 Yeah, Rodgers, do you want to do a brief mic check? Mic check. Dina, can you hear me? Loud and clear. Can you hear me? Can you hear me okay? Dina, I could hear you, but it doesn't sound like the mayor could. Natalie, did you get it working? Yes. Sorry, I have my volume down for council meetings and I didn't turn it back on. Okay. Can you hear me now? Yes, ma'am. Okay, make me sweat it today. Thank you, sorry. I heard you loud and clear to council member Rodgers and now newly appointed Mayor Rodgers. You all switch your room. Thank you very much. Please, you can still say Rodgers. We just wanted to make it as easy as possible. I think for the first year and a half of being mayor, I kept getting letters that were to Mayor Schwedhelm. Now at least it'll be properly addressed. Yes. And Dina, with that, let's go ahead and call the roll and establish a quorum and get moving. Okay, thank you, Chair Rodgers. Mayor Rodgers. Present. Council Member McDonald and Chair Rodgers. Here. Let the record show that all members of the Climate Action Subcommittee are present with the exception of Council Member Rodgers or Council Member McDonald. Perfect. We'll start with public comment for non-agenda items. If you have a comment that falls within the purview of the Climate Action Subcommittee, go ahead and hit the raise hand feature on Zoom. But I do not see any. Did we have any pre-recorded messages? We did not, Mayor. All right. Let's go on to our departmental reports then. Mayor, we did just have a hand pop up. Okay. My apologies. Let's go to Jacob. Thank you. All right, can you hear me? Yes, I can. Okay, and I had submitted a comment prior to this and I had received an email saying that it was going to be put in. So I'm not sure what happened. All right, we can look into that. Okay. Well, my name is Jacob. I am a Sonoma County native born and raised in Sebastopol. I'm here representing Fossil Free, California, also just as a concerned citizen and a father. So I'm not going to take up too much time, but I was here to humbly propose to the Climate Action Subcommittee to bring a divestment resolution forth to the city council, which would be calling on CalPERS to divest all holdings in fossil fuel investments. Real quickly, among public pensions, CalPERS is the number one funder of the fossil fuel industry, funding roughly $27 to $28 billion in projects like coal plants, oil pipelines, fracked gas wells. And as you guys know, the devastating wildfires that went across Sonoma County over the last decade, you guys know firsthand how important it is that we move really rapidly away from our dependency on fossil fuels and towards cleaner renewable energy. We currently have 14 different cities in California who have already passed divestment resolutions of their own. And I think it would mean a great deal for the citizens of the County and of Santa Rosa if you guys join that list. So I'm happy to provide any sample resolutions if you guys want to look at some and any other additional information or support that could help the committee and the council to pass a resolution as such. And I just want to thank you all for your time and wish you well. Now, thank you so much, Jacob. And if you could send that over to the subcommittee members, I'd love to take a look at it. Hi, Chair. Secretary, I see that we have Vice Mayor McDonald and the attendees. Can we get her pulled over? Well, do. And I will make note, Chair Rogers that we did receive a comment under item 5.1 and it was attached to the agenda distributed to council and the agenda was republished with that this morning. Perfect, thank you. So while we get the vice mayor pulled over, let's move on to our department reports. Hello, Chair Rogers. My name is Tasha Bate, Energy and Sustainability Coordinator. And at this time, we do not have any department reports. All right, we'll go on to item 4.1 then. 4.1 is the Wildfire Mitigation and Resiliency Update brought to you by Paul Lowenthal. Here's our fire marshal. Take it away, Paul. Good afternoon, Chair Rogers, Mayor Rogers and Vice Mayor McDonald. My name is Paul Lowenthal, Fire Marshal with the Fire Department. And for tonight's presentation, we'll be covering our Community Wildfire Protection Plan and the mitigation efforts that's taken to aid in climate change. I will note that we're actually gonna be back in front of the entire council for our second annual Community Wildfire Protection Plan on January 10th. So rather than do a full detailed presentation, we'll plan to hit some of the highlights for the subcommittee this evening and then follow up with the full report, again, for the second annual Community Wildfire Protection Plan in January. So if I can get the PowerPoint presentation and you can take it to the next slide, please. So our Community Wildfire Protection Plan is a plan that is designed to enhance the protection of human life, safety, and reduce the wildfire threat to our community assets, such as homes, commercial infrastructure, businesses, natural and historic resources within the city of Santa Rosa. The Community Wildfire Protection Plan was developed through a grant that was actually approved by hazard mitigation through Cal OAS following the 2017 fires. And believe it or not, for some council members remember it all too clearly, but the plan was actually approved by council just days before the glass fire impacted our community. The plan itself identified the greatest threat to our community as the area that burned. So when the glass fire took off, we knew what the impacts were gonna be to the community based on a lot of the work that was done. Ultimately, the goal of the plan again is to protect our community through a number of items that have been identified in the plan itself. Next slide, please. So essentially the plan took into account our local community risks, it did modeling, it looked at past wildfire history, looked at the fuels, the topography and took into account climate change and essentially identified nine objectives for our community and 46 actionable items. Those actionable items, no pun intended, are in the weeds. There are some Community Wildfire Protection Plans that are very high level and almost as a template that are used to secure grant funding but are very broad and general in nature. We felt that for the City of Santa Rosa's very first Community Wildfire Protection Plan that we wanted to actually tell us what we need to do within our community and specifically what needs to be done around our community, whether it's in Oakmont, whether it's in Bennett Valley, whether it's in Fountain Grove or Rinking Valley, there's different conditions in different parts of our community and we felt it was worth the investment to ensure that the recommendations really do truly relate to what we see here locally. So with that, there's some confusion. Oftentimes people think that the Community Wildfire Plan does nothing but reduce vegetation and do mechanical work. And although that is great, there's a lot of other things that have to be done to make sure that vegetation management and the plan itself are successful. One of the first actionable objectives of the plan was to improve coordination and tracking. And so that's making sure that we are aware of what work is being done around our community, what work is being done by different agencies, whether it's Cal Fire in the State Parks of Annadel, whether it's the County in Spring Lake or some of our HOAs within our community so that we can map where the work is being done, track where it's being done and adjust where we need to do work within our own community. We need to improve our evacuation routes. You'll see in a future, in a slide a little bit that we fully understand that some of our evacuation routes are challenged from not only traffic conditions that have been approved upon with some of the work that Public Works has been done, been doing for traffic signals during evacuations but also vegetation along our roadsides. So we have some exciting grants that are in progress that you'll hear about in just another couple slides or so. Educating the public on how to mitigate the risks of damage of wildfire, you've seen in a lot of our social media posts, a lot of the outreach we've done that we've pretty much taken everything that we've had on a number of different pages through different departments and different needs and consolidated them all down to two very specific web URLs, srcity.org forward slash wildfire ready and srcity.org forward slash ready SR. Those two web pages now serve as true hubs to what can be done to not only prepare for wildfires but emergencies in general. The pages have proved to be very useful, very beneficial and have improved our overall wildfire preparedness which is objective number four. So improving wildfire preparedness, you've seen already Santa Rosa, events that have taken place in Courthouse Square, a lot of the outreach and education that we're doing and I keep paying to say it but you'll see some of the benefits of the plan shortly with another grant that will help in those efforts. We're also looking at how to increase our structural hardening with our community and so we're doing everything from assessments and making recommendations on what residents can do on their property as well as what we can do to help them with hardening their structure. Treating the vegetation is the big one. That's the one that people see the most and that really truly does have an effect on our community. We have done everything from actual fuel modification projects including shaded fuel breaks in Howarth Park, both on the Medica Ridge side as well as the Sullivan Ridge side of Howarth Park where we physically are utilizing some of our funds to go in and actually do work. Most recently, for those of you that travel up and over Fountain Grove Parkway pretty frequently, you've probably noticed an area in between the Shanae interchange and Brush Creek Road on the south side that has been heavily overgrown with brush and vegetation. That was another example of a field treatment job that we facilitated through our program. And we'll continue to look for opportunities to do some of those, some two exciting improvements that we're making right now that will aid in that, that you're getting kind of a sneak peek in through the subcommittee. Our two relationships that we're working on finalizing. One is with the Santa Rosa Junior College. We are finalizing an MOU between the city of Santa Rosa and the Santa Rosa Junior College where with their newly developed vegetation management program, we will be able to utilize some of our parks and open spaces and undeveloped lands for them to come and teach some of their skills classes for landscapers, for people that are looking to help or work in the field management business, take classes and we'd be able to actually have those classes hosted on our properties so that we're able to actually benefit from the program and have work done on city properties. We're also in communication with the Conservation Corps of the North Bay that'll allow us to potentially engage and utilize vegetation management funds to have local residents that are in Sonoma County work in potentially between the ages of roughly 18 and 25, helping us with field management projects that'll give them some work experience but also do some valuable work within our own community. Number, losing track, seven or so, improve education on defensible space standards. So again, more outreach that we're continuing to do. We actually just converted our second building plans examiners. So if some of you remember part of the move in forward with our vegetation management program came with the addition of three limited term positions that would help offset some of the workload to free up staff and kind of shift assignments around to really make our vegetation management program a success. One of those positions was a second plans examiner due to the demands of the development that was taking place following the fires and with what we're experiencing in Santa Rosa. We were unsuccessful in recruiting that just because we couldn't really compete with the private industry. So we've opted to convert that second building plans examiner to a second community outreach specialist that will aid again in a lot of the needs of the community wildfire protection plan. But most importantly, some of the grant funding that we are getting into now that is being awarded to us that will help us successfully educate and really make a pretty drastic improvement in the path forward of our community wildfire protection plan and overall vegetation management program, which ties into the eighth objective, which is the increased staffing. So once we complete the recruitment for that second building plans examiner, we will be essentially fully staffed and really able to now kind of turn the gears and move forward with a lot of the exciting opportunities that we have with our vegetation management grants that are coming forward. And then lastly, consider expanding the designated wildland urban interface fire area to include other areas of the city that are not located within the wooey. The biggest and most noteworthy one that came of that recommendation was to move Coffee Park into the wildland of interface. There was a lot of discussion about that. That did not take place and has not taken place at this time due to the location of Coffee Park and it truly not being in what meets the definition of a wildland urban interface. As we saw the fire did push out of our wildland and into Coffee Park and that became more of a conflagration where it was no longer in the wildland and it was a fuel, a wind-driven fire that as we know had the winds not stopped that fire would have likely continued to push into downtown Santa Rosa. People also have learned since that request was made the effects of what it means to actually be in a designated wildland urban interface and there could be a lot of unintended consequences with insurance, with a lot of other issues that come with that. Regardless of all that, we actually just received notification about two hours ago from Cal Fire that they have now publicly released their high fire hazard severity zone maps for public comment of the state responsibility areas. So the city of Santa Rosa is all local responsibility areas. So we typically map our own wildland urban interface fire areas, but oftentimes regardless of whether or not it's our own local responsibility areas, the state will sometimes map high fire severity zones within the local fire, wildland urban interface fire area, gets a little confusing. But I did quickly before this meeting look at the maps that were made public and I do see some changes to their maps. Most noteworthy is that they're red, which would be the highest level of fire risk on their mapping does actually come all the way down now to Highway 12 directly across from the Stonebridge portion of Oakmont. So in between the end of the Stonebridge and Oakmont Drive, what my understanding is is I would suspect that where you see red immediately stop at a city boundary will likely mean that the state will push some of their boundary, their mapping into our city, which could drastically change some of the requirements for some of the residents within our community. So we're kind of waiting to see the first public hearing that will take place for those changes will be in January at the Board of Supervisors. And I can pause there before I go on to the next slide for as any questions. Now, I really appreciate you actually bringing that up, Paul because I saw the tweet from Cal Fire when it went out a couple of hours ago as well. And so I had it queued up to ask you specifically about how it would impact our community wildfire protection plan and if it was gonna make us have to rethink a number of things. I know that the comment period starts on the 16th. And so if you have comments or ideas of what the city should be putting forward, I hope you'll work with the city manager and the mayor to get a letter out to Cal Fire and specifically to the office of the Fire Marshal. Understood. And I will say that the PowerPoint cut off line for the January 10th city council meeting will be, I believe it's the 20th of this month. So in the next six days, I'm gonna try and figure out what I can with the time I have to see what I can incorporate into that council update for you guys. Okay, I'll look to my colleagues to see if they have any questions on this portion of the presentation. Vice mayor. Thank you, chair. I was actually just going to ask you, Paul, once the state draws the map and that we actually are in the red zone, does that come with some funding or is there something that changes or does it mean the onus is on us that we just have to maintain it at a different level because it's in that zone? I'm not as clear on what it means when they've expanded the map. I mean, my hope is that it comes with some support from Cal Fire or some vegetation management, but can you maybe expand on that a little bit for me? Yeah, so it is a difficult one to try and to peel the layers back on. So I'll give you an example. AB 38 is an assembly bill that came out recently that requires properties within the state's very high fire hazard severity zone to essentially get an assessment for the sale of a home. And I'm really simplifying it because it's a pretty complicated topic, but we only had some specific areas that were mapped within our community that met those criteria. So if for example, all of all the sudden Stonebridge now falls into that very high fire severity zone, we, the local agency would be responsible for conducting those inspections. The state does not provide us funding to do those inspections. There's a little bit of a backstory into how that all rolled out, but again, that's a very long drawn out conversation. We've established a fee for those to try and offset some of our costs, but we don't have any other way of absorbing the workload other than just charge a fee for that service. If there are drastic changes to our very high fire severity zone, I don't know, I think for, there would be necessarily any automatic funding for us, but I do see it as an unintended consequences, but almost a benefit where I would have no problem highlighting those changes and the history that we've had within our community when we're seeking grant funding, which in theory should make us more better suited for different funding opportunities. Great, thank you so much. I know that's like my section and that's one of their main concerns. So I'm hopeful that as these maps come out, as that becomes public information that we do our part to kind of explain to the community of what that means to us and what the expectations will be from the city of Santa Rosa and then also for our neighbors. So I appreciate that, thank you. You're welcome. Any other questions? I'm sorry. Just wanted to check. And I apologize, I have to jump off the call for one quick minute. So I'm going to turn it over to the mayor and I'll be back on in a few minutes. So I saw the chair unmute, so that's why I pause for the quick question, but just got a couple more slides to go and then we'll wrap it up for you. So the relationship to climate action to the plan. So there's no secret, our plan fully recognizes and documents climate change and the effects that it is having on wildfires. And our plan is designed to mitigate, again, not just fires, but also do our part to reduce the effects of climate change. We've seen what wildfires are doing to our environment. And yes, fires are supposed to happen. They are a naturally occurring thing. We use fire and we use fire for our first time in our community as an actual fuel treatment project. So not all fires bad, but fire that's consuming structures, that's consuming human made materials is not great. It's not great for us as firefighters and it's not great for our environment, for what it's doing to the ozone. So we've seen since the, we've changed and have been implemented in the plan and the way that we have been, the outreach that we're doing, the education we're doing, we're actually seeing it paying off. And although not in 2022 this last season, but in 2021, we had more fires and burn more acreage in the city limits than we have in the last several decades. Take away the Tubbs Fire, Nuns Fire and Glass Fire, but just fires in general. In 2021, we had multiple fires, 50 acre fire, eight acre fire, five acre fire. But the one thing that we were seeing that we hadn't seen in the past was people's preventative measures that they're taking because they're learning from our projects, they're learning from our education is paying off. We watched the fire on Gernville Road. If you remember, it was one of the pretty big fires we had two years ago, burned about eight acres in the area of Lansing, Gernville Road and had that fuel break not been cut on that field. That fire would have likely pushed into the, not only those fences, but it would have likely pushed into those homes. And it would not have surprised me had that fuel break not been there, had we destroyed anywhere from a couple homes to a dozen homes just based on those conditions. And that's what we saw around our community is defensible space is paying off, fuel management is paying off and even the prescribed fire that we conducted along Old Redwood Highway, that fuel break actually paid off. We ended up with a vegetation fire on that hill, a matter of two months later that actually burned into that prescribed fire. So these efforts are paying off and it's us doing our part to help with climate change. Next slide, please. And so lastly, what I was referring to a little bit earlier in the presentation was the benefits of the plan. The three most notable projects that we have coming forward through grant funding. Our one is a hazard mitigation grant program being funded by FEMA and run through Cal OES is a fuel reduction evacuation routes project where we will be funding fuel treatments along specific routes and roads within our community. Montgomery Drive, Brush Creek Road, Calistoga Road, Los Alivos, a number of different roads around our community that have been designated will be funding fuel treatment along road sides in front of private properties. So we're getting ready to roll out phase one which will opt residents into that program. And then once we have the residents opted in, we'll roll onto phase two which is actually physically doing the work. That project is roughly $2.9 million in total and had a local cost share of 25%, which is coming out of our PGD settlement funds. The second project is a wildfire, I'm sorry, Urban Wildland Urban Interface fuel modification grant. That's about $2.1 million. That project will allow us to do assessments on homes assuming they set the homes are in compliance. It'll allow us to fund home hardening including vent screens and gutter guards on a first come first serve basis around our entire wildland urban interface. So everybody within the wildland interface will be eligible for that grant. And the last one was just awarded to us, sorry, grant one and grant two are both pretty around the same timing or both are gonna be in phase one around the same timing. We hope to have phase ones and people opted in by around I believe May of next year, which would then allow us to submit back to CaliOS and FEMA and then start funding the actual physical work for both projects later next year. The third grant that we've received is through HCD and it's a mitigation grant. We were awarded the full amount of a half a million dollars for that one. Originally it was supposed to be for a Chipper program. However, HCD's determination was that if we were gonna do a Chipper program we had to do a full NEPA review of our entire wildland interface which made it in practical and we didn't wanna spend all the money on an environmental review and only have some change left to do chipping. So we've changed it and that funding will now fund staff to do education as well as outreach on vegetation management, defensible space and the plan itself which will then free up more money within our PG&E settlement money for vegetation management to do more physical work throughout our community. So it's a true benefit to us. Next question, sorry, next question, next slide. And that is it. So that was me who you know I talk a lot sometimes doing my part to try and make this quick since you'll hear a full detailed plan report in a couple of weeks. With that, I will take any last questions before I turn it back over. Are there any questions from the public? I see no hands being raised via Zoom. Great, thank you so much for that presentation. It was great. And we look forward to having you come to the council. Thank you. All right. So we'll be moving along to 4.2 status update on general plan and greenhouse gas emission inventory and presenting that is... Asha, can you help me out? Who's presenting? Yeah, that'll be Amy Lyle. All right, Amy, thank you so much, welcome. Thank you so much. Good afternoon, Mayor Rogers and committee members. I apologize, my internet does not seem to want to work in my office, so I'm hiding in a meeting room. So apologies if my internet is a little bit spotty. But this evening, we wanted to talk to you about our general plan and climate action plan update as well as our greenhouse gas reduction inventory. So I'll be kicking off the presentation and then our great consultants, Tammy Seale and Eli Crispy are on the line will also be helping with the presentation. I should say this afternoon, not this evening. Next slide, please. And thank you, Dina, for sharing the presentation for me. So just as an overview of what we'll talk about tonight is what we are doing with the greenhouse gas reduction strategy, and then we've just completed an inventory. And this is from 2019, so Tammy will walk through that. And then we'll talk about what the rest of the process looks like for our climate action work as part of the general plan and then open it up for questions and discussion. Next slide, please. So I do just want to back up a little bit on where we're at with our update of the climate action plan. So we are updating our climate action plan at the same time as the general plan. So they're going to be two processes into the same. So we are in the process of doing a comprehensive general plan update. So this includes our housing element, safety element, the addition of environmental justice policy, public health policy. And so climate is really woven within all of these subject areas. So we won't have a separate climate action plan. It will all be one in the same. So a lot of these policies can have interactions and synergies together. And we will have programs associated and metrics to be able to report out similar to what you see with our existing climate action plan. And next slide, please. And I will say the other benefit to this process of having both woven together is that for environmental review purposes, it will allow us to incorporate a lot of the inventory and the greenhouse gas reduction strategies into other actions in the general plan. So it's really ideal that both are done together. So, and this will also help us really make sure that we're capitalizing on other areas, other than things that you traditionally see in a climate action plan because greenhouse emissions are really community wide. And so we wanna make sure that we're really looking out to 2050, making sure that we're really capturing what those horizon years are and the reduction efforts are. Next slide, please. And then, so at this point, I'll turn it over to Tammy if she was able to get promoted and I'll let her carry on with the rest of this presentation. Thank you, Amy. I'm happy to see everyone here today. I'm actually going to do a handoff myself to my colleague, Eli Crispy. He's been the lead for our place works team to prepare the GHG inventory and he's gonna take us through the next few slides. Thank you, Tammy. Good afternoon all. I'm Eli Crispy with PlaceWorks. We're going into a little more detail about the greenhouse gas reduction strategy and the greenhouse gas inventory that we've worked with the city to prepare. So the intent of course of the greenhouse gas reduction strategy is to reduce Santa Rosa's greenhouse gas emissions. And in that sense, it is very much an update and kind of the next iteration of the 2012 climate action plan or community climate action plan. And like that document, the greenhouse gas reduction strategy will assess recent and projected future greenhouse gas emissions. It will establish targets for reducing future emissions. And it will include a set of strategies and implementation efforts that will enable the city to meet or exceed its future greenhouse gas reduction targets. Since we do want to tie this in with the Santa Rosa forward process, it is going to the greenhouse gas reduction strategy is also going to take some of the high level greenhouse gas reduction goals and policies that may be in that general plan and bring them forward, carry them forward in greater detail, provide more specificity to help the city implement them. Next slide please. So we have prepared an initial draft of a community wide greenhouse gas inventory for the calendar year 2019. And this inventory is an assessment of Santa Rosa's greenhouse gas emissions from the activities that occur in the community or that can be attributed to the community. So this includes vehicle travel within Santa Rosa and between Santa Rosa and other communities. It includes the electricity and natural gas use within the community, solid waste generation that occurs in Santa Rosa, water use and various other sources. We went with 2019 as a year for this inventory since because of the COVID related shutdowns and shelter in place orders in 2020 from a greenhouse gas emissions perspective that year was something of an out there. We wanted to go with 2019 as a bit more of a regular kind of average year. So it's better for assessing long-term trends. As part of this work, we also updated the 2007 inventory that's in the 2012 cap. The parts of that inventory at least that we can trying to make the methods and the data that is in the 2007 inventory consistent with the approach that we used for the 2019 inventory. That was possible in some places, but not always in others. Next slide, please. So these are the sources of the greenhouse gas emissions that we are assessing in this inventory. This is pretty similar to the sources of emissions in the 2007 inventory. The biggest difference is that we are now adding emissions that are created by the loss of carbon storage and plants, carbon storage in plants and soils that occurs when greenfield development occurs. We're also looking at emissions that are absorbed that is sequestered by urban trees. Current protocols for greenhouse gas inventories require us to include that source and sync of emissions for the past few years. That was not a requirement when the 2007 inventory was prepared. We are also now including emissions that are associated with the smart trains due to the opening of that system. And we are including greenhouse gas emissions from wildfires, controlled burns, and stationary sources that is large industrial facilities as informational items. These are items that are assessed, but they are not included in the total. And I should point out that because there were no wildfires or controlled burns within the city limits of Santa Rosa in 2007 or 2019, at least as far as state records are concerned, you will not see any emissions associated with those activities. Next slide, please. So I mentioned the updates to the 2007 inventory. These are those changes in a little more detail. We have updated what are called the global warming potentials. So this means that we consider the greater impacts on climate change from methane and nitrous oxide, which are other greenhouse gases in a manner that is consistent with the latest and greatest science. We have added in those emissions from land use and sequestration, as I mentioned. We have also changed the methods that are used to calculate greenhouse gas emissions from selected sources. We wanna make those methods more consistent with the current guidance and best practices. At the moment we have not altered or updated the underlying data for a lot of those sources. It's only been changes to the methods themselves. And the 2007 inventory does only assess greenhouse gas emissions for the city limits of Santa Rosa. We have not changed that. Next slide, please. So comparing the 2007 and 2019 greenhouse gas emission results. Under this draft inventory, we have noticed that emissions fell about 27% from 2007 to 2019. Again, these are draft. Those numbers may change if new data becomes available. The 2012 climate action plan includes a target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions 15% below 2007 levels by 2020. And it appears based on the 2019 inventory that the city is on track to achieve that. Since 2007, electricity in Santa Rosa has gotten a lot cleaner in large part because of Sonoma Clean Power. Buildings are generally more energy efficient than they used to be. Those have helped to reduce emissions quite considerably. Cars have gotten more fuel efficient as well that has played a role in some of the changes in greenhouse gas emissions. There are also some other changes in emissions sources that may be linked either to behavioral change or to changes in underlying methods. Unfortunately, we can't really say for share at this moment. Next slide, please. So here are the 2007 and 2019 emissions side by side. You can see that the proportion of greenhouse gas emissions for each of the sources remains relatively consistent. The overall level of emissions declines but the general amount of each total taken up by each source is fairly similar across both years. Transportation was the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in both 2007 and 2019, followed by energy use in residential and non-residential buildings. Then comes off-road equipment, which is construction equipment, landscaping equipment, and other similar smaller scale devices that aren't used for transportation. That's then followed by solid waste and then various other sources. Next slide, please. In the 2019 inventory, we have also estimated emissions for the planning area. When we refer to the planning area, we're speaking about areas that are outside of the city limits but are still covered by the general plan. So this is the sphere of influence, urban growth boundary, and a few other areas outside of the adopted city limits. Taking into account the land uses, the population, and the jobs that are in the planning area outside of the city limits, we have effectively scaled up Santa Rosa's greenhouse gas emissions to account for that additional area. As you can see, adding in the planning area that is located outside of the city limits adds about 60,000 metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions. We've done this to be consistent with the area that is being assessed in the general plan, and this will also help to make the environmental review for the general plan more consistent with the greenhouse gas reduction strategy. Next slide, please. So the greenhouse gas inventory draft is complete. We'll be working to revise that where we can, but we have some initial numbers. A climate change vulnerability assessment is also complete. That is an analysis of how climate change and associated hazards may harm people, buildings, infrastructure, and other components of the community. Over the next few months, place works will be working with city staff to project greenhouse gas emissions for future years to develop updated greenhouse gas reduction targets that are consistent with community values and goals, as well as recent changes to state law. We'll also be looking at greenhouse gas reduction benefits from existing strategies in the 2012 cap and in Santa Rosa's other existing efforts. After that, we will consider any new strategies that make sense. We'll look at how effective they might be in reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the hope of demonstrating a clear and consistent path towards achieving future targets. And there are also opportunities for members of the subcommittee and others to be involved in the project at several of these milestones. Those are the points indicated with an asterisk on this slide. Next slide, please. And then in addition to those upcoming steps of the greenhouse gas reduction strategy, we will also be working to integrate the goals and strategies that are ultimately developed for the greenhouse gas reduction strategy into all applicable elements of the general plan. Next slide, please. And that concludes the presentation. And we'd be happy to answer any questions. Thank you so much for that presentation. Vice Mayor McDonald, do you have any questions? I don't, thank you so much for the presentation. All right, so I do have a question. So let's get to hear all the reasons why the greenhouse gas emissions have declined. And I know per the presentation you're gonna get to this in spring, summer of 2023. But transportation seems to be the largest percentage. So what innovative ideas have we seen in other jurisdictions that we're even thinking about maybe bringing to Santa Rosa? And then are we on track to do so? Or what are the barriers for implementation of these projects, whether they're fiscal barriers or infrastructure, what are some of the barriers? Or if you have any ideas, you may not even have them yet because we haven't got there. Well, it is still pretty early in the process. So I wouldn't want to rule anything out or to say definitively that we're moving in one direction or another. I will say generally, we do wanna make sure that any strategies we're proposing for the greenhouse gas reduction efforts are consistent with the general plan. And that doesn't mean being consistent with whatever land use preferred scenario emerges from that process. But generally speaking, when we look at transportation-related emissions, we wanna look at options to both reduce the vehicle miles traveled as well as to generally, if you will, green vehicles that are on the road. So I think it will be a combination of finding ways to make people less dependent on private cars. So looking at ways to improve walking, biking, public transit that can include behavioral changes. It can include infrastructure improvements, changes to land use, a number of other things. And then also looking at ways to make electric vehicles more affordable, more viable to increase adoption rate. And our hope is that with both the improvements to the electric vehicle side and with making private vehicle ownership less of a necessity, we can get those transportation emissions down pretty substantially. That was a perfect answer. Thank you so much for that. And I look forward to hearing more in the spring, in the summer about what it is that our plan is. Thank you very much for the presentation. Thank you all for being here. And let's see if we have any comments from the public. Mayor Rogers, it does look like we have a hand raised via Zoom, Mr. Bertelbaugh. Perfect. Please give them speaking permissions. Steve, go ahead. Yes. Thank you, Chair Rogers and Steve Bertelbaugh for the Transportation Land Use Coalition. We look at reducing VMT as a major issue because shifting simply to electric vehicles doesn't solve the problem. It solves about half of the problem of driving but not the other half. And the access to transit and the availability or the reduction of food deserts, I think our two issues that we really need to focus on are we in conversation with city bus as to its plans and do we have any goals in terms of making sure that everybody's within walking distance of groceries? And that's it for me. Thank you. Thank you for that comment. So I don't have the specifics in front of me but I do know that we're working with the city bus to get our fleet to be more all-electric. So we are actually in the process of that which is really exciting. And then I forgot the other question. I didn't jot it down. Tasha, do you remember what it was? No, okay. So hopefully that answered your question, Steve. But you can always email us and we'll be happy to get that information out to you but we are currently working on electrifying our fleet and also working on making this city more walkable, imbicable and not just walkable, imbicable but so it can be safely walkable, imbicable. It's very important to the council and it's one of our goals. So thank you very much for the presentation and thank you guys for being here. Thank you so much and congratulations to you and the vice mayor. Thank you. We will now go to item five, future agenda items. Our list of future agenda items is attached to today's meeting agenda and if you have any questions, I'd be happy to answer them. If not, I have nothing else. I see no hands raised and vice mayor McDonald, do you have any questions about future agenda items or anything you would like to see on a future agenda? No, I think this looks good to me, the bus plan update. And I would think the only thing around that is that might be another indicator to us of when the new buses are going to be coming. I know we have some more of them and I'm sure that's part of the bus plan update. And then in that, if there's anything specifically around the infrastructure on the charging stations and what our plans are around that as well. Great. All right, well, seeing nothing else, we will now adjourn the meeting. Thank you all for being present. Before we adjourn, can we open up for public comment on future agenda items? Oh, yes, we can do that, Dina. Thank you. I didn't see any hands raised. We just make the announcement. Okay, there we go. Jacob, it looks like you have a comment. Hello again, I'll just reiterate what I said at the beginning of the meeting and hoping that you guys will be in conversation with me as I will send all the information to Mayor Rogers, which I presented earlier about the possibility of a divestment resolution presented to the city council centered around the call for CalPERS to divest any current holdings in the fossil fuel industry. I look forward to getting that email. Thank you, Jacob. Are there any other public comments? All right, seeing none. Thank you all for being here and we will now adjourn the meeting. Thank you, Mayor Rogers. Thank you and congratulations to both of you.