 Good afternoon, everyone. I want to welcome you here. My name is Carol Werner. I'm the executive director of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute. We are delighted to have you here for this briefing that we are cosponsoring today with the National League of Cities. It was no one's idea that this briefing would be quite so timely in terms of the topic facing us today in terms of how can cities become more resilient or become resilient to extreme weather. Unfortunately we have been witnessing extremes of all manner across our whole country and I know that our hearts have gone out to so many people dealing with so many different situations whether they be in the West dealing with fires or dealing with hurricanes in Texas and in the southeast. The Environmental and Energy Study Institute was formed back in 1984 by bipartisan congressional caucus that was very concerned about finding ways to talk about energy and environmental issues in a way to bring people together in a bipartisan way to learn more and to find common sense practical policy solutions to problems facing us across this great country and around the world. So that is our mission and our briefings are an important piece of how we work to deliver solid information to policymakers and to people across the country and to certainly the whole policy community. So we are very, very glad to see you all here in terms of looking at this very important topic. Talking about resilience is part of a whole series of briefings that EESI has engaged upon this year and in prior years we have also looked at the issue of resilience but this year we have been doing a series of briefings looking at resilience and doing so in partnership with state and local government officials because they are extraordinarily important voices because they are the ones who are dealing with so many situations on the ground. They are the first ones to have to understand, to figure out, to solve problems, to help their citizens in terms of dealing with all manner of situations. So I think everyone has been acutely aware of many issues that are confronting certainly local governments across the country as they try to grapple with all sorts of situations. The issues that we are all confronting are bigger than any of us which is why I think it's so important for us to come together to talk about things how we can all help each other, how we can learn from each other, how we can all do a better job on behalf of all of the people of our country. So we're delighted to be partnering as I said with the National League of Cities which has been taking a lot of leadership in terms of working with their mayors, their city managers with regard to resilience, helping cities to address these issues. And we are so glad to have a wonderful panel on this issue for you today. We will first hear from the Mayor of Pittsburgh, from William Paduto, who has been, he was elected Mayor of Pittsburgh in 2013. He, in that period of time, he has also been a very important leader for the National League of Cities as well. And he has spent 19 years in the Pittsburgh City Council as well as being on the staff of city government. And in his role in terms of being on city council, he was involved in so many different council committees so he learned city government up one side and down the other and which equipped him very, very well in terms of his whole role as mayor and in terms of being an important leader that other cities now look to. He has been especially interested in sustainable transportation and community-based development. And he also has presided over another important venture which is that Pittsburgh in 2014 was selected as one of the Rockefeller Foundation's 100 Resilient Cities. That enabled Pittsburgh to hire a Chief Resilience Officer who is tasked with implementing the City's Resilience Plan. So we're going to hear more about all of that this afternoon. Please join me in welcoming Mayor Paduto. Thank you. Thanks, girl. I'm going to try to be brief and I'm going to try to take us off on a little bit of a journey to start this discussion because resiliency is obviously a buzzword today and if you're a city and you don't have a Chief Resiliency Officer, you will. But it really goes back throughout American history. I just want to take a little bit of a tour of the city of Pittsburgh. So Pittsburgh back in the mid-18th century was a French fort town. We were Fort Duquesne and there was a young major in the Virginia Militia who marched over the Allegheny Mountains and he came saying that Virginia and the British want this area, this confluence of the Allegheny and the Monongahela to form the Ohio and go out west. And on his way back, going back down to Virginia in the middle of the night, he slit the throat of a young French ensign named Jamonville and thus began the First World War. His name was George Washington and the Seven-Year War, the French and Indian War, was fought because they loved us so much. A little bit of revisionism in my history lesson, by the way. And that's what we became. We were a frontier town and the resiliency back then meant Seneca's smallpox and mountain lions, better known as Pitt Panthers and Penn State Nittany Lions. But the fact was they built a fort, they built the walls high, they made sure that there was interaction with Native Americans. They kept it kind of simple and that's what they built the city around, a resilient city. Fast forward, 19 or 18, 13 or something like that, a couple of guys get in a boat down by Heinz Field. Their names are Lewis and Clark and they discover Ohio. No, they discover the west. And in that process they manifest destiny, seed is shining sea and they say, yes, but who's going to build it? And during that first part of the modern industrial revolution, they looked over their shoulder and they said Pittsburgh. And long before it was ever steel, it was stone and lumber. It was iron and Pittsburgh boomed under the first revolution and we built wooden houses up next to factories and by 1845 we burned our city to the ground. In Pittsburgh and the great fire of 1845 was decimated. But it would build back from its ashes and it would grow and folks like Andrew Carnegie and Andrew Mellon and Henry Clay Frick and George Westinghouse would build the leader of the Second Industrial Revolution when electricity would move Prada. And in that process they also created the greatest disparity between the haves and the have-nots, between those immigrants that came to work in the mills and the mines and those that managed and had owned them. They created the worst air pollution in American history. Our lights stayed on 24 hours a day because it was so polluted you couldn't see. And they created water that was poisonous to drink. And in that time period those great disparities were not externalities of some 19th century economics. They were the realities that Pittsburgh had to had to abide by. And I often think back at that time and how Carnegie and Frick really hated each other because I am certain that had they worked together the university in Oakland would have been known as Carnegie Frick and Mellon. But they did do other things. We created the first clean air act in American history. We banned the burning of coal in our furnaces and we cleaned up our air moving further than any city has in the prospect of cleaning air. We still have a lot to work to do but we traveled further into that in that territory. We worked in our mines and our mills to organize our workers and we created the middle class in this country. Pittsburgh and Detroit and Buffalo and cities is where the middle class was born. And we lessened that disparity between the haves and the have nots. And we created great water campaigns. A young western Pennsylvania woman named Rachel Carson became the matriarch of the modern environmental movement marching up these steps of Congress. And we did it in our own city cleaning up our rivers and being able to put together for a next generation. And that's what resiliency was based upon. From the 1846 flood or I'm sorry fire to 1936 floods to economic devastation and environmental degradation we were able to become resilient. And that went really well up until 1979. Pirates won the World Series. Been a long time. Billy Stardewal, we were family. Steelers won their fourth Super Bowl in six years and Pittsburgh died. We died. Our economic heart was ripped out of us. We had to find a way to rebuild. We lost more people than New Orleans lost after Katrina and they never came back. We have almost double. We'll actually triple the amount of unemployment that Detroit has today in the city of 19% unemployment greater than during the Great Depression. And we had a debt of city government that was higher than New York City's when they went bankrupt. There were no federal bailout plans for us. There were no programs. We had to learn how to build a resiliency for economics and we have and we've come back. And now we sit at this date where we're talking about resiliency and looking at it through a lens of manmade failures, environmental failures, economic failures, in a model of a city that's been able to bounce back from all three. But the one thing that we didn't do in any of those cases was prepare. We never built into the strategy of today what about tomorrow. And so we've put together a resiliency plan through 100 resilient cities in the Rockefeller Foundation called 1PGH and we looked at this model first through the lens of our environment because yes in Pittsburgh we're having 100 year rains on a constant basis as well. But we don't have shorelines. We have riverfronts. We have hills that fall down and fall to the ground. We have people who have lost their lives sitting at a traffic signal as the water has raced up so fast they had no way to get out of their automobile. And we have never put in a green infrastructure plan to be able to take that water and do anything but move it into pipes that are now over capacity. So as we look at our plan we basically analyze what are the shocks and what are the stresses that we should be looking at. In other words if they were looking at this during the second industrial revolution when the industrial titans were working at that they would have noticed the need to be able to clean the air. We wouldn't have waited 50 years. They would have noticed the need to have clean water and what would be so important about building up an opportunity for everyone under that economy. Today we see our shocks as infrastructure collapse. A nation that doesn't invest in its infrastructure and just assumes it will solve itself is a nation that doesn't face reality. Has mad accidents that could be done at any part of our city whether it's crude oil that is running through the heart of our downtown to experiments being done at the University of Pittsburgh in NBC type of environments. An economic collapse because even though we've diversified our economy it doesn't mean that outside factors could have an effect. And climate change and extreme weather is the key ingredient of building a sustainable city of the future that's based on a resiliency strategy. But at the same time what we didn't realize but what we found out after a year of talking to the people in the city or talking to the stakeholders is that the stresses that would face on a daily basis were based on other factors as well. Economic and racial inequality will be something that will hold the city back unless it's dressed proactively and giving people opportunities everything from affordable housing options to the ability to have pre-K for every three and four year old in our city and a scholarship waiting for them when they graduate. Environmental degradation is the model of an American city that can say we did it wrong. We now have our opportunity to be able to say if we did it so can you. Aging infrastructure and fragmentation the basic cores of responsibility of local state and national government being ignored and just pushed off to another generation. All of these factors come together as you start to build out a local government and understand that when you're buying and creating that recreation center or senior center for today make sure that it's filled with cuts because you may need it tomorrow. The whole idea about creating a resiliency strategy is not based upon the needs of government today but based upon the needs of the people tomorrow and as we look at these real issues of environmental climate change that are affecting cities on the coasts and those that are in the core of this country and cities throughout the world we have to be able to realize what tomorrow's problems will bring with another economic shift where we don't even know what work will look like in 10 years and what are we doing about it today to be able to minimize the negative impacts. Thank you very much that was something that I think we all should think about very very carefully it affects everything in terms of how we should be looking at things and I think Pittsburgh is very lucky to have you. I now want to turn to our second panelist who comes to us today from Flagstaff Arizona and that is Nicole Woodman who is the sustainability manager for the city of Flagstaff. Nicole as city sustainability manager focuses on the development of effective programs and policies to catalyze long-term community and organizational sustainability. She's responsible for growing the city sustainability section from the ground up. Her focus areas include energy efficiency, renewable energy, climate adaptation, resiliency, legally designated open space, waste minimization, food systems and community empowerment and actually I think that as we listen to the mayor that all of those kinds of things were all part of what's encompassed within Pittsburgh's resilience plan as well. And so Nicole is currently leading the charge to bring Flagstaff's energy portfolio to 100% renewable energy to develop a community-wide climate action and adaptation plan and to introduce the framework to achieve zero waste. And Flagstaff in 2012 completed its resiliency and preparedness study to assess the vulnerability, get this, to assess the vulnerability of 115 of its critical weather-impacted operations and they have begun work on their climate action and adaptation plan. So just as Mayor Paduto talked about all sorts of different factors that were involved, when you think about it in terms of Nicole's 115, this is happening in every city that local officials have to deal with. It can be quite, it can feel overwhelming and yet it's so critically important. So we are delighted that Nicole is here to talk about sustainability and Flagstaff. To our host today and to Mayor Paduto, my name is Nicole Antonopoulos-Woodman and it's an honor to be here to share Flagstaff's story with you. So before we get started I would just like to give a little context to Flagstaff and it looks like we're getting a little truncated on the screen there but for those of you that are unfamiliar with Flagstaff it was founded in 1882, so a much shorter history than that of the east coast in Pittsburgh but it is the largest city in northern Arizona and it is the regional economic hub of our county and the northern part of the state. Flagstaff is nestled at the base of the San Francisco peaks at 7,000 feet. Our peaks reach almost 13,000 feet just to give you some geographic content here and we are surrounded by the largest contiguous ponderosa pine forest in the world that comes in to be a very important factor here in a few minutes. Our population is just under 68,000, however we host almost five million tourists a year. So we are an all seasons destination and we have a lot of considerations when we're talking about community sustainability and resiliency. So we do know that the west is experiencing climatic changes and an accelerated rate. What that means for our inner mountain west community is rising temperatures, intensified storms, reduced snowpack, drier forest outside of the monsoon season, increased severity and frequency of forest fires and a shift in precipitation patterns from rain excuse me from snow to rain and an increased risk of flooding during those changes. So 2010 was a year of extremes for us and flagstaff. In January we received five feet of snow in five days. That 70 inch snowstorm coupled with a 30 inch snowstorm that previous December broke our budget for snow operations in less than 30 days. We disrupted operations in commerce and it wreaked havoc on our infrastructure. The spring we experienced record warming and low moisture. We had high winds that shut down our i-40 transportation corridor more times in one month than in history and we had destructive tornadoes. In the early part of June the catastrophic wildfire that our community had been bracing for finally happened. So if there was a silver line to 2010 it was that we had a living laboratory. We had climatic extremes to study analyze and to learn from. So with a series of those catastrophic events behind us we set out to answer a number of questions. How can the city organization reduce its vulnerability and build organizational resilience to climate variability and climate related issues and more importantly what are the risks if we don't act. Over the course of the next 12 months we assess the level of vulnerability the degree of risk and the potential impacts to those 115 areas that Carol mentioned of city operations that are exposed to climate variability. We analyzed seven systems and as I mentioned more than a hundred key planning areas. What we learned was that we must take a systems approach if we are to prepare for the changing climate protect our assets and meet our service commitments. It was no surprise that water quality water resources and water infrastructure along with forest health were our most vulnerable areas with the highest risk. What we also learned is that we can no longer ignore the interdependence of our systems. We also recognize that we cannot control the volatility of change and that we must design and redesign systems while operating under a wider range of economic social and environmental considerations. So the Flagstaff watershed project also known as the FWPP is a great example of our effort to do just that. So during 10 days of June in 2010 a 15,000 acre fire which is small in comparison to everything that's happening in the west right now ripped through the Coconino National Forest just northeast of Flagstaff. The damage from the Schultz fire came around one month later when intense rains washed debris settlement and ash downhill and caused local flooding damaging homes roads and infrastructure. The total impact of the fire including cleanup, loss in personal wealth, flood insurance premiums was estimated at about $140 million. The event was tragic and it was fortunate that the city of Flagstaff watershed was not directly impacted. The damage and cost of life if the south side of the San Francisco peaks burned was estimated at between $500 and $100 million. So the Flagstaff watershed protection project which really is a result of decades of collaboration and communication research with local partners regional agencies was designed to prevent catastrophic flooding and protect Flagstaff's water supply. It expedites forest treatments and environmental analysis in the watershed north of downtown Flagstaff. On the heels of the Schultz fire in 2012 city voters approved a $10 million bond to help seed the Flagstaff watershed protection project. Keep in mind $10 million for forest treatment is literally the proverbial drop in the bucket. Flagstaff watershed protection project is the first of its of its kind. It's a payment for ecosystem services a PES project that uses taxpayer money on federal land to protect a local jurisdiction's watershed. It's a result of multi-agency partnerships as I mentioned between the city of Flagstaff, the Forest Service, the state of Arizona, tribal nations, Northern Arizona University and a number of forest partnerships. So in 2002, excuse me 2012, the tax was passed, the bond was passed. In 2013 to 2015 the NEPA process began and then today we are actually in the forest thinning and for those of you that can see the screen you can see an example of a treatment area and you can see the density of the forest in the upper right hand corner and then post treatment in the lower right hand corner. This is a significant difference. So what made the forest watershed protection project bond successful? We believe it was enhanced public awareness of fire and of water nexus. That the prior education of forest health and fire threat was significant and effective. That investing in our community assets became a priority and then we had a strong focus on cost avoidance. Northern Arizona Rural Policy Institute released a cost avoidance study and the study results estimate a range of potential losses from catastrophic wildfire and post-fire flooding between 573 million and 1.2 billion dollars. So we felt that a 10 million dollar seed money was a good investment for our community. We've also been able to leverage the money from the 10 million dollar bond against additional funding mechanisms. So next I'd like to just touch really touch down on our climate action and adaptation planning that is currently underway. One of the things that we are focusing on in Flagstaff is really building off momentum. As I mentioned we have had a lot of activity around the Flagstaff watershed protection project and we really want to now take this out into the community and start talking about climate action and adaptation. So we've set we're working to set goals in the community to reduce emissions which we've had within our organization since 2008 but now we're ready and primed to take this out to our community and we want to outline specific steps that the community will take to reduce those emissions so focusing on mitigation and then we're going to actively engage and identify actions to prepare for climate changes. So what we want to see is very much focused on community action. We believe that a successful climate action and adaptation plan requires our community investment and our community to be involved in the process. With that in mind we've set a community action group we've pulled together a community action group long before we issued our RFP. We want this to be the voice of Flagstaff because we believe that success is only going to be achieved with our community members involved, our political leaders taking action, and us creating an identity around our actions. We also have a lot of other focus areas that support climate resiliency and climate action. They range from residential energy efficiency programming to municipal projects looking at for example our asphalt. Flagstaff experience is more than 200 freeze-thaw events a year which means that our asphalt is has to adapt to that changing in temperature swing of 40 plus degrees. So we've got a lot of things ahead of us we have a lot of things to learn but as I mentioned we really do believe that we have a living laboratory and that we've got the resources locally and nationally with our peers to take on the challenge. So with that thank you so much and I look forward to answering some questions. Thanks so much Nicole for talking about and about Flagstaff and giving us a little bit of an eye in terms of the kind of approach that you are taking there and what this has meant in terms of also thinking about how the fires the forest fire that you talked about all of the different impacts that happened to the community as a result of that and therefore all of the different pieces that needed to be considered and put together in terms of helping solve that whole situation. So another important lesson and learning experience for all of us. So the third panelist for us today is Cooper Martin who is the program director for the Sustainable Cities Institute which is an important part of the National League of Cities and Cooper is as I said the program director where the institute provides a whole variety of information tools and guidance to strengthen the ability of communities to help them to be able to thrive and to prosper while they are also facing the challenges the kinds of challenges that you just heard about from from Nicole and from Mayor Paduto in terms of dealing with a changing climate in a very uncertain global economy and so his areas of expertise include climate resilience, community development, dealing with transportation, economics and of course emergency management. So we are delighted to have Cooper here to talk about the institute and the cities to which the institute is is providing assistance. Like Nicole I think I'm going to have to do a little dance here with multiple moving across multiple slide projections. Well first of all thank you very much for having me and and thanks to EESI for agreeing to cosponsor this briefing or co-organize this briefing with us today on on a topic that as we've mentioned has already been a little bit too timely I think for many of us. The National League of Cities is an organization representing cities not just mayors but council members staff across the country we have just shy of 2,000 member cities as well as a network of state municipal leagues all 49 of the state municipal leagues count themselves as members of our organization so indirectly we represent approximately 18,000 cities towns and villages throughout the country. My program within that the Sustainable Cities Institute as you can see provides resources to catalyze support inform and celebrate those city led sustainability efforts. We cover not only sustainability issues traditional environmental issues like water air quality things of that nature open space but I do run a number of programs on renewable energy on resilient business development and economic development and things of that nature. You can find more obviously on our website the Sustainable Cities Institute there we've got a program called SolSmart trying to reduce the cost of solar around the country we have another alliance called the Water Now Alliance network of municipal officials who by virtue of their elected office also serve on their water utility boards something that a lot of them probably don't know they're getting themselves into when they run for office on education let's just say or public safety and find themselves in charge of a water utility but today obviously we're going to be focusing on the community resilience portfolio there which you can kind of see and I think you know to sort of introduce this program and the work that we're doing the Rockefeller hundred resilient cities programs already been invoked by other speakers most of you are probably familiar with it and we're really working to see if the strategies if the lessons learned from that effort and from that network of cities which is really some of the global powerhouse cities not just in the United States but around the world to see if those strategies translate and apply to cities that are smaller in population smaller in budget smaller in staff resources what kind of challenges are they facing and what are the strategies that they can employ you know given those limited resources you know Nicole I think is probably the head of one of the largest sustainability departments in the country at this point for a city under a hundred thousand and Nicole how many how many staff people do you have total right now five yeah which is about five times as many as most cities of her size I also want to point out that aside from this program we we run a resilient cities summit we've done that for three years now in partnership with the urban land institute and the United U.S. Green Building Council really to connect local leaders those people in decision making elected office with their sustainability staff so Nicole was able to participate with her mayor just this last summer but also to connect them with the people who are making investment decisions in cities around the country financiers insurers land use professionals developers in a low stakes sort of setting oftentimes these conversations are had over policy discussions or over multimillion dollar development proposals and that's not where you learn from one another so we try to give them a low stakes environment to have these kinds of discussions and so that's that's something that I'm proud to say we've been able to do for a couple of years but getting into the program specifically leadership and community resilience one of the things that we try to do at the National League of Cities is take the passion that you've heard from our prior speakers who work in municipal government for their own community day in and day out and and deliver those stories to people who are like yourselves policy makers around the country and try to wrap this up so I'll talk about a couple of cities that we've been working with but I think that that what we've been hearing today is really not unique it's emblematic of the kinds of challenges that a lot of communities are facing you know fires in flag staff obviously they're raging throughout the west right now but this is something I've heard over and over again from cities like Fort Collins and elsewhere that the same kinds of issues where you have a fire and then you have a water quality problem or a flooding problem immediately after the fact economic resilience and the story that Mayor Perdudo told is is something that our second vice president Mayor Karen Freeman Wilson of Gary Indiana has has really made her own platform within the organization on and so I wanted to impress upon you the fact that these case studies aren't just you know one-off stories it's something that we've been hearing that I've been hearing in my work at the NLC for the last several years so you can see the goals of the leadership and community resilience program there we've been working with 10 communities throughout the country for about the last year and a half now we were able to give each of those cities small pass-through grants $10,000 to host resilience events in their community and to define what that sort of initiative was going to look like is it going to focus on energy is it going to focus on water is it going to focus on jobs or some sort of social aspect of resilience and so here I always like to define my terms how many I don't know how many people in this room have had difficulty explaining to colleagues or peers what the heck resilience actually is but this is the way I do it with our membership of elected leaders I try to frame it in terms of goals and metrics where sustainability you're trying to limit the impact that you're going to have on the environment and with resilience you're trying to limit the impact that the environment is going to have on you and this works whether you're a building owner whether you're a city whether you're a homeowner it's something that you can set clear goals on and if you find an initiative a policy a project something that meets both of these criteria you've probably already done your cost benefit analysis in the process it's probably going to be a worthwhile investment to make and so moving on from there the 10 cities that we've been working with around the country I'm just going to touch on two of these I won't go into cases of all 10 we've been in Riverside we've been in Tempe we've been in San Antonio St. Paul Des Moines South Bend Indiana West Palm Beach where unfortunately everything is sort of unfolding and they're waking up to the devastation of Irma right now Portland Maine and Providence Rhode Island so first before I continue is anybody from any of these cities any anyone in the room which one Phoenix Tempe okay so close to San Antonio we haven't been working with Houston on this project although they are working with us on some equitable economic development issues but yeah Tempe is an interesting case and something they're mostly focused on heat obviously but also flash flooding and the steps that they can take to reduce both at the same time providing more shade providing more vegetative cover that'll help with both of those but the two stories I want to touch on I think really encapsulate the cases we've we've heard today our first Annapolis Maryland and second San Antonio Texas so so that we get a little bit of a flavor of what resilience looks like throughout the country in Annapolis they are obviously a historic coastal community they're facing both sea level rise threats and flash flooding threats from increased rainfall they're also much the same as a Flagstaff they're they're primarily tourism based economy but they also have some pretty major critical federal facilities the naval academy the naval base and a lot of other critical facilities around there that that frankly most cities of about 38,000 would would envy if they had those in their community what we've been working on with them for the last year is weather it together which is a historic preservation effort primarily so they're not coming at this from you know old climate change is a serious problem we have to act they're coming at it from you know our downtown our historic downtown that's one of the oldest communities in the country is really going to struggle to adapt to a changing economy it's going to struggle to adapt to increased storms and not just in the future but but what we're already seeing today increased incidents of flooding and so whether it together has been an award-winning process over the last several years to account for the economic impact of the downtown to work with business owners as well as the naval academy and the navy facilities there on how they can collaboratively protect their infrastructure whether it's a seawall or other initiatives and then how you can actually work within the historic preservation code to make these necessary changes and change you know just thinking about windows is something that the historic preservation code takes very very seriously and they can't make their buildings more energy efficient just by installing new windows they have to be very sensitive to the fact that their entire downtown is a historic district and so the money that they have is actually being used for an international conference this fall called keeping history above water so they're going to have communities from all over the globe from all up and down the east coast coming and figuring out how cities can learn from one another to apply some of these critical lessons how you can protect historic resources along the coast how you can work within these codes and processes to make sure that building owners that the people are protected while preserving your character and not completely demolishing everything and building it 10 feet higher than it was before because that's really not an option both financially and legally for them and then San Antonio, Texas which is basically the polar opposite it's a city of 1.9 million currently they're obviously not facing sea level rise but they do have some serious flash flooding issues the issues that they're most concerned about are first of all heat because heat is actually one of the deadliest conditions nationwide it kills more people than any other weather related disaster but it also causes things like crime spikes and if you ask any police chief in the country you know if it gets above 92 93 degrees do you start to see noticeable changes in your 911 calls or your violent crimes the answer is yes they know it they might not know about climate change but they know when it gets hot people get it irritable and of course it ruins air quality so you're talking about serious public health impacts when the temperature gets above much above 90 degrees in a city like San Antonio where pretty much everyone drives it's a really really serious problem and so right before we started working with them the city released a set of three plans called essay tomorrow it's a multimodal transportation plan a comprehensive plan and a sustainability plan all rolled into one and so what we're trying to help them do is initiate a series of public dialogues about what different institutions stakeholders around the city could do to help the city implement these projects because there's not really much of a disagreement in the community about what their challenge is going to be over the next 20 years they're expecting more than a million new residents by 2040 so transportation and housing affordability are at the top of everyone's mind now because it's already a problem and if you add a million more people it's about 33 35 percent increase in the next 20 years so it's one of the fastest growing regions in the country and it also happens to already be one of the largest and so i think sort of the the big theme that we've been seeing and to summarize some of these recommendations how cities can work with their states with the federal government to improve resilience of infrastructure it really gets into the cycle of of disaster response and anyone who's worked with FEMA won't be unfamiliar with these four phases of that response but first obviously the federal government has to be a partner in preparing cities for the kinds of challenges they face whatever those challenges might be the national flood insurance program definitely needs to be authorized it needs to be affordable it needs to be solvent and that's that's something that the nlc has had a long-standing position then the the government needs to be able to mitigate some of the disasters that we can't necessarily prepare for 100 percent we need to encourage property owners to retrofit existing structures encourage cities to retrofit existing infrastructure so that the next generation of infrastructure is actually ready to withstand not the conditions of today but the conditions that are going to be going on in the future i know that i've been working on this issue in particular for a number of years codes aren't necessarily enough the code is a minimum for life safety it's not going to protect property it's not going to necessarily reduce the kinds of economic disasters that we see after after a natural hazard the code will protect you long enough so you can get out of the building unscathed and then the building's likely totaled so we need to look at what that the government can do to encourage property owners cities to design infrastructure and buildings to exceed the code so that it reduces that economic loss after the fact we know and i'm sure many many people before me have told you that one dollar in mitigation leads to four dollars in post disaster savings i don't know if that number is impressed enough because it is only the federal dollars that are accounted for in that study that the national institute of building sciences did several years ago that does not count insurance loss it does not count indirect loss it's only the the post disaster recovery funds so the actual number when you are when you tally up all the indirect costs and and co-benefits and things of that nature is something closer to one in ten dollars saved relief i i put this slide together before this this last week really but continued emergency assistance has to be provided every time there's a disaster it seems like there's at least a couple of days of oh how big is the package going to be are they really going to bail out the cities this time that bargain was struck a long time ago between the federal government and cities and without probably a decade or two of notice cities aren't prepared to take on the kinds of emergency relief functions that the federal government can help out with and last recovery rebuilding has to consider and i've already touched upon this future climate risks future vulnerabilities on the fact that infrastructure tends to last longer than its design lifetime so most infrastructure is built to last maybe 15 years we know it's really going to be there for 70 with that you have my contact information i think we're going to open it up to some questions from the audience for the rest of the time that we have today thank you very much so before we open it up for questions i just wanted to to ask jeremy marcus if you wanted to talk a little bit about what your boss is doing with regard to prepare act because this it follows directly upon what cooper was just talking about in terms of thinking about different roles that that people play and in terms of the role of the federal government and jeremy is going to talk a little bit about what this means here so awkward hi jeremy marcus i'm uh with congressman cartwright i just wanted this is great to hear so much about what your people are doing at the local level i wanted to talk a little bit about what we could do my boss thinks we should be doing at the federal level to help us repair both locally and nationally and so i hope for those of you who might represent a congressional office here you might be willing interested in joining us or if you are with an organization you might be willing to help support this effort so as many of you might know every congress the government accountability office comes out with the high risk report it's looking at where the biggest fiscal vulnerabilities the federal government starting in 2013 and every congress since it's put extreme weather right near the top of where the federal government faces vulnerability so my boss working with the government accountability office the administration and dozens and dozens of outside groups put together something called the prepare act and it does a few really basic common sense things the first thing it does and the previous administration had put something very similar into place is creates an interagency council so the different agencies with different missions have a place to come together to discuss the issues of preparedness and resilience there are a few agencies that have this in their core mission there are agencies like the department of defense that think about this every day and do a great job and there are other agencies that really go about their business that don't think about how extreme weather is going to impact their mission and how they can accomplish what they need to and they need to start doing this and they need to be able to have the access the expertise from other agencies for folks who really understand what the future is going to bring in terms of extreme increased prevalence of extreme weather so that's the first thing interagency council the second thing is making sure each agency comes up with a plan there already were there already have been mandated all that's been rescinded recently but they were mandated to do this every year some agencies have been doing a great job some haven't really been taken as a seriously so putting it into code will make sure that each agency is preparing documents to show how they are going to they are going to accomplish their mission with increased prevalence of extreme weather the third thing it does is make sure that we have the all the data the best practices available for everyone to use so if not everyone has a five person resilience staff they can still have access to the best information and the fourth thing is it coordinates federal resources that are regional to make sure that different agencies that have regional presence are talking with each other and talking with local folks so it's mandating in an annual meeting regional meetings and regional reports to talk about how each region is individually working with a federal government to prepare for extreme weather so the bill it's been scored by cbo it costs nothing the national tax payers union had it their number two no brainer last congress so this is common sense legislation unfortunately the last few weeks have shown the need for this and we're hopeful to get it going um our next our last step we were going to get technical feedback from FEMA obviously they're a little distracted right now so we're a little delayed but we're hopefully hoping to introduce this bill in the next month or two so i'm happy to stick around a little bit and answer any questions and if there's anyone here who wants to get involved or help support the bill we think it'll help us prepare better next time so thank you very much and i'll just hang out here in case there's a question about that too if you don't want to okay are there any questions for jamming before we open it up okay i'm wondering um what do you think you considered a role of land trust and in helping to change land and floodfront areas so i would just say i would just say the bill um what it does in terms of the inner agency council is mandate certain areas be represented on the council um certainly land use and natural resource agencies are included in the council but it does not get down to the detail of mandating what the preparedness should be how that will be how that will be uh specifically directed to land use although i will say if you're interested we also have another bill called the SAFE Act which is very similar but directs specifically at the natural resource agencies to do natural resource planning so um if you want to talk about that i'm happy to talk about that separately but it's very similar but it's specifically natural resource agencies targeted well as i mentioned the city of Flagstaff is nestled in the the base of the San Francisco peaks and surrounded by extremely large quantities of forest um we recognize the value within the organization and we do have legally designated open space that we are working to protect and conserve um recognizing that our ponderosa pine trees are not strong carbon sinks but that the value of our um our a healthy forest is much further than just carbon and as i mentioned earlier our water sources are protected because of a healthy forest so we do recognize that um and legally designating open space in our part of the region is a very powerful opportunity for us and we just embarked on it in the last seven years so yeah great thank you on Nicole and i should mention too that it's a bipartisan effort and recognizing how important it is for everyone to to find ways to have common sense solutions i would just add you know creating programs all the way down to the neighborhood level of adopt a block or love your resilient block program so we have we've now expanded it into our greenway program and we're creating a greenway program 2.0 that actually looks at converting the ownership over to local land trusts so the administrations in the future won't be able to develop the land we also secured last year the largest public park in our city's history nearly 700 acres and we negotiated until we were able to get the mining rights and all of the rights so it could never be used for fracking or mining in the future this park of the nearly 700 acres is the largest urban park in almost 50 years and then finally what we're looking at is we're solving our combined sewer overflow program we're implementing a green first approach and in cities like pittsburgh or buffalo or cleveland or baltimore we have tons of properties i have 17 000 empty homes vacant properties blighted properties empty lots so we call it plinko you ever watched prices right plinko the thing goes down and it goes over here which one of those 17 000 do we want to put in a land trust for community groups to redevelop the property into home ownership opportunities which ones do we want to gather together in larger areas to be able to work with our urban redevelopment authority in order to redevelop based upon a community plan and then which ones do we want to leave green to be part of our combined sewer overflow problem that has the best impact of creating a sponge not a funnel approach to being able to solve the problem okay question back here hi my name is roge latiani with the peanut power um so really great presentation by everybody um we heard a lot about resilient city and its topic but it's interesting hearing a little bit about migration you know so for example mr martin you you have one of your members being west palm beach um there's a lot of scientists saying that west palm beach is going to be under water in the next 50 years how do those discussions happen you know what's the economic assessment against the general versus rebuilding versus just migration i think the the conversations are just uncomfortable at this point um the the issue i i see with a lot of coastal communities is that the the option isn't there for the community to migrate within itself so being a representative of cities it's not like the citizens of west palm beach you're going to move eight blocks inland um most a lot of the communities along florida are narrow east to west and and long north to south so they're they're not really having conversations like that at this point and and i can tell you that the southeast florida regional compact the network of four counties and several hundred jurisdictions is one of the strongest multi-jurisdictional partnerships around sustainability and resilience in the country right now i don't think that they're they're at that point so on one hand there's that at the official level i think nicole and i were talking earlier about you know climate refugees even temporary and i i wonder if that is something that you wanted to expand upon now absolutely so in flagstaff and as part of our resiliency and preparedness study we have talked extensively about climate refugees where flagstaff is about two to two and a half hours north of phoenix arizona and when temperatures in phoenix reach well over a hundred which they do very frequently we see an incredible influx of phoenix residents come up to flagstaff so we have to take into consideration not only our visitors but our climate refugees and our how our infrastructure can handle that as well as the depletion of our natural resources as a result of that so it's something that we are talking about have we identified strategies to deal it's part of the discussion but we don't have anything identified specifically yet so i'm bob colby and i'm originally from fuchsia texas and we have a small family one local park there and uh and because of harvey and a whole lot of things going on there and basically what has happened is we had 45 homes get flooded in about 50 inches of water a lot of these homes are now just you can't live and so what we did next kind of give you the neighborhood level of what goes on in this world it's new to us too is we we call thema we try to help with your seven million people so there's a delay and hurricane already hit and then sba we got 3.3 billion clients over there which is great they're talking about fill out a lot of these forms and these forms are hard to get information quickly because you got to go to your bankers you got to verify the department you're going to lose another couple weeks maybe more and now because of the sharp demand in spite of mobile homes because in the south mobile homes are very prevalent it's a very common situation we're waiting another four months to even get a house that's 45 people aren't going to get a house happening on them so it's gone and so the big issue which i think probably everyone if you can see it is everything's retroactive information gather to the funding to the talking to FEMA everything is retroactive and so my question is what can we do more proactively for small businesses that directly impact low-income families like main passive home communities good question who wants to i think all of you can take a crack at that well no i mean the first thing that comes to my mind is it may not be on the private market side where there's an immediate emergency need but where the federal government can set up especially when it comes to housing opportunities like we have for our military in the middle east where you have modular housing that is readily available that could be used for families or individuals and be able to have it in somewhere in this country to be able to be shipped immediately into areas that need housing and that was one thing i thought of but um and that would be great put into but then the question becomes like where are they going to put them so like maybe if you made a list of where they go you could do that on a local level without a doubt i mean local governments right now look at land use policy from so many different perspectives and understanding floodplain whether it's a river or an ocean or a lake you can definitely find areas on higher ground to be able to have access and cities could be able to do that but we wouldn't have the ability to do turnkey private operations just because of the amount of materials that a company would have to have in storage would probably bankrupt it i think from a city's perspective certainly one of the challenges is always going to be procurement of any of that that stuff in advance procurement of just about anything as a challenge for cities let alone you know pre disaster having materials for disaster recovery on site ready to go um talking about proactively what what can be done better um i think at the highest possible level it's it's really about interagency partnerships and recognizing the fact that all of the infrastructure that cities are investing in that private industry is also investing in has to serve multiple functions we're actually talking about this again this morning where you know communities are getting better at rolling up and thinking holistically about these challenges where you know your transportation network is the first point where you're managing your storm water thinking about the water energy nexus and how much energy it takes to move water from one place to another in in a multi-sector way then you roll that up and you have to start applying for things to the federal government you start applying for transportation projects where some of those other benefits that you've just tallied at the local level aren't accounted for they're not recognized and you can't then make that case to the federal agency that's providing some sort of you know matching funding or something along those lines to do the little bit extra that would make your your investment more resilient now i don't think that's going to get to your your recovery planning but it'll certainly mitigate and lessen the impact of what's going on so that hopefully FEMA can respond quicker that people who are more in the eye of the storm are the ones who are being helped first rather than people who are out on the periphery of the storm something along those lines but none of that's to downplay the significant i mean 50 inches of rain is a ton of rain there's there's no city no amount of pre-disaster planning that was going to you know significantly mitigate or alter the the result of of harvey and if i may just add i think the overarching issues that we need to systematically remove barriers um and identifying those is challenging and removing those barriers is even more challenging but as we see more and more events extreme events that require assistance they're happening faster and um we do need to change process david blocks in with national council for science and environment thank you each for really interesting presentations cooper i'm intrigued by your reciprocal definitions of sustainability and resilience and i'm wondering um with with each of you do you see trade-offs between sustainability and resilience how do you operationally both optimize sustainability and resilience great uh do i see trade-off um rarely uh i i think is the answer there i i think it's usually the most sustainable slash most resilient solution sort of presents itself and then reality of financing reality of implementation reality of politics is that barrier it's not um application of that theoretical definition i think that's sort of what i would it's not a trade-off between the two conceptually i would view under the old urban planning swad analysis that strengths and weaknesses tend to be more towards sustainability opportunities and threats about what could happen is more about resiliency and they sort of form together under the the swad analysis and i think that if you as you look at it it's much more holistic we look tend to think of uh both sustainability and resiliency based simply on environment but it is a whole host of issues it's every issue and it's how you plan for it and how you implement you either do it or you don't and you either doing things for the immediacy or you're doing things for the immediacy in the future and the biggest challenge to that ends up being coming cost because obviously it costs more uh to put on protections in the roof other than just putting fixing the hole in the roof so that it won't happen again but that's where the politics come in and that's where the art is made i guess over here at the corner thank you thank you um i'm in a studio with Google PMA um i'm curious to know uh you know given the planning that's taking place and and most of the communities and florida and just to look but then you all have worked with the cities dealing with what they can do sort of their communities against studying as an i'm working at encouraging questions or in combination with handmade structures like their things etc what is the what is the advice what is the comment that i've seen or you recommend me um i guess the first answer to your question is a little we we've worked with a few of those cities directly most notably west palm beach which is in our program here um i think the recommendations we we as an organization almost never make specific recommendations to our member cities about something that they should do um is the first thing that that i would say to that um but we do bring in a lot of partners a lot of other organizations and we try to facilitate a conversation that will lead to you know an outcome that maybe we would have recommended in the in the beginning um that's neither here nor there um i think the most common thing we we see right now is the promise of green infrastructure and of integrating stormwater management much more into roadway design because that's what the city owns you know the city owns its right of way it owns its streets it owns the ground beneath the streets and can do all the utilities that are involved with that but being able to treat and i think mayor produta said you know use it as a sponge not as a funnel uh to rich uh to hold water in place a little bit more to mitigate the kinds of runoff rather than just channeling it directly into sewers untreated, unslowed causes flash flooding that's the thing i think is most promising what about storm surges oh well storm surge is a totally different thing um and particularly in florida with it with it being limestone you can't build a seawall it goes underneath like geologically it will go underneath your seawall um so you have to find a way to uh create you know berms build on higher ground um fill on higher ground or you know again manage the the uh the storm water the rain water when you can um but storm surge it's it's too specific of a challenge depending on the the hydrology of an area and the geology of an area florida's obviously uh gonna have the biggest problem with this but from an engineering standpoint i really don't know the solution i know it's not a seawall but but i don't i don't know what the uh the other engineering alternatives are there if i may just offer a non-coastal um perspective from flooding because we do have a lot of seasonal flooding uh in flag staff and we are we recognize that not only is our flooding um disruptive to our economic health in our community but we have a social justice component as well um a lot of our flooding is in our lower socioeconomic um parts of our community and we have begun a number of individual projects to try to divert water create um green street projects last year if i recall correctly we had 200 year storm events within a week of each other um so we we have to figure out how to deal with the intensity of our storms um they are getting stronger uh we're seeing a lot more flooding again seasonal flooding um in our community and so we're trying to incorporate infrastructure improvements which are significantly expensive but we really do have to look at it in a holistic way and again going back to my comment about approaching this as a systems um or as a system uh and recognizing that we can really couple a lot of initiatives and infrastructure improvements together and we should um but we can also bring in the cultural piece too and uh the equity dialogue as well let me add one last thing because you guys live in dc and there's very little hope in the city so i want to let you remember that the cities are still out there working on solving problems and the government actually works and people like like government and it's a lot different outside this little area but um there's a group called the it's the metro lab network it's over 20 cities that partner with universities and cities all across this country and we steal each other's ideas on a constant basis so when Mayor Pete Buttigieg out in south bend decides that he's going to partner with Notre Dame and they're going to be able to come up with a new way to manage storm water it isn't simply through green infrastructure it's by using technology and sensors within the pipes that's taking it and doing simple things like stopping the flow because a storm doesn't hit a city all at once unless it's a massive storm it moves and by using that engineering and tech sensor technology you're able to be able to adapt to the physics of that movement and stop flooding from happening there's a reason that our poorest communities are always the ones that get hit because we planned it that way when we built that big highway and that highway exit made out of concrete it went right by the poorest houses in the community and there are no trees there and there's nothing to be able to handle the water and it all drops into a system that was built a hundred years ago when there were lots of trees and hills and everything else and it goes to over capacity so if we can work with technology sensor detection combine cities and universities to work together we can create things that we're not even thinking about yet to be the solutions to solve it in the future certainly I hope so okay we'll go back here we'll take two back here then here and then over here okay um I was very curious number one thank you very much for holding this um I was very interested in Mr. Ward's comment about building codes are not enough my question I guess is giving people you've seen the rollback in many places of building codes when you talk about resiliency do you think about building codes at all as just being at least a building block or a component if you will of resiliency even if community will work are you even thinking about sort of that essential element or what some would call an essential element like yeah I mean yes we did we definitely do and I'm increasingly interested in how the National League of Cities can get more involved in the codes creation and adoption process I don't think that I think where you see rollbacks in the codes it's unfortunate because it's not necessarily that they don't want to be applying the codes it's a difficulty of applying and enforcing them and code enforcement is a much more critical problem and in local governments around the country than code adoption is I think that's the shortest way I can answer your question but yeah it's definitely important so we have it also adopted a voluntary program 2030 building districts in both our downtown in our university area and this is calling by 2030 a 50 percent reduction in energy use and a 50 percent reduction in water use and with now in 2016 we passed the ordinance that's called the Building Benchmark Ordinance and that requires the owners of all large buildings in Pittsburgh to be transparent in sending in both their water and their electric usage and looking at that as part of our modeling on potential flooding but more importantly it reduces our carbon footprint greatly and we've been able to do it with the partnership of our corporate community and not against it and if I may there's a really important dialogue here to bring up and that's about education and educating as Cooper mentioned just the enforcement so you have the education of staff but the building community as well I also want to add my boss had asked for in January GAO came out with a report on the use of forward-looking climate data in building codes and found that most code organizations were not looking at projections but only historical data and the use of codes so we actually have a bill called the NIST Success Act which has NIST work with agencies to use forward-looking climate data when codes thank you very much and and and it's been very interesting in terms of all the television coverage of course throughout the weekend is in terms of how many times building codes have been mentioned okay over here yes you didn't read my tweet yes it's our economic future no so yeah without a doubt Allegheny County is now the largest employer in the state of Pennsylvania and clean energy jobs the clean energy industry in Pennsylvania has more employees than the coal and natural gas industry combined we view it as not only part of our future in the sense of being able to build out a new economy and be able to attract companies like Google and Uber and Microsoft and Intel and Tata and Bosch and everybody else but a critical part of seeing that expansion of our economy as well so we view it really holistically we look at transportation and say what's transportation going to be in the future it's going to be shared autonomous and electric what are we doing now to be able to do it so we're creating corridors within our city we're powering them with electric we're creating micro systems of micro grids over eight different projects simultaneously happening right now and anything from natural gas to 100 renewable and we're doing all of our major new developments under micro grid systems to become much more efficient and to lower a carbon footprint especially in low income neighborhoods and then we're working on job retraining in order to be able to get people locally involved in those jobs it all fits together from the buildings that we're doing in the 2030 districts to our own incentives to be able to get to 100 renewable by 2035 to be able to create new energy systems today and new transportation options based upon technology for tomorrow you put it all together and you know what you'll get to compete in 30 years with other cities that are doing it and those that aren't doing it now we're going to have to play catch up okay I just wanted to add from a very small town perspective but we're we're working really hard with our economic vitality department and our goal is to create and educate but create more programming and policies then when we are talking about economic development we do look at impacts on our natural resources in our community and what types of businesses are being attracted are they water intensive I mentioned earlier today in a meeting that our last well that we the city installed was 2,700 feet deep so water for us is a very energy intensive resource and so we really need to look at this going back to the holistic comic that Mayor Paduto just mentioned we have to look at this collectively and so when we talk about economic development we also want to look at the impacts on our natural resources great thank you okay here and then we'll back there and here okay go ahead yeah my name is David Havis I'm with the Institute for Building Technology and Safety I mean he has I actually have two questions but Cooper you answered them already what you talked about infrastructure system resilience my other question is what has been your experience in the role of public private partnerships helping pay for preserving also I'll take crack it it depends on where the partnership is based so in seeing public partners public private partnerships that are based through either banks or utilities for the most part they're basically created in order to be able to make money for them we had a very similar plan to chicagos with parking authority and had chief economist former chief economist of the sec advise us that the best you could do is lose two billion dollars in this deal so we want to be able to figure out a way that allows public assets to remain the public while at the same time trying to find better ways than just raising rates in order to be able to recover revenue what does that mean it means when looking at a water authority do you have the ability to sell excess water do you have the ability to do it if you're a municipal authority or do you have the ability to do it if you're created into a public corporation looking at that is a potential revenue source that can come back to the ratepayers but simply the private public partnerships that benefit bondholders or stockholders isn't something that we're very interested in pursuing we are looking at other options of being able to keep the asset public while being able to capture revenue that we couldn't otherwise for our community public private partnerships are going to be critical and how we move forward and as i mentioned the flagstaff watershed protection project is really a fantastic example and a first step that our community has made in a multi-agency relationship and the results have been quite successful we are looking at a number of projects um hopefully i'll have the opportunity to update folks at a later date on but i look at that as a critical component of of our success at least in our community we'll go on i think that's that captures the dichotomy of experience well i'm jerry hillan with the passive housing institute and may you mention microgrid we don't have to make building energy efficient right but i've been pitched that you're also looking at direct current microgrid you know would you speak a bit about what you're thinking about that at the city block level yeah so in india in europe dc power grids are pretty common there's over 5 000 that operate within both continents providing local energy much much more efficiently uh and directly to source um in the united states there's five and we have two in western pennsylvania one is actually in our lowest income neighborhood in the city and it is raising tilapia and is an urban garden indoor that's 100 power with renewable sources and the other is a shipping center of 18 wheeler tractor trucks and both are developed by local companies in western pennsylvania uh if you ask me the future of energy and i'm not an expert but what i believe is it's not going to be based on 18th century it's not going to be 100 and some miles away burning sources out of the earth dripping electricity all along the way and being 38 efficient at the end basically losing the majority of the energy in the production and transportation of the energy till it gets to your coffee pot in the morning future of energy will be based right in your own neighborhood and it will be based upon your property which will become very much more efficient as well we won't be using as much energy so when i sit down and i talk to the folks from people's natural gas or console energy or the areas of western pennsylvania that help to build the energy economy of the united states the giants that are still there at first they were well we don't really see it that way now they're partnering with us people's natural gas is one of our partners and being able to create a micro grid within the city of Pittsburgh they're bidding on taking over our old steam plant which is falling in on itself to do cogeneration and create both heat and electric for our downtown and they see this as an opportunity to expand their portfolio to be able to partner early on with a city and then offer that same service to other cities around the country in those forward-thinking fossil fuel companies we'll be able to see another hundred years because they'll have invested now great story i'm glad that came up okay over here hi i'm geosanchez i represent capital solutions here in the dc mr falton area cooper you had mentioned the importance of managing stormwater runoff and it's becoming increasingly important uh nicole you talked about asphalt engineering you know that sort of thing you know my company deals with stormwater runoff we actually produce a product that is flexible and porous and it's a surface product and so you sort of have to i mean all these solutions i hear you talking about you know i see the need for us to think outside the box a little bit it's not just the water runoff already in the streets it's all those areas that contributes to that like sidewalks we replace a lot of sidewalks with our product in the dc area we're talking about rooftops our product is great for rooftops because it's lightweight you know ours is just one technology but you know as we develop these systematic approaches we have to you know factor in not just the big technologies you know that that you know channels and whatnot we need to talk we need to think about materials that we're using in those solutions and i think i think that's going to be the way to the future and the more more we can do that the better but we also talked about historic areas um you have to balance historic preservation against safety and so you know i see all these areas in dc in georgetown i don't think these are the same sidewalks that they had you know 200 years ago i think you know i think there's been some modernization of the brickwork and things like that but you know when you if you can think outside the box and incorporate a solution like ours into a design you know we can salvage that historic field of some of these communities um but that's that's really my point is that we need to look at materials and not you know not just structure yeah i guess the only thing i would just add to that um you're right and i've probably been using green infrastructure as shorthand for all of that that stuff not just roads but sidewalks alleys rooftops um but i i think the more cities that can come out with design guidelines for that kind of infrastructure for street design you know philly has some good ones for planters and bullbouts and things like that where they're they're incorporating a lot of different things here's how you can treat you know a street of this width here's how you can treat a neighborhood street here's how you can treat an alley blah blah there's there's only a handful of those nationwide right now and i can tell you that very few cities are going to just look at what philly has done and say great we'll take it everybody wants to do their own design guideline their own their own treatment of it so you're right but we need more proliferation of those examples so that a city can look at a pier and not philadelphia or not you know landcaster of pennsylvania or syracuse or a couple of the other cities that are doing this pretty well i would add it goes back into the economic development argument when we designed a new uh environmental center we decided to meet the highest standards the living building challenge that a building would use the same energy as a flower meaning that everything is there's no plugins or pipes or anything the building is producing all of its energy producing all its water producing all its heat and everything from the building itself it's our second in the city we actually created one of the first at phipps so the beautiful thing about phipps is all of the products the carpet the lighting everything had to meet the highest standard and all either owned by local uh western pennsylvania eastern ohio northern west virginia companies are manufactured there so we were not only able to create this amazing building but we were also able to build it with local companies and as those standards start to get higher than lead platinum and they will those types of products are going to be sought after to be in the buildings that we're building globally and the question we have to ask ourselves are are we going to buy that carpet from china or are we going to buy it from eastern ohio are we going to be able to buy the furniture that has been made out of recycled materials from india or are we going to buy it from western michigan and we have the opportunity right now to be able to be a part of that thank you and i want to thank all of you for your really thoughtful good questions and i want to say thank you to our panel for a wonderfully thoughtful informative discussion and i think we should have you all come back and keep this whole discussion going so please join me and thank you