- All right, so I'll call to order this meeting of the Bloomington Commission on Sustainability at 6.02
- PM. And we'll go through the roll call. Tara Dunderdale? Here. Here. Justin Vassell, I'm here.
- Matt Austin? Present. Present. Zero Rose. I don't see him online or in the room. Zach Ammerman? Here.
- Here. Dave Rallo? I don't see Dave online or in the room.
- Quentin Gilley? Here. Here. Ross Carlson? Here. Here. Alex York? We don't have you on audio. Here, remote.
- Perfect. Thank you. Here, remote. Jamie Scholl? Here. Here. Annalise Jenke? Here. Here. Diana Ogrodosky?
- Here. Here. And Shenghuai Xu? Here. Here. Perfect.
- All right, we have a quorum, so we'll move on to the approval of the agenda. So we've got a few things
- on the agenda today. We've got a resolution for first reading, which basically applauds the efforts
- of the council and the city in the work that they did during the appropriation and the lapse in federal
- appropriations in being able to provide resources and funding for continued staff benefits.
- We'll also vote on dissolving the ad hoc committee that we stood up in late 2024 to produce a sustainability
- assessment report. And then I think the bulk of the meeting will probably go towards the presentation
- that we're going to see from Zach about methods for estimating transportation related greenhouse gas
- emissions. And we also have Wes DiCivestro, and I apologize if I pronounce that incorrectly, with us as
- an expert guest who can help field any questions that we're going to have during that presentation.
- And that's mostly it for the agenda. So just out of respect for Wes's time, I'd like to make an adjustment
- to the agenda so that we can move that item up a little bit earlier on. But before we can actually amend
- the agenda, we have to bring it up for approval. So is there a motion to approve the agenda?
- motion to approve the agenda. OK, is there a second? OK, perfect. So then I'll move to amend the agenda
- so that item 7b occurs after item 5, which is public comment, and before item 6, which is reports from
- commissioners. Is there a second for that motion? Second. Second. OK, wonderful. Any discussion?
- OK, since we do have some folks online, some commissioners online, we'll do it through a roll call vote.
- So this is, let me just write this down here. Are we voting on the action and the amendment, on the
- approval and the amendment together? No, just the amendment, I think, in case somebody else has something
- else they want to move.
- OK, so yeah, so this is on amending the agenda in that manner. Tara Dunderdale? Yes. Yes. Justin Vassell,
- yes. Matt Austin? Yes. Yes. Sarah Rose is still absent. Zach? Yes. Yes. Councilmember Rallo is not present.
- Quintin? Yes. Yes. Ross? Yes. Yes. Alex? Yes. Yes. Jamie? Yes. Yes.
- Diane? Yes. Yes. And Shengwei? Yes. Yes. OK. The agenda is amended. Are there any further amendments
- to the agenda? OK. Seeing none, we will vote to approve the agenda. So Tara? Yes. Yes. Justin? Yes.
- Matt? Yes. Yes. Zero? As not here. Zach? Yes. Yes. Councilmember Barallo is not here.
- Quentin? Yes. Yes. Ross? Yes. Yes. Alex? Yes. Yes. Jamie? Yes. Yes. Annaliese? Yes. Yes. Diana? Yes.
- Yes. And Shenghuai? Yes. Yes. OK. The agenda is approved. So now we will move on to approval of the
- minutes from December 9. Are there any corrections to those minutes as they were circulated last week?
- Okay. Hearing none, is there a motion to approve the minutes? Motion to approve. We'll send it here
- and then do you want a second? Second, yeah. Yeah, perfect. Okay. There's a motion and a second to approve
- the minutes from December 9th, 2025. We'll do a roll call vote for that as well. So Tara? Yes. Yes.
- Justin? Yes. Matt? Yes. Yes. Zero is absent. Zach? Yes. Yes. Councilmember Rallo is absent. Quentin?
- Yes. Yes. Ross? Yes. Yes.
- Yes. Yes. Jamie? Yes. Yes. Annalise? Yes. Yes. Diana? Hoopstein. Hoopstein. OK. And Chiang Mai? Yes.
- Yes. OK. The minutes are approved as circulated. OK. So that brings us to public comments. So we've
- got up to three minutes per person for a total of about 10 minutes for public comment for anyone in
- the room and online. There's nobody in the room in the gallery right now. So if there's anyone online
- from the public who would like to comment,
- Feel free to raise your hand. Give it a moment. Sometimes it takes me a little while to find the mute
- button even, so hang tight for a moment. OK, I'm not seeing anything. So that'll do it for a public comment.
- OK, so normally that would bring us to reports from commissioners, but we've amended the agenda. So
- now we'll move on to item 7b. So I guess I can just, so you're going to present some slides. I think
- Jolie is planning to drive because there's some, or I can drive, somebody can drive. I know there's
- some animated components to it. Yeah, I think Sean and Wes are going to speak, say something briefly
- beforehand, I think.
- So I'd like to introduce Wes DiSilvestro. He is with Climate NAVE. We've been working with him for the
- past couple of years. He provides our greenhouse gas inventories every year and also is responsible
- for creating our climate action plan dashboard. And so I'll turn it over to Wes. Thank you so much,
- Wes, for being here. We really appreciate your time.
- Thank you, Sean, for having me, and it's definitely an honor to speak before the Commission. I haven't
- had a chance to actually chat with the Commission for the City of Bloomington, although I have presented
- the greenhouse gas inventory report that we've published over the past two years with the City Council.
- But yeah, I'm a huge fan of Bloomington and all the work the Commission and everyone else is doing.
- I spoke with both Sean and Zach individually, but they know I'm a huge fan because I
- work with a number of communities across the country. And I think Bloomington really stands out as being
- particularly invested in climate action and really like, you know, step far and above what a lot of
- other cities your size are doing. And so it always really inspired me to see how engaged everyone is.
- And I think Zach's presentation today is a perfect example of that. So, you know, Zach will share a
- lot more detail in this presentation, but I'm sure everyone's familiar with what a greenhouse gas inventory is, but
- just for the sake of a little bit of preamble, I thought I would give a quick explanation, some context
- before we lead into his slides, which he's done an excellent job on. So the purpose of a greenhouse
- gas inventory is really to try to get an estimate of the amount of emissions that are occurring within
- a specific community, right? So you can think of, you might have heard, you know, with the past few
- years people becoming a lot more climate conscious, you have
- corporations trying to figure out their supply chain, how much emissions they contribute. You have countries
- trying to figure out how much emissions that they contribute to the global atmosphere. And then now
- cities as well are really interested in figuring out what that number is. So there's actually a really
- sophisticated set of protocols that have been developed over the last two decades. Because this is kind
- of a bit of an art, kind of a bit of a science to how you do the accounting with this. And there's no
- specific formula you can apply. There's a lot of discretion and kind
- subjective measurements you have to put into it. Sean can attest to this, but every year when we go
- to the inventory, one of the really huge challenges is often just getting the data. So one of the ways
- that we try to approximate what emissions are occurring in the city is to look at all of the different
- potential sources of where those emissions originate. So you can think of all the different types of
- activities that happen in everyday life and how those might drive emissions, things like driving your
- car around and the food that you eat, whether it's more meat or plant-based.
- if you're using electricity or natural gas to heat your home or power, you know, your different appliances,
- all of those things together come to generate, you know, emissions. It's obviously really hard to measure
- that on a, you know, specific basis. I can't tell you exactly how much carbon is going up into the sky
- because that's pretty much impossible to measure. But what I can do is I can look at things that are
- upstream of the, you know, sources of emissions and data sources that correlate really closely with
- that. And that's what the protocol does. It gives us a way of looking at those sources upstream
- doing some, you know, math and statistics on that, and then that gives us a way to kind of generate
- greenhouse gas inventory report. One thing that we've done with Bloomington the past few years, which
- is really innovative, is we've sought to try to be really, really rigorous with this methodology. So
- we've put a lot of thought into this. We're a lot more consistent, you know, in each year-over-year
- inventory so that the numbers can be compared and actually commensurate between years than most communities,
- you know, are able to kind of invest in.
- And, you know, Sean has kind of really been at the helm of making sure that this is like really data-driven
- policy, that, you know, the commission is able to have access to data to be able to help support, that
- the city council is able to look at, et cetera, and that decisions can be made for funding that are
- data-driven. And so, you know, active to her for all the effort on that, and we've been really happy
- to be able to support that. And so what Zach's gonna present today is kind of these really great slides
- about how within one sector of admissions, which is transportation, we have, you know,
- Like I said, many different ways we can kind of measure where transportation emissions come from. And
- there's been basically a limitation in the data sets we've had available to measure those emissions.
- And Zach did some awesome work to basically say, hey, the last few years we've only been measuring emissions
- for a subset of those emissions. There's a bunch of emissions we've missed. We knew we were missing
- those emissions. It wasn't something that was unfamiliar. But it just wasn't easy to approximate it.
- And every year we look at the science. We try to find new data sets to see if there's a better way to do it.
- And we kind of exactly put together a really good case study for how a few other cities are measuring
- an area of missions that we now can start measuring using some Google data. And we're actually going
- to be updating this next year's inventory using some of the feedback that's out there. So I thought
- with Sean and I both thought this was an awesome kind of case study and educational opportunity to show
- how the inventory is not kind of a static thing. It's a volume year over year. And it's an art and a
- science, and we love
- seeing this type of engagement from people who look at the data and give thoughts on how we can do it
- better. So I will hand it over to Zach, who has created probably one of the most beautiful PowerPoints.
- I think it's just, you know, Sean knows I really pride myself and our firm really putting out like really
- nice looking reports. But, you know, I think I saw this my first reaction was, oh my gosh, we have a
- competition. This is beautiful. Thank you. Thank you for the great work. Thank you. And yeah, really
- looking forward to it.
- Awesome. Real quick before we start, I just want to. So I think the intention was to have some opportunity
- for discussion after these slides and things. So we've got about 30 minutes total set aside on the agenda
- for this. So if you're having questions and stuff on certain slides, if it's really vital to understanding
- what's going on, feel free to jump in. But if it's just general questions, we can save those for the
- end, and then we can do a presentation and then do discussion.
- So great for that. I'll hand it back over to you, Zach. Thanks. Thank you very much, everybody. And
- to start things off, I just want to say, while I was looking at this, I looked at a whole bunch of different
- cities' greenhouse gas inventories. I just want to say, I think Bloomington's is actually considerably
- better than most others. So this is in no way meant to disparage at all the work that you guys have
- done. Wes, yours is much more thorough and detailed in your methodology than most. So broadly speaking,
- I think yours is far better. So I just want to start off by saying that kudos to you guys for that.
- And this is in no way meant to be
- It's hypercritical or anything. I think we can make it better, and it sounds like we already maybe are.
- So broadly speaking, this is on different methods for counting greenhouse gas emissions from transportation.
- I'm just going to maybe move. Can I minimize this, that, right there? OK, cool. So really briefly, the
- background. Transportation, as many of you probably are aware, is the number one source of greenhouse
- gas emissions nationwide. This is the current baseline nationwide for where greenhouse gas emissions
- are coming from. This comes from the EPA, while it still exists.
- Unfortunately, it might be in danger, but this data might be in danger, but right now it's still here.
- So transportation is currently 28% of our greenhouse gas emissions. And the largest single source of
- emissions, largest subcategories, is effectively personal vehicle use.
- Personal vehicle use are short trips. So I'm talking you guys driving to the meeting tonight, going
- to the grocery store, that sort of a trip. That is one of the largest single sources of greenhouse gas
- emissions nationwide. So knowing that it's this big chunk that's approaching 30% total of our greenhouse
- gas emissions, when I saw our current baseline, this is Bloomington's current baseline, the sliver seemed
- a little bit small to me. So that's what prompted this.
- Me starting to dig into this, I'm kind of uncovering a little bit of this. So the transportation emissions
- in Bloomington right now, I think it's at maybe 14% of our emissions using our current baseline. Most
- of our emissions it shows, our inventory shows is coming from energy, meaning like electricity generation.
- We get a lot of our power from coal, for example. So it makes sense that's a big source of it. But I
- still thought maybe the transportation was a little low, so I looked into it a little bit.
- A little bit more background. There are many other studies like this out there. This one is
- fairly representative, so I brought it in for this presentation. This is a 2021 study from
- Nature Communications that finds that cities across the nation are underestimating their emissions by
- an average of around 18.3%. And that if you extrapolated that average out to the entire country, they
- study 48 cities, but if they said
- If it's 18.3% on average, we extended that out to every city in the country, it would be the equivalent
- of having an extra California plus 23% of a California on top of emissions. It's a hefty chunk of emissions
- that is potentially being uncounted. Specifically, SIGES in this report is one of the major reasons
- for the undercounting of municipal emissions is using different methods for estimating transportation
- emissions. So just to talk about the scale of the problem, it's a major amount of emissions that are
- potentially being uncounted nationwide.
- So how are greenhouse gas emissions calculated from transportation? This is a very simplified diagram.
- I just want to underline that. Extremely simplified is much more complicated than that. But what I want
- to underline is that the process in the United States typically uses what's called a bottoms-up approach
- using vehicle miles traveled as the baseline. So vehicle miles traveled is the total number of miles
- traveled by vehicles in a given area over a given period of time. You start with EMT.
- From there, you divvy it up by vehicle classes, so whether you have how many hybrid vehicles there are,
- how many electric vehicles there are, how many SUVs. And that sort of stuff you can get from vehicle
- registration data, this public data, that's relatively easily accessible. From there, you divvy it up
- what types of fuels are those vehicles using. And then at the end, that gives you CO2 emissions. But
- what is important is that vehicle miles traveled is where it starts. And if you have a wrong estimate
- on vehicle miles traveled at the beginning, everything else after it is going to be wrong. And you're
- going to end up with the wrong number at the end.
- So for undercounting VMT, that can lead to undercounting emissions at the end. So that's the key thing
- to understand here. Again, that's a very simplified diagram. It's much more complicated than that. So
- how are we calculating VMT? So on the left, you've got what the city of Bloomington's current inventory
- uses. And this is due to a limitation in INDOT data, Indiana Department of Transportation data. But
- there now is another source of data out there that I'm going to get to later. But there is a reason
- why they were doing this.
- So the city of Bloomington current system, under all of these diagrams, the solid blue line is a car
- trip that is being counted, and a dotted pink line is a car trip that is not being counted. So if somebody
- gets in their car and, say, drives to Indianapolis every day, the moment they get on I-69 and cross
- the city limits, they are no longer counting that trip. The rest of the trip is uncounted. It is only
- the portion that is within the city limits that is counted under our current system.
- I'm going to skip over the middle and come back to that in a second. Over to the right is the full VMT
- method, which I'm just including for information. I don't necessarily think we should use it, but it
- gives you a good upper limit. Any trip that starts or ends in the city, you count the entire trip. So
- I'm going to do some examples in a second to show you in detail what they would look like. But basically,
- that leads to over counting. So on the left, I think we're under counting a little bit. On the right,
- I think we're over counting by quite a bit. In the middle, you have the induced traffic model, which
- comes from the GPC protocol. I'm going to talk about what that is in a second.
- And there's a simplified diagram. It's a bit more complicated than this. But broadly speaking, to start
- off with, it's the same as our current system. Any trip that's fully within the city is fully counted.
- But any trip that starts or ends outside of the city, you count 50% of what happens outside of the city.
- And I'm going to show you why right here in the next one, if it will go forward. There we go. So this
- is an example of someone who commutes every day from Indianapolis. I think it is a conservative estimate.
- I think it might actually be higher than that, is roughly 13% of Bloomington's workforce. So it's a
- fairly large number of people we're talking about that are doing this trip every day. So on the left,
- under Bloomington's current system, somebody gets on their car. They start driving. That portion is
- counted in Bloomington. They get on I-69, cross the city limits. Their trip is no longer counted. For
- the sake of argument, let's act like Indianapolis counts, uses the same system for all of these. They
- don't actually.
- For sake of argument, ideally, all cities would be using a similar system so they could compare. So
- let's pretend they're using the same system for all these examples. The entire trip between Bloomington
- and Indianapolis would be uncounted by either city. And the moment they reach the city limits
- in Indianapolis, it starts being counted again by Indianapolis. But the giant bulk of their trip in
- between, which is the bulk of emissions, the bulk of miles traveled, is being entirely uncounted under
- the system.
- On the far right, you have the full VMT. I'm going to jump over the middle one again, just like a second
- ago. On the full VMT on the far right, the entire trip would be double counted by both cities, or counted
- by both cities, meaning the entire trip is double counted. So that is over counting. So on the left,
- we're under counting a big chunk. On the far right, we're double counting the entire trip. The reason
- why we have the induced traffic model that I talked about a minute ago is this right here, is that the
- trip would be fully accounted for.
- Ideally, in practice, it would actually be a little bit more messy, and there might still be a little
- bit that's uncounted, a little bit that's double counted. But it's closer to having the full trip accounted
- for where the trip is split between both cities and fully assigning the blame, so to speak, between
- both cities. You're not leaving any part uncounted. So that's that. Let me move on. So what is the GPC
- protocol? Just briefly, I'm not going to go into this too long. This was developed by ICLEI WRI C40 cities.
- released in 2014. It's kind of become the gold standard for municipal greenhouse gas inventories. Its
- adoption by municipalities is growing, and it standardizes inventories for easier apples-to-apples
- comparisons between cities. So you can see which cities are, you can truly compare between cities, and
- you're not just using completely different methodology. We use this method, but I'll get into something,
- that part in a second, this next part. We use this method broadly, but there's one, hold on, it's not
- going to, what is going on? There we go.
- So the GPC divides emissions into three scopes. Scope one is within the city boundary. Scope two just
- deals with grid supply to energy, so I'm going to skip over that. I'm not going to spend much time on
- this slide. Scope three, though, is really what I want to hammer. And that is all greenhouse gas emissions
- that occur outside of the city boundary as a result of activities taking place within the city. So that
- includes emissions from vehicle trips that are happening because the city exists. We should include
- those. That's what the GPC calls for as much as possible.
- Bottom line on this slide is that we are doing scope 3 emissions as we should for every category except
- for a tiny handful like railways, maybe one or two others, I can't remember, and transportation.
- Transportation being the big one that we're not doing it. And it's because there's a limitation in the
- data, but that limitation no longer exists. So I'm going to get into that in a minute. But that leads
- to because we were using scope 3 emissions in all other categories except for transportation that's
- compounding the undercounting issue because it makes the other categories look bigger and the transportation
- look even smaller.
- Just something to highlight. OK, so now what is the scale of potential uncounted miles that we're talking
- about? This uses census data. Just really quickly, this is completely valid, something that is completely
- valid to use for at least including in your vehicle miles traveled emissions estimate. The city of Ann
- Arbor uses it in its calculation of VMT. And ICLEI, which is a major organization I'm going to get to
- in a second. I mentioned it a minute ago. I'm going to mention it again at the end.
- Lists this type of data specific as something that's a potential source of the empty estimates is potential
- completely valid to use estimates So more than one out of five workers in Bloomington are commuting
- more than 50 miles to their job every day That is the highest rate among Indiana's largest cities And
- less than half are commuting under 10 miles. So we've got a lot of super commuters in the city on all
- of these charts the dark blue numbers of
- are the numbers that I think we are currently mostly accounting for under our current system. Anything
- in pink, I think we are largely not counting. So this is Bloomington Workforce by commute distance.
- Over here, we've got workers. So there's the people coming in that work in the city. There's roughly
- 11,000, 21%, that are coming more than 50 miles to get to Bloomington every day to work. The vast majority
- of those miles are not being counted. And this here is number of people, not number of miles. So these
- people are going 50 miles, and these people are going like,
- Make five, let's say, the portion is going to get a lot worse than it looks right there. Residents,
- so this is outflows, people that live in Bloomington, roughly 60% are going around 10 miles or less.
- But you've still got about 20% that are going more than 50 miles to work every single day. That's a
- hefty number of miles that aren't being fully accounted for.
- So this is a baseline number of estimates. This is a very conservative estimate of what this top figure
- would look like in number of miles. I used the lowest number for each category and just multiplied it
- out. And the highest number for this, so I overcounted this and undercounted all these. So it's at least
- this bad in terms of number of daily miles that we're talking about that are being, the ones in pink
- are largely being uncounted. Again, the very beginning or end of each trip will be counted. And the
- ones in blue are largely being counted. Again, there might be one or two miles on each trip that isn't,
- because they might be coming just outside of the city or whatever.
- But that gives you a baseline conservative estimate of the number of miles we're talking about.
- So over here, we have commute patterns. I'm going to spend a little bit more time on the census data.
- But I think this is important because it underscores the scale that we're talking about here.
- In Dark Bank, you have people that live inside of Bloomington and commute outside. So that's 20%. A
- big chunk live outside of Bloomington commute in. 60% is a Bloomington workforce. And then you've got
- about 20% that live in Bloomington and commute inside of Bloomington.
- In pink are largely at least partially being uncounted these are this is the only category on this entire
- page that I know is fully being accounted for. Under under our current transportation system so just
- want to highlight the scale of the potential number of miles that we're talking about. I'm not gonna
- spend too much time on this but this just gives you an idea of on the left you've got Bloomington residents
- by the county that they work in.
- So in dark blue, it's Monroe County. And again, not all of these people necessarily work in Bloomington.
- The majority probably do. I just did it by county because it was easier to categorize. I had it by city,
- and there were 8 million things. You couldn't see anything, so I did it by county instead. But there's
- a big chunk that go into Marion County every day. And there's a big substantial portion going into all
- these other little counties here and then all other locations. So there's a big chunk going outside
- of the county for work every day. This is Bloomington Workers by County of Residences. These are to
- the same scale, so you can see the size we're talking about.
- Bloomington workers by the county they live in, and not all of this, about only about half of this Monroe
- County chunk actually lives in Bloomington. The others live outside of Bloomington in the Monroe County.
- So there's a big, so basically from here up are people whose commutes are at least partially not being
- counted. In some cases, we've got like, there were a handful that said like Fort Wayne. Like you can
- say, so people are making, there's a handful of super commuters in towns that are, their miles are not
- being counted. Anyway.
- I'm not going to spend too much time on this. This is just the same data showing you the direction and
- the number of people going. For the sake of time, I'm just going to skip over that. It's repeating the
- same basic trend of what I was showing you before. OK, so how are peer cities measuring vehicle miles
- traveled for greenhouse gas inventory? So as I mentioned, I looked at a whole bunch of different cities.
- I tried to look at medium-ish size college towns, roughly the same category. Most of them have a fairly
- large university, and how they are measuring
- vehicle miles traveled for greenhouse gas inventories. The ones in pink are the ones using the induced
- traffic model that I think we should switch to using. I think we're going to start including, it sounds
- like, which is great. The ones in blue are the ones that use the same system Bloomington does, which
- is in boundary only. And you'll see the ones with the asterisks on them. All the ones that have an asterisk
- used to be in blue and switched to the pink category in the recent years. So there is a trend towards
- that as the data becomes available. And I think we should try to follow that trend. So this is just
- the same data.
- I included the ones, so just to make it clear that I wasn't cherry picking and only finding the ones
- I included. I found several that I couldn't find an answer to. Durham and Chapel Hill, both in North
- Carolina, were unclear. And Burlington was the only one that uses a completely different method that
- isn't very common in the US. So anyway, just to show you, this is all of the cities that I could find
- a greenhouse gas inventory for that met the criteria of a medium-sized college town. And the majority
- are using the induced traffic model. The same number of cities as the number
- greenhouse gas emissions per household from transportation for all these cities. In blue, you have the
- ones that were in blue on the other page, and pink are the ones that were in pink on the other page.
- An important thing to retain here is this line back here is the average for the induced traffic cities
- in pink and the average for the inboundary-only cities. The point here is not to make us look worse
- so that our emissions are worse. This is the average for those cities where potentially there's a potential
- big amount of emissions that we're just not capturing.
- That's really what I'm trying to hammer here. If you use an induced traffic model, you're capturing
- more of the emissions that are actually being caused by the city. There's a couple cities that have
- switched. I highlighted Ames here. This is Ames' old greenhouse gas emissions, and this is what it turned
- into when they started using the induced traffic model. It more than doubled. This is what our current
- emissions are. This is what I believe, if we used, I'm going to get into what this is in a minute, the
- Google data.
- This is what our emissions per household would be. And this is if we use the full VMT method, which
- I don't think we should use, because I think it's overcounting. But just to give you an idea, this gives
- you a good idea of the range. We're somewhere in between these, probably, and the induced traffic model
- is right in the middle. The number of megatons of CO2 per household would be around nine. So it's a
- little less than doubling. Again, this is just a list of other cities that use the induced traffic model
- around the world. This includes Toronto, London.
- Paris, Mexico City, Madrid, Lisbon, et cetera, just to show you that this is from, this is not an exhaustive
- list, it's just a list that report their emissions, the climate disclosure project, just to show you
- that we'd be in good company doing this. L.A., South Bend is on there, Tokyo, et cetera. Yeah, so I'll
- skip over that quickly. Okay, so there is now,
- another source of data that allows us to calculate VMT. It has some flaws, and it has some pluses and
- minuses. I'm going to get into that in a second. So this is what we are using to calculate VMT now,
- which is from NDOT, Indiana Department of Transportation, and the number of vehicle miles traveled per
- year. And this is the Google Environmental Insights Explorer data that allows us to do the same thing,
- but with an induced traffic model, that model that I think we should use.
- And it's showing it's a little bit less than doubling the number of miles traveled. And I also just
- want to highlight, this data goes back to 2018. So we can compare to previous years. That's a positive.
- So just like our current data, I think our actual inventory started in 2018. We could compare it backwards.
- The baseline is 2018, yeah. So it wouldn't necessarily change too much in that respect.
- So this is that translated into greenhouse gas emissions from transportation. I included Crosswalk Labs.
- It's just another source. I don't actually think we should use it, because it's got some major flaws
- to it, so I don't think we should use it. But that's just showing you it's another source of greenhouse
- gas emissions estimated for the city of Bloomington. Our current estimate is 176,000 megatons of CO2
- for transportation. This is finding 303,000, so a little bit less than doubling our greenhouse gas emissions
- from transportation.
- And this is that same data just showing compared to our current emissions inventory. On top is just
- raw emissions, and on the bottom is percentage. So we'd be a little bit less than doubling, and we'd
- be going from around a little bit less than 15% to close to 23% of our emissions from transportation
- if we were to use this model. Yeah, so I've got a few more slides. I've got maybe five more slides.
- So data sources and their issues.
- The data that is needed to calculate a GPC-compliant induced traffic emissions model is now available
- and freely accessible by anyone using Google's environmental insights explorer. I'm going to get into
- a little more detail about the pluses and minuses of that for a second. But basically, the way it works
- is it tracks anyone who has a smartphone that has Google Maps on it. They are tracking where you are.
- I mean, we already know they're doing this. I'm not gung-ho about it, but they're doing that. It's the
- exact same technology that they use to tell you where a traffic jam is when you're going through
- traffic, whatever, and tells you how long it's going to take. It's essentially the same thing. It is
- a massive data set, because it's using anyone with a cell phone that has Google Maps on it, which is
- about as close to everyone as you can get. And it is more granular than most public data sources. So
- that's a huge plus, and it's positive in its column. I just want to point out that among the pure cities
- that I looked at, and this is a non-exhaustive list. There are plenty of other cities out there that
- are probably doing this, but these are the ones that I found.
- This data source is being used as the main or only source of transportation emissions data for Boulder,
- Madison, Berkeley, and Lawrence, Kansas, which is just among the cities that I looked at for the pure
- emissions. I also know Athens, Greece is using it exclusively. And Seattle, Austin, Texas, San Jose,
- Hartford, and Pittsburgh are also using it in some capacity. Again, this is a non-exhaustive list. I'm
- sure there are many others that could go on this list. These are just the ones that I happened to find.
- The reason why I'm telling you that is we would not be going out on a limb here being the first ones
- doing this. There are many other cities that have already done it.
- So the bottom line, for me, is that public data with clearer methodology would be preferable, and I'm
- going to get into the methodology question in a second, if it allowed us for calculating VMT that included
- induced traffic, but it doesn't. It just doesn't right now. It's just the way it is. And so I think
- it's leading to undercounting greenhouse gas emissions from transportation. So about the environmental
- insights exploring, I'm going to go into some pluses and minuses here. So it does not give a full A
- to Z methodology, which is a very valid criticism.
- It is a little bit of a black box, although I don't think it's as big of a black box as some people
- have called it. Because we know essentially what they're doing. They're just tracking cell phone movement.
- And they go into their methodology here and here. I included some links there if you're curious about
- it. They're just tracking cell phone movement. Anybody that has a Google Maps thing. What we don't know
- and what is a black box is the algorithm they're using after that. But we know what the basic input
- is, and I think it's pretty reliable.
- They've also conducted ground-truthing comparisons of their data in collaboration with the city governments
- of Mountain View, California and Boulder, Colorado, where they estimated how much traffic was going
- to be at different times of day on certain streets. And then they put actual sensors on the road and
- counted them. And they found an average 0.9 correlation, which is about as close to copy and pasting
- from one to the other as you can get. That's very high. And they even, in some areas, found 0.99, which
- is insane, crazy high.
- So it seems to be fairly accurate. I don't think it's as big of a black box as some might say, which
- it is a little bit of a black box where they don't know what the algorithm is, which is a fair criticism.
- But we know the basic technologies they're using in cell phones. So I don't think it's that crazy of
- an idea. ICLEI, which is an organization that helps local governments. I'm sure the city staff know
- ICLEI well. They help local governments come up with sustainability and climate change things. They
- actually help develop inventories for some cities.
- issued a report. There's an overview up here that's more abridged and a very detailed assessment down
- at the bottom for European Union policymakers about the viability of the EIE for using for transportation
- emissions. They basically said, try it, that it's worth trying. And they, by the way, are the ones that
- helped develop the GPC protocol that I've been talking about. So they think it's a valid and perfectly
- valid thing to be using for transportation emissions. So that being said, I'm going to move on. There
- are detractors, though. And I just wanted to point out, I don't want to just give an all
- positive thing of the EAE. There are detractors, and some of these criticisms are valid. This is an
- article in Urban Studies from 2025, so very recent, that is highly critical, although I want to highlight
- that it's almost entirely on philosophical grounds. And I actually agree with some of those philosophical
- arguments, but that doesn't change the fact that the data is there, it's available, and it's, I think,
- fairly accurate. So the main critiques from this are that it increases reliance on big tech.
- and that increases the power imbalance between local governments and large corporations. I completely
- 100% agree with this. That is 100% true. But that doesn't change what I said, that it's fairly accurate,
- it's free, and it would help us do an induced traffic model. So I do agree with that, though.
- Number two, it may undercount users without cell phones in mode split calculations. There is a way around
- that, though.
- So when I was talking about the equation at the very beginning when I said you go VMT to the type of
- vehicle, to fuel type, to that type of vehicle, mode split, and who's in a car versus a bus versus a,
- you can get that from other public data sources. You don't necessarily have to rely on the EIE entirely
- for that. So there's a way you can kind of get around that. And I also think we are underestimating
- the number of people that actually do have cell phones.
- People who even don't have homes have cell phones. Many of them still have cell phones. I don't think
- we're undercounting that much. And if we're really worrying about undercounting, the NDOT data is like,
- data set is a dramatically smaller data set compared to the EIE thing, which is a massive thing with
- anybody that has a cell phone, versus the NDOT thing, which is just every couple of years, they put
- some sensors down on the road, and that's what you get. So you're kind of undercounting both ways. And
- I think there are ways you can get around that potential concern. I'm not saying it's not a valid concern,
- but I think there's ways around it.
- Number three, they said that cities cannot alter the EIE's indicator themselves, although you can tweak
- the parameters of them. They allow you pretty a lot of independence on that. I kind of found that argument
- to be a little bit silly. That being said, the last one I think is 100% valid, but it does not apply
- to Bloomington at all, is that the EIE does not count at all things like rickshaws or tuk-tuks or informal
- forms of transportation, like ferries in some cities they mentioned. That's completely valid, but it
- doesn't apply to Bloomington. We don't have any rickshaws or tuk-tuks here.
- So that's bad. So I do. Yeah, go ahead. Does it apply to bicycles? Yeah, yeah. No, it includes the bicycles
- in the mode split. They are in the, yeah. They're included as a calculatable thing in the EEO rating.
- Yeah, but the other things that are more specific to Global South Count context, Rickshaw's tuk-tuk
- thing like that, they didn't think of in their equation, which was a major flaw. And that is a valid
- criticism. It doesn't apply to us. So all that being said, there are valid criticisms of it.
- I'm honestly more likely to be accused of being a Luddite than anything else. I'm very anti-big tech.
- But I do think when they do something good, we should maybe use it. I think this is something that we
- could potentially use. So final thoughts, last slide, bottom line. Our current method of calculating
- transportation emissions is likely undercounting transportation, because it's not including traffic
- induced by the city, but that takes place elsewhere. And census data suggests that it's substantial.
- Public or open data sources are preferable, and we should explore if there are viable alternative methods.
- But I don't think there are.
- If there are, I'm all for them, but I don't think there are. So if an alternative is not available,
- I'm just pointing out that Google's EIE provides a viable, immediately accessible, and free alternative
- method that's compliant with the GPZ protocol and accounts for induced traffic. And it's already used
- by a large variety of peer cities. There are other sources out there. Most of them are private and can
- get quite expensive. Streetlight data is another major one that many cities are using that I saw. It
- is very expensive. It is highly detailed.
- It's very expensive, but I just want to point out they're using basically the exact same thing that
- Google's EIE is. They're just tracking cell phones. That's how they do it. And it's even more of a black
- box. They don't really fully tell you what it is because it's entirely proprietary. But many cities
- use it for transportation planning, broadly speaking, for a whole bunch of different applications. And
- that seems to be the main competitor to Google's EIE. It's using the same technology, basically.
- Yeah, so I mean, that's basically it. The bottom line is, I think it sounds like we may already be doing
- this, consider at least including EIE data in our emissions data alongside INDOT data, at the very least,
- to show what the range of possibilities for our greenhouse gas emissions for transportation are. And
- that's it. I'm happy to take any questions or anything. Awesome. Well, thank you, Zach. That was a very
- beautiful presentation, as Wes mentioned, and really insightful. So I'll open it up to the group here
- for questions, comments.
- General discussion. Tara. This is incredible. I feel like I learned so much. Thank you. Is there concern
- in the field of a price bait and switch? Like, if we kind of put our eggs in this basket, that then
- they'll go in a year. Actually, now, it costs twice what you were paying streetlight data.
- Is that what I was thinking? Wes can maybe answer that. I don't see that happening with this. This is
- more Google trying to pretend that they're good for the world. They aren't, but they're trying to pretend.
- I see this as really them trying to. I don't see them doing it. Maybe Wes has an opinion, but it's different
- than that. I don't know. I think Zach's right. It's probably mostly driven by them wanting to have a
- little bit of a PR stunt, so to speak. I will say the biggest concern with Google is they discontinue
- a lot of stuff, a lot of really great things. And so that would be the biggest concern.
- But yeah, I think at least for a few years it should be fine. And the good thing is it has started a
- conversation. Like Zach pointed out, a lot of articles have been written about this, and that people
- in academia are talking about it. So even if they did kind of pull it out and start using it, I think
- people will have the motivation to find an alternative. But that's a very good question. I see Alex
- has a question on Zoom. His hand raised. Go ahead, Alex. Fantastic presentation.
- I was wondering, I know the greenhouse gas protocol is currently doing a big update that's from what
- I've seen seems to be centered largely around like scope 2 emissions. I didn't know if during that there
- was any updating that they're also doing to these scope 3 emissions that we should maybe be watching
- closely and
- I didn't see anything. Maybe Wes is aware of that more than I am, but I'm not aware of that, no. Yeah,
- I don't think it immediately comes to mind, but we do always check each year with the inventory. And
- I think one of the good things I wanted to emphasize coming out of this presentation is that that's
- the point of the meeting, art and science. We have to think about, what are we using inventory for?
- I think at the end of the day, every city has a different set of considerations than what they're using it for.
- ultimately usually to drive a policy outcome. And you could imagine maybe you have a better representation
- of what percentage of emissions goes to each sector. We're under county transportation now, but if we
- add EIE data, we might be able to fix that. But maybe you add a different data source that gets you
- closer, but it's super unpredictable. It takes you year over year. And it's not as maybe trustworthy
- as Google data. Well, there's another policy.
- aim that we have with this tool of the inventory, which is we want to be able to track if the work we're
- doing in Bloomington and the programs are funding and everything else is that actually moving that particular
- category of missions down. And it's going to take a few years to see that. So you have to keep measuring
- it. And there's obviously variability. But that's where getting to the kind of black box comment, which
- after really looking into it, I kind of agree with Zach. It's probably not as much of a black box as
- people will say. But that's why we have such a concern with that type of thing. And that's also why
- we're a little bit
- careful when we're looking at changing inventory updates or how the protocol is changing, because we
- want to really make sure that we're consistent year-on-year. Because if not, then it's like, OK, well,
- sure, you've done the exercises in the inventory, but did that even meet the point of it? It's like
- the city's spending money on something that's not actually even a valuable policy tool. So we're always
- really careful on that. And that's something Sean's always done a good job of emphasizing as a goal.
- A second question.
- mostly for Wes and Sean. It sounds like this is already being implemented. So other than, say,
- good job, we know. Is there a role for the commission to potentially be supportive or helpful, if anything
- related to this? Oh, thank you, Wes. I had mentioned to Zach before the meeting that I would love to
- see the commission, if you're really interested in reducing transportation emissions,
- I put forth the idea a couple years ago when I was a BCOS member to potentially try to launch an anti-idling
- campaign, a voluntary anti-idling campaign. And so that's something that we could talk about if you're
- interested, what that would look like and what type of support that we could provide. Another thing
- I wanted to highlight is the Bloomington Energy Works program. That's a program where we're trying to
- gather a list of energy efficiency and solar projects worth a minimum of $50 million by April 15.
- and projects that would qualify our EV charging stations. And so we would love to see multi-family units
- add their EV charging stations to our list, businesses, manufacturers, and really try to spread out
- the EV charging stations that are available across our city. So not only in Bloomington, but also in
- Monroe County. So if that's something that you want to help promote, we would greatly appreciate that.
- if there's a business or manufacturer that wants to transition their fleet to EVs, that's also a project
- that they could add to our Bloomington Energy Works public-private partnership plan. So I'm happy to
- talk to anybody about that in further detail if they're interested. But those are two of the tools that
- we have that can reduce emissions in Bloomington. So is the city planning to use this
- So in terms of the context of this talk, the city's planning to go forward with that method? Yes. Is
- that going to happen? I have two questions. I was just going to ask on that. Is that happening mid-cycle
- in your active climate plan? Or is it starting this year and next year? Or is it starting in 2030?
- Well, we just received the data from Duke Energy for 2024. We've been waiting. We asked all of 2025
- to receive the 2024 data. So Wes is working on our 2024 greenhouse gas inventory. And so that hasn't
- been compiled yet or completed. So we will be adding the EIE data to the transportation emissions. Exactly.
- So our first week, we built around it to cat-pick this. And we've actually already been updating it
- to have EIE data. So the 2024 inventory, which will come out in a couple of months, will already feature
- what we discussed today. And yeah, we're excited to switch the induced traffic model. Is it going to
- be applied retroactively back to the 2018 baseline data? That's a great question. Awesome question.
- Very good question. Yeah, so one of the things I point out that's really we're lucky with with the Google
- data is sometimes
- you don't get year over year, but they actually do have the historical data. So that way we can maintain
- year over year consistency. So we will also be going back and doing the historical calculations to make
- sure that we're able to fairly compare numbers year over year. Great question. That's great. One other
- question I wanted to ask was on the topic of biofuels, biodiesel ethanol. Is that counted, or how is
- that being counted in this method, or is it? Wes, do we have biodiesel information
- I don't. That's a great question. We actually do with the in-doc method because we get a list of vehicle
- registration from a different department. I'm thinking it off the top of my head, but from a different
- state department. Actually, it's the county registration data. And they actually have a split of the
- distribution of different vehicle types and what they use. I do remember bio being really, really low.
- But we do actually include that. Yeah. I was just asking because some accounting methods will
- not count it because it's regenerative. So I was just curious. Yeah, we have a custom emissions factor
- every week for it up at the top of my head. So we would adjust for whatever is associated with it. OK.
- Thank you. On the anti-idling campaign, I absolutely love that idea. Are there any cities that have
- already done that? And what were the results on that? Because I think there's already something in city
- code about city vehicles not idling.
- Having taken the Citizens Academy and going to the police force, they said they have to keep their police
- cars on because of the amount of equipment that's in there. They can't. It would drain the battery if
- they were shutting the engines off. So this is more towards residents. Right. Because I've climbed up to.
- plenty of contractors' vehicles and shut them off. I hate it. I absolutely hate it. And I will continue
- to do it. I've got my people's windows. They're like, why are you idling? It's not necessary. No, I
- know DC had a law against idling. Anecdotally, though, it didn't work very well because it didn't enforce
- it. Right. And not that we wouldn't be able to do it all, most likely because it would be preempted
- by the state, but some sort of a campaign, an awareness campaign. Yeah. Yeah, idlings are most effective when
- audience these kids. And so what they did with drunk driving and seat belts in the 80s was PSAs targeted
- at my generation so that we would appropriately shame our parents. And that's like a shame, you know,
- it could be a shame. Like I'm not being facetious, it was highly effective. They got a bunch
- of eight-year-olds to yell at their parents about it. Shame is the only way you're really going to get
- people to do it.
- I do have an example city and they had stickers that would be placed in parents windows and it's like
- I'm a part of the anti-idling campaign and so that the other parents could would see that while they're
- picking up their kids and you know it is sort of like a you know community effort and you know join
- this positive
- campaign for our community. So I know they wouldn't go this way, but if anybody's seen the guy that
- annoys people about leaving their shopping carts and not putting them back, and he's got magnets that
- he puts on people's cars to lose their mind. Don't touch my car! Do you see what your car looks like?
- Anyways, we like the stickers, but hey, if we could get some magnets to put on people who are idling,
- that'd be great. Talk about shaming. I'm ready to shame some people and to stop idling. Come on.
- I don't know if we'll do that as a commission, but to you, man. Just curious, do you know what, Indianapolis
- is not really a peer city, really, right? But do you know what they do for their kind of method?
- I did look. It was kind of difficult. Theirs was one of the more difficult ones to decipher exactly
- what they were doing. But I believe they're using, I mean, they have more resources than we do, and
- they're doing
- Their metropolitan planning organization does sort of modeling about where it's more complicated. I'm
- not sure exactly what they're doing. But they have some sort of a model to figure out where people are
- coming from. And then I think they're counting it based on that. It's based on the entire metro area
- of Indianapolis, not just the city, was my understanding. Yeah. Are there parameters in these kinds
- of data sets and models to look at?
- the kind of mercurial nature of traffic in a place like in a college town to see if there's sort of
- like optimal intervention times like when is the time like I mean we know like it's August and everybody's
- driving on the wrong side of the road like what is the like is that something that's possible with this
- kind of data set or methodology is time series data I don't think it gives you anything more than the annual
- estimate. If we use something like street light data, which is very expensive. The contract ranges from
- anywhere from $40,000 to $150,000 per year for a city. Our transportation department may already have
- it. I have no idea, because they use it for transportation modeling. But with that, you would be able
- to. But again, it's extremely expensive. And I believe using essentially the exact same thing that the
- Google EIU is is just more detailed. But no, the EIU is not able to do that. Any more questions?
- And maybe it was something I missed. Was there a differentiation between the types of vehicles, whether
- it was EV, hybrid, or gasoline, diesel, bio fuel, for the distances, whether it was longer or shorter?
- And that's part of the, I mean, that's kind of one of the criticisms of the EIE is that they don't tell
- you exactly how they're doing that. But they do say that they're splitting with the EIE based on estimates
- of what the mode split is.
- With the INDOT data, we're able to do it, as Wes was mentioning, from VMV vehicle registration data.
- And then you're able to estimate them from comparing what fuels, fuel types of the vehicles are using.
- And then at the end, they give you CO2 emissions. With the EIA, that's one of the valid criticisms.
- We don't fully understand exactly how they're calculating that. But they say that they are including
- it. Yeah. Awesome. Thank you. So with EVs, is the emission
- being counted on the power generation or on the not? I believe in the power generation. If the current
- model is under the power generation, I believe it would be EIA as well. So like someone commuting on
- an electric bike, that would not show up? Yeah, that would be under? Yeah. Yep. Yeah. This may be kind
- of for a kill, but it's something I've been following with the precious metals. I think I've mentioned
- that. And we've seen a lot of change in silver just in the last month since we met last.
- And that, whether it's the Samsung battery for EVs, you know, if we do that, it's this feeling of,
- oh yeah, 20-year lifespan. We can charge it in nine minutes. It has this 600-mile range. How great is
- that? But then it takes a huge amount.
- of the silver that is mined, which is often not just straight silver. So whether we're looking at solar
- panels, AI technology, cell phones, laptops, even in medicine, or anything else like that, because I
- was looking up that China refines, and this is something I've newly discovered in the last few days,
- is China refines. So it's the whole part of not just having silver, but the refining of the silver
- The US has two refineries. China has what I write down like 27. It's the world wide leader by huge amounts.
- So I'm just wondering how, this is my last session with you all, but just wondering how are we going
- to look about how to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions with the way the world is changing and looks
- like a new world order is
- taking place and we're in the shifting timeframe. Is that a part of discussions and thinking about when
- looking at the data, how that, you know, do we have some new columns on the spreadsheets being added
- or, you know, pivot tables or whatever it is we need to know to make some good decisions going forward?
- I mean, you're not going to find me making an argument for any type of car ever. I'm extremely anti-car.
- And I don't think there is an environmentally friendly car. Environmentally friendly? No, there isn't.
- Silver is going to be in all of this. So even if we reduce the greenhouse gas emissions by working at
- home, but still using the technology and heating our houses and all these other things, that we're still
- going to be using solar panels and relying on something that still is going to be
- you know, already in a deficit of over two years in regards to silver supply. And I saw where the amounts
- from last year or the year before last year has more than doubled and sometimes tripled with what is
- going on in the development in green energy. So just kind of throwing that out there for you all to
- think about.
- I'll probably tune in to some meetings periodically and want to still contribute in some way. But just
- kind of throwing out some questions. And I've been really big into resilience. How are we going to navigate
- this as a community, as a part of the county and a larger area that when we have so many people driving
- long distances, which I have done that, for their work?
- That's why it's very hard to track the scope three data. You just mentioned that. But I think in the
- EU, they act just like introducing new act. So in order to prevent the TTCFD things regarding the public
- companies, they
- disclose their financial data regarding the greenhouse emission thing, some of that. So there is a standard
- now, like only after some certain size of the company, like maybe they have employee, like 5,000 people,
- or they're like market share, some of that, and then so they are required to disclose the scope one
- and scope two data.
- below that, some small size companies. So they are not required to collect the data things. So I think
- it is impossible to require each individual people to do so many things for the society or for the planet.
- I think the EIE data might be a good way to show some of the things that the whole county is doing good
- things for the environment and the planet. All right. We'll probably have to leave it there. We've got
- some of the other items with us. So thank you very much for the presentation, Zach. And thank you, Wes,
- for coming and spending some of your evening here with us answering some of these questions. Really
- appreciate it.
- Thank you to the commissioner for having me, and I really appreciate the engagement. Hope you all have
- a great rest of your meeting. Thank you. Thank you. OK, so next item on the agenda is we're back to
- reports from commissioners, so chairs report. Did you want me to share, Julie? Go ahead.
- Okay that's good enough. Okay so here's the current org chart not a whole lot well not different at
- all really since last time. We've got one vacancy right now at the moment but this is going to change
- pretty soon because we have three farewells to give today. Jamie already mentioned that this is her
- last meeting with us. Zero Rose is also going to be stepping away after this meeting and Annalise Jenke
- is still going to be in town for a little while I think but not
- pursuing another term. And so just wanted to give thanks and appreciation to all three of you for all
- the great work that you've done since you've been here. I see that I put a typo on this. You haven't
- been serving since 2005. The commission wasn't even around then, so apologies for that. Really dedicated. But no.
- for everybody who's been serving for the last couple of years or even since the last year. He's done
- a lot of great work and really appreciate all the enthusiasm and effort that you've brought
- to the commission. So thank you. And definitely wishing you luck in future ventures and hope you'll
- come back. Come back and visit us again. Okay, so let me try to make this a little bigger too,
- So my update slide is growing every time. It won't get any larger than that. But I'll walk you through
- the important stuff verbally if you can't read it from there. Some of the stuff is.
- is from last time and hasn't really changed, but the stuff that's in bold and blue is the newer stuff.
- So I'll go to the second bullet point there, the resolution 2025-04, which is about the name change.
- Nothing really new on this front except just to mention that there's new leadership now in council and
- some of the committees. And so I haven't actually checked, but the leadership and membership of the
- council on
- Sorry, the committee on council processes may have changed, and that was going to be the entity that
- probably took this up. And so just to say I'll reach out to them once they get settled in just to make
- sure that this doesn't kind of get lost in the noise there.
- Going down a couple bullet points, the Sustainable Energy Utility Feasibility Study, which is the O'Neill
- capstone that we're serving because it's serving as a client for, that begins this week. So Alex and
- I are planning to attend that first class this week. And then the next time we'll hear from them is
- February 12, when they'll have a finalized work plan for the rest of the project. And then April 28
- is when they'll deliver a final report for us.
- When is that class? When is it? Like what times of the week? The first class that you're going to. Oh,
- it's this Thursday. I think it's around 2 o'clock hour. If anyone does want to attend that, we can't
- accept too many more people just to be safe on quorum things. But we could do another one, maybe.
- Yeah okay the 2025 annual report so the plan was to have that draft here for us at this meeting to review
- but it's not quite there yet so I'm thinking probably between meetings so I'll probably email that out
- to everybody with a link to a spreadsheet that you can fill in with comments and send it back and then
- at the February meeting we can go over all those comments and the changes and stuff and if it's good
- to go at that point we can approve it or if there's more
- changes that people want to work through, then we can go another cycle on that. The Waste Production
- District of Monroe County has a compost bin and rain barrel sale that's coming up. I think they do this
- every spring, or at least for the last couple of springs. And ESD is a collaborator, as I understand,
- on this, or at least a supporter, I should say, maybe, of this sale.
- If you're interested in that, the order deadline for that is April 15th, and then you pick up those
- supplies on the 24th and the 25th. Grant project reports. So we've got a couple working group grant
- and sustainable neighborhood grants from the past that we're still awaiting presentations from.
- I'm hoping to fit two of those in in February. So that would be the Working Group Grant from Canopy
- Bloomington and the Sustainable Neighborhood Grants from Grandview Hills Pollinator Gardens Project.
- And then hopefully a TerraCycle 2.0 presentation before too long. Okay, so that brings us to the other
- side of the form here under the upcoming column.
- So the strategic planning retreat. So you got an email from me today with a link to a Google form asking
- you to fill that out. The idea is that we are looking to schedule the retreat, and so we wanted to see
- what dates work for people. I listed, I think, five Saturdays, four of them in February, one of them
- in January, and then asking about, do you want like a half day, three quarters day, or full day sort of event?
- I remembered later that I had talked about sitting around additional options besides that, like other
- different models. Instead of having kind of a day-long retreat on a weekend, we could do a single regular
- meeting on a weekday, or we could do a series of working group meetings or something like this. So I
- forgot to put that into the survey.
- I sort of remembered people generally liking the idea of a longer day thing, but it wasn't really a
- formal consensus or anything like that. So I wanted to ask the group, before we go too much farther,
- is there anybody who's interested in those kind of other options where maybe we do a series of shorter
- meetings rather than one big kind of partial day-long retreat? If anyone wants to see those options
- on the survey, I will happily put those in and just resend it out.
- So I'll give people an opportunity to just say if they want more options there. Is everybody happy with
- that? Maybe you haven't had a chance to look at the survey yet, and that's fine. But it's basically,
- here's a list of five Saturdays. Which one works best for you? Or rank how well each one works for you.
- I just wanted to say that Jolie and I will need to be at the retreat. And it's really difficult to have
- staff capacity for a full day.
- our schedules are pretty full, and if it's possible, it would be great if you could extend a regular
- meeting and have time set aside for your priorities to talk about your 2026 priorities. That would be,
- I think, easy for everyone, since it's already a regularly scheduled meeting. That way, we're not taking
- up Saturdays. Yeah. I think the idea behind doing a sort of day-long retreat thing is it gives us a
- real opportunity to
- in sessions, think about our work in different contexts. We can think about where we are right now,
- think about where we want to go, and then try to figure out how to get there, which is really tough
- to do in a single working group session or a single meeting, even if we have an extra hour or something
- to it. And then this kind of gives us the option to maybe break out into smaller groups for 10 minutes
- or whatever to tackle a certain issue and then come back, share with the group, just try out some different formats
- for kind of working through these things. I do appreciate the staffing concerns that are there. Is there
- a reason that staff would have to be present for the full day or the full event? I think any DECOS meeting
- staff is required to be present. Where is it required? Who is required? That's pretty typical. I don't
- know if you want to address that. Well, if I could.
- We've had working group meetings in the past that haven't had any staff there. So that seems similar.
- I guess the question is, is it a requirement on us that staff be present? And if so, what is
- that requirement? Or is it a requirement on staff since this is the purview of staff, right? Hi, Audrey.
- Hi. Please, go ahead. Everyone's favorite person, the attorney. Would you like to add a new speaker?
- We are not. I'm sorry. I'm staff. I assume that I've never been presented as a new speaker as a staff
- person, but you're welcome to. We've had a lot of instances of our agenda being changed by staff without
- notice, so I just want to make sure we're following the right procedure. I'm just offering clarification
- on the topic that's currently being discussed. I'm not presenting a new agenda.
- OK, so if you had a comment on the question about requirements. Yes, exactly. Yeah. So sorry, Audrey
- Riddingham, city attorney. I support Sean and Jolie in the ESD department and this commission, if you
- guys ever have questions for me. The requirement that staff be present at public meetings is
- a requirement we have on all boards and commissions. And I think it was one that just clearly wasn't
- communicated super well to this border commission or to Sean and Julie in the past. So I only just recently
- found out that there were committees meeting without staff present at them. That is a unique.
- This is the only board of commission where that was occurring, to my knowledge at this point. And my
- advice was that staff needs to be at all of them. That is about making sure that open door laws are
- followed, that quorum is followed. All of those requirements still apply to subcommittee groups.
- And so we need to have staff that have been trained in those issues at those subcommittee groups. And
- it's mostly a protection for you guys, because the city has been sued over things like quorum and open
- door law violations. So again, it's a protection for y'all, but staff does need to be present at all
- public meetings.
- retreat that you have would have to be noticed. It would be a public meeting. It'd have to be noticed
- as such. And I would have to work with Jolie and Sean to figure out the best way to notice subgroups.
- So I would also need you guys to figure out timing-wise when you would have subgroups form, and then
- when you would have breakout sessions of those subgroups, because they might need to actually be noticed
- separately from the entire meeting, which is why when I was thinking about it earlier, sorry, which
- is why it might be more beneficial for you to break it up into not just one long meeting, but a few
- smaller meetings. Because then you would have the opportunity to discuss maybe what subgroups would
- we want to have, and then at a subsequent meeting work out how the subgroups are going to break out
- for notice purposes. That's what I have.
- Thank you. Is that a written requirement somewhere? The requirement that staff be at all meetings is
- that? Is it written somewhere? Yeah, written policy of the city. I don't know. That's a good question.
- I don't know if it's written. It's practiced by every board and commission, to my knowledge. It's a
- risk thing is what it is, minimizing the risk. Because the mayor is saying that the city would be liable
- if there was
- accessibility sort of violation or something like that at one of those meetings. Yeah, absolutely. We're
- also required to maintain meetings, or sorry, minutes, agenda, notices, like in the, we're required
- to maintain the information from all public meetings indefinitely, forever. And so Sean and Jolie know how to
- keep that information. But yeah, absolutely. The open door law issues, the quorum issues, what happens
- when you have a meeting that's on Zoom and Zoom isn't working? What happens when someone decides to?
- attend and participate in a meeting on Zoom more than twice in a row. These people are trained to deal
- with that and answer that question so that the actions that you take in that meeting are enforceable.
- Because if you violate an open door law, let's say someone participates virtually in something that
- they legally shouldn't have participated virtually in, then whatever action you took isn't valid. So
- it's really a protection for
- the city and for the board itself. Okay, thank you. So, yeah. Well, we've got other things to do in
- this agenda. But I think this is, I don't know, maybe we can have a working session to discuss this
- more or something in the next couple of weeks. Because I think
- Especially if nothing's written, that's an issue for requirements, because we're not aware that it's
- a requirement if nobody wrote it down. And if staff's not even aware it's a requirement until a certain
- point, and it's still not written down. Anything can be a requirement if you just say it's a requirement,
- right? I mean, just as a chair, the city is asking you to follow these procedures. And I would hope,
- as the chair, that you would be willing
- to follow what the city is asking to do. I'm going to move on from this topic. I just think that this
- is a strange requirement, because in principle, what it means, and I'm not saying this would happen
- as a theoretical situation, but in principle, if you decided you never want to be cost to meet again,
- you could just not attend any meetings. And then we're not allowed to meet even if we're all in the
- same room, and we have a quorum, and we've noticed it publicly the way we're supposed to by the open door law.
- then we couldn't make decisions because staff isn't present. And so it just seems strange. And OK, very
- quickly. I'm sorry. I'd like to clarify that that requirement is coming from me. So you could set a
- meeting and require the meeting to happen. I would just require that an ESD staff person be present.
- So if these two were unavailable, then I would require someone else to be present, perhaps myself, another
- person from ESD.
- So I'm not trying to say that staff would prevent you from setting up your meeting. I'm trying to say
- that internally, the legal department is going to require staff be present at a meeting whenever you
- set that forth, even if you do set it for the entire day, which I think is ultimately your prerogative.
- Totally up to you guys. I would require that staff attend the meeting. Thank you. All right.
- Moving on around the city, council elected new leadership. So council member Asare is the new president,
- and Zulik is the vice president, and then council member Daley is the new parliamentarian. I don't think
- we have council member Aralo on, but I think that's the big news lately. And if you track things at
- the state level, you'll know that the Indiana General Assembly is currently meeting for their regular
- legislative session this year. Not a lot for us to do there,
- They do have a lot of bills out right now, and some of them are in the realm of sustainability. So if
- you're interested, I put some links up there to the different bills you can take a look at. It's good
- to know it's coming down the pipe, potentially. OK, I want to talk for a few minutes about elections,
- which are coming up in March. So first, I want to go over some of the rules and requirements that we
- have here. So a couple of them come from Bloomington Municipal Code.
- the first section there on officers. So we're required to elect a chairperson, secretary, and treasurer.
- We also have a vice chairperson in this commission, but that comes from us. And then the other bit there
- is that the Bloomington Municipal Code actually lays out what the duties of the secretary are. So that's
- not something that we can change here. That's where that comes from, ultimately.
- And then there's several provisions in our bylaws that explain how elections are supposed to go. So
- that first one there is that elections have to happen at the annual meeting, which is defined in the
- bylaws as being March by a majority of current membership of the commission. We also have the right
- to decide annually on the structure of the executive offices. So kind of an interesting concept here
- is that we can choose whether we want a chair and a vice chair or if we want to have co-chairs.
- And that has happened in the past. I think there was maybe a four-year stretch or something back in
- 2014 or something like that, where there were co-chairs. And then more recently, a few years back, there
- were co-chairs as well. So that's something we could decide to do. Eligibility, all officers have to
- be members of the commission. And nobody can hold more than one office at a time. Pretty simple. And
- then term links.
- So terms start at the close of the meeting at which somebody is elected. You could serve more than one
- term. And then there's a provision in there about if you have materials and stuff that you use to do
- your job as an outgoing officer, then you pass those on to the incoming officer. OK, so real quick overview
- of the different roles and duties here. So chairperson, you prepare the agenda for all meetings, preside
- over the meetings, unless you designate it to the vice chair.
- distribute the agenda and related documents, and organize and submit the annual report for the commission
- in coordination with the other members of the executive committee here. I'll go down to the vice chairperson
- first and then say that, OK, so that serves as the chairperson in the chairperson's absence, performs
- the duties as assigned by the chairperson, aids on request. This one I'm not totally sure about. Post
- notice of vacancies of the commission's
- advisory committee positions and requirements thereof. This might be a relic from something we used
- to do. I don't think we have an advisory committee. When we talked about the bylaws update, that it
- might be something that was from a previous version of the bylaws that was removed, or like a previous
- type of committee that existed. And that was taken out at some point in the history, but not the description here.
- Having held this position for the last 10 months, it won't ever come up because it doesn't exist. Right.
- Yeah, and basically serve as a secretary in the absence of a secretary or appoint somebody to do that.
- The secretary, again, this is per Bloomington Municipal Code, which we already went over. Oh, I missed
- the co-chair's part. Let me back up for a second.
- So co-chairs are a little different. You've got basically two chair people instead of chair and vice
- chair. And they basically decide amongst themselves, if elected, how they're going to divide
- those responsibilities of the chair and the vice chair amongst themselves. And then that decision gets
- put down in writing and then presented to the commission by the next regular meeting. So everybody kind
- of knows who's responsible for what. There's no confusion there.
- And then the treasurer facilitates the preparation of the annual budget, which we haven't really had
- one in a while. At least income is zero and expenditures are zero. And facilitate the offer of commission
- members to identify funding sources in order to execute the strategic goals of the commission. Okay,
- so that's what officers do. What about the process for elections? So this is where there's not a super
- set in stone way that we go about doing the actual electing. So there's some flexibility there. So there's
- a couple of questions I wanted to present to get people thinking about. I think we can make some maybe
- more formal decisions on this at our February meeting next month so that we kind of know going into
- March what the process is going to look like. But question one is, which structure do we want? Do we
- want a chair, vice chair, or do we want to do a co-chair kind of thing? That's probably the best decision
- to start with because that will kind of set up
- how people nominate themselves or how we nominate others. So speaking of nominations, how does that
- process work? A couple of ground rules I think just make sense. You can make nominations ahead of time,
- or you can do it at the meeting during the election. Nominations can be made by any commissioner. I
- guess I didn't put this down, but the commissioner can make multiple nominations if they want.
- And commissioners can nominate themselves. We don't have a threshold for nominations, or at least we
- used one in the past. So if somebody gets one nomination, they're welcome to stand for election. And
- in the case that nominations get submitted, and we'll have a process for this, but in the case that
- nominations get submitted before the election meeting, then we'll inform the nominee and ask if they're
- actually willing to serve in that role if elected. And if so, then we'll make sure we announce that
- during the meeting. So we have an option here. We haven't done this since.
- I've been on the commission. But if we wanted to, we could invite people to make candidate statements.
- If they accept the nomination ahead of time, they could write something down. Or here in person, they
- could say a few things. Hey, here's why I want to be chair. Here's why I want to be vice chair, whatever.
- We also don't have to do that. Question three, how should the actual election process work?
- We know from the bylaws that electing an officer requires a majority vote for the current commission
- membership. But there's a couple different ways we could do this. In the past, we've done it pretty
- unstructured. Well, actually, no, we've done it sequential kind of unstructured. But we could just make
- it kind of a free for all, where we just say, OK, who's got nominations? And people throw out nominations
- for whatever positions they want, or they could throw out nominations for a whole slate. I think this
- person should be chair and that person should be vice chair.
- And then we vote on that. That's kind of how council does it. At least, that's how I saw them do it
- the other night. We could make it sequential, which is kind of how we've done the last few times.
- So first, we start with the chair, do the nominations, and then do a vote. Then vice chair, and we go
- down the line. Or we could do a sequential ballot situation, or we do that same sequential thing, but
- instead of just trying to say, OK, there's been a motion for this person to be chair.
- Is there a second, all in favor of that kind of thing? We can instead figure out who all the nominees
- are for a position ahead of time, and then give everyone a ballot to write down who they think should
- get that. Quick caveat there is that we can't do secret ballots in a public meeting. So that information
- would have to be public ultimately. And it also adds logistical overhead. So anyway, those are our options.
- We don't have to make these decisions now. I want to get people thinking about it, and we can make some
- firm decisions maybe at the next meeting. But before I finish up this report quick, are there any pressing
- questions about the election process that people want to ask now? Is the expectation for the March meeting
- that the entirety of the meeting will just be elections, or will there be other things? No, it's just
- a portion. It's pretty fast. In the past, it's gone pretty fast.
- It's a real volatile situation. It can't be, but it doesn't have to be. It can be, but it doesn't have
- to be. At least in my time there. I wasn't anticipating. But I was looking at all the options,
- and I was like, some of these could take longer than others. All right, perfect. OK, so that does it
- for me on the chair report then. I would say just in thinking about the chair, vice chair, co-chairs,
- it's helpful to think about if you are interested in doing it, and then which would be preferable if
- you are comfortable
- like more comfortable doing it in sort of a partnership model or just like filling in things like that
- is helpful for thinking about that. Even if you're not like for sure gonna do it, I find that a helpful
- way to think about it. Oh, you're talking about me specifically? No, no, I'm talking about everybody.
- Oh, everybody, okay. Like think about like if you were gonna take this role, which one would you want?
- Because you might be nominated. You don't have to take it, but just like. Right, yeah, it is good to
- think about it ahead of time, because then all of a sudden you're just like, oh wait, no, I didn't think
- anyone was gonna nominate me.
- Maybe I should make this rash decision right now. It's a good point. OK, perfect. Thank you. That brings
- us to Waste Management Working Group. Matt, do you have anything for us? All right. Thank you. That
- brings us to Council Ex Oficio report. And I don't think Council Member Rallo is on there yet. So flying
- through now.
- OK, so that brings us to item 7a, which is the ad hoc committee. So this was the ad hoc committee for
- the sustainable assessment report that late 2024 we set out to do. The goal was to just get our feet
- wet, kind of get the muscles moving again as far as generating some of these reports where we assess
- the sustainability efforts here. And as the committee started going, which was chaired by Tara, started
- going through the process,
- The scope just kind of changed, and we kind of realized that that was not what we set out to do originally.
- It was probably not the best use of time and resources, and so we'll probably find other ways to get
- at some of those questions in the future. So being that that's the case, I'd like to make a motion to
- dissolve the Ad Hoc Committee on Sustainability Assessment Reports. There is a second from the chair,
- so that's a good sign. Is there any? Also for context, there were three of us, and almost immediately,
- then there were two of us, and then one of the people
- was not present for like six meetings in a row. And so it was just me. And I would like to not do that
- anymore. Very good. Is there any further discussion? Not much of a committee, but only one really. Yeah.
- That's right. That's right. All right. Then we'll move to a vote on dissolving the ad hoc committee.
- Tara Dunderdell? Yes. Yes. Justin, yes. Matt? Yes. Yes. Zero is absent. Zach? Yes. Yes.
- Councilmember Rallo is absent. Quentin? Yes. Yes. Ross? Yes. Yes. Alex? Yes. One more time? Yes. Perfect.
- Yes. Thank you. Janie? Yes. And thank you, Tara. Yes. Annaliese? Yes. Yes. Diana? Yes. Yes. Shenghui? Yes. Yes.
- OK, the motion carries, and the ad hoc committee is dissolved. Thank you very much, Tara. And I'll say,
- we didn't get nothing out of it. We got work. We got a resolution out of it. And I think we learned
- a lot about the challenges of doing any kind of collaborative work like that within the confines of
- open door policy. So I think it was not a waste of time, but it was perhaps still really ambitious for
- reality. Absolutely. Also, my children were sick for, like,
- of the last winners. Real quick, before I move on, Sean, did you have a staff liaison report tonight?
- I'm debating how much time we should ask for in addition on the agenda. I just have a brief update about
- when energy works. OK, perfect. So I think a five-minute extension should be enough. The resolution
- will be fast. OK, perfect. So I would like to move that we extend the time of this meeting to 7.35.
- unless we get to the agenda faster. OK, there's a second. All right, let's do our roll call vote to
- extend the time to 7.35. Tara? Yes. Yes. Justin? Yes. Matt? Yes. Yes. Zero is absent. Zach? Yes. Yes.
- Dave Rallo is absent. Quentin? Yes. Yes. Ross? Yes. Yes. Alex? Yes. Yes. Jamie? Yes. Yes. Annaliese?
- Yes. Yes. Diana? Yes. Yes. Shengwei? Yes.
- Yes, perfect, thank you. All right, we have no resolutions for second reading and discussion. So that
- brings us to 9A, resolution 2026-01. So I hope you've had a chance to take a look at the resolution.
- Essentially, and I've lost where it is here. Essentially, what it does is it just applauds the work
- that the city administration had done.
- back in November when the lapse in federal appropriations led to a gap in SNAP benefits being sent out.
- And so the Thompson administration provided, I think, $46,000 in emergency funding to Hoosier Hills
- Food Bank in response to that.
- And also the City Council provided resources in the packet materials of one of their meetings for connecting
- residents with groups that can support and also encouraging residents to donate if they're able to and
- to stay involved sort of long term and trying to help provide for these food banks and that sort of
- thing. So this is just a resolution saying we think that was great and thank you for doing that. And
- recognizing that food
- the access to food throughout the community is a resilience issue. It's a sustainability issue, right?
- So it's something that we care about. So I'm introducing this for first reading. So we don't need to
- debate it or anything yet. It'll come back to us in February for a second reading where we can properly
- discuss, debate, offer amendments, that sort of thing before we actually adopt it fully. So I will move
- that we pass this on for a first reading. Is there a second?
- Second. Second. All right. Any discussion before we go on the roll call vote for that? OK. Perfect.
- So this is to advance the resolution 2026-01 to a second reading. Tara? Yes. Yes. Justin, yes. Matt?
- Yes. Yes. Zero is absent. Zach? Yes. Yes. Councilmember Rallo is absent. Quintin? Yes. Yes. Ross? Yes.
- Yes. Alex? Yes. Yes.
- Jamie? Yes. Yes. Annalise? Yes. Yes. Diana? Yes. Yes. And Chiang Mai? Yes. Yes. Perfect. All right.
- We will revisit this in February for a second reading. And that brings us to the report from staff liaison.
- Shawna, the floor is yours. I already talked a little bit about Bloomington Energy Works. I just wanted
- to give you an update. We are creating some momentum. Novo Nordisk has applied for free technical assistance.
- So we're hoping that they will add their projects to our public-private partnership plan.
- TASSIS will be adding a solar project. We're meeting with IU tomorrow. I'm meeting with IU Health on
- Friday. I've talked to Cook. Just really trying to get the word out there and get as many projects as
- possible. We're competing with 48 other cities across the US. So if any of you can help spread the word,
- it's basically, this is available for anybody in Bloomington and Monroe County, residents, businesses,
- manufacturers.
- anyone can add their energy efficiency or solar project to our plan. So if you can help spread the word,
- we'd greatly appreciate it. And also I wanted to touch on the volunteer portion of this program. Electrify
- Indiana, they have added some volunteer opportunities to our website. So if you haven't checked out
- our bloomingtonenergyworks.com website lately, there's links to their canvassing volunteer opportunities.
- They're basically going to be knocking on doors every weekend from now until April, I believe. So there's
- plenty of opportunities to volunteer. If you're interested in giving group presentations, you can do
- that as well. Or if you have a house that has already installed solar or energy efficiency projects,
- they're looking for people who are willing to open up their house for show and tells. So all that information
- is on the BloomingtonEnergyWorks.com website.
- Quick question, do you know Mady Hirschlund? Yes, I'm working on it. That's a good Hirsch. I know she's
- speaking of green drinks. Yeah, she's talking about Bloomington Energy Works. OK, so she might even
- have some guy. Yeah, she's been hired. A primary partner, yeah. Right, she's great. Yeah, thanks.
- Thank you. Thank you very much. OK, any member announcements? I will say if people have questions about either
- a sustainable energy utility thing, and they want to come to a class thing, reach out to me, I'd be
- the point person for that. And I'm also working maybe on the volunteer component of limited energy work.
- So if people want to volunteer, I'm also an excellent contact for that. I just want to make sure you
- don't reach quorum if you're going to. Yeah, quorum is seven. I don't think we'll have been more close
- to that thing. But it's always good to keep in mind
- Thank you. I will make sure. Please reach out to me so that I can ensure that we don't reach court.
- I will be responsible for being guardian of that. Thank you, Alex. Thank you, Alex. All right. There's
- no new business. And we're just moments away from our end time. So we will adjourn at 734. And we'll
- meet again on February 10, 2026 at 6 PM. Thank you, everybody. Thank you. Thank you.