 This is Portland Sustainability Series, third season of this series. My name is Meg Ray, I'm the Science and Technology Librarian here at the Library, and I partner with Jessica Burton, the Executive Director of the Southern Maine Conservation Collaborative, since this year, it sure is, to bring this series to you. So we meet on the 4th Wednesday of every month, except next month we're going to take a break because it's Christmas week. So we want to see you again on January 23rd. We're going to be showing Maine Coast Harvest. It's a series of documentary films on Maine's aquaculture industry. So thank you for being here. After the presentation, there will be a Q&A, and I'd just like to remind everyone that the Q stands for Question on Statement, and to please be respectful of our audience members. Jessica's going to introduce our speaker. I'm Jess Burton with the Southern Maine Conservation Collaborative. We are an organization that provides a space for land and water conservation organizations to work together for greater impact. We have 19 member organizations, and we're all focused on happening into the future in a better way. So I am thrilled tonight to be here for this event to listen and to be able to introduce Troy Moon, the Sustainability Coordinator for the City of Portland. Troy started with the city in 1997 in public works. During that time, he worked on a number of different projects including island services, open space and solid waste, and throughout all of it, sustainability has always been really important to him. So in 2016, he joined the executive department and started as the Sustainability Coordinator and is going to tonight present this talk, which I understand is the first time, first of many opportunities to hear what this great work is, and thank you. So thanks, Jess, and it's really great to be here, and thanks to everybody for coming out. Really pleased to see so many people join us tonight. So basically today I want to focus on some of the impacts that we're seeing from climate change some of the things that the city has been doing over the last number of years and then also think about what we might be doing in the future. Where you probably might have noticed in the paper there were just beginning our climate action planning process and so this is kind of like the introductory meeting for that just to get everyone introduced to what we'll be doing in the next 18 months. Oops, let's see here. There we go. First thing I want to mention is a little bit about our office. So the sustainability office in City Hall is relatively new. When John Jennings became city manager about three years ago, he really thought it would be really important to have a sustainability office and he invited me up to be the sustainability coordinator. As Jess mentioned, I've been working with the city since the late 90s and throughout that time I've been really involved with a lot of different sustainability projects, from solid waste to working in the parks and open spaces, but really focused on environmental issues. So I was really pleased to be up in City Hall managing a lot of interesting projects that John particularly has been really supportive of. And just recently we were able to add a second person to our office, Ashley Krulik, who's say hi Ashley. So we're really pleased to have another person in our office. But we want to get started. Climate change has certainly been on everybody's mind over particularly since the release of the latest climate assessment. And so it's certainly something that we've been thinking about in the city for a while. We've kind of collaborated with some of the local organizations doing work and we really appreciate the work that the Portland Society for Architecture has been a real great leader in this area for the last number of years thinking about how climate change will impact the city. But we're seeing some impacts already. Climate change, it didn't just start yesterday. You can see that over the past decades we've seen some incremental rise in sea level at the Portland Tide Gate. But over the past decades it's been kind of modest. Over this time span it added up to about eight inches. So people might say, well that's not so bad, eight inches. We'll have wet feet when we go to U-Haul once in a while or something. But unfortunately it's not going to stay that way. So all the science that we've seen projects that sea level rise is going to start happening a lot more quickly than it has over the past decades. Since 2000 records show that the pace has gone up three centimeters and in fact in the northeast it's going to be rising a lot more quickly. So NOAA did a big study and released it in 2017 and really upgraded the projections of what we see sea level rise being over the next hundred years. And it's pretty significant. So what's it mean for Portland? As part of our Bayside Adapts project that we did last year kind of a neighborhood scale adaptation project, we commissioned some scientists to take the latest data, apply it to Portland, particularly Bayside and really give us an idea of what we need to expect for sea level rise in that neighborhood and for Portland as a whole. And so by 2050 on the intermediate scale, which at this point I don't think anyone puts any credence in the lower estimates that sea level rise is increasing rapidly so I think the lower level ones are pretty much dismissed at this point. But the intermediate projection calls for one and a half feet of sea level rise that we need to definitely be expecting, but potentially up to three and a half feet of sea level rise by 2050, which is crazy. But by 2100 we're talking much higher. We can definitely expect up to four feet, but on the extreme scale, which unfortunately more and more people are thinking might be the reality, 10 plus feet of sea level rise. So that's pretty significant. And so just for example, just to put some of those numbers onto a map of Portland, you can see the green is the intermediate scenario and it doesn't seem that bad. But as you look at the blue, which is the highest scenario in the red, which would be the extreme scenario, the 10 plus feet, you can see that there's a pretty substantial impact on the city of Portland. In fact, if you overlay the projections that NOAA has just released onto old maps of the city, you can kind of see the dark purple is where the original geography of the city was that. The Deering Oaks Pond was tidal and people could sail boats into the back cove. But over time we've filled in different parts of the city. Warf Street used to be the waterfront, but now commercial streets are waterfront and certainly East and West Bayside didn't exist until after 1866 when the Great Fire caused a lot of debris that needed to be disposed of somewhere. But as sea level rises and the water comes up, maybe potentially we kind of see the original coastline recreated. So that's something to think about. And we certainly all have experienced the impacts in the last several years. Seems like there's big storms that knock out power pretty often. I remember being a kid, power didn't go out all that often. When it did, usually it was on pretty quickly, but now we're seeing storms that are kind of more powerful and impacting people, bringing down the power. People are without power for a longer period of time. There's more intense rainfall, which we can expect to get worse. We all may remember a couple of years ago, in September of 2015, there was a great big deluge. We had almost six inches of rain in just a matter of a couple of hours. You had cars floating past Whole Foods. That was kind of the wake-up call. I think that really kind of got people's attention, that we really needed to start taking some action. In fact, right after that, the city commissioned the Bayside ADAPT study. That was a great wake-up call. Unfortunately, other communities had wake-up calls like Hurricane Sandy or Superstorm Sandy, which was devastating. Ours was luckily not quite so significant and gave us a chance to really get going. But there's definitely changes happening. We now have protocols in the city to barricade off a number of streets in Bayside. Every time there's an astronomical high tide or storm tide. So it's good to the point now, or even the police are getting a little whimsical reminders of the people really need to pay attention to the barricades, which come up pretty regularly now. In fact, here we have a picture from yesterday. One of my colleagues was down on Commercial Street. This was a high tide yesterday down by Chandler's Wharf. Again, it's happening all of the time. It's not just getting our feet wet or having some inconvenience by not being able to travel down some streets. The Gulf of Maine is changing rapidly. It's warming faster than 99% of all water bodies on Earth. We're seeing fishing stocks declining. The shrimp seasons canceled again this year. The marine industry is really important to the city and to the whole region. So that's something we really need to think about as we move forward. Of course, over the weekend we saw the fourth National Climate Assessment released. I haven't had a chance to read all of it yet, but I've certainly thumbed through part of it, particularly the part that affects the northeast. Again, it pointed out that the Gulf of Maine is warming rapidly. The northeast in general is warming faster than most parts of the country. Regardless of scenario, it indicates that we will probably see a 3.6 degree Fahrenheit rise in the average temperature here in Maine by 2050. They also point out that vital infrastructure is very vulnerable to sea level rise, whether it be roads and bridges and train tracks or electrical infrastructure. You just have to look across the bridge and you see a major substation in South Portland is surrounded by sea water. That's pretty vulnerable. Water treatment plants and there's big oil tanks right on the water. Those are a big concern. Also, we need to think about, in terms of equity, the people who are most vulnerable to impacts of sea level rise are the people who are at least able to deal with that, whether it be poor people or elderly folks or people who just arrived in the city or in the community. As we move forward, think about how we're going to react to climate change. We really, really need to think about how we're going to include equity to make sure that we're not leaving anyone behind. The city has been thinking about this for quite some time and so we've done a number of projects. I'm going to try to run through some of the interesting ones that we've been working on for the past number of years. What's really great about working in the city, there are a lot of people, a lot of staff members, departments in the city who have found that really sustainability and environmental ethics are really ingrained in most of our operations, which is really great to see. We're going to touch on a few things. One area, of course, that's going to be very significant is energy. You've probably read in the paper we're working on some solar projects. Actually, I'll start with LED streetlights, sorry. We've begun working on our LED streetlight program, which is just about done. You can see a map of all the different streetlights there across the city. There's about 5,200 streetlights that we've switched out over the past year. We were really trying to be really careful about picking fixtures. We picked some that were compliant with international dark sky standards to prevent light pollution. They're also very, very energy efficient. The projects actually reduce the city's overall electrical consumption by 8%. Already, which is pretty cool. Energy efficiency certainly is key to any sustainable program. Electricity, you're not burning in the first place. It's more environmentally sound than any that you're producing. We're really excited about the big reduction in electricity. It actually also saved the city about a million dollars a year, which we were also very excited about. We were the first city in the main to undertake this type of project. Moving on to solar projects. Over the past year, we've installed a number of solar projects. This is kind of a cool, smaller one. All of the golf carts at Riverside Golf Course are now 100% powered by the sun, which is cool. We have installed the landfill solar project, which is a 1 megawatt array. It will produce about as much electricity as City Hall and Merrill Auditorium use on any given year, so it's kind of close. It's basically about 1.2 million kilowatt hours a year. Also, we have a third solar project that we undertook this year at the Portland Jet Port, which is about half the size of the landfill solar. It's actually the largest roof-mounted solar array in the state right now, so we're really pleased about that as well. We also have an energy benchmarking ordinance. You probably saw on the paper that it's kind of stalled at the moment, but it's something that actually is really significant. We want to make sure that the large properties in the city are really thinking about how they're using energy and water in their buildings. Basically, if you're not measuring things, you're probably not keeping track and you're not able to reduce your use. The ordinance would be to require any building with 20,000 square feet or more to benchmark their energy use and report to the city. That would allow us to be able to help encourage them to be more energy efficient or direct programs at them that can help them reduce their energy consumption or reduce their emissions and save money. We're working closely with the CMP to get that off the ground. Waste reduction and recycling is actually kind of near and dear to my heart. That's kind of how I started my career in public works working on the recycling program. It's something that Portland residents have done a really great job with over the years. When I first started working for the city, we used to dispose of about 23,000 tons of trash every year. We implemented the curbside recycling and the pay-as-you-throw trash program in 1999, and we've seen some pretty significant results. If you follow the blue lines here on the graph, you'll note that we've reduced our disposal rates by about 60%, which is really pleased that Portland has been able to take that on. So recycling went from under 1,000 tons a year to pretty close to 6,000 tons a year now. So the trajectory is on the whole going in the right direction for waste and recycling. Since I've been around a long time, I have some old textures that I like to show off. This is what trash used to look like 20 years ago in Portland. It was just basically people put out whatever they had and dumped it on the curb. We had a lot of issues with litter and just being pretty unsightly. We had a program also called Heavy Item Pickup. Some people may remember that. It was kind of like a trash fair where people would put whatever stuff they had on the curb. Every council district had a week, and it took supposedly everyone had a week, but it always took two months to finish that project. So it wasn't a really great use of city resources, and also it encouraged a lot of waste. So last year we rolled out recycling carts to all of the participants in recycling here in Portland. Here's a picture of when they showed up. We had about 22,000 of them stashed out near the airport, getting ready to be passed out. But we're really pleased that program's gone really, really well in terms of reducing litter. If you remember from the little blue tubs, every time there's a windy day, your tub would be all over the street instead of in the back of the truck. So the carts have really done a great job of taking care of that. In fact, before the carts came out, we did a study with USM, and we determined that over a ton of litter was coming out of the blue tubs every week. So it was really becoming a huge problem. So the carts have solved that, which we're pleased with. And you're also familiar with our green packaging ordinances. So if you go to Hannaford and you forgot your bag, you have to pay five cents to get a new shopping bag. And we've also banned polystyrene containers like coffee cups or takeout trays. And really the point of doing that was water quality was huge. A lot of the projects we do in Portland are related to keeping trash and litter out of Casco Bay, and certainly the green packaging, both the polystyrene bin and the bag were designed to keep litter out of the bag. Both of them have been really successful. Back when the program first started, Hannaford mentioned in the press that we're seeing 80% of their customers bringing in reusable bags, which I hope it stayed that high. People might have slipped a little bit, but still. And for me, just having the cashier ask people if they wanted a bag rather than just stuffing things into it was a big win. So we're really good, really pleased with how that's going. This is, we call it the Gorilla Cage. It's out by Capistic Pond. But this is a big outfall for stormwater. And so we can see litter from recycling, dog waste bags, et cetera. Anything that goes in the street eventually goes into the catch basin, which eventually goes into a local body of water. And so here's an example of what happened, you know, some of the things that get caught in the grates. And, you know, if it didn't have a grate, you certainly would have just gone right out into the water. So when we were showing, you know, folks on the green packaging task force and certainly the city councilors, this picture really helped emphasize, you know, what the issue was that we were trying to address. So stormwater, I mentioned stormwater is a huge issue for us. And we're really trying to improve, you know, both stormwater and wastewater. This is a picture of a large conduit that was installed in the Bat Cove. You may remember a few years ago, we had closed the street for the most of a year. And we put in a two million gallon storage conduit. There's going to be five of these, excuse me, in the city before we're done. But they basically catch the first inch of rain, which is the most polluted of any storm, and capture it and store it in these containers. And then once the storm subsides, it can go to the water treatment plant and be treated before it's discharged into the bay. And so we have a lot of, you know, we've been working on reducing the number of combined sewer overflows and go down to about 30, which is less than half of what we had originally. But basically in this type of old system, a lot of old cities have this. All the stormwater goes into the same pipe as the sewer. And then a really heavy rain event overflows and just discharges directly into the water body. So this is what we're trying to get rid of. We're not just doing pipes though, we're also doing rain gardens. You might notice that there's a Bat Cove that's kind of the largest rain garden. But we're deploying these around the city. On the left-hand side, that's off of Clifton Street. But you can kind of see how it works. All the water just sort of goes down into the pond area and infiltrates into the ground, as opposed to just flowing off into the water bodies. Landcare. Our parks department does a really great job of taking care of the parks and open spaces. I'm really, really impressed with what the folks at the golf course are doing. Gene Perotti is a superintendent out there. And since we've been talking about reducing pesticides, he's really taken it to heart. He's reduced his pesticide use by over 60%. So he's created a system where they only need to apply pesticides on the greens and just in a limited amount on some of the fairways only as needed. But he's also jumped in with both feet for his beehives all over the course. And he's got boxes for birds. They're working on being certified Audubon facility. So that's off to Gene. He's doing a great job out there. As you probably know, we have a ban on synthetic pesticides. It goes into effect for private property on January 1st. It's already in effect for city property. But basically it says you can't use any synthetic pesticides on your property. We're really promoting organic landcare practices. And we'll be doing a lot of work over the next, you know, later this, you know, basically starting the first of the year, we'll really be getting the message out for folks to think about how to do their lawn, you know, in a more environmentally sustainable manner starting this spring. We've already talked to the number of the, you know, the lawn care companies and getting them on board. But this is a, it'll be a nice change. Certainly South Portland already has this ordinance as well. So it need to be kind of a critical mass around this area. Another thing that's really cool in our parks department is promoting urban, you know, urban meadows and wildlife habitat. And this is kind of the most obvious one. If you're on Washington Ave, looking up towards East End School, you'll see, you know, the slope there moving up towards the school. We have the Mountain Joy Orchard, which is an urban apple orchard that's run entirely by volunteers who do an amazing job of keeping it up. And we have the Wildflower Meadow on the left there that's been strewn with plants, mostly native plants that are really friendly for pollinator habitat. And then we, of course, have the Community Garden, the North Street Community Garden. So it's really cool. And I'm really excited about this, it's really taken off. I think at this point, you know, if someone decided they wanted to mow the, mow the hill, I think people would be outraged. We've really kind of taken, taken to that. And they were, we've adopted the meadow habitat in other parts of the city too, like Franklin Street, the median. That only, that only gets mowed occasionally just to allow, so you get more habitat. And mobility, of course, you've probably noticed, we have the new bike lane on a, on Park Avenue. It's a pilot program that's seeing how that's going to work out for people. We're also looking at different ways to promote mobility with technology. So we have on Forest Avenue, we have some smart traffic signals. They're the first adaptive traffic signals installed in the state. So basically, they detect traffic from very far away, and then they react in real time to the, to the conditions when vehicles approach. They, and they have an algorithm that makes the light cycle in the most efficient manner possible that will reduce wait times. We've seen, so far they're deployed at Morals Corner. We've seen wait times at the lights reduced by 20%. And we're currently, as we speak, actually installing the, some additional, additional units on Forest Avenue. Basically, everything from down by the CVS Plaza up, back up to Morals Corner. Well, all those signals will be, will be the smart signals, and they'll all be able to communicate with each other. So we're really hoping that we'll see some much more efficient traffic on Forest Avenue and, excuse me, why that's important from a sustainability perspective. Cars that aren't sitting at the lights, idling are certainly not putting out as much greenhouse gas emissions. And they're not, you know, polluting the air around the neighborhood. So we're really excited about that. And we're also working on autonomous vehicles. Commercial Street, if you've ever been down there on a sunny summer day, which I'm sure you all have, it's cramped. There's lots of cars, there's buses and trucks, a lot of conflicting uses on Commercial Street with the heavy marine industry and everything else going on. So we need to figure out a way to get fewer cars on Commercial Street, encourage people to, you know, take alternative forms of transportation or, or just walk. But also, so we're imagining right now we're working with a company called INRICS. It's a technology company that works in the, in the transportation sector. We're mapping the, mapping all of the regulations on, on this quarter. Basically, Forever Parkway on Commercial Street and then up Franklin Street. So all the signs, all those lines, stripes, all the, all the, you know, the written rules about how vehicles operate are basically creating a, creating a data set that future autonomous shuttle will be able to reference. And so we're imagining, you know, maybe the next couple of years, I'm doing an RFP for an autonomous shuttle that would be able to, to move between remote parking lots, maybe, you know, the, so maybe start at the Transportation Center at Thompson's Point, move down to like Angelo's Acre, which is kind of right at the end of High Street and over to, over to the Casco Baylines and up Franklin Street. So encourage people rather than drive their cars down into Commercial Street to take this shuttle. And one thing that makes it more important is that, you know, we have a lot of companies, you know, three, three firms starting, opening office buildings on the east end of Commercial Street, bringing maybe 2,000 new employees to the waterfront in the next year. So, so thinking about different ways to get people in and out of Commercial Street without taking cars is definitely a topic we're thinking a lot about. And, you know, bike routes and byways are really, you know, you've seen more and more bike lanes around the city, and we're kind of signing off particularly, you know, good routes through neighborhoods that may be parallel, some of the busier streets, just to create ways that people can get around the city more effectively. And we're getting ready for bike share. We have a bike share ordinance in place. Several bike share companies that are interested, I think it's just a matter of time before we see bike share here in the city. And certainly our planning department is, I think they're a really progressive group of folks. We just did our comprehensive plan last year that really, they did a great job of having a lot of public engagement. They met with people, you know, their philosophy really was go to the people rather than require people to come to them to provide input on the master plan. And I really like their, kind of the mission statement was, you know, they were dealing with, you know, Portland's equitable and sustainable, dynamic, secure, authentic and connected. And I think as we move into our climate action plan, I really want to take a page from the work the planning department did on the comprehensive plan and really take that lesson forward. As we start thinking about climate action, this is a quick look back to the history we've done. So the city did its first greenhouse gas inventory back in 2001, and that was my first kind of sustainable project. It was during the first greenhouse gas inventory. We updated that in 2005. In 2009, we had kind of a green ribbon committee that issued the sustainable Portland report. And in 2011, we proclaimed the Council made a proclamation to support planning for sea level rise. So there's been some time in between, but we're really kind of now kicking things into high gear for our climate action planning process. Last year, the city council adopted some pretty significant goals. They decided that the city should operate on 100% clean energy by 2040. And they adopted a goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions 80% by 2050. So these are pretty significant goals. And we're going to have a lot of work to do to figure out how to get there. So just for instance, in 2006, we had 2005, we were just as just for the city as the city operation is not for the community as a whole. We had, we were emitted about 26,000 tons of CO2 equivalent. Over the intervening years, we've managed to get that down to 17,229, which is, again, 34% reduction. I'd like to say that it was because we were all doing awesome things, but a lot of it became, a lot of it's because we switched all of the city buildings from oil to natural gas, which is a great step. It certainly reduced emissions a great deal. And also the grid in New England is cleaned up immensely. So that accounts for, we've done some great steps in making buildings more efficient, but really most of the savings came from the fuel switch and from the grid being cleaner. But just for instance, most of our, most of our emissions come from 34% from electricity, 48% is from buildings, heating buildings, and 17% from driving vehicles. As you see now in 2016, natural gas is the largest component of our emissions electricity, followed by electricity, which is 34%. So basically, for the city operations, buildings is really our big deal. But what does 80% reduction look like? Just to give a little context, so you can see that we have a graph here, 17,000 tons of CO2 equivalent, and then we have to get, if we want to meet the 80% inside of our city government, we have to get that down to 3400 tons. So that's a big jump. And so on the community scale, we'll be updating our community greenhouse gas emission during the climate action planning process, but I'm sure we're going to see a similar kind of large gap of like we need to move from huge to almost nothing by 2050. So when the council wanted to make, you know, they wanted to commit to large reductions, it became clear we needed to have a really good plan. And I have a great colleague on the other side of the river, Julie Rosenbach, and we were talking and we thought it would be much more effective if we worked together on a climate action plan for both Portland and South Portland. And our city managers and the city councils both thought that was a great idea. And so we're starting the process of getting that off the ground right now. So we did an RFP for some consulting help. We had amazing response. We had, you know, we had firms from all over the world, really top-notch consulting firms applied to partner with us to do this project. We ended up picking kind of a group led by a company called Linaean Solutions who has offices here in Portland and also in Cambridge. And they partnered with Kim Lundgren Associates, which is another Boston-based company. Integral Group, which is, they do outstanding work on energy issues. They developed the Cambridge Mass Issues Net Zero Energy Plan. Wooden and Curran, which is a good-sized engineering company that they do a ton of work in Portland. They know Portland infrastructure better than anybody, so they're really well positioned to help us think about how to move forward. And also Carl Epic, who's a planner who's worked in Portland for many, many years in the transportation sector. So we're really excited about this consulting team. And we're just finally in the contract with them and we'll have that signed shortly, I'm sure, and we'll get started. But what's really important as we think about this Climate Action Plan is we talked a little bit about all the doomy and gloomy things. We're going to have sea level rise and, you know, the oceans are warming and we're having some problems there. But this is really an opportunity for us to act now. Because how we respond now will impact how bad things get to be in the future. It's not like if we don't do it by exudate, you know, we have to stop doing things. It's like, it's a continuum. We have a choice. The sooner we take action, of course, the less dire outcomes will be in the future. But we have an opportunity to kind of imagine what we want our future to be in Portland and South Portland. And that's kind of how we want to approach the Climate Action Planning processes. What do we want our community to look like? You know, certainly we're going to have challenges. We'll have to address sea level rise. And, you know, looking back to the Bayside Adapts Project, we asked, we had a design challenge. We asked some of the firms here in Portland to imagine what Portland might look like, what Bayside might look like by 2100. And people brought some really, really creative ideas for it. How do we adapt to the impacts of climate change but, you know, make the community vibrant? So here's an example of one of the designs, one of the firms submitted it as part of the challenge. You know, a tide gate across Bat Cove but also doubled as recreational facilities so people could paddle in the Bat Cove or they could, you know, run the rapids as the tide left the Bat Cove. So I think it's an opportunity for us all to be really creative to think about, you know, how do we, you know, we have a great city, a great quality of life. How do we maintain that? How do we make it even better? Maybe even as we move forward. And there's definitely things that everyone in the room can do. We all can do to, you know, bring that future about. And certainly one of the most important things we can do is, you know, talk about how climate change is going to affect the things that you care about because it is going to affect pretty much, you know, if you have a hobby, it's going to affect it. If you have an interest, it's going to affect it. If you like birds, you know, you're going to see different bird species or if you're a gardener, you maybe need to grow different plants. Or, you know, this really has impacts to pretty much every part of, you know, the ecosystem. So there's probably something that somebody cares about that's going to be affected. So let's talk about that. Let's make climate change something that, you know, it's a topic of conversation, you know, regularly. And certainly we want you to participate in the climate action planning process that will be getting started soon. So stay tuned to the city website and to our Facebook page and Instagram. So we encourage you to sign up for those. And I think also it's important to get involved with community organizations that are doing great work. I mentioned the Mountain Joy Community Orchard. This is like all volunteer groups and they, you know, they take care of the orchard and they do a marvel's job and, you know, it's a great amenity. There's like any number of different groups that people can involve with to build the community, you know, a connected community is a resilient community. So if people know their neighbors, they know, you know, other people across the street or doubt, you know, other people in the city who share their interests, it helps knit the community together. So whether you're interested in, you know, the bay with friends of Casco Bay or your neighborhood association or the friends of one of the parks, just I think it's a promote community involvement engagement is I think it's a really important part of our effort. And with that, I guess I'll wrap up my talk and certainly appreciate your attention and happy to answer any questions you might have. Yeah. I have two questions. So Tom, what is it about ground up? Have you listed it as a pesticide but I think it's actually an herbicide? Yeah, I know we kind of use it interchangeably. So the ordinance we passed prohibits herbicide. We defined it as herbicides and pesticides as, yeah, so. Can you explain why our waters are rising and even up more than other areas? Well, I mean, I'm not sure. I mean, I'm not sure we all know entirely. I certainly don't know all the answers to that. But the data is certainly showing that. I'm not sure, you know, I'm not sure. Troy, how will citizens be invited to participate in the plant action plan? That's a great question, Alan. So, you know, again, we're going to be doing announcements on the website and I'm sure press releases, Facebook page. Again, our goal is to get to be out in the community. I'm sure we'll have some more organized meetings, but we're kind of wanting to go where people are too. So I think you'll see tabling and, you know, visiting people's meetings that are happening anyway. If there's a group that wants us to go talk to them, we're going to do that. So it's going to kind of open invitation to participate. You know, reach out to us and say, hey, we want you to come talk to our group. We'll be happy to do that. Yes. What about municipal Wi-Fi? Municipal Wi-Fi. So we have actually have a small foray into it. If you were over here in Minewood Square, we have public Wi-Fi available there. And also in Tommy's Park and Post Office Park, which is down in the old port. So it's kind of a pilot project. So it's been going pretty well. I think maybe we'll do a few more locations. So I'm not sure we'll do it city-wide. There's a lot of changes coming up in the telecommunication industry. I think you'll see 5G really soon, next several years. So I'm not sure Wi-Fi is like, they're going to be the best investment over the next number of years, but we definitely want to do some of it and kind of in key locations where it will be most impactful. Heather. First of all, thank you. I think it's really great that Portland is making this such a strong initiative. I'm really proud of that. And that we're the first city in the whole state of Maine. To answer this woman's question, I'm a research scientist. And I strongly recommend to you that you check out the section of the Released Climate Report that Andrew Pershing at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute, as well as other research scientists here in the Gulf of Maine have contributed to that will probably help you understand how we're trying to answer that kind of really complex question. And now my question for you. I'm always looking at the root cause of greater problems. And one of them I see is in any big city, especially one that's really growing and attracting people here for jobs and also facing space problems and housing and now climate, it seems to me that the root cause is really lack of integrated transportation infrastructure to actually reduce the overall bigger problem, which is too many cars and too many people, getting them off the road. But I see less, I see the metro working, I see less people using that transportation resource. Are there any integrated initiatives with the city to partner with Metro and try to make things come together a little bit more for the transportation puzzle? So I think it's a great point. I think the answer is yes. We've certainly seen, one of the things I really like is the fact that in the school department now all the high school students get a metro pass instead of a yellow school bus. So to me that seems, it's creating the transit rider of the future, getting people accustomed to riding, if you ride bus when you're younger, you're more apt to want to ride the bus in the future. So that's a great step in the right direction. But again, I mentioned before that we're getting more and more activity on the peninsula. So it's kind of in its nascent forms, but I think we're looking at different partnerships with Metro and other agencies to try to make that more integrated and to promote more alternatives. So I'd say we're in the early stages, but definitely we're thinking in that direction. Sir. I attended a meeting here last month at the Press Herald put on regarding commercial real estate. Very enthusiastic about the prospects for each base site. I used to ask the question, who's thinking about climate change here? With a 10 foot rise, the building now is going to float away. And no one had thought about it. They said, oh, somebody in the city is going to be getting back on us on that. So it's really kind of shocking to me that this kind of money, like the Wex building, is not sustained in the city. Yeah, it's certainly a big question. And I think as we move forward, developers need to think about that as well as the city. It's a tough question. And people need to start thinking about it. Definitely need to start thinking about it. But shouldn't the planning office step in here and say you can't do it? Well, I guess it's not quite that easy. But it's a great question. I don't have a great answer for you right now. Yeah, John. Other than Portland and South Portland, are you aware of any other similar efforts among other towns and cities in the Portland area? As far as, in terms of developing climate action plans, I think we're the ones doing it at the moment. In fact, I can't find any examples of other cities collaborating on a climate action plan. So that's kind of cool. But I know a lot of our neighboring communities are looking at it. They'll be watching carefully. And the reason we wanted to do it together is to build some regional relevance. A lot of the things we're going to need to do are going to be similar or the same. There'll be definitely some different things and communities are a little bit different. But there's a lot of overlap. And if we can start creating some models for regional action, I think that's going to have a greater outcome than cities just doing it on their own. Yes. You go on. To go back to the transportation question, what is the argument in favor of doing the autonomous vehicles on that corridor as opposed to, say, hiring drivers to drive in electric vehicles? Yeah. I mean, I think partly it's... I think the industry in general is moving towards more autonomy. I think we'll see in the future we're going to see more autonomous vehicles, hopefully electric. But certainly that could be an outcome. Maybe there's an intermediate step of shuttles with drivers. So that's a possibility. My question is, you have these pretty ambitious goals, which I applaud for the 2015 production of greenhouse gas emissions. When I'm looking at your pie chart, and then almost what you've been almost having is coming from the heating buildings, how is... any of the insight into what the city's planning to do there? Are we talking about, like, enormous retrofits of insulation that would provide pumps for greenhouse gas emissions? So we don't know entirely yet. Certainly energy efficiency is going to be essential. But we have, you know, it's not just the city buildings that have this problem. Portland has very old building stock in general, so it's going to be harder than in cities with newer building stocks. So definitely looking at all the options that we have, you know, insulating where we can, adding heat pumps. In fact, we just put heat pumps in city council chambers as a step in the right direction. But yeah, energy efficiency is going to be super important. And just to follow up to that, how does historic preservation do a lot for some of the buildings, and not only the city buildings, but also in the private buildings? Yeah. So my experience with this HP has been pretty accommodating in a lot of cases. I think, you know, they want to make sure they protect the character of the buildings as much as they can. So I think, you know, then we'll certainly work with them moving forward. I suspect there'll be a part of the Climate Action Plan that will address historic character while moving forward with more sustainable building. But, you know, from feedback I've gotten from some folks who have gone through the process, they found that they were, you know, receptive. Maybe there's things that we could, you know, improve on there or do it a little differently, but I think that they're willing to look at that. Yes, ma'am. How is the new planning committee going to coordinate with the state? We now have a governor who's much more forward-thinking and there'll be changes. I know the building code. There's issues with the building code statewide versus what the city can do. How are you going to coordinate that? We'll be really interested in working with the state for sure. Right now there's a lot of discussion or energy policy particularly. That's something that I've been particularly interested in. But, you know, I'm not sure what the state's plans are for kind of a unified approach. I mean, we used to have a state planning office that kind of was a clearinghouse for that sort of thing, but that was dissolved a number of years ago. So I don't know if there's any thoughts to bring that back. But, you know, we work with the DEP. They have a sustainability unit, the DEP. So we work pretty closely with them. We'll continue to do that. And we'll work with the state as much as we can. I mean, certainly we need every level of government to engage on climate issues. So you mentioned a regional approach from Cape Elizabethan as the Chair of the Energy Committee in that town. Is there anything for me to put it to coordinate? I know that GPCOG is interested in working on climate issues too. So, you know, I haven't reached out particularly to anyone specific in Cape personally. But I know that, you know, they work with GPCOG. And, you know, we'll certainly be cooperating with our regional government folks. So I'm happy to talk more about that. So I saw that 80% by 2050 for the municipal government. That's community-wide. That's community-wide. Okay, that was a good one. That's that. And what I heard from the UN report about the 1.5 degrees, we're saying it needs to be 50% for the world by 2030. And so I'm wondering, like, does this, do you feel that the planning process natural plan is aggressive enough? And 80% by 2050 seems really good. If we get to 50% by 2030 on the way to that, whoa, that's on target. But do you feel like it's going to be sort of scale like that? Well, I mean, you know, we haven't, I think as we go forward with it, you know, the science indicates that we need to make as much, you know, progress as quickly as we can, move towards renewables in the early timeframe. I think we'll look really closely at that. Part of the project will be to set intermediate goals that we can start achieving. So I think we'll try to, you know, find ways to move to renewable energy as soon as we possibly can. So, but yeah, it's going to be intermediate. You know, it'll be definitely, we'll set goals that we can achieve in the short term that will lead us towards the larger goal. And we'll try to calibrate those to be the most impactful. I'm interested in the conversation. So you've been with the city for quite a while, and you've certainly had many conversations about this topic. And, you know, what have you found to be one of the best ways to address any pushback or questions about why some initiative that has proceeded maybe initially got some pushback. Is there any one thing you do, or if you could speak to that a little bit, that would be great. I think it's really specific to the issue. But as a whole, I think Portland is, Portland residents have been really receptive to the initiatives we've undertaken. You can see like recycling. Portland residents have really embraced recycling and waste reduction, which is, and I remember back, when they started the pay-as-you-throw with the blue bag system, there was definitely some skepticism about it. But it really showed its worth in providing some financial incentive to avoid making waste. And kind of the same model we used with the bag fee at the shopping center. So I think our experiences and people have been, once they understand why we have a policy or why we're trying to do something, it's pretty well-embraced. I think we're lucky to live in a community that really has a strong green ethic and really cares about these things. And also, sorry, just within the city, the conversations that you might have also with your fellow city folks. I'd say certainly cost is usually something we talk a lot about. We have limited resources in the city, so we need to be mindful that initiatives we undertake are good uses of tax dollars. And also, are we achieving policies that have been established by our elected officials? And certainly, working on climate is one of the policies that our elected officials have said is important for us to begin working on. So we really followed that policy direction. And we're really pleased that we have an administration and elected officials that are really supportive of environmental issues and particularly on climate. So someone else had a hand up. Can I question just about whether there's been a discussion about having city collection of compost? Yes, there has definitely been some discussion about that. I think to achieve really high waste diversion rates, I think that's something we need to do at some point. Last year, we actually issued an RFP to see if we could get bids from companies to do the service. And it was cost prohibitive at that time. So we're trying to look at different ways that we could do a collection that would be cost effective and fit in the budget. In fact, we traveled. I had the opportunity to travel with EcoMain. We went to Scandinavia and saw some technology there where residents can put their food waste in a green bag that went in with their regular trash and then got sorted out at a plant, which worked really, really well. We went to five cities in Scandinavia that were doing it and it's pretty successful. That's something that we've looked at and working with EcoMain, which is our regional waste handling agency, is kind of the leader on that. So we're definitely thinking about it. It's going to be important. I think we'll do it at some time. We just need to find the right way to do it so we can make it cost effective. I have a couple of questions. I'm aware that Oslo is saying that by 2025 years or something, all cars have to be electric in Oslo. Is there any push for that? I think that's a national policy in Norway, not just the city. Is it just the city? We haven't actually considered that at this point. South Portland, I know, has plug-in spots. So we have a few. Our city parking garages have charging stations. In the next phase of our smart city project, we're looking at installing additional electric vehicle charging stations in some key places around the city. So it's in the works. Okay, and then a really quick question. Who gets the five cents for the plastic bags? So in our ordinance, the stores keep the five cents? They do. So really the intent was to provide some financial incentive to the customer. And so ideally the five cents, it's a revenue stream that declines over time. So we made that decision to have the stores keep it. I heard that there was some effort to look at electric buses here recently. I just wondered what the result of that might be. How do they look at this point? So Metro is getting two electric buses pretty soon. And so they're getting two buses and the charging infrastructure to go with them. And I'm not sure what the delivery time frame is, but that's in the works. So we'll be seeing two new electric Metro buses in the not too distant future. So hopefully that's just the first one. I have another question just about, there have been a couple of questions about transportation and about development. I'm curious, and you say, you know, there is everybody who's an elected official in here is in very close sustainability. And I guess there is, I'm curious as to what you think the steps are to kind of reconcile that with a lot of sort of parking lot development ideas. And how do we, you know, reconcile that transportation question and the develop, like how do we sort of bring sustainability into the development part of that conversation? Yeah, no, it's a tough question for sure. I mean, you know, we're a city, you know, in a state, you know, in a regional environment. So, you know, we have, you know, people are coming, people live in, people, a lot of people work in Portland. They live outside, they travel to Portland. So we want to get them out of the cars. We'd like to see them take public transportation. But in the short term, you know, and you maybe hopefully not too long into the intermediate term, they're going to be driving their cars to the city, you know, tourists are still coming. We want them to, you know, take the bus or take the train. But a lot of people are driving. So in the short term, we're going to have traffic. We're going to have, we need to do something with cars. But, you know, we need to think about how do we move away from that? So, again, it's a tricky question. You know, I don't think we have a, you know, the best answer at this point. But it's something we're working on and struggling with. So. So one more question. Have you guys considered implementing super blocks on any part of the peninsula? Super blocks. So you wanted to explain. So she was asking if we have, thinking about implementing super blocks. And so I'd say probably no at this point. You wanted to explain a little bit more about what that is. Yeah. So it's just a designated area within a city where only bikes walking paths or public transportation can actually use the roads in those areas. So no cars. Yeah. So, I mean, our foray into like a car freeze zone, we have like on Sundays in the Boulevard summertime we block that off to vehicles. So that's the kind of the regular, you know, car free zone. So we haven't really considered, you know, that concept yet on a large scale. So. Great. Well, thank you everybody.