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.