 Hi, Council Member Rogers. I see you there and I'm trying to promote you. It looks like you're maybe in now. I mean, now I've enabled your seeking permissions. This is Torgerson. I see you and you'll be promoted to a panelist when your item comes up on the agenda. Okay. Is that your question? That's my question. Thank you. Thank you. Council Member Rogers, are you able to hear me? Are you able to unmute me, Rogers? I'm having difficulty promoting Council Member Rogers to a panelist and I'm not able to hear her even though she's been allowed to speak. Okay. Let's go ahead and give it one more minute. Let's see if we can figure that out. Okay. Thank you. Roberta, if you want to make me a co-host, maybe I can try to mess with it a little bit and see if we can get her promoted. Okay. We'll do. I think I finally was able to promote her. All right. Council Member, are you ready? Just making sure we can hear you. Let's go ahead and call to order. Let's take a roll call vote, please. Mayor Rogers. Here. Vice Mayor Alvarez. Council Member Rogers. Present. The record show all subcommittee members are present with the exception of Vice Mayor Alvarez. All right. We do have a quorum, so we'll go ahead and proceed. We'll start today with our public comment for non-agenda items. If you're interested in providing a comment about things that fall within the Climate Action Committee's jurisdiction but are not on today's agenda, go ahead and hit the raise hand feature on your Zoom. We'll start with David. David, you'll have a couple of minutes here. As you know, we can't get into a back and forth on non-agenda items, but we will take some notes down and can have some follow-up with staff. And I'll let co-host the Desmond to share the poll. Thank you very much. And Mr. Harris, you have been allowed to be talked to. I just hit the unmute. There you go. Okay. This is David Harris. I've commented in the past and thank you for this opportunity. And I'm just very aware of the fact that we need to communicate as much as we can to the whole public about if we're gonna reach our climate objectives and what we can do to change, each of our individual behaviors in reducing our carbon footprints is gonna take a lot of communication and what strategies and how we're gonna arrive at broader strategies to communicate about the transportation alternatives as well as the home energy use heating in particular, air conditioning. You know, it's gonna be a slow process unless we can find more effective ways of communicating and motivating individual actions. And certainly visibility, I've become very aware that I think the majority of the residents of the city really are unaware that SMART is even operating. You know, those of us who pay attention to things like that are well aware that it's there but how many opportunities does it present to us to be using it? But there are certainly a great segment of public moving up and down 101 that when they're slowed up on 101, SMART is not visible to them as an idea, as an alternative. And what we can do to increase visibility of the things that we do have are as important as creating new things. So I'll leave it at that for this point and how we are going to increase visibility and motivation to the public to really get action that changes our carbon footprint. I think it's a real challenge. Thank you. All right, I really appreciate it. David, let's see if there are any other hands. Thomas? Hi, can you hear me? Hello, can you hear me? Yes? Yes, we can hear you. Okay, great. Well, you know, Chairman and Mayor Rogers, this is my first opportunity as David, I'm sure is common in many times to speak with the Environment and Climate Subcommittee. And I gotta thank you for that opportunity. You have pursued this with diligence. I am an environmental engineer and I do pursue it with diligence. I have not seen enough. We see a lot from the city in terms of an all-electric future and so on like that, which is really great. I am not, I'm doing a lot in some other things and haven't been to this meeting. Let's face it. But like David, I believe that we have to do a lot more. I've definitely come to the realization I've met with Jared Huffman a number of times and tried to show him about the temperatures that we have received or those that were just in Canada in Lytton and those are where the town burned up there. It was 121 degrees and just unbelievable. These things are unbelievable and we need to change our mindset. And one of those elements that can do that is information and hopefully we can, as I've mentioned, we can maybe put some work that indicates smart on the over-crossing for the Edwards Elliott over-crossing. We also need to keep smart. This is an opportunity for alternative transportation and that requires Jenning. So each of us is gonna have to do a lot more to communicate, to effectively obtain or achieve these goals. We're gonna kiss it off. I'm in the process of writing an article about the fires and it's probably gonna be, I hope to be published in the American Geophysical Union, probably also be with the Union Concern Scientist. And what I'm gonna describe is some aspects of fire that have not been discussed, but are general physical principles, but no one is talking about it. And these are really profound and we have a real struggle with both the science of applying the general science that we have. It's not being applied. We're looking at terrible climate outcomes because that thinning of forest is not an option and yet that's the thing they're doing. We need to do a lot more and particularly smart, I think is, that would be smart. Thanks a lot for the chance to come in. Thank you, Thomas. See if there's any other hands. Okay, saying none. We'll go ahead and move on to our departmental reports. Do we have any reports from staff today? We do not. Great. We'll keep moving then. We'll go on to new business. Item 4.1 is our update from Snumbah Clean Power on Evergreen and some of the other programs that we have. So I'll welcome in Erica from Snumbah Clean Power and thank you for being here. And I'll turn it over to you and let you kick it off. Thank you so much, Mayor Rogers. Am I able to share my screen now? I hope, oh, look at it. You should be able to, yes. My name is Erica Torgerson and I work for Snumbah Clean Power. I'm the director of customer service and I really take the opportunity to thank you, Mayor Rogers and Councilmember Rogers and staff for allowing me to speak with you guys today. So Snumbah Clean Power, I'm gonna kind of do a little bit back to basics just cause it's always a good reminder of what we do and who we are. Snumbah Clean Power is the public power provider for Sonoma and Mendocino counties. We were formed in 2014 to provide customer choice for, of electricity providers for the first time in more than a hundred years prior to that, Pshene had the monopoly. Our rates and power sources are governed by our board directors made up of local elected officials such as Mayor Rogers. We appreciate your service with us. And then last year in June, we actually opened up a new headquarters building in downtown Santa Rosa. It is the old North Bay title and CPS real estate building on 7th and E and we have about 35 employees housed there who serve our 228,000 customer accounts. So a little bit just again, how it works. We are a community choice provider and SCP takes care of the generation of the electricity, purchases that. And then we also provide local programs that are specifically targeted just as Sonoma and Mendocino County. Meanwhile, Pshene delivers the energy through their infrastructure including the poles and wires and meters and customers pay them for those services. Conveniently Pshene is also our billing agent. And so they only send one bill to customers and you can pay your charges for SCP through your Pshene utility bill, which is great. So customer benefits from cleaner energy, competitive rates and more access to programs. So we get SCP of admission of turning the tide on climate change through bold ideas and practical programs. And we do this by targeting programs that are specifically designed to be innovative, inclusive and practical. Sonoma Clean Power offers two services. The first is Clean Start and the second is Evergreen. And these mixes are, I think I missed a slide. There we go, I'm so sorry. So the local choice is Evergreen. Evergreen is our 100% local renewable product. This is a unique program in the entire United States. Nobody else has local 100% renewable energy. For us, our base load resource or the resource that we used during the evenings and on cloudy days to support the services geothermal provided by the geysers. And then solar also makes up a big portion of this for the daytime hours. Because of the city of Santa Rosa's decision to upgrade to 100% local resources, last year SCP was had the opportunity to offer a request for offers on 10 new megawatts of local energy resources that will include storage right here in Sonoma and Mendocino counties. And this is a direct result of the city of Santa Rosa and other cities making the choice to move to Evergreen. When comparing power mixes, we look first at, we first look at the power mix that makes up and we compare that to PG&E as well as to the state of California. So as you can see, PG&E only has 31% renewables last year in their mix. Meanwhile, they have a significant amount of nuclear which SCP does not use. Our clean start compared to PG&E is actually 49% renewable, including 44% from large hydro, which is mostly in the Northwest. And although it is carbon-free, it is not considered renewable in California because they don't want to have people go out and put new dams in place. The city of Santa Rosa, when you compare what PG&E's basic standard services compared to our Evergreen, you can see that we are much cleaner than PG&E. So carbon intensity deals with the amount of carbon per megawatt, pounds of carbon per megawatt hour that how clean or how dirty the power is. And you can see that SCP's clean start is 50% cleaner than PG&E's. Now, our Evergreen also does have some emissions because it is primarily made up of geysers energy, which does just have a natural emissions factor. But as we add more solar into this mix, the energy intensity will decrease considerably. The city of Santa Rosa used approximately 34,000 megawatt hours in 2020 and about the same based on annual look at 2021. And using the 2020 emission factor years, we can see what a big difference just having Sonoma Clean Power and having the option of Evergreen allows for the city. And we can see if we go one further, we can talk about how that really affects the city of Santa Rosa specifically. So the city of Santa Rosa is already, by selecting Evergreen has already reached the Senate Bill 100 requirements 25 years early. This includes all the Muni accounts, including large ones like the Laguna treatment plant. It also means that any chargers the city owns for electric vehicles is also being, is also 100% renewable energy made locally here through Evergreen. And the best part is when SCP, or excuse me, once the city of Santa Rosa switch to Evergreen from clean start, it resulted in approximately 770,000 pounds of carbon reduction. So besides offering really clean electricity, like Evergreen, we also offer a variety of programs. I know that time is tight, so I'm just gonna go through our biggest one that we're working on right now, which is the Advanced Energy Center. At the Advanced Energy Center, which opened last year as well. And it's also located in downtown Santa Rosa and the old Stan Ray Music Building on Four Street. We'd love to have you come and visit and see all the new kind of technologies for energy efficiency and fuel switching that are available in the market today all in one place. Come learn from experts about how all these work. And best of all, we have a contractor matching tool. So finding the right contractor who knows the technology and knows how to install it in your home or business is really helpful we find for customers. It is open now. It's also open online at scpadvanceenergycenter.org. Here are just a few of the brands that are featured in our Advanced Energy Center. And specifically we are focusing on heating and cooling your home through HVAC, as well as water heating and then in fuel switching with induction cooktops. The best part about this as well is that we are offering 0% financing for customers up to $10,000. And they can pay that back over 10 years on their utility bill. So even if you don't have the money right now but you wanna still make energy upgrades in your home we're here to help. So I know I ran through that pretty quickly. I am happy to take any questions you might have. All right, council member, do you have any questions? No, sir. Okay, Erica, I just had one question to kind of follow up on some of the data and how we frame it for the public. So you mentioned that we had a reduction of 770,000 pounds of carbon by switching over to snow McLean power based on the amount that was also doing math on my pad here. The amount of carbon emissions that we do have for the city it looked to me like that was about a 36% reduction just by flipping the switch over to Evergreen. I'm wondering if one, you can help confirm some of that math or two, which is probably more likely, help me, how is it best to explain to the public what the economic and carbon benefit of what we did play how it plays out throughout Santa Rosa? Absolutely, so your number sounds about right to me but I'd be happy to double check it and get back to you with that, Mayor. For the second piece, I think Evergreen is an amazing resource that is unique to our territory and the reason is not that it's 100% renewable energy it is that is a 100% renewable energy made right here. And so to me, the greenhouse gas emissions savings are fantastic, but more importantly, we're focusing on resiliency and the more assets we have here the more control we have over our own power mix. And when you look at Senate Bill 100 you can see that the future is Evergreen. We just have to get everybody there eventually and find the right price point for everybody to get there eventually. Yeah, and I'll give a quick shout out to Runert Park who I know just recently did this as well. I think Healdsburg just recently did it. I know Petaluma has been on board with it. I think they did it last year. So, and Katadi was one of the earliest adopters I believe of Evergreen. Sonoma actually, the city of Sonoma was the first. Okay, okay. Council member or excuse me, Mayor Landman will would have killed me if I didn't include Katadi. So I know he's been a big leader on Sonoma Clean Power. Talk to us a little bit, give us a little bit of context and you touched on it about the impact that places like Santa Rosa have on helping to make projects pencil out so that we can continue to develop other types of renewable resources. I think the hardest part for developing new resources here is permitting and finding the space. So I don't have a perfect answer for your question right here but I think definitely get back to you. But anything we can do to make Santa Rosa more resilient to the fires, including micro grids and looking into battery systems for people who are getting affected more often by those type of things. I think based on this last winter storm it made me appreciate a little bit more about how those winter outages are equally as tough for people and it's often very cold. So I think our focus is going to look at that as well. And then we're also very focused on the new geothermal and a potential to extract more energy from there with less environmental cost. Perfect, that's good to know. And I will mention before I go to public comment we were doing agenda setting earlier this year and one of the things that is coming up in Santa Rosa in the next coming months, months is a conversation around micro grids and that reliability and that partnership with snow McLean power. So for folks in the audience, you can look forward to that from the council days coming up. Council member. Really quickly, I wanna say that I love the presentation and I remember getting something in my PG&E bill some years back asking did I wanna switch over to Sonoma clean power and not really understanding what Sonoma clean power was. So I do and I see a vice mayor Alvarez with his hand up in the attendees list. Just wanna point that out but not really understanding what it was but I think that it is important for us to do a better job in getting that out to the public. So now that I have a very full, robust for me, right? Understanding just with the PowerPoint presentation and what I knew already, I think that it would wow people to know that they would have such a part in helping, right? If they were able to sign up with Sonoma clean power, like if they knew what they were able to do and how they were able to contribute but just when you get the mailer you don't really know what it is. It's just another, oh, it's another mailer. So yeah, it's unfortunate that there are people don't have enough for a lot of education around it when that comes out. I 100% agree. It's something that we are constantly trying to work on getting the word out of how it works and then really trying to bring people into our programs because that is gonna be a big difference compared to what PG&E offered. All the customers are still available to work in the or to use the PG&E program that are available but we wanna add on top of those additional benefits and incentives. Agreed, that sounds great. Great. Vice Mayor, did you have any questions? No, Mayor, I show up lost, please excuse my tardiness. I did read the presentation as well as the agenda but no comments at this time, sir. Okay, great. And glad you were able to make it on. I know how much you care about the topic. So it's good that you get to be here as well. Let's go to public comment on it and we'll start with Jenny. I'll ask the co-host to share the public timer if possible. Hello, can you hear me? Yes, we can. Great, thank you very much. Thank you for the presentation. I wondered if you could say a little bit more about the power sources. I'm looking at the 2020 power sources slide and looking at the Sonoma Clean Power Clean Start, it had 49% eligible renewable and 7% unspecified. And I wonder if you could explain what those mean and also confirm whether the evergreen is 81% solar, 19% geothermal as it says and nothing else. So I wondered if you could just say a word about that. And the reason I'm asking is because I know that last year there was some discussion about including biomass energy in the evergreen and there was a lot of opposition to that. And I wonder if you could clarify something about the unspecified and the eligible renewable sources and what those mean. Thank you. Sure. And Jenny, I'll go ahead and I'll finish public comment on the item, but I took a note down and we'll ask that question after a couple other folks get to make their comments as well. Thank you. Let's go to David. Okay, I see the clock and I assume you can hear me. This is David Harris again. And I have a number of questions. I mean, we're talking here specifically about the city of Santa Rosa and what it is acquiring from Sonoma Clean Power, but it raises a question about, and you did mention some other cities, but within the city limits of Santa Rosa, we have other government entities that specifically the county and the state and federal government have facilities. Are they, just by the default is to be at least in a clean start and what the status is with the other government entities, but even in realizing that traditionally street lights were kind of a guess. I don't know whether that's still the scenario with street lights, you know, street lights weren't metered in the past and whether this is just an estimate that the city is acquiring for street lights, but that also though takes me to the next subject is this same set of questions applies to making the switch away from gas and how much the city's consumption of gas is for space heating and water heating and the few other things they may use it for. We will leave out the question of transit. I think the city transit is not using any compressed natural gas, but the county certainly does and I guess their facility is actually within the city limits, but that's a whole bigger topic of transportation. But where does government though sit relative to the consumption of the whole private sector, the individual consumers and the commercial consumers, you know, what percentage of this bit that moved in the city from a clean start to evergreen is that of the total power consumption in the city? You know, that's the number that, okay, the city's done something and it's an example, well, it's an example that I hadn't heard about until this and obviously the city council made this decision sometime back and certainly it did not come to my attention. It's come to my attention today, but it raises that question is the city step there is important, we commend it, but now what do we do to motivate the rest of us to make the step to evergreen and to look at how we can make the step from natural gas to at least clean start if not to evergreen. So that's, you know, those are bits of information that I hope one could become available to public and two could get visible to the public. Thanks. Thank you very much. I appreciate it, David and we'll ask some of those questions in the follow-up as well. Let's go on to Elizabeth. Hi, my name's Elizabeth Ridlington and I have a fairly small question or just maybe a flag here, which is, I love some of the programs that are available, especially to encourage fuel switching for residents to switch to electricity and away from natural gas. But recently when my husband and I were looking at installing a heat pump, our general contractor told us that he was not able to do all of the work that would be involved in the project and that he would instead need to bring in an electrician with a C10 license. According to my husband who works in the solar industry across the state, he says Santa Rosa is quite unusual in requiring a licensed electrician to do electrical work that a general contractor is fully capable of doing. And I just bring this up to flag that it's an obstacle for people who are looking to fuel switch in the interest of moving to less climate polluting fuels. And that seems like it might be something within the jurisdiction of this committee to ask about and maybe remove that one particular obstacle for fuel switching. Thank you. Great. Thank you, Sponge. See if there are any other comments on this item. If so, go ahead and hit the raise hand feature. We'll go to Michael. Yeah, can you hear me? Yes, we can. All right, thanks everybody. It's good to be with you. Regarding Schoma Clean Power, encouraging rooftop solar I think is, as you well understand, is really important. And now we're facing with the CPUC wanting to implement a tax penalty on existing solar and future solar and lowering the net median net metering credits that really kind of de-incentivize a group of people from doing solar projects. So that's one comment I have to make. And locally, I wanted to switch my residents from gas to all electric and I'm doing it in stages and I wanna add battery backup in order to do that, the permit process gets a little more cumbersome because you have to involve the fire department. And when we got to that stage, there was a two to four month backlog and it just puts a lot of stress and getting installers together. And then this is all incorporated in our issues of being able to get hardware with the supply lines. And that's the bigger issue. I've been waiting nine months to get a battery and they still don't know when it's gonna come in and this is really common throughout the industry. So there are many roadblocks, most of which are undetended but really need to be looked at to really smooth the process. And in terms of equity, I think some of the surpluses that we have in the state or wherever they are need to be infused into creating solar projects for lower income groups that can't afford them. So there's no financing and we can bring everybody on board. So those are my comments and that just comes from my personal experience. Thanks a lot. Thank you, Michael. Do we have anybody else who wants to make comment on this item? Okay, I'll pull it back. So Erica, there were a couple of questions there. I will say, particularly around the issues around streamlining for permitting and some of those issues on how Santa Rosa does things, that I will go ahead and take back to staff because that would be a more appropriate conversation for us to have as its own study session item for the committee. Probably not during the update for Sonoma Clean Power but I think it's a great one for us to talk about is how do we make it easier for people to make some of these switches that we're asking them to do. There was a question about taxing solar and the issues that are coming up about that. I will share with the public that I have submitted a letter on behalf of the city in opposition to some of those reforms that are being proposed and happy to talk more about that later. Then there were two, in particular, two questions about the Sonoma Clean Power presentation. One was about the power sources and just confirming and if we can pull back up that slide, I think it is slide six of the presentation. And I really heard two questions embedded in it. One was for the Sonoma Clean Power Clean Start program, the 7% of unspecified power. What does that make up? And then as it pertains to Santa Rosa with the Evergreen program between the geothermal and the solar, is that the correct percentage breakdown and is there any reliance on biomass in this? So first, the 7% is made up of, it's called unspecified resources. It's resources that can't be directly traced back to a specific power facility. So it is mostly natural gas. That's how we clarify it to most people, but it can technically have a few renewals in it, but in terms of GHU emissions, we treat it as if it was natural gas. The 49% of eligible resources in Clean Start, there is no biomass in 2020 and consists solely of solar and wind. And then for Evergreen, the geothermal is actually the 81% and solar is 19%, but we expect that solar number will go up as we add new resources in our area. Okay. And so just to be clear for the public in the question, none of the Evergreen power makeup comes from biomass. No, it does not. It is 100% from solar and geothermal. Right. There was also a question about other jurisdictions and I think that it's a fantastic one. Other jurisdictions that operate within the city of Santa Rosa and I broadening it for a minute, could you walk us through which Sonoma County entities currently have the Evergreen program? So we mentioned Brunner Park and we mentioned Sonoma. Which cities, I guess I should ask, which cities do not? And does the County of Sonoma participate? Some of the accounts for the County of Sonoma are on Evergreen and others are still on Clean Start. For them and then within the city's area, I'm not specifically sure which county or state or federal accounts are in Evergreen, probably not a ton, but for the cities, we have Sonoma, Brunner Park, Cattadi, Petaluma, Windsor has a couple of accounts and I believe we're down to Cloverdale, who does not have any at this time for Sonoma County. I do know that the chair of Sonoma Clean Power is working on that. I have heard that as well. We'd love to help. Yeah, the chair is from Cloverdale and there's a big believer in it. So hopefully she can get that across the finish line. Yes, and just real quick for street lights, they are still unmetered and they are charged by the hours they are on, as well as what kind of lighting light bulb is installed. Okay, that's great. Well, council members, council member and vice mayor, one thing that I am in favor of doing and the idea put on the radar by some of the public comments, with your permission, I would love to send a letter to the governor and our state delegation and request that the buildings that they have that are in Santa Rosa that they complier, that they participate in the Evergreen program, just as we are trying to do with our government buildings as well. I would definitely agree with that, mayor and please send him my hello's while you're at it. I will, and perhaps I'll be able to coordinate with Jeff Seifers, who's on the call as well. I think he's probably chuckling back at his office at the idea of the governor giving a letter from us, asking him to participate. So with that, are there any other questions or any other comments? Council member, vice mayor? Right, right, right, right. Go ahead, vice mayor. I'll start by the right part of the screen, right? My question, I'm sorry if I missed this part. I didn't see it in the presentation. If there, I understand that, that Cinema Clean Power is made up of 30 plus employees. And I'm wondering if there's any efforts, and I'm sure there is, what efforts are geared towards the Latino population to understand what the benefits of the green compared to the basic power sources are and really how much benefit we have, especially with the reduction of greenhouse emissions. So advertising and getting the word out is one of the priorities for Cinema Clean Power in terms of that park it, we have a Facebook that is bilingual, our website is bilingual, as well as we have multiple employees on staff who are bilingual. And we are also running ads in Spanish, as well as print ads in Spanish as well, and are continuing to work to find ways to ensure that our programs are equitable and inclusive. One example I can give you is that we recently, last year ran a electric bike program, specifically for low income care customers and had a great response to that. So we're gearing up to hopefully be able to launch another one of those this year. And in addition to trying to work to improve our access to that community so that we can share the good word with them too on this. Thank you. And also a great kudos and a thank you as well from staff, from Cinema Clean Power, from our elected officials prior to sitting on city council for the vision of being able to take something as our geysers and convert them into something that is so efficient when we speak of carbon emissions and really just the sustainability of our energy usage. I see it in our water resources because of technology that really reduces the amount of water that we're using. And I also need to applaud Cinema Clean Power for their person doing the same. So thank you. All right, thank you so much, Erica. And thank you to your team for your constant support, both out in front and also behind the scenes. We really appreciate it. Absolutely, thank you. All right, council members will move on to our next item. It's item 4.2, it's an update from the climate center and it'll be presented by Barry Vesser. Barry's well known to this committee as well. I will also note for the council at five o'clock, I have to jump off for a public meeting on our new safe parking program. And so we'll leave this in good hands with the vice mayor to run the meeting. Great, thank you so much. Mayor Rogers and vice mayor Alvarez and council member Rogers. Great to be here. Always good to follow Cinema Clean Power. I just want to emphasize what an asset they are in our community and encourage everybody to take advantage and really to become an evergreen customer. People didn't talk much about cost, but I've been an evergreen customer since the first year it was available. And it's really pennies on the dollar in terms of investing in carbon reductions. So with that, I'm going to go ahead and share my screen. Oh, it looks like that needs to be enabled. I just upgrade your tool co-host. I apologize for the delay. No problem. Okay, can everyone see that all right? Yep. Yes. So I want to talk about climate safe California, which is the climate center's campaign for rapid decarbonization, but particularly as it relates to a state policy and local government and how those things interface. Before I get into that, I'm going to talk to you just a little bit about COP26. So the climate center got observer status this year to go to COP and our CEO, Ellie Cohen, was there for about nine days. And we were able under our observer status to bring two state senators and a state assembly member, as well as two members of the administration. So it was a great learning opportunity but it was also a great time to talk about California climate policy. And a lot of good things did come out of COP. There was some really important agreements about methane stopping deforestation by 2030. There was language for the first time about phasing down coal and fossil fuel subsidies. And there were increased financial commitments made to developing countries by developed countries. But we have to note that the developed world still has not delivered on the promises that were made in Paris in terms of financial support. The bad news I think is that really, they kicked the can down the road in terms of setting serious commitments. The commitments that are on the table by all the parties are variously estimated to be about, commit us to about a 2.2 to 2.9 C increasing temperature. And that would be disastrous. Our own assembly speaker, Anthony Rendon said I don't feel that we in California are leading the world anymore and we concur and we need to do more. This is really just making that point I just made about the levels of commitments. And this was a paper by Tim Lenton who did the analysis. It's also important to understand a lot of times people hear 1.5 C and then 2 C and they're like, well, there's not that big a difference between 1.5 C and 2 C, it's only 0.5 Celsius, right? These are non-linear impacts that we're going to experience. And it's important to remember that since the first cop, warming has doubled and it is predicted to double again in the next two decades unless we really step up our ambition. I'm not gonna spend a long time on this. It's just to say that the world, California has been setting their targets based on reports from the UN, mostly the 1.5 C report that came out in 2018. And these reports are laudable but it's also important to understand that they are based on a consensus of the science and signed off on by 196 nations. They are inherently conservative. Here, closer to California, this is a report by D. Ramanathan from the Scripps Institute of Climate Scientists who is predicting that California could cross that 1.5 dangerous level of warming by 2030 or even as early as 2027, which would have a devastating impact on our agricultural economy. I'm sure you're all probably aware that the UN came out this year with the IPCC six assessment report and the Secretary General characterized that as a code red for humanity. The thing that's important, somebody mentioned that Linton in Canada early is that we are experiencing impacts now on the ground that were not predicted in any of the climate models that have happened in the last 10 years. So very serious state of affairs indeed. And this is a recent report, an editorial about 220 medical journals saying that there is no degree of temperature rise at this point that is safe and that the climate crisis is the greatest threat to global public health. And this is the last science slide I'm gonna show you. This is out of the Potsdam Climate Institute. Johan Rockstrom was the head scientist on this, but there was a bullpen of like incredible climate scientists. And basically what they found is nine of 15 global tipping points are already underway. The reason this is important is twofold. One is they didn't think we'd be at this point for a couple of decades. And number two is that these are mutually reinforcing these tipping points. So this is Johan Rockstrom in his quote is we have underestimated the risk of unleashing irreversible changes and that the next decade is our window. That is important to us because that has everything to do with the target that the Climate Center is recommending for California. We know that climate action to like costs us money and that delaying is not a good idea, but sometimes I think it's hard to appreciate the magnitude of some of these costs. There was a report last January that the fires of that year in California cost the economy $150 billion. That's about two thirds of an average state budget in California. It's an enormous amount of money. A report by the World Resource Institute on the other hand shows that 80 billion invested in California in climate mitigation and adaptation would generate about 725,000 jobs. So California must lead for a climate-state future for all sorts of reasons. We've got the human resources. We've got a politically progressive climate. We've made great investments in clean energy as Sonoma Clean Power is one fantastic example and local governments are key to getting there. And I think I want to just pause for a second to say two reasons for that. One reason is because all the significant climate solutions that are going to be implemented are going to be done so at the local level. And number two is that local government is the interface in our democracy with the citizenry. So I know that you guys have all kinds of people coming to you with ideas about what we need to do about climate. And I'm afraid I'm just one more of those. But what we believe at the climate center is we need to support local government, build local government's capacity and provide technical and financial resources so that they can serve on the front lines effectively. Otherwise it's just wishful thinking. So the goal of Climate-Safe California is that by 2025 California will have enacted the policies required by science to dramatically reduce emissions, start drawdown, so that's pulling carbon out of the atmosphere and secure resilient communities by 2030. Our goal is to get to negative emissions by 2030. This draws on two former goals, one by Governor Brown and the other by Governor Schwarzenegger but just accelerates those goals dramatically. And I have to emphasize here that in order to do that that would require a large amount of nature-based annual sequestration. I'm saying nature-based because the climate center believes that's the most cost effective and proven technology we have for sequestering carbon. There's lots of technical ways of doing that but they're expensive and most of them are not operating on the scale we need right now. These are what I call the four policy pillars of Climate-Safe California. We need to accelerate the phase out of fossil fuel development, production and use. So that includes electrifying building stock, electrifying the transportation sector and cleaning, getting the electricity grid to 100% clean energy. We need to scale up nature-based sequestration. That's really key for getting at that legacy carbon that's already in the atmosphere to the tune of 100 million metric tons a year. The climate center just did a report on that and we believe it's technically feasible. And more importantly, we had it reviewed by soil scientists in California and they also have concluded that it's technically feasible. We need to invest in community energy resilience. I just wanna congratulate Cinemaclean Power and starting to invest in local storage at scale. This is really important for our community. Really solar should not be deployed at this point in the game without storage. And then we need to fund this action. This climate action at an appropriate scale. And I do wanna compliment the governor this year that he has submitted a budget that really is in the scale of where we need to be year after year in order to address this problem. Climate Safe California has three principles that are in line, all our targets, our policies and our programs. One, everything's based on the latest science. Two, we wanna ensure just transition for fossil fuel workers and impacted communities. And three, we wanna prioritize climate justice and ensure that lower income communities are no longer disproportionately harmed by fossil fuel use in production. And also just as important to have equal access to climate solutions, which has not always been the case in California. A lot of people ask us, they say, well, that sounds like a wonderful target you have there, but is it feasible? Last year we worked on a report with Dan Kamen and V. Ramanathan, I mentioned earlier in a number of academic experts and basically it's all about the pathways that it would take to get there. This slide is just one slice or way of looking at those pathways. And I think you can see if you look at the sector reductions there in the middle, that it requires like tremendous reductions in every sector and 103 million metric tons of carbon sequestered annually to get us there. So we're not saying this is easy, we're just saying it's in alignment with the science and that it is doable. Last year we had a bill with Senator Stern to set a target for net negative emissions by 2035. That was the best thing we could get. Unfortunately, didn't make it out of the Senate, but the reason pushing for what's actually required is important. We got to do some briefings in the Senate on this is less than a month after this, Governor Newsom came out and he directed the Air Resources Board to evaluate pathways to getting to carbon neutrality by 2035. That is 10 years ahead of current California law. This is the one, the bill that I really wanted to bring to your attention. This is SB833 with Senator Dodd. What it would do is create a new California Energy Commission program that would provide grants and technical assistance to local governments to do community energy resilience planning. This is really important. Right now we've seen diesel purchases go up like crazy all across California, Northern California, Southern California, 20, 30% a year because of all the PSPS events we're experiencing plus some of the additional outages that we're experienced because of climate impacts. So we need to have clean energy resilience, clean energy backup. And to do that, we need to plan and local government is the area where we have general plans, we do zoning, we do permitting, we figure out what resources work well with we believe local government has to be empowered and supported to do this. And just to show you that it's not just all about planning either, we work with a group called the Microgrid Equity Coalition and the CPUC has put out $200 million program for microgrids in the most vulnerable communities. We believe that's just the beginning we're advocating for a billion dollars to be put in the state budget this year for the exact same purposes. And what this would do would be to allow communities to do microgrids to keep up critical facilities. And those critical facilities importantly would be defined by local communities not by the state government. I'm just gonna skip over this one in the sake of time. We need to dramatically increase sequestration. As I mentioned, we can do this through carbon farming through composting, through agroforestry and through smart climate habitat restoration. And we worked on a bill last year that actually is the first target that will be set in California for sequestration will be sent by ARB and that was a bill put forth by Nancy Skinner, Senator Nancy Skinner. So our challenge is that we need to be bold and new forward and we're being stymied in Sacramento. And so I have to be careful here because I know this is not an action item on your agenda. So I'm not asking you to take action, but I do want to educate you so that you might take this back to the council and decide what you'd like to do. And what I want you to know is that we're trying to get resources for local government. We need local government to stand up so that elected officials at the state level understand that this is a priority for local governments. We have a hundred, we actually, this is an old, my slide's a little out of date here. We have over 1500 endorsements now. You can see a number of local elected officials and you'll see many jurisdictions in Sonoma County that you recognize there. And we hope that you will consider supporting these efforts and tell us how we can support your efforts locally with statewide policy. And I'm happy to answer any questions. All right, thank you, Barry. Before I jump off here and turn it over to the vice mayor, I did want to just signal my support for bringing that to the council. And so I'll let the council member and the vice mayor sort of discuss that here after public comment. I'll turn it over to you, vice mayor, for questions, comments, and then public comment as well. So thank you, Barry, for being here. Really appreciate it. Thanks so much. And with that being said, a moment of silence, right? No, well, as we continue forward, councilwoman Rogers, do you have any questions for? No question, I just, I would hope that we continue to let the public know and let people know that it maybe is a difference in routine but contributing to climate change aside from changing your routine, but doing things differently is not, does not always have to be a big hefty task. And it doesn't always have to be something that is not something that is burdensome because I think that's a perception that people have. Sometimes when people are not used to doing things like composting or things like that, that it's a very time consuming and it's a big hefty task. Like once you get it set up and you get into the routine of doing certain things, it actually can be very enjoyable. It's something that you can do with your children and it's definitely a way that you can give back. So to me, it's all about educating and the more we do that and the more we get that out into the community, I think the better, the better we'll be. So we need to just keep promoting and educating. And then hopefully we get more people to buy in. I could definitely say that is one of the reasons why I am here and why I continue to wanna be here because I have been asked that I wanna, do you wanna stay on this committee? And I definitely wanna be here because I constantly learn new things. So I love it. Thank you, Vice Mayor. I was gonna call you Vice Mayor, imagine that one, right? If there's a dollar jar, I'd definitely be pulling it up by now. In regards to the nature-based sequestration, could you give us a couple of examples of such a practice? Sure, so one that was pioneered just south of us in Marin County is the use of composting and that's on both agricultural and range lands. And that's shown to greatly increase the amount of carbon that can be locked into the soil. And there's agroforestry. So that's the use of more permanent crop system. Another is what they call rotational grazing, which is a different way of using livestock on the land so that it's not quite so damaging. So there are a number of different, and of course there's just habitat restoration. Wetlands are great carbon sinks and there's money in the budget this year to do a lot of coastal wetland habitat restoration. That will be very good for, but I should say that the scale that we need to do this on is enormous in California. And we should be willing to go there because our agriculture is incredibly vulnerable in the Central Valley to not very great shifts in temperature. And so we have every reason to want to make those investments besides the climate. Absolutely, with especially taking into account the great amount of carbon emissions through our agriculture and dairy markets, I imagine that to be one of the great producers of such gases, right? Anything else Councilwoman? No, sir. With that being said, is there any public comment on the item? It's like we have four hands raised. So I'll ask, thank you. Thank you. First is Jack Swarngen, Mr. Swarngen, I'll allow you to talk. Mr. Swarngen, you should go ahead. It appears that we're unable to hear. Is there any, the second person if possible? And we'll make sure that I would give that person time to come back, should they need it? Yes, David Harris is next. Mr. Harris, you've been allowed to speak. Thank you. Thank you, Vice Mayor and former Vice Mayor. Well, I am commenting on every avenue here this afternoon and I have been following capital improvement projects in Santa Rosa and becoming very aware of how difficult it is to follow what's going on in the budget. So my comments are about, gee, I think we need a better and improved way overseeing our capital improvements because many of the things that city can do relate to, you know, creating the infrastructure that allows us to reduce our carbon footprint. And, you know, that is not really a clear evaluation. And I'm just looking at the 21-22 document for capital projects that lists the climate as the number six in the nine points of priority. And just how that level of priority is even evaluated with these projects, you know, it certainly is a daunting task to do that, but it's with the documents that are available to the public, it's unclear. You see a cumulative prior year funding. Well, does that mean that that balance has been sitting there or it's all been expended? It's not clear, but I kind of get the impression that a lot of this is funds that have been allocated for projects hasn't been spent yet and is waiting for some more money to get to the critical level. And the totals that are shown in this budget document are current year funding is like 90 some million and we've got like a hundred and some million prior commitments to these same projects. Well, are we leaving money, you know, sitting on the table? Actually, it's a 91 million new funding this year for capital projects and 148 million. How much of that's just been sitting there waiting for more money? I do think there's a need for better oversight on how we are prioritizing our capital improvement projects. And, you know, I've heard from staff that there are issues with having enough staffing to get these projects moved forward, but that is an area that I think we could improve our performance and the city council paying some attention and getting more, you know, basically getting staff to be a little more informative about what we could do to really move projects along that would have an impact. Thank you. Thank you. Next is Thomas. Thomas, you've been allowed to speak. Hi, can you hear me? Yes. Hi, great. Jack probably didn't unmute. So hopefully he'll be able to come back in a minute. I spoke before about smart, smart's very important. Jennings crossing to get smart. Each of these things are keys to unlock the door to sustainability. And I have spoken before with the city, particularly about the Herne over-crossing planning in respect to what David is talking about. So their funds sitting aside waiting for that. But the design is poor. The design was done, the concept for the design was done in the 1980s. There's no difference. We're taking out two lanes and replacing it with four. When they take out the two lanes of the Herne over-crossing, there's not gonna be any over-crossing. So it's both a climate problem from the standpoint of evacuations, fire. It's a congestion problem. It's an expenditure problem. It's an equity problem. It hits all the buttons. There's more than that. Particularly with respect to this gentleman and the climate change initiatives that he's talking about. I mostly speak with the county about this. They have the groundwater sustainability Tom Schwenholm, the former mayor has been on that for Santa Rosa and David Rabbit for Petaluma. Saltwater intrusion is incredibly important. They're not monitoring it. So they're really big issues on this as the gentleman mentioned. And one of the issues is regarding fire. And as I think I said before, is that I'm going to be writing an art. I'm in the process of writing something to be published in the American Geophysical Union, I believe. And one aspect of what's going on is the thinning of the forest. So the thinning of the forest do not allow for the mulch to go on the ground and be used to collect the moisture and hold it there to prevent fires and so on. Which is what the purpose of composting would be. So he's exactly right, but the policies are not right. There's a new proposal, which are new ordinance in the county, affects everyone, law passed in 2016, which is SB 1383, which is the organics recovery and particularly food recovery. So I'm going to be working in food recovery. I would like to see if the city could help sponsor something in this area to help establish the program for food recovery that would go to the homeless. So I just wanted to mention that it's going to prevent methane from going, being developed in the landfill because of the organic food waste that would be, going there, it will be diverted to the homeless. Thank you. Thank you, Tom. Next is Jenny Blaker. And you've been given permission to speak. Thank you very much. I'm grateful to council member Alvarez for bringing up the question about nature-based sequestration and also dairy farming because my understanding a lot of greenhouse gas emissions are coming from livestock. So I'm wondering if, how much that is being considered by the climate center trying to reduce the amount of dairy and meat farming. And also the last speaker, what he said about food recovery totally, that seems to be another really important area. But in particular, when I heard, you Barry Vessa mentioned agroforestry, that raised a bit of a red flag for me because I think treating wood as a crop, in instead of simply protecting existing forest ecosystems is a danger. I understand from reading Professor Bill Moomore and other climate scientists that the best way to sequester carbon is in existing forest ecosystems. And when trees are cut down, carbon is released. And it's a very long time between when newly planted trees will ever grow to that size again, it could be decades or hundreds of years before a large tree is replaced. And in the meantime, the soil, the fungi, the wildlife habitat, all the other things that make up a sort of complicated, complex forest ecosystem without all its different relationships is destroyed. And so there's a huge difference between plantations for crops and natural ecosystems that are also important wildlife habitat and protect our watersheds and so on. So I'm wondering why protecting existing forests isn't higher up the list of priorities for sequestering carbon. I think that's the main question. And there seems to be a lot of money, a lot of money being poured into cutting down forests at the moment in the name of public safety for fire. Even though a lot of the newer science is saying that that is not, that it's counterproductive and doesn't even make communities safer. But that's a big long story and I should probably follow up with the climate center separately. Thank you for the opportunity to speak. Thank you. That is our third speaker, is Jack available by chance? Well, last call for Jack, Jack, if you're there. I'm afraid we're not gonna hear from Jack tonight. Oh, there you are, brother, good deal. Good deal, good to hear from you. I don't know why I was on three Zoom meetings today and they sound worked on both of them. Although this doesn't work, but that's not your problem. Not a problem, continue, sir, and get to have you. Okay, I'm not only chair of Friends of Smart, which is a citizens support advocacy group, but also I have a small business whose job it is to produce hydrogen and ammonia or nitrogen fertilizer from renewables. And we're doing this in Washington state because my wife has a wheat farm there. I've learned a lot about soils and cycling nitrogen and the atmosphere and throughout the system. And Barry, if it's all right with you, I'd like to call you and chat because a lot of stuff that you're talking about, I'm already, I'm doing. I don't claim to have wisdom that nobody else has, but can I have your permission to email you? Oh, absolutely, Jack. Although, why don't you email me and I'll connect you with our research initiative manager because I think you'll have a far more productive conversation with him. He'll be able to complete. You seem pretty knowledgeable. You convinced me that you're pretty knowledgeable, but I'll start with you. So let me focus on transportation for a minute with my friend who's a smart role. Two thirds of our county emissions at greenhouse gases come from transportation. I'm sure you know that and that's true in North Bay and California is almost as bad and the nation 40% to 60% comes from transportation and agriculture is important. I'm involved in it, but transportation is crucial for near-term fixes and that means how to get people out of their cars and onto either bicycles or their feet or public transit. We have a smart train that we spent megabucks to build and it's suffering acutely under the pandemic. And yet it's a solution waiting to be used. And I appeal to the city and to the climate protection group to help us focus people on thinking not cars first, but bicycles for short trips and public transit for longer trips. It's going to be a very, very important part of the problem. So in particular, help us shift. And that means smart tax ascension campaign will be up in 2024 and presently structured, they don't have no chance and smart will wither and die without that tax extension. And it's going to be a big, big issue in their future. And another way to do that is the new Highway 101 overcrossing between Edwards and LA, which is funded, but it could also contain a place maker signage. It shows Santa Rosa is more than just a place to travel to or through on your way to the buying country or the redwoods. We have smart paralleling your current route and we had the Snoopy Museum and I have made a little sign. Okay, I'll stop. Finally, the Jennie's crossing issue has to be resolved. There's a phase off between Santa Rosa and smart. And we need more active involvement. I'm sorry that Chris Rogers was not available to hear this, but I'll make sure you hear it some other way. Thanks for your time. Absolutely. Thank you, sir. I appreciate it. And we have one more raised hand, Steve Bertelbaugh. You've been given permission to speak. Thank you, Vice Mayor Alvarez and member Rogers. Steve Bertelbaugh with the Transportation and Land Use Coalition. And I am also very concerned about the fact that we're driving too many miles. We need to get more people on bicycles. I really appreciate the big picture that Barry has provided and one that shows that we're way behind the curve here. But the action needs to begin at the grassroots and the city's action is key because the state government learns from cities and the national government learns from states. So what the city is able to do to reduce driving is going to have an effect because other cities gonna copy us and as more cities figure out how to reduce driving the state is gonna follow and then we're gonna be able to wean ourselves off of car dependency. Many people think that simply shifting from a gas powered vehicle to an electric powered vehicle is gonna solve the problem. That's an important step to take because you get a 70% reduction in greenhouse gases by driving an electric vehicle. But that leaves 30% that needs to be taken care of by reducing driving. And we've done the math for Sonoma County and it comes to about 6% per year reduction. So if you're driving 10,000 miles this year you wanna drive 9,500 next year. And until that gets into our minds and we begin to do the things that will reduce driving we're gonna be stuck. So now is the time to begin to think what do we need to do in order to encourage people to reduce their vehicle miles traveled? And step one is to set an example. So pay attention to how many miles you're driving and how often you're filling the tank and cut it down bit by bit month by month and show it how it can be done. Thank you. Thank you. Are there any more comments? Vice Mayor, I do have one more raised. Him, Michael, I think it's LePelt or LePelt. You've been allowed to speak. That's correct. Yeah. Thanks for letting me speak. I have two areas I wanna comment on. The first is regenerative farming in an urban setting and in order to make that happen it's all about greening our surfaces and not putting in more parking lots with asphalt or more concrete, we need pervious surfaces so that we slow and sink water when it does rain and it doesn't run off and go into storm drains and out into creeks and into the ocean. By greening our surfaces we enhance the soil carbon sponge which not only holds eight times more water than it holds carbon. So you not only sequestered carbon but you hold a lot of water in the soil. So it's a self-feeding system that enhances that ecology, that live ecology in the ground and the other piece of that is reducing our reliance on fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides, things like Roundup which kills the vitality of the soil and doesn't allow the soil to sequester carbon and hold water. So those are simple local projects that we can engage families and their children with to plant trees and green sidewalk areas, et cetera, et cetera. My second piece is to comment on active transportation that has been alluded to and one of the major areas both locally and on many levels is by enhancing our active transportation. And it's one thing to talk about more people riding bikes but it has to be safe and it has to be secure. And if we wanna get this to scale and speed we need we need to strategize and show people that we can do two separated bike paths North and South and Santa Rosa, East and West that connect downtown so that these short trips people can take and utilize for utility cycling and not just recreation and feel safe about it. And it creates great community like community rides there's so many health benefits, community benefits, social benefits and once we get these concrete pathways more people see people on bikes that encourages more people but right now it's all disjointed. We have a pathway you could be riding on and then it disappears. So I'll kind of leave it at that. Thank you for allowing me to speak once again. Thank you, Michael. Do we have any more comments? I don't see any other raised hands. I appreciate it, we'll bring it back. Let's see here. Councilman Rogers, do you have any comments or questions? A comment just to thank Mary for coming and for the presentation. And also in case you didn't know about me I love children, I love family. So I always try to bring it back to what a for me a normal non traditional family that does not know anything about climate because that's bringing it back to my roots. So what can a family or individual that doesn't know anything about climate or climate change do? And what can they get from your presentation? So I always try to just bring it back to the basics because you guys are a lot of times I sit here and you have so much information and a wealth of information that when someone doesn't know or have all the background they can get pretty lost. So I do try to bring it back and I apologize if I did not get into the depth of your presentation. I just try to bring it back to basics because I think that it's sometimes the smallest things even though they're small. If all of us do it, that's a start to me. And it's better than all of us doing nothing or only a few of us doing the largest things if all of us do the smallest of something. So thank you so much for your presentation. Thank you councilwoman. Barry, there were a couple of questions and I don't know if you can provide the answers. I believe this is also, well, I'll start with our planning that we will be having a meeting in mid-February in regards to our goal setting. I believe that the comments that I've heard from my colleagues, climate continues to be something that is important for us as a whole. So I definitely expect to see that conversation being pushed forward and I'm very proud to be able to say such a statement. In regards to the projects that, our list of projects along with the allocation of funds is there anywhere on our city website where we can obtain such information? I think that this is the general question. I'm used to asking questions as a council member at the dais. So here running the meeting, I'm learning what my resources are. So if you have to excuse me, if Barry was going to play 30 questions today. Well, regarding resources, so there's a lot of resources that are just coming online because last year's budget was a historic budget for climate in California. But most of those state programs are just getting stood up now. In other words, they allocated the funds and they're hiring the staff to help implement and create those programs. So I would say you'd want to direct your staff in the next few months to look at what's available for local governments. There's things through the strategic growth council. There's office planning and research in the governor's office. Both have programs for communities impacted by climate change. And I mean, there's way too many resources to talk about in a truncated way in this conversation, but I could certainly send you some things and some web links about that. But there's a plethora and those are going to, many of those programs are going to expand because of course this is only a proposed budget for the governor this year, but I think it's safe to say that whatever the legislature does, it's still likely to be a historic amount of money that goes into climate mitigation and adaptation strategies this year. So sorry, that's a very gentle way of answering. Absolutely. And there's a lot of changes and a lot of innovations happening in when it comes to sustainability. So one of the comments that I heard was from Jack that he learned a lot about nitrogen and being a weed cultivator was what he gained his experience from. And as a fellow cultivator, I definitely believe that the worm is the greatest farmer known to men. And definitely along with nitrogen and the production of nitrogen, it's definitely our friend. And we definitely do have to work with alongside Mother Earth in order to get the best results, so to speak. Permutable, I also heard a comment to do with the permeable factor when it comes to water absorption. I know that the city of San Rosa opposed to laying pavement or traditional concrete, we've been looking at such technology as permeable concrete for pathways and other uses. And I'm hoping that sits well with you unless you have other technology that is being made readily available for cities, which I would love to recommend to our different departments. No, I think permeable concrete is a really good idea and permeable last fault lays out layouts because they do allow for water infiltration. One of the problems with the runoff is that a lot of the water runs off and isn't ever captured. And so it's just basically loss. I also wanna say a thank Jack for making a point that I failed to make, which is really important. I think it was Jack, it might have been Michael actually, but about doing composting and doing some of these other regenerative agricultural practices increases soil productivity and its ability to retain water. This will be incredibly important as we go on to a time in California it's going to be a decadal droughts. So very, very important that we do have tools to make our agriculture more resilient and our communities more resilient. And that's absolutely true, especially in our Southwest communities where we have a lot of the Adobe clay that doesn't absorb water so easily, such as our other different soils throughout the city of Santa Rosa. So I can definitely see how sustainability of our grounds can definitely help with the absorption of water. There's another question that was in regards to dairy farming. Now I was wondering, what are we doing in regards to educating as well as reducing carbon emissions in dairy farming? And you did, you alluded to it just a little bit ago with my original question. I was hoping you could elaborate on our efforts. Yes, well, for those of the people who don't know, Albert Strauss, who is the head of the Strauss family creamery, is really an innovator in the climate space. I think as far as I know, he's the first person who ever had an electric dump truck on his, I mean a full-on dump truck on his property. But he's done, he's doing a lot of trials using seaweed to help reduce the enteric gases that create methane from the burps of cows. And it really is more the burps than the other things. And so I think that's a very promising approach. Another one is methane digesting and Strauss has also been doing some work there as have many other cooperatives around the world and family farms. There's a lot of things that need to still be worked out with methane digestion on scale, but basically it's taking some of that methane that would otherwise escape and creating relatively clean electricity from it. So those are two things that can be done in terms of methane. And methane is a very virulent greenhouse gas. So it is an important one for us to try and limit. Thank you very, and there was a comment in regards to Heron Avenue overpass and over crossing. It just happens to be that we have Nali Rogers and myself who are representatives of Southwest San Rosa. And I wanna let the community know that we're absolutely focused when it comes to Heron Avenue and the infrastructure improvements needs redesign and design that must be dedicated to the Heron Avenue overpass. So I'm sure my community that it's definitely our sites and it's something that we really wanna focus on and make sure that happens in a way that we ascend Rosin's approval. So I do appreciate the comment from Thomas, I believe it was. Let me see if there's anything else here on my list. Do you have to excuse me if I might miss one of the comments. If it's all right, I'd like to respond to the agroforestry comment that was made. Oh, yes, sir. I appreciate that. It's an important one. So agroforestry, this is not the tree plantations. This is intercropping. So or tuning with other types of understory cropping. We do not subscribe at the Climate Center to tree plantations. They're very unhealthy ecosystems and they're not very resilient. And I will just say for anyone who's interested, we do have a report on our website about biomass and the utilization of biomass. It's a very complicated subject and as is proper management forest ecosystems. So I'll just say really briefly and I hope my remarks won't be misconstrued that we believe that very small biomass plants can be a healthy and important part of addressing climate but not large plants and that these plants should be operated on community scales and they should only be from waste from thinnings. They should never be from forests being cut down to feed these plants. So it's a complex area. I would encourage people to read that paper if they wanna have a discussion with someone on our staff. Jack Christensen is one of the authors of that report and you'd be happy to talk to them about it. I appreciate that both clarification and elaboration on the subject. Thank you, sir. I think the last point that was made from our community was program for food recovery. And I won't speak much about it but I do know that there's both efforts at a state level to reconstruct the health ordinances in regards to being able to gift the food as... I know from my experience there were a lot of restrictions when it came to food and health safety codes. So I know that there's definitely efforts in the state to make that more efficient and really make food available to those that are hungry. So I definitely wanna see that initiative move forward. If there's nothing else, I very appreciate it, sir. And if I'm not mistaken, we would be moving on to item 5.1, unless mistaken. Thank you so much for your time, I really appreciate it. Thank you, very appreciate it, sir. Tasha Wright, would you like to speak on item 5.1 at all? Yes. Yes, please, thank you. Thank you, my name is Tasha Wright and I am from Santa Rosa Water and assisting with supporting this Climate Action Subcommittee. As far as future agendas, what we've begun to do is take the city council's... Let me start my video here so you can see me if that works. There you go. What we've started doing is taking the format of the city council future meetings list and so we've made that available. It is my goal to continue to bring forward both information about the city's efforts to continue the work on the Climate Action Plan. I think that we have not had all the opportunities that we should have taken or we haven't taken all the opportunities to really let the public know what is happening behind the scenes. So I really have quite a few different future possible agenda items from staff that will be addressing some of the things we're doing but then it's also important for me to bring in our different nonprofits, our utilities to talk about some of the things that are happening in our community and that are part of what we are also doing within the city so that we can really show you and the public what that looks like and how we're moving forward towards our climate action goals and our carbon neutrality goal of 2030. So we are planning in February to bring forward a couple of items from staff, a discussion item around what is considered EVIT. What is considered EVIT? It's an ordinance that was brought forward by Petaluma. And then the other piece is we would like to provide an update on the gas station ban. I know there's been requests about that as well. So we will continue to move forward. I'm excited about this next year. Again, that list is made available and we are also excited about the council's work group and goal setting and looking forward to seeing the climate action piece continuing to be in their priorities. That's our hope. So glad to be serving this committee. And we thank you very much. Absolutely. Councilwoman, do you have any questions in regards to future agenda items? Anything in the horizon that you wanna mention or questions that you may have? No, sir. Absolutely, thank you very much. For myself, I think it's pretty obvious how important climate is to our communities. So I definitely look forward to seeing the different items and just as importantly learning about the different issues that are affecting us worldwide and locally as well. I'm definitely having my eyes open to the different, what makes the climate situation what it is and just what a steep hill battle it is because of lack of education as the residents of the world as a whole. So I'm definitely hoping that we can do our part locally and being the leaders of the North Bay, I think it's over important that we do such a thing. So I definitely look forward to those efforts. Thank you, Tasha. Now, do we also conduct public comment for this item? And if we do, are there any comments? I see one raise hand, one moment, please. Thank you, Roberta. Come on, thank you. Ms. Blaker, you're been given permission to speak. Thank you very much. Yes, my name's Jenny Blaker. I'm the co-coordinator of the Coalition Opposing New Gas Stations, CONGAS. We've been to this committee and presented before to explain why we feel it's so important to put prohibitions on the building of any new gas stations or any new fossil fuel infrastructure at this time. In September, the Regional Climate Protection Authority passed an ordinance agreeing that they would support and help all the jurisdictions in the county to move forward with their own individual ordinances. So that was great news. And I'm delighted to see that this is on the agenda for February the 9th, and I hope that you'll be able to progress this with Santa Rosa City Council as soon as possible. And we'd be happy to help or provide any information. I think you already have the contact information for Woody Hastings and myself, Coalition Opposing New Gas Stations. We realize that the staff is really pressed for time and has a lot on their plate, but we do feel that if there was an ordinance prohibiting new gas stations in the city of Santa Rosa, that would help save staff time and resources in the long run because every time an individual application comes up, it has to be considered and we will strongly oppose it. And that will take a lot more time and effort and energy than if there was an ordinance in place and potential gas station owners would know that there was no point in even applying. The other thing is that this is being taken up by several other cities. As you know, Petaluma passed its own ordinance. I gather that Windsor City Council has recently agreed to do the same. And we know that Katari and Sebastopol and Ronat Park and some of the others are already working on it or have council members who are interested in progressing it in their own jurisdiction. So hoping to see this move forward early this year if possible in Santa Rosa. And thank you for your past support of the idea. Thank you, Jenny. Are there any more comments? I don't see any of these comments. Perfect, thank you. Let's bring it back. On the item of or the issue with gas stations, you're absolutely right. I applaud Petaluma for taking the initiative that they did. And Jenny, I applaud your group for really standing strong in regards to the construction and gas stations. I know that that board among other automakers are now venturing away from our fossil fuels into a more renewable energy sources, which I definitely am happy to see. In regards to the city of Santa Rosa, I will definitely take your comments seriously and have that discussion with the mayor as well as my colleagues without following the Brown Act, of course in regards to moving the issue forward. Councilman, are there any comments or questions that or comments that you may have? Very well, with that being said, let's move on to item number six, which is the German. Unless mistaken, and you hear me say unless mistaken, this is the first meeting that I am conducting. So I definitely appreciate the patience of fellow staff, my colleague as well as the people who are participating via Zoom. With that being said, item six, a German of our meeting. I believe that we've reached the end of our meeting and I wanna thank everybody for participating and joining me on this new experience of conducting a meeting. So thank you all. Bye now.