensive plan as well because for Latio County really tie those two things together. There's no land use without transportation, so no transportation without land use. We really have three policy, three principles at the beginning of our transportation mobility element and I'm not going to read them all out but really the idea is to provide a safe system that lets people take whatever way they want to get to a place, whether that's walking or riding a bike or a scooter, so safe, that we reduce the amount of travel that people have to make in the county. So it's not enough to just say, you're in an hour ride your bike 15 miles. It's really about trying to provide those services in a smaller area so that people don't have to feel like they have to take a car all the time. And then to discourage sprawl, an encouraged, efficient use of the cluster, again by directing new development to where the infrastructure is. And we have, like I said, a whole element of our comprehensive plan that deals with those specific items. But really, there's kind of three parts of that. So, as I mentioned, land use and transportation and the third leg of that is funding. So, since for now, ten years, what is this? Twenty-four. Also since for now 10 years, what is this, 24? 15 years, the counties had traditional neighborhood and transit oriented developments by right in our residential land uses. So these are developments that provide for higher densities and intensities, they require mixed use have very specific design standards that are intended to encourage lockable mixed use neighborhoods. We have transportation policies that really focus on providing multiple modes of transportation, not on widening existing roadway corridors, and to the degree necessary to provide access, providing new multimodal, safe and efficient transportation networks. And the sort of third part of that is the funding. So it's great to have policies about how you do things, but if you're not going to identify a funding source, then it's really hard to get there. And so that's where the county has had a, we had multimodal transportation mitigation. We started, we now have a mobility fee. And those are pay-as- as you go for our developers, so it's dependable, it's a known fee, they can pay, and then the county puts in the infrastructure when it's ready. I like this, we put this in our presentations often when we talk about transportation, these are actually the same place. And this is, I think it's Brainerd, Minnesota. But this is from Strong Towns. If you take a look, they have a lot of good stuff there. But you can see this sort of walkable street scape on the left-hand side. You've got wagons, people are walking down the road. I've looked really hard. There's actually a couple of people on bikes there as well and then that same street Basically devoid of cars in the middle of the day and so I think this is sort of what we wanted to get away from where we have this peak use of our Infrastructure once a day where it's happening because that that's fiscally, it's not sustainable from a fiscal standpoint, but also from a maintenance standpoint if you have all this infrastructure that nobody's using, but you still have to make it available, then you're trying to mitigate any changes that are coming in the future on that infrastructure. So it's really important that we find the most efficient way to use that infrastructure. So one of the ways that we can do that is to distribute our non-residential uses. And some people would say, well, why focus on only the non-residential? So I think people who live in Elatra County will know a very significant portion of the population here goes to one place to work or spend the day. And that's the University of Florida, and that means that all those roadway corridors that lead to the university carry the burden of our transportation. And by distributing some non-residential uses to be outside of that and providing for employment opportunities that aren't necessarily directly on campus. We can distribute some of those trips. We can mitigate the amount of traffic that flows on those major arterials towards the university, but also shorten the trips that people have to make. That reduces the energy necessary to make the trip, whether it's in a car or on a bike or any other way. And that reduces sort of for everybody the amount of energy that's used for our transportation system. And again those TODs and T&Ds have specific design principles that provide for a more efficient use, bike pedestrians, bikes cars, whatever it is. I'm going to skip some of the fiscal efficiency. It's in the presentation. We're working to take a look at it, but I'm going to move ahead a little bit. And I did, I just wanted to sort of identify that we do have maps and policies in our conference of plan that identify specific pieces of infrastructure, whether those are roadways, greenways and blueways throughout the county, into all of our municipalities, as well as transit. And all of those are intended to support a reduced dependence on the automobile, which is the most energy intensive part of our day. So the last few slides, I'm gonna just provide some sort of ideas about where we can kind of go with some policies. These are not kind of built out all the way to the point of being having a metric, but sort of developed with the idea that each of these can have a metric that helps us to understand how we're doing and trying to get there. So the first is identifying at-risk infrastructure. So this would be things like roadways with potential storm impacts. Maybe that's a tree canopy that's close by, that's not healthy. That could potentially be where we know we have storm water problems or where the potential exists as identified in our vulnerability assessment for roadways that would be subject to flooding just because of our changes in our water table or in our river levels. So those are a few items there. And then looking at where we're having recurring flooding on our roadways and identifying appropriate improvements to those, whether that's a pumping station, a new stormwater basin, or reconstructing the roadway, so that it's elevated, sort of like what they did in on 441 across the prairie. Where they added, I know it doesn't seem like a lot, but three inches of asphalt, and that three inches can actually make a big difference if you're only talking about three inches of water cover. So those are the kinds of things that we would be looking at for policies to sort of identify those specific projects. The next is to encourage a shift towards resource-efficient vehicles. And I'm going to call them resource-efficient vehicles because sometimes that might be electric vehicles, but that might also be bicycles or scooters. And it really depends on the specifics of that individual trip. And so really the idea is to sort of move that focus away from everybody driving necessarily a single family gas powered diesel powered vehicle from here to there. And that's really through doing a few things. It's providing the infrastructure that is safe enough for people to feel like they can use those other modes of transportation. It's not getting rid of roads that exist, but it's providing safe infrastructure for people who are using other modes to install public charging infrastructure. So the majority of those alternative vehicles are going to be electric of some kind. Maybe that's a scooter. Maybe it's a car. Maybe it's a bus. But looking at installing those sort of public charging facilities. And then incentivizing, really by financing, I think is the big way that we'll be doing it, the private charging infrastructure. And I will just stop and say we're struggling a little bit right now with how we sort of couch this in terms of our policies. The state has sort of, it's not even a preemption, I would say, prohibits and accounting your city from adopting or enforcing any ordinance and it's so broad related to electric vehicle charging stations. And so we're really having some conversations now about how that affects what the county really can do. And this or any of the cities for that matter. And then again, sort of the last one would be to fund those pilot enhanced transit services. Whether that's in the city or the county or both, probably, or out to our other municipalities, really looking for how we can fund those enhanced transit systems locally, not necessarily looking for state or federal dollars that are really competitive, but identifying how we can make this happen and make get people on board with it. And then really my last one is to make a shift to resource efficient transportation infrastructure. So this really involves making sure that we're using our infrastructure that's on the ground today in the most efficient way. That's by helping individual travelers on our roadway system to make good decisions about where they're going and when they're going. And that means that we need to be identifying data that can come out of our existing traffic monitoring system or that we can add new monitoring technologies to provide that information to travelers. And that would include not just our sort of individual consumers, but also to our freight deliverers who are an increasing number of the trips on our roadway. And I think it's really important that we consider that as well. And so that that, Madam Chair, I'm going to wrap up my presentation. Provide any, I ask, answer any questions that you all might have. I know I have one but we'll first go to the lights and our first night is from Commissioner Offer. Okay. Thank you and thank you for mentioning transportation from the outlying communities that's up in that. I feel like it's really important and I and I guess my question has to do with the fact that we have more and more people computing from outsider county into our county and I know I've asked about looking at park and ride kind of things to encourage people to utilize public transportation once they reach you know our urban core. But I also want to ask about accessing public transportation dollars that might be available in the surrounding counties that might not be using them if we were to extend any sort of public transportation into the cities that are just on the other side of the border to try to increase the number of people that might be using services. Is that something that we've ever looked at? No, it's not something I've ever looked at honestly, but I guess I would say I don't know, for sure, what other public transportation dollars are out there. Not every county is allocated those and most of the public transportation dollars in Alachoy County are from our own local governments whether it's the University of Florida or the City of Gainesville or Alachoy County but I think certainly trying to work with our other counties to look at that. Again I think a big part of that is identifying whether we can do it just here in Alachoy County and then sort of once we get there expanding that scale to look at our other commuting hubs. Well, I mention that because I want to have a statewide prosecution where that was mentioned that there could be money access from other counties that might be available. And I don't know if that just was in more urban areas in South Florida or if that was something that was available here. But I do know that as our property values go up as we densify and as the land that our building sit on rapidly becomes more valuable than the building themselves as we densify, it makes it so that we have more people that are commuting from the outlying areas whether they're in our county or not and they're often using some of the least efficient vehicles not in the area and I think about the you know the impact of that so I appreciate the fact that you brought that up and that was something that I've been concerned about for a while so thank you. Thank you. Michelle Wheeler. Thank you. Thank you. One of the questions that I'll get to next was rails to trails. I know that we've got a system throughout the county and then there's some projects that we're working on too. And I didn't know if you had any updates for any of that. Well, so rails to trails is very specific, sort of category of projects. I think that's probably sort of better categorized as our greenways plan. Okay. And that's probably sort of better categorized as our as our greenways plan. Okay. And that's really sort of the focus of providing those non-roadway based multimodal trails between really sort of the hub of Gainesville and the cluster out to other municipalities. I think there's still a lot of work to do. There are projects in the pipeline. So right now, DOT has a project to identify an alignment for a trail that runs out Newberry Road to Newberry. And then has acquired the right of way to connect from Newberry to the, oh gosh, what does I forget with that trail is called through Gilchrist County goes all the way out west then. So those projects, that project is there. Really the big thing is that these projects require a very heavy lift for dollars and there aren't the kinds of capacity dollars for them that state roads might have. So we continue to monitor what grant cycles are out there, what projects qualify for all those different funding sources that are available and then to look to utilize our own mobility fund fees as a as a match to be competitive for those programs. I know they were looking for a coast to coast connector and I didn't know where we fit into any of that. That's not necessarily Rails to Trail, so I'm excited to hear that DOT is weighed in on some of this too. Yeah, the state provides $50 million a year at this point for the priority trail network across the state. And we've been very successful in competing for those dollars in getting projects. So as we continue to identify where there are corridors that we either own or acquire right of way, then we can continue to look for those dollars for construction. The other thing too is about the trucks, you know, if we could work to get alternative routes for some of these trucks that are going right through the middle of town and some of particularly high springs, you know, there's trucks that are clogging up the main street in high springs. And I had talked at one point to DOT in the mayor of Fort White about the possibility of a bypass around high springs, particularly there. We also talked in a lot to a trying to get a new access point to a piggy road onto the interstate. And everybody talks about the possibilities. Nobody's saying no. They're just saying it's expensive and, know, of course having too many access points and a location together, but if we are developing in this county the way we are, you know, if we could have bypasses or consider those kinds of roadways that would get the heavier traffic off of our little back roads or out through our communities. So are we looking at that as we plan ahead to how to keep the heavier traffic, the truck traffic, particularly from the distribution centers off of our little back roads that we're having a hard time maintaining as a result of their use? Are we making plans for? I think it's a complex question. There actually was a session on this at the planning conference last week. But it was really, I think it's important to understand that the state is always going to maintain its facilities. It is focused on very heavily ensuring that state routes are there to provide transportation routes, not just for passengers, but also for freight. And I think it's important for us to realize that we are increasingly dependent on freight vehicles. Every time we hit the order button at Amazon, that's got to go on an average of four vehicles to get to you. And at least a couple of those are semis. So I think it's worth planning for those increased freight services throughout Alachua County. I think one of the ways we do that is not necessarily by building bypasses, which can have negative effects on our small towns because it sends everybody away from them, from an economic development standpoint, doesn't just send the trucks away, it sends everybody away. And I think there's a need to be careful about that. I think one of the things that we're sort of seeing now is that the smart technologies that are sort of coming online, especially that the University of Florida is looking at, are really focused on helping freight identify what their best routes are so that they're not getting stuck in small little towns where there's a whole bunch of congestion on a day. But I think it's a double-edged sword. Freight has to go somewhere. Cars have to go somewhere. And like I said, increasingly, the way that we order to our houses just means that there's more and more of that as we go. So I think it's incumbent on all of us to sort of identify where those corridors are, but realize that we need them too. I know the state roads, I understand, and they will maintain those state roads, right? If they're the ones who are actually making sure that their routes are available to the truckers, but their local roads, we're not going to be able to keep up with the damage done on there unless we have some way to engage those companies using the trucks to help us with those roads. And that would be my concern. You know that. I think, and to your point, I don't want to go down the rabbit hole too much in a commission Wheeler. But I think a couple of your point, I don't want to go down the rabbit hole too much minute commissioner Wheeler, but I think you know a couple of things on that front. One is that those smart technologies are diverting those trucks to our smaller roads because they can get around, they can cruise around areas and they can take less travel roads that don't have as many lights and things like that. So those smart technologies can be useful but they have we have to make sure that they're using truck routes and that we have designated truck routes and that they're not just kind of smart routing their way to zig-zag through our community, using words that were never built to take those kinds of trucks on. The other thing I wanna say is that I hope that the smaller municipalities who have particularly a lot to me, we've had this conversation with them and I really appreciate their willingness to have the dialogue continuing that have kind of put their bucket in the economic development world of distribution as a big piece of the kind of companies that they're attracting, that they understand that impact fees are really important and that having those companies paying impact fees so that we can they're paying their fair share of the impacts to the roads and that those companies, I understand we want them here, I understand they're bringing jobs here, but they're not always the most high-paying jobs with the best jobs, first and foremost, and secondarily, they're also bringing a lot of impacts to our communities. And so we need them to be willing to invest in that infrastructure if they're going to be utilizing that infrastructure onto the extent that they are. And I've been really happy that the smaller municipalities have been thinking about that more and being willing to have a dialogue with us and with each other about the importance of impact fees for commercial development so that we can begin to build our roads so that they can take these trucks and that we can successfully begin to do some multimodal transportation options as well. Okay, I want to pass it on to you. Did you have something to say? Yeah, yeah. Well, first of all, just thank you for the presentation. I think this is one of the more important parts of the whole thing that we're doing here. We have certain control over our energy efficient vehicles, stuff like that. But if we can get a grocery store closer to 20,000 people that is 20,000 people that are driving, significantly less, using significantly less gas in order to get there. If you can have the density to a lap to ensure that buses are able to get somewhere and then bring them into town that makes public transportation more efficient. And so I loved a lot of the backup. I loved the portion that you kind of skipped over about the land use and efficiency. That was really good. I'll go back and reread that if you weren't able to skim it. But yeah, it seems like the city and the county are well aligned on a lot of our overall goals. On our land use, we're adopting, we have a zoning regulation coming forward that would adopt some more of your single family zone changes that are currently in your plan. Love to take a look at your TOD plans at some point and see what's worked and what hasn't. And curious what you guys are doing on Tuesday night with working with Live Local. I've heard you guys have big things coming forward with that. When I am excited about coming from the county most of all is you guys have a byte master plan and then a vision zero plan. So what can you talk a little bit about where you are in process with those? I will try to without making Allison mad. So we have contracts in place for both of those projects. I think there are kickoff meetings for both of those. The October probably. Those are public kickoff meetings in October. Yes, sorry. And then they probably both have sort of year to 18-month time frames for completion. Okay. Those are very exciting. If you're interested in bicycle pedestrian work or keeping our roads safe, I'd encourage anyone who's watching again involved with that. And thank you guys for taking that on. You guys have some great staff over there. I think we'll do a great job with it. Thank you. All right. that you guys have some great staff over there. I think we'll do a great job with it. Thank you. You mentioned about the jobs here in Gainesville. So, hash brain is a better home community. Is there anything in the pipeline that have transportation from hash brains to bring people through the jobs here? It's a great question. So, I think one of the challenges is identifying what the funding source for any of our transportation projects are, whether that's a road or a bike path or transit. And so there's always a little bit of sort of what's the use of that going to be. Just a few years ago, maybe five or seven years ago, we actually had a pilot project with the city of Alachoy and we ran transit from sort of downtown Alachoy there into the university. I think it went to the university. And the ridership on it was, I would say, surprisingly low. I thought that more people would be interested in utilizing that route, but it was really difficult to sort of justify continued spending on it. So I think any of those opportunities that exist, and I think they are opportunities from all of our sort of outlying municipalities, will require coordination between the City of Gainesville, those outlying municipalities, and certainly the county as well. And I think that that's a conversation that needs to happen. Certainly at the commission levels to sort of identify those priorities for each of the municipalities for the county itself and then to identify a funding source as well. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, sir. I just want to say two quick things. The first is that I think that your idea of the transportation options and I think even within the city of Gainesville, we have a pilot community health worker program. It's been doing a lot of work out in the community and these community health workers. Some of them are focused in very specific areas like heart disease or maternal health. But some have been doing much more sort of social determinants of health work. And part of that is identifying resources, helping connect people to resources. And the number one challenge that almost everyone identified when coming in and talking about resource needs was trans being transportation limited. So the majority of our community that are experiencing challenges with some other resource, rather that's healthcare resources, food resources, clothing resources, housing resources are also experiencing transportation limitation challenges. And so I think that as we as we begin to try to address that disparity and that challenge, we've got a real opportunity to also be thinking about creative education on using different types of transportation and the ways in which we have conversations about bicycling and scootering and walking and all of those things. But I just want to bring that up because I do think as we talk about this transportation issue, it's an issue for our rural and outlying areas and it's an issue for those in our community who are already experiencing challenges from a socioeconomic standpoint in a number of other areas. So transportation is a really big deal and we need to be thinking about it. And I guess that's the other thing I want to say ties to that and that's behavior change. I think all of this gets, we have to have, we have to somewhere have a conversation about behavior change because people are not adopting. In fact, they've gone the other direction. People who used to write buses now aren't writing buses after COVID. And so we're really seeing a shift back to single occupancy vehicles as a primary mode of transportation and more convenience ordering of materials to get directly to their doorstep instead of You know going to the places where it's being brought to a central area So we do need to think about that And I I'm not gonna go into that too much today But I think it's something we need to be thinking about how do we incentivize behavior change and adoption of the kinds of behaviors that we want as we create these trails and these connected areas. How do we get people using them? Yeah, do you come in? I mean, I always felt that this was a great opportunity for private enterprise to get involved. Someone from the community who could get a van and start routes like this, you know, that it could build a fleet of transportation, you know, from the Hawthorne is another one, you know, but there's opportunities here for someone from the community who could actually build a business, a transportation business, you know, that would accommodate some of these smaller communities too, then that wouldn't involve such a big enterprise or big investment from the county that, you know, that it would be an opportunity for someone from the private sector to come forward with a business that would a Commodate just think you've heard I think you've returned that but yeah I hear you I think you're right I think there's opportunity for collaboration with the private sector for sure All right we are going to move on now to the next section I think's energy maybe, or are we on to our mental energy transportation? We'll have with the transportation. No, we don't. There's another part of energy. Great. Come forward. Oh, energy, yes, I see. Good morning. To the board, my name is Betsy Riley. I'm a sustainability manager with the Lachua County. I'll be presenting today actually with Jenny Ford. Dr. Zew, it wasn't available to make it today. And we'll be talking about energy and transportation. The county, on the county's part, we'll be talking about energy and the city will be talking about transportation. The transportation was discussed as one of the largest users of energy in our neighborhood at the county's climate action plan. We chose to break that out into two separate chapters, but they're combined for the city's plan. So that's the connection. And go. Okay, so in the Elatrial County Conference of Plan, we talk about three specific ways of improving our energy infrastructure at county. The first one would be energy conservation, which is behavior change. The next is energy efficiency and the last is renewable energy. Today I'm going to be focusing extensively on our energy efficiency work and our renewable energy work and then I'll turn it over to Jenny to talk about green transportation in the city. So the sort of crown jewel of energy efficiency at Electro County is ACPE, the Electro County Energy Efficiency Program. It pays for up to $15,000 in energy efficiency rebates. Only low income rental units qualify. Right now are one of the only games in town for rental units. And as part of the program, the landlord agrees to an affordability commitment in exchange for the funding. So it comes with some, it serves the dual purpose of lowering utility rates for our low income renters, as well as ensuring that they're sort of locked into an affordable unit for an extended period of time. Those upgrades include things like insulation, but also appliances, so we'll do updates for water heaters for entirely new HBAC systems, whatever our contractor team, our local nonprofit, I think make the most difference for the teachers themselves. Right now, that program has been working with AC Turbo E, the American Council for Energy Efficient Economy on an energy equity for RIPTOR's technical assistance grant. We're looking to move into a final program by the end of the year. We've had 54 units to date that have received two nubs. Those two nubs alone can get you a 10.6% utility reduction. And the fed 14 units that have received or will receive additional upgrades. We've had a little bit of a delay as we switched our paperwork that we've been doing. So we're at 14, but we just signed on firmware units this last week. So that number should be increasing pretty soon. So that is our energy efficiency work. The commitment to renewables is our solar. So we have a plan to move all of the buildings of Latvia County to renewable solar PV energy by 2030. We are making significant progress in that direction, the biggest being the 337 kilowatts system that just came online at the health department. This had more than doubles. Our current renewable energy that's being produced by Latchua County. We are anticipating producing 500,000 kilowatts in the first year alone from this installation. We're expecting a full return investment in just a few years and the panels haven't from this installation. We're expecting a full return investment in just a few years. And the panels haven't expected 30-year life, which means that after 2030, we're basically getting return investment every year, we're getting revenue from that every single year. We have a fair number of renewable rooftops. This map shows all of the solar panels that we currently have in a Latchua County. The size of the dots will indicate how large they are. This includes a couple of new panels, which are, as I mentioned, both the health department, but also the fire station number 80 has panels. That just came online in February. And we also have ground mounts out at the La Veda Brown institution. We currently have plans as well to do more renewables around our courthouse buildings. These projects are enlarged part funded by our Energy Conservation Investment Project, the ECIP fund. Basically, it earmarks utility savings for more solar. So every time we put up a solar panel in a natural county, if the funding comes from this budget line, then the utility savings go back into the same patch, and that patch can only be used for more renewable energy improvements. This is how the county is planning to sort of like show our continued investment in renewable. It can't be used for any other purpose besides more renewable updates. To date over $200,000 and ECIP funding has gone directly into solar panel installations on our county buildings. We do have a solar installation on the civil court house and there's a thermal energy storage unit that is planned for the court complex. There are a few additional pathways that we are exploring for improving where we are at right now. One is the inflation reduction act has a Act has a Community Change Grants program. We are very, very close to submitting this grant application. It would provide pathway forward for us to do the Solar Leasing program. We also have, we were just recently awarded the Community's Leap Grant Local Energy Action Program. We received, we were the original cohort for this and we made enough progress that they ordered it again. This grant comes with a $50,000 in actual funding that we can use for community engagement so that as we're doing these community engagement projects, which last time the community's had to sort of volunteer for, now we're actually able to move that money into the community's do better community engagement and develop these programs that are going to have long lasting structural benefits to these communities. And then finally, the AC Tripoli Energy Equity for Renter's Program, that grant is going on right now as well for larger scale improvements to our energy efficiency programs. We'd like to go ahead and ask questions now, Madam Chair, or we'd like to hear from the City next. To everybody has any questions on the energy stuff? We've heard this quite extensively at the county level, so I think we're good. Okay, my only question is how this is what we're currently doing, but this wasn't like the student striking me as being a chapter in the climate action plan as our future activities or goal oriented. So are you planning to sort of take that and then project into the future, how many kilowatts of solar we want to put in or what the leasing program may do and begin to set goals for the climate action plan? Is that the intent? Yes. So, presently, our comprehensive plan, our goal is 100% photovoltaic, renewable energy on all kind of buildings by 2030. That might not be possible even with our largest insulation. We're only pretty soon maybe about half of the energy that's that's the buildings are using. So we're planning to come back to the board with maybe something that's renewable focus, but not. It doesn't have to be solar PV. So that sort of allows our health department, for example. We produce about 50% of our energy through solar PV. We get the other 50% for GRU. So as that grid becomes green, which we'll see what GRU is going to do. But the latest IRP was positive in the direction of renewables, then that can sort of help us meet some of those goals so that we're managing our buildings through renewables, but not necessarily exclusively solar PV. And then for the energy efficiency component, we're hoping to provide a larger update very soon on our new plan for that program, pending the feedback that we're getting with the ACEE AA technical assistance grant. Great, thank you. Right. Hi, I'm Jenny Ford. I'm the Environmental Coordinator. And I'm here to talk about infrastructure electrification or sorry, transportation electrification. The way we break it up into categories and look at our city fleet is we have our RTS buses, our RTS light duty vehicles and the general fleet, which comprises all the other vehicles we use in a day. And we're gonna talk about how we're gonna support that with our charging infrastructure and funding resources. So our current status of RTS buses, we have 118 buses, 7.6% of which are EV and high-rid. So we have nine EV and high-rib buses total, two of which are in procurement. And we hope to have 10 by 2025. It was an ultimate goal of 2045, have 80% lower-nower mission fleet. That's kind of a graph of how we're gonna get there what that would look like. Whoops For our light duty vehicles from RTS we have a just a little under a quarter of the 36 light duty vehicles are hybrids and we hope next year to have 10 and again a 100% low or no emission fleet by 2045 and for our light duty vehicles we have a thousand and 80 vehicles, 131 total or 131 are EV and hybrid, 11% EV and hybrid goal. But we will also be supporting the public. This is a calculator from the Department of Energy that estimates that we're going to have 12% electric vehicles by 2030. Right now, we have 2,245,000 vehicles on the road on only 1,600 of those are electric. So by that 12% by 2030 up to 29,000 is going to be a huge leap. And we don't have that much infrastructure to support the electrification that we need. I'm going to quickly go over the kinds of EV chargers we'll see. Your level one is just like your basic plug-in, 120 volts, anything like your laptop goes there. For level two charging, it's something like your washer. It's a little more 240 volts. And for your DC fast charging, which will probably ultimately want a lot of, it's 480 volts. That will take your charge time down from four to six hours to get to a full charge to roughly 30, 45 minutes. So that's a little more attractive to support our electric vacation of the city and our public's use of EVs. This is a map of all of the rides or the charging stations in town. There's 126 total stations, a lot of which are at UF. But we only have 29 superchargers and those are at these locations in Alachua at 39th Avenue and in front of Whole Foods and Much of those are Tesla only so we don't really have a lot that are open to the public and usable by all types of electric vehicles 80% of the Chargers we have are the level two only so it's the slower chargers that take longer to User EV and but 54% of those are free to use the public much of which are at UF. We have 669 Level 2 Chargers total. Because of the way the bill that precluded use of EV charging being mandated or any kind of incentive for that. The only ways we really can incentivize or bring up the numbers of charging station is to increase the number of chargers ourselves and to expand the infrastructure through grant writing. And we currently have these grants that we've submitted to and we got the lower three so we will submit the charging and fueling infrastructure discretionary grant program that we're the lead on shortly this week. We helped you with the immobility charging infrastructure grant earlier this month and then the three below we've got the solar power mobility hub, low- and low ambitions, and the electric transit bus program. Thank you. Any questions? No? Okay. Thank you so much. Last but not least, we have our mental health with the Elantra County crisis. Thank you, Commissioner for having me. any crisis there. Thank you, Commissioner's, for having me. I feel honored to be here and being part of this conversation. At the beginning, we had an applicant for the Climate Action Plan. And I just want to speak to a little bit of what she said that people of color and in-proversvers communities who are already facing environmental injustices, social injustices, and systemic racism are experiencing the worst impacts of climate change. And when surveyed 10,000 kids, 80% felt betrayed, 48% felt the negative impacts of the daily functioning. 60% of kids felt sad and afraid when thinking about climate change. And 40% felt shame, grief, and powerlessness, as well as anger. And levels of distress were worse, and areas where climate change are loss of life, loss of industry, economic impacts, heat related impacts, food and securities, and at the heart of all of those are us. And our mental health and well-being is impacted by climate change and is as well documented. Some of the impacts are increased stress, anxiety, hopelessness, depression, and feelings of powerlessness. Vulnerable populations are at a greater risk. Increased heat is also associated with greater incidence of physical violence, and I'm going to talk about that in a moment. So some of the impacts of climate change on mental health are acute. So when a natural disaster has just occurred or is occurring, those people generally experience acute symptoms of acute symptoms on their mental health. When the situation becomes more chronic or when natural disasters hit back-to-back, perhaps when it takes a long time for recovery and restoration, those impacts to the mental health can become chronic. People also experience indirect impacts to their mental health, and so that is more globally, so watching others suffer from the effects of climate change. As I mentioned, we experienced feelings of loss and hopelessness, and there have been some terms coined to specifically talk about how people feel about climate change and those are eco-exhiety, climate-exhiety, ecological grief to name a few. We've documented that climate change has resulted in increased rates of post-traumatic stress disorder as well as acute stress disorder. And there are also increased incidence of violence and aggression, increased rates of suicide, and increased rates of substance use and substance abuse. My name is Lara, and I'm from the Latcher County Crisis Center. I'm the the Latria County Crisis Center. I'm the Clinical Standards Coordinator and I am very happy to be part of this group that is talking about how climate change affects us. And we do a lot to support this community and beyond at the crisis center. And so I just like to talk a little bit about what we're doing and how we support people. We have a 24-7 crisis line as well as the 988 that's the suicide hotline. We do mobile responses so that's interacting with members of the community who are struggling with mental health crisis. We provide short and long-term counseling services for individuals, couples, and families. We also operate 3-1-1 with just the critical information and room or control line during natural disasters to address our citizens' fears and concerns. We provide an 80-hour crisis intervention training to all of our staff and phone volunteers. And this 80-hour training provides crisis intervention skills, reflective listening, and suicide prevention. I also left something off here. We also provide a 40-hour crisis intervention training for lawment and 911 dispatches to help them better cope with and address mental health concerns within the community. So in our ADR training program, we have 311 training for all of our staff and volunteers so that they can address natural disaster fears among our citizens. We work closely with other social service programs to connect people to resources. So, as I said, we operate a 24-hour crisis line, and we talk to people in crisis, and if they happen to be in our area, we can connect them to our local resources. If not, our phone volunteers are really great at Google and they look up resources to try to connect people to. Currently we have four staff and four volunteers who are trained in NOVA's crisis response team. NOVA is the national organization for victim assistance and they've partnered with Florida Crisis Response Team to provide a 40-hour training in crisis response to send throughout Florida and beyond to address crises. So this team responds to natural disasters, mass casualties, and so there are currently eight of us who were trained in this program. So as we are talking about climate change and how it affects mental health, we would like to focus some of what we do as specifically on addressing climate change fears. So some of the things that we intend to do are to provide ongoing training for staff and volunteers. So there are on the biological, physical and social effects of climate change. So that our volunteers can tune in to the things that are being talked about on the phone lines. And if they are specifically talking about heat-related stress or fears related to the future, hopelessness specifically as it relates to climate change, our phone volunteers can attend to those feelings. We are connecting and joining other organizations who are conducting outreach events related to climate change. So the Hawthorne Climate Summit is coming up this month. We'll be tabling there. We'll also be at the climate summit in November, tabling as well as possibly having a couple of our staff there to do breakout groups. And we're also maintaining a systems approach to understand how migration impacts infrastructure needs in our community. Climate change is complex and there's a lot of uncertainty and unknown and understanding that complexity and being part of this conversation is critical to how we are intending to move forward. We're in the process of compiling and maintaining a list of resources that address climate fears and impacts, connecting with other practitioners who are climate literate. There are a variety of evidence-based treatments to use in the counseling room that specifically tend to people's climate fears. And so we're in the process of determining when to use those and how they might be useful and helping to train our staff with those. And attending mental health conference and climate related conferences and trainings when possible. Later this month, 988, which is the suicide prevention hotline, is putting on a disaster in behavioral health conference. We're hoping to go, hoping to send someone. And the mental health and climate change conference in January put on by the mental health climate change alliance were also intending to attend that conference. As I was looking this weekend over my presentation, I found a really beautiful feelings wheel, and I'm sorry that it's not in this presentation, but we used feelings wheels to help people articulate and have language for how they're feeling. I found one specifically related to climate change, and I just wanted to say that some of the emotions on that climate wheel were anger, sadness, fear, grief, overwhelm, betrayal, powerlessness, and loss. But there was also this sliver of positive emotions, and they were hope, gratitude, empathy, inspiration, empowerment, interest, and curiosity. And we are excited to be part of this conversation to help our clients and callers have some positive emotions associated with climate change as well. Thank you for your time. Any questions or feedback? I have one next time. Commissioner Alfred. Thank you. Thank you for this. This has been something that has been a concern of mine for a really, really long time. Since it's something I've studied for a really, really long time and I really appreciate the rhetoric about positivity because I know for us up here, you know, as we talk about all these things and interact with the public, it's so hard and so well, so easy to get home feeling pretty depressed by the entire process, you know. And so I hope that you guys are taking care of yourselves as well because I know that there's I guess what I've tried to say is there's a cost to do what you're doing and and I know that your department is very supportive but I appreciate what you're doing. I really do. I was particularly interested in the mental health climate change alliance. Could you send me some more information about that? That's something I'd be happy to. It's a virtual conference, so it's easily accessible. I think it's also free of charge. I will do that. I'm very much appreciated. Check. Thank you so much for what you're doing. Yeah, thank you. Thanks. And I also echo thank you and I'm really excited to hear you're going to be at the Hawthorne Climate Summit and hopefully at our climate summit in November, I think the more that we can get ahead of the conversation about mental health and climate change and somewhat to somewhat, and not to the little people's anxiety or fears, but to focus on solutions and on the curiosity and the opportunities that exist with this to shift our society I think the more we can hopefully help people to find things that will help alleviate some of that anxiety and stress so I'm glad we're getting the word out I hope we can continue to spread the word for that and I hope I didn't mention it earlier with our transportation or our water folks but I hope they'll also be at our climate summit in November and at the Hawthorne Summit if they can be there so we can continue to spread the word about all that we're doing. Thank you. OK. Thanks. It's fun. Oh, and let's make a commission wait. Yes. Yes. We really can't wait for that presentation. I think it's, again, we have a focus that we don't always focus on or even aware of. But I think disorientation is a word to that you could add to that list, you know, of how people are feeling because it's really disorienting when we are adjusting the environment to the needs of the community. And as we have more people coming in here from this climate fugitives that we're going to be changing our environment to the point where it's unrecognizable in a lot of ways and I've been calling it environmental Alzheimer's where you are you can't really relate to your community anymore or to your surroundings and it feels I remember going through this with my grandparents in terms of wanting to go home because what you recognize is not home. And I can see that this is going to have an impact too and the work that you're doing. So thank you very much for that focus. Thank you so much. Thanks. Thank you so much. All right. We are on to the member comment portion of our agenda. Does anybody have any go ulcer down here? Do you have any general comments from the board? I'm sorry. I'm sorry. We do have public comment signed up for this item by Mr. Shepard before moving over the climate. Yes. Okay. Great. Come on up. You can address the board. We have three minutes. I named Zander Shepard. She was called myself the People's Representative. I run from there and did soon become. I wanted to touch on several things. We chicken had a stormwater's start off with that um that there is something that uh Has been hurt in our farmers so that will recharge you the storm water need to be looked at the other Thing bars pump stations We need more pump stations. There's been a lack of funding for that. And I think that we need to take and put funding in it. So we need to use these areas directed. North Main Street is a big area of the sewage in that area, being overrun and running out into the ditches and 39th area and 39th street. There's pump station needed to be there. The gentleman didn't bring a video portrait video or portrait of where we need these plant stations. I made a misstep but I think that this is a critical thing part of city goes. What else was there? Oh okay I'm gonna take it and up with I wanted to thank this young lady for taking this and bringing this to the City Commission and if she came to the county, I wanted her to thank her for that. This is a critical saying that is needed in games for all the retirement homes, for all the people that sit out in the commission, what kind of counseling do they get to help them? Because I don't know, y'all have experienced it, that I have experienced it, where some of the people that come to the podium are very present, you're in, you have a commission or a mayor, you have to endure that. And so that there is something I say, you turn over to God, but you're still at Mopin's you. So I wanted to thank this young lady for that and thank everyone for what they brought today. That's all. Thank you. And quickly on the pump thing, I think our vulnerability analysis does address some of the areas where additional pumping may be needed. And I know that on the 39th Avenue area, which is in the county, we have actually bought increased pumps in that area. And in the last storm, I can happily report that all those pumps worked so well that we didn't have any flooding in any of our legacy flooding areas. So we have made that some of those investments. Sorry, we can't come back up. But thank you. We can talk afterwards if you want. OK, we will now go. Any other, is there any other public comment? I need to comment. OK. All right, number comment. Sir, you have any comments for the board? I know work. This is a very easy case of knowing that. We have the information that I'm trying to process. And I want to commend someone who got spilt my name, right? Instead of calling me Brian, it's not in Byron. So thank you so much for welcoming David. That's great. Yes, I look forward to serving you. I'm really, really happy to have you. We've been without our other municipality representative for some time. It's really great to have you here and to get a renewed energy with the other municipalities around the county. So thank you for being here. Thank you. All right. Anything? No. Okay. Commissioner Wheeler, anything general. I just didn't know if this board needed an end-up date at all on the Mill Creek activities that's going on. I know we know as a county, but I didn't know if the city or if Commissioner Williams knew. And Steve, I don't know if there's anything that we can comment on at this point. That this board should or not know about. I don't know. Madam Chair, Steve Poster, Electric County Environmental Protection Department. I can just basically tell you what we're currently how we're engaged in welcoming the government. That's appropriate. I just didn't check off this board. Should maybe. Sure, so that the County Commission, we've provided two chairletters to the city of Latua, expressing concern and interest in working with them on proposed development activities in and around Mill Creek sink. That is a car speech right in the, basically right in the center of that city of Alachua. And as we've learned over many decades of study of that, it's probably the most studying system, cave system we have in Elachua County, we know that the water that enters that feature there does quickly enter our drinking water in aquifer and in general moves in the northwest direction through the city of Elachua and up into high springs and the unincorporated area. So any activities that go on in and around that system have a significant potential for impact. So what we're doing is we're meeting with city staff and the developers, anyone to come back to the Elachua County Commission at your regular meeting on September 24th to talk about the strategies and ideas that we've been working on to address those concerns. So if anyone is interested in public's watching, we'll be talking about that September 24th at the County Commission meeting. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, too. Okay. And Mr. Offert. Just one thing on a similar note tonight is the city of Archer will be making a decision about the concrete cement plant brother that is proposed for the literally the center of Archer to go in. So if anyone is interested that meeting starts at 6 p.m. P&D Center in Varcher. The staff recommendation from the City of Varcher is to approve it. All right, thank you. That's sad. I'm depressing, but thank you. Yes, I'm depressing. OK. My only comment is, so thank you to staff. I know this has been an incredible amount of lift and an incredible amount of work to get to where we are on the climate action plan and it's exciting to get this update and begin to see how it's coming together. And I guess my only one comment too is that I hope that as we begin to pull it together in a document that it'll have similar formatting throughout so that the chapters, so when people, if there's going to be a chart with actions that everybody has that or if there's going to be a list of recommended actions everybody has that, or if there's going to be a list of recommended actions, like in the vulnerability analysis, that it's sort of similar. Just so the public can digest this easily, because I know it's a lot of information, and I know it's not always easy to digest things down into simple bite-sized points and things that people can easily understand. But the more that we can do that, I think the more we're going to get that engagement that we're seeking for our community. But I really great job and just thank you to everyone for all the hard work because I know this has been on top of everything that you do on a day to day is thinking about how what you do on a day to day impacts climate and how we're going to be addressing that. And we really appreciate the info so that we can begin making policy decisions. So thank you. And we are adjourned.