- ahead and get started. We do have a packed agenda so we might as well try to get as early a start as
- we can and we do appear to have a quorum. Okay so I'm calling to order this meeting of the Bloomington
- Commission on Sustainability at 6 p.m. and we will go through the roll call. Tara Dunderdale? Here.
- Justin Vassel? I'm here. Matt Austin? Present. Christopher Miles? Here. Zach Hammerman? Here. Councilmember Rallo?
- sends his regrets. Quentin Gilley, I can check online. I don't see him online. So not here. Alex Yorke
- is not here yet. Shengwei Xu, let me know that he was going to be absent today. Diana Ogrodowsky. Here.
- Here. And Ross Carlson. Here.
- Okay, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. So our quorum is six. We have a quorum. We'll move on
- then to the approval of the agenda. So as you can see, it's a very packed agenda tonight. It's a very
- packed room. This is all good stuff. So I'm gonna try to be a little more stricter than I usually am
- about making sure we're keeping focused on discussions and just trying to keep on track best we can here.
- So with that, I don't see any commissioners online. So with that, well, let me first ask, are there
- any proposed changes to the agenda? Otherwise, I'll suggest that we just do that by consent. Okay, so
- without objection, the agenda is approved. We'll move on to the approval of minutes from January 13th,
- 2026. Does anyone have any corrections to those minutes that they'd like to put forward?
- Is there a motion to approve? Motion to approve. A motion and a second? Second. Second, perfect.
- All right, all those in favor say aye. Aye. All opposed, nay. Any abstentions? All right, minutes are
- approved. That brings us to our public comment phase. So for this period of the meeting, we've got about
- 10 minutes set aside and three minutes per person. So if you're a member of the public and you're interested
- in speaking, either here in the room or on Zoom,
- you're welcome to so maybe for here in the room we'll have people one at a time come up to this mic
- over here this open chair and since we've got some folks online if you're interested in giving public
- comment from online from on zoom just use the raise hand feature and we'll just try to go room zoom
- room zoom till we run out of time for that so perfect is there anyone here in the room who would like
- to make public comment hello welcome in
- Okay, not seeing any. How about on Zoom? Is there anyone on Zoom who would like to make a public comment?
- Oh, okay, we've got someone. Yep, so Cale, I think the name is there. Go ahead whenever you're ready.
- Hello, yeah, thank you. Thank you, commissioners, for your time and hearing public comments today. Several
- Bloomington residents who are concerned about plot cameras in our community learned this afternoon of
- your resolution
- We wish to respect your limited time and allow your sufficient time in the meeting for your open agenda
- items. As such, we created a short joint statement and shared it online to be signed by fellow community
- members. We plan to read each signatory's name individually, but in just the three and a half hours
- since the joint letter was shared, 155 community members joined the signatories, even more people adding
- their names since the beginning of this meeting. Each of these Bloomington and Monroe County residents
- care deeply about sustainability and their community and support this resolution.
- As we would not have the time to read the entire list of names in the allotted 10 minutes for public
- comment, and to leave room for anyone else who wants to speak, we will instead email the joint letter
- and complete the list of signatures to the commission, requesting inclusion in your meeting minutes
- as well as the public record. But the joint letter reads, we the undersigned ask the city of Bloomington
- the commission on sustainability to approve revolution 202602 concerning automated license plate reader
- surveillance technology and its implications for social sustainability, community resilience,
- on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. We thank the commission for recognizing
- that sustainability is a core component of our entire community, including resisting map surveillance.
- We fully support all measures of this resolution, including recommending that the city administration
- disable all currently deployed plot cameras in Bloomington and do not renew contracts with plot safety.
- We look forward to hearing your discussion on this resolution tonight and your vote at the commission's
- March 10th meeting.
- We're specially signed and submitted to the City of Bloomington Commission on Sustainability 1.5 Bloomington
- and the Roque County community members. Thank you. And that's it for me. Perfect. Thank you very much.
- Again, much appreciated. And we'll try to get in touch so we can get that version of the letter that
- you had there. If that email is helpful, we'd love to have that as well. Thank you. Perfect. Should
- they send that email?
- to me, or to include in the minutes, or to the email assistant for the staff liaison? I guess, but yeah,
- if they send it to sustainability. Oh, OK. Yeah, so if you go onto our official commission website,
- there will be an email address there, and you can email it to that address. And I appreciate that. Thank
- you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Is there anyone else in the room who would like to make a public
- comment? No more in the room? Anybody else on Zoom?
- Okay, I'm not seeing any. I will note that Commissioner Gilley is on Zoom now. All right, so that's
- the public comment section. So that brings us to the chair report. So this is gonna be a relatively
- quick one today. I don't have slides to show. I did send around a written report for everyone to take
- a look at. There's more detail in that just to kind of
- keep you up to speed on things that have been going on. But just a couple of things that I want to point
- out from that. Number one are just the organizational updates. We usually show the org chart as one
- of the first slides here to see what has changed. And so we do have some changes here. So number one
- is we have a new commissioner. So Christopher Miles here is joining us for the first time. Welcome.
- And usually we just give new commissioners a chance to kind of introduce themselves to the group and
- say a little bit about maybe your background and what about sustainability interests you.
- So I'll hand it off to you. Hi, everybody. Thanks. Happy to be joining you. My name is Dr. Christopher
- Miles. My background in relation to sustainability is long and varied, but a lot of my professional
- work has been on sort of the genealogy of sustainability and applied work on digital agriculture. I
- did a postdoc at Cornell over a year ago now.
- studying the political economy of ag tech and its role or lack thereof in advancing sustainability
- transitions. And have engaged with the concept and the field in a lot of different ways for a long time.
- I'm excited to be here because that work I did most recently was on sort of private sector and ag tech.
- And I'm very interested in public sector approaches to enacting sustainability broadly defined.
- So very happy to be here, very happy to join you all. Welcome. Welcome. I'm just going to share my screen
- here so people can see the agenda, see where we're at, follow along. Great. Can we land a chair? Yeah.
- Wonderful. All right, well, welcome, Christopher.
- Yeah, Zach had his seat reappointed by council his last couple of weeks, so that's great. Just a month
- or two after he got in the first time. So that's good. So currently we have three vacancies, M2, M3,
- and M5. And we've got one carryover seat at the moment, which is Matt's seat. And so we've got 11 of
- the 14 seats filled.
- The secretary officer position is currently vacant now that zero is gone. So given the fact that we're
- so close to another election, I don't see any point in trying to reelect or elect somebody to fill in
- for that time. So Tara's been doing a great job taking minutes and stuff for us recently. So we'll just
- do that if it's okay with you until we have the elections next month.
- Exciting news. So we passed a resolution at the end of last year recommending to council that our name
- be changed to the Bloomington Commission on Sustainability and Resilience. So we transmitted that to
- council and some other parties and basically the guidance we got was that this would probably be something
- good for the committee on council processes as they were working in some title two changes already that
- they were planning for later in the year and it could just get folded in there. So I was thinking
- halfway through the year or something, it might pop up. But no, it's already had a first reading this
- past week at City Council. And so it's, I think, currently slated for February 18th for a second reading
- and a vote. So by the next time we meet, we may have a new name. So that's exciting. There's a lot of
- other Title II changes in that ordinance as well. But that's one of them. And they do reference our
- resolution in the ordinance. Yeah.
- We're getting some traction with these resolutions. OK, what else did I want to say about that? Yeah,
- the only other thing is the strategic planning retreat that we were talking about last time, trying
- to find some time, hopefully a more extended period of time, maybe over a weekend, where we can spend
- some more focused time really digging into what we want to get done over the next 12 months or so.
- So not a whole lot of updates in terms of scheduling that. We're still kind of working on that. Again,
- more details in the full report here. But I'll just be working with staff to try to find a time that
- works for everybody, where we can have that kind of retreat, where we think ahead to the next year and
- kind of what we want to get done. So stay tuned for more on that. And with that, I think that's all
- I have for the chair's report.
- Any questions on that stuff before we move on? OK, excellent. In that case, that brings us to reports
- from Waste Management Working Group. Matt, do you have anything for us today? Yeah, just real quick.
- Well, no report. OK. I'll wait till I have more robust. OK. Looking forward to it.
- Okay, perfect. Then we would go to the Council Atroficio report. But like I said, Council Member Rallo
- is not able to join us tonight, so no report there. Then that brings us to the Sustainable Neighborhood
- Grant Report from the Grandview Hills Pollinator Garden from Tara. So let me pull up those slide deck
- here. I'm presenting on behalf of Grandview Hills and I'll just
- preface that I am presenting this now, not as a commissioner, but as a private citizen who lives in
- Grandview Hills and was part of this grant project. But certainly, we knew about this grant because
- of my participation with the commission. And we've already reported. We've already submitted.
- I say we, my neighbors, already submitted our report to ESD on this grant. But we wanted to share some
- of the highlights and some of the lessons learned with this commission as well since this commission.
- voted to approve it. So we received in tail end of 2025, sorry, 2024 to implement in 2025, $1,000 for
- pollinator gardens in the Grandview Hills neighborhood. If you scroll to the project plan.
- It's okay. Technical difficult. Hard to see on this map, but this is the location in our community where
- the gardens were set to go in. We had a $1,000 grant. We ended up making a neighborhood match in order
- to extend the number of households that could participate. So we each contributed a proportional amount
- based on the number of plants we were ordering. We in total ordered 240 two-inch plugs from Prairie
- Moon Nursery.
- specific specified to their locations for six homes in our community. Can we scroll to the next sorry.
- One thing that we are we found that while the money was pretty essential to implementing this grant
- there were a lot of additional sort of hidden unexpected resources that were required in order to make
- it possible. If we go to the next slide.
- The biggest one is time and labor. I don't know what's going on with the graphic. The grant application
- and then the subsequent follow-up was a tremendous amount of work for the neighbors in my community
- that worked on that. I was not involved in it. The grant application was just labor intensive. When
- people write grants for nonprofits, that's their whole job. This was a thing that everybody had to learn
- how to do for the first time. And then there was a lot of subsequent back and forth follow-up with the city.
- boilerplate documents that had stuff that was unrelated that had to be verified and corrected. So there's
- just a lot of work. We had to communicate with each other both to write the plan and to implement it.
- So we had to be able to be in communication with each other, take time to talk with each other about
- how to do this. We prepared all the beds where this was going. Several of our neighbors were
- killing grass or pulling out a lot of weeds or invasive species, we needed to plant the gardens. And
- these particular plant packages come out. You get a window of time that they could come out, but it
- is pretty much we're shipping it tomorrow and it'll be there in three days. So we needed to be ready
- for a long period of time and then be able to get them into the ground right away or make sure that
- we could keep them alive until we had the time.
- time that had to be set aside, labor that had to be set aside, and something that we were not in control
- of when we did that. Ongoing throughout the summer, we needed to continue weeding and watering. And
- then because we had committed to document the process, we also needed to photograph the work that we
- were doing, upload all of that online to a shared document. The next category of additional resources
- that we needed to implement this grant, go to the next slide.
- is money. We, in addition to the neighborhood match that we made, many of our neighbors paid for mulch,
- the cost of water, of utilizing your water resources for that. Some neighbors tapped professional support,
- hiring landscaping companies to help them with the work, to cut sod, to put the plants in, to mulch,
- to weed and water, all of those things. And then any additional materials, if you needed a hose, if
- you needed fencing, if you needed tomato cages to protect from the deer and bunnies. We tried as much
- as possible to share these resources when we had them, but there was additional cost for everybody in
- order to be able to make sure that these plants survived.
- of category was knowledge. Again, grant application and follow-up is a whole job that none of us necessarily
- do every day. We leaned on one of our neighbors who had a ton of knowledge about plant care and plant
- identification. Prairie Moon, the vendor that we used, did come with some very helpful
- guides for for how to plant them and for, you know, aesthetically, but also for spacing and things like
- that. But we still needed additional knowledge and that was
- We had that in our neighborhood and we were able to share that, but that was essential to making this
- successful. That was especially important during weed identification of am I killing my tiny plant that
- I want or the tiny plant that I don't want. Pest control was an ongoing thing. We had a lot of aphids
- this summer. And then again, documentation. I know it seems like a low barrier, but you had to know
- how to take the photos, how to upload them to a Google Drive. You had to have internet access.
- you had to have work or computer access. Again, that was something that neighbors tried to share for
- and offer help if somebody didn't know how to do that so that everybody could do that. But that coordination
- and that sharing of resources was critical to the success of this grant. So now these are the gardens.
- This is the fun part. These are our site selections. You see a lot of us were taking beds that were
- either just grass or that were underutilized or taken over by invasives. One of our neighbors I know
- pulled out a lot of invasive honeysuckle bushes, pulled out weeds, areas that had been used for vegetable
- farming, vegetable gardening that didn't do very well. Each of our plant packages was
- targeted to what they were doing. So for example, my yard is I'm still on a septic tank, even though
- I'm in the city. And so I planted at the edge of my septic leach field with a rain garden because I
- planted plants that could tolerate that really intense amount of water that we get in that area. If
- we could go to the next slide.
- This is sort of our progress through the summer of prepping the beds. Again, this was work that some
- folks were doing on their own. Some folks were working together with our neighbors and helping each
- other out through the process. But it was pretty labor intensive, as you can see, to get things from
- what we saw before to the areas prepared for planting. The summer was very hot, very wet, which definitely was
- challenging for getting out there and working in these gardens. If we go to the next slide, we'll see
- that despite that, we had a lot of really beautiful blooms. We had a lot of success in a lot of our
- gardens. And the advantage of it being very wet was that it limited how much watering we did end up
- having to do. Although the period of the summer was like, it would be like really wet.
- for two weeks, and then it'd be really dry for three. So it was challenging to get the water control
- and weed control, all of that well-balanced. And my neighbor, if I'm wrong, feel free to tell me. And
- then if we go to the next slide, we'll see.
- So these are our results. 83% of the plants that we planted in May were still alive in October of 2025.
- We also have several plants that we think will come back this spring. All of our Prairie Blazing Star
- were eaten by bunnies, but the roots still look like they're there, so they might come back. Huh? They're
- all perennials, yeah. But yeah, so the gardens were
- gangbusters. We saw some variation in this. We had some where we had 90%. We had some that were closer
- to half, again, because of a lot of the issues with the weather and the individual site, idiosyncratic
- to the individual sites and sort of how they were able to tolerate the unusual heat and water. If we
- go to the next slide, and I won't read every single one of these, but these are some of our reflections
- that are in our full report that we submitted to
- ESD, some things that we would like to do differently or things that were challenging. Especially invasive
- vines were really hard. Individual health issues make it difficult to continue to go out there when
- it's hot and humid. It was really hard to keep up with the weeds. Flagging them or putting tomato cages
- to mark them would have been something that would make it easier. So those were some lessons learned.
- If we go to the next slide.
- We saw that we also had an amazing summer of pollinators. Our goal was to increase pollinators. We had
- so many pollinators in our yards. I, at one point, counted nine monarch butterfly caterpillars on my
- milkweed in one day. We saw hummingbirds. They were beautiful across our neighborhood. And we also met.
- periodically throughout this process just to chat about what was going on, what were the problems, and
- that was really great for neighborhood cohesion, for getting to know each other. Just yesterday my daughter
- said, or just last week my daughter said, when are we having another pollinator meeting? So it was really
- great for connecting us to our neighbors and thinking about the resources that we share and the resources
- that we can bring to one another.
- I think that's it. Thank you so much. Yeah, so it was a great experience. We learned a lot. There's
- a lot of factors that make this a difficult kind of grant to implement. And the money is really important,
- but I think there's a lot of other supports that would benefit neighborhoods to implement these kinds
- of grants. I think these hidden costs and these hidden hurdles, especially around the challenge of actually
- writing the grant and going through that process, could
- make this a much easier grant for people and improve the access to these resources. Because it made
- a big difference for us, but we had to bring a lot into it in order to access those resources. And if
- the city really wants to make sure that truly all of our communities can access this money and have
- all these beautiful benefits that we had, that some additional supports would be really great.
- Great. Yeah, that's amazing. Well, let me open it up to the commission for questions, comments. Not
- a question, but more of a comment just echoing sort of what you're saying about grants. I don't know
- anything about the details about this grant, but I think there are a lot of resources that are out there
- with cities and municipalities that are available. And frequently, they are, again, I don't know anything
- about the details of this one, but they frequently have overly burdensome processes for actually accessing
- the funds. And there's a way we could
- maybe make some recommendations about simplifying that sort of access. I think that could be beneficial,
- maybe, as future work for the commission, maybe. I also, yeah, go ahead. I was just saying, yeah, right
- before you commented, my ask would be any particular feedback you have about the difficulties with the
- grant process I would love to hear about. We've reformatted the application, I think, since your neighborhood
- applied. We were on the old one. The old one, right. And we've updated it and tried to streamline
- streamlined it a little bit, but I would just love to use more specifics if you'd like to share something.
- Yeah, and because of the potential conflict of interest, I wasn't involved in the actual writing of
- the grant. Because at the time, for anybody who wasn't there, BCOS would, once ESD approved them, BCOS
- then voted on those grants. And so I was abstained from that. And I, in order to also make sure that
- I was separate from that, I was not part of the actual application, other than my name was on it and
- my house was on it.
- But I'm sure my neighbors who were very involved in that can share feedback or share it with me. And
- I can share back to the commission. And I have anecdotally talked to a lot of other communities about
- this grant and telling them what we did. And I think one thing that is the grant is very fuzzy on what
- it's designed. And I think that's to its benefit. And then it's sort of like this dream up what you
- want to do in your community around sustainability.
- But also, when I've talked to folks, that lack of rails can feel overwhelming. I have to think of everything.
- I have to design. Designing an entire project can be overwhelming. So we've also talked as a neighborhood
- about sharing what we've done and our model and our plan with other neighborhoods if they want to implement.
- Like, just do here. This is what we did. And you can just copy it. But that also requires community.
- like communication between neighborhoods and things like that that can make it challenging as well.
- Cool. There's an irony in me asking this question, because I can't stand metrics in a lot of ways. But
- did you measure anything about the biodiversity as well? Because what I was really excited about when
- I read your report was a relatively immediate and noticeable change in the biota of your backyards.
- significant in a lot of different ways. It's not like people haven't measured this and shown this over
- and over. But even just anecdotally, locally, seeing that is exciting. Purely anecdotally, we have those
- metrics. Our official success metric for the grant was the number of plant survival, because it was
- just the period of the sort of reporting period was May to October of 2025. So it was just that we don't
- know what it will look like next year. But anecdotally, and this is in our full report that is in ESD,
- talk about all the different species that a lot of us saw for the first time in our neighborhood. Right.
- Particularly that was cool, because when you go from basically zero, like the desert of grass, to a
- place where things actually live, and you get to see the things that depend on those things being there,
- there's that whole ecological chain that sort of unfolds. And that, I think, can be exciting if you
- can put it in ways that are tangible to people and speak to them immediately about doing something similar.
- Elsewhere. That's a great idea. Yeah, I really hope that you guys being successful. Like, your 86% was
- it? 83. Yeah, 83. Like, that's really great, honestly, for something like this. And a lot of times when
- I have, in my experience, especially from like on a county perspective, these types of grants are like
- lot minimums and sizes that
- just excludes large areas. And so getting together, still having a pretty decent size planning area.
- And obviously, it had impacts. It's great to get 30 acres planted as pollinators, but doing small pocket
- gardens in a neighborhood does have impact. So I'm hoping having some of these reports on the ESD website
- and moving forward, it just helps
- continue more neighborhoods to be able to do these things. Yeah, I think this square footage ranged
- from like 100 square feet to like 200 square feet-ish for garden. Yeah. And they were different. Some
- of us used exactly the model that came with the plants. It was like, I'm going to, that's what I did.
- Yeah. And some folks had to work with what they had and adjust and things. But they were all, that was
- the kind of the range. Yeah. And really, hopefully, going forward, these will, I mean,
- sleep creep leap is kind of what I always say. A companion project that our neighborhood organized was
- that was not part of this grant but was just my neighbor Jillian really was going into each other's yards and
- with permission and cutting down in massive amounts of invasive honeysuckle bushes. We did that as part
- of a neighborhood cleanup grant that we got through hand the year before that we've gotten in 2024.
- So in preparation before we applied for this grant we had done that and part of the neighborhood cleanup
- grants includes brush pickup and I happened to be outside when the vendor that the city hires for brush
- pickup was coming by to do a drive-by before the
- cleanup event and he said I was contracted for four hours of brush pickup and you have 24 hours worth
- of brush pickup. The city asked us to stop putting out brush because we had so exceeded what they did
- and what he said was he's done a ton of these hand grants, these neighborhood cleanup grants with the
- brush pickup and nobody had ever worked together before and the
- the impact was exponential. And my garden fence is actually a bunch of those branches cut down. I dragged
- them into my yard and built the fence.
- folks in the neighborhood are excited to sort of continue maintaining it going forward now that, like,
- the initial project's over. I mean, obviously, there's a really good survival right here, but just kind
- of replacing the stuff that did die and kind of carrying the work on. I think so. We talked about that
- in some of the reflections that everybody's really excited to see what's going to come back this year.
- We've put in some, you know, like folks have put in more stuff after this that we're excited to look
- at. We've already talked about getting together to do some,
- milkweed seedling prep because did you say you have 8,000?
- milkweed seeds that she collected from her milkweed in her yard. So we're going to start working on
- that. We've also talked about doing a walking garden tour, or kind of like open house. Come see, and
- I'll just talk to you about my plants, because I really like to talk about all my plants in my yard
- and show people this is what I did. And what do I do with this? I don't like this thing, and I think
- it's invasive. Please help.
- So it's spurred a lot of ideas of how we could keep doing this and keep that neighborhood cooperation
- piece of it. A garden parade. Yeah. And actually, one thing, one of our other neighbors stopped by and
- left on my porch a gallon
- milkweed seedlings because she saw my pollinator garden. And she said she had too many. And she was
- living in a rental and didn't want to get in trouble for planting too many. And so she said, you seem
- like somebody who would like these. And she left them up. There was just a note when I came out of somebody
- who left. So it also meant that other people were noticing it outside of the grant participants that
- we were doing this. Quentin, I see you dropped a chat. Did you have a comment that you want to share?
- Yeah, I just want to echo the sentiment that you mentioned earlier about creating this second space
- for people. I think that can, just that alone, can have a huge benefit to resiliency and sustainability
- with the neighborhood. So that was a great project. And I will say, I
- did this presentation right now, but my neighbors did almost all the work. So I just want to recognize
- my neighbors that are in the room. I offered to give the presentation because I was like, I will be
- there anyway. I will do it. But I really want to recognize all of the labor and work that came from
- our neighbors. I mostly just showed up and put flowers in the ground. It was really all of their brainpower
- and efforts and knowledge and skills that made this possible.
- It's amazing. Very, very well done. Thank you all for coming and for doing this awesome work. This is
- really exciting stuff. Excellent. And thank you for presenting time. Appreciate it. Hey, Alex. Hello.
- Come on in. Are you also on Zoom? Oh, you're probably just on your phone. Yes. I'm like, wait a minute.
- All right. Yes, well, thank you again for the presentation. That brings us.
- to election planning. So I did make some slides for this, but most of them you've seen before. I'll
- just touch on them briefly. I don't know why I have my slides at such high resolution. Because the TV
- is like the size of the world. OK, so this is mostly just a reference slide just to show kind of what
- the statutory and bylaw requirements and rules surrounding elections for us are.
- Yeah, we don't have to go through that in detail, but the, you know, the Cliff Notes version is that
- we're required to have elections in March of the year for our four main officer positions. And so that's
- what these are those positions here, chairperson, vice chairperson, secretary and treasurer. Or if we
- didn't want to have a chairperson and a vice chairperson, we could have two
- co-chairs, who basically split the responsibilities of the chair and the vice chair between themselves.
- And the commission has done that before in the past. It's worked well. So it's a proven model. But yeah,
- so I'm hoping that everyone here is at least thinking about if they were to either go for an officer
- position or if they were asked or voluntold to take an officer position, maybe which one they might
- be interested in.
- You can see all the duties here listed out. But mainly what I want to talk about now is how we actually
- want this process to go next month when we meet. So we can just get down to it. At least since I've
- been here, the way it's normally gone, it's been very informal. People usually show up and we just go
- position by position. So we start with the chair and then
- We say, OK, who wants to be chair? Or who wants to nominate somebody to be chair? And then somebody
- gets nominated. They're like, OK, are you willing to do it? And they say, no. And then somebody will
- go to the next person. And I've never seen a situation where two people are running for the same position
- at the same time. So I'm not totally sure what happens in that case. But otherwise, what we've done
- is just been a nomination for somebody. They say, OK, I'll do it. And then we do a roll call vote.
- up or down, and then we go to the next position all the way down. So that's like the very unstructured
- way. On the other end of the spectrum, we could do it very structured, where we require people to submit,
- I don't know, like either nominate themselves or somebody else, and then the candidates can submit statements
- and things like that. Or maybe we want something kind of in the middle. One thing we can't do is secret
- ballots. This is an open meeting. But otherwise, we've got a lot of flexibility in terms of how we actually
- want to administer the election.
- So I'm going to open up the floor a little bit. What do people like? What would they definitely not
- like? One thing I don't like is the- Yeah, I don't know what's happening there. Is it messing up? Yeah.
- I think last time you had to unshare and then reshare. I can try that. Sorry for the interruption. Let
- me try that. And in the meantime- Yeah, in the meantime. Just on the process, is that what we're talking
- about? Yeah. Because it's not in our bylaws how we do the elections, just that we have to do them. So
- we have flexibility in how
- I mean, the way you said just going position by position starting with chair sounds fine to me. I don't
- know what other people think. Yeah, I mean, I think the biggest thing is just if we're going to split
- that position and have come chairs or a single chair and a vice chair. But beyond that, I'm fine just
- kind of going by position. I think whether or not we opt for the
- chair, vice chair, the co-chairs, depends on who's thinking about taking on either of those responsibilities
- and what they want to do. So I wonder if we could, I don't know how, if this is within what is flexible,
- but if we go position by position, elect chair, vice chair, and then let them decide, do you want to
- stay that or do we need to elect them as co-chairs? Yeah, I mean, we could elect for those two positions
- and then somebody could
- If we decided we wanted to do that, somebody could make a motion to convert those positions into co-chair
- positions. And as long as we do it by the book, it should be fine. Can we, for clarity's sake, share
- who's in what positions right now? I know our co-chair position's open. Yes. You're the chair.
- I'm the chair. Kara's the vice chair. And then Matt is our treasurer. But we don't have any money. We
- have no treasuring. And the vice chair currently acts
- the chair or any other officers like stead. And that's why I've been doing the secretarial duties since
- the other person hasn't been here. Yeah. That's helpful to know. Thank you. Just for context.
- Another way, at least the way the city council did it last time, because they just had their reorganization
- meeting this past January. And so they did their own like chair or president, vice president elections
- and parliamentarian, I think is the other one they elect. And they sort of did them in
- I think one batch, I think somebody made a motion, like, I think this person should be president, that
- person should be vice president, this person should be parliamentarian. And then, yeah, and they seconded
- it and just voted in a slate. So we could do it that way, too. Yeah, if we keep it unstructured, then
- we can kind of, in the moment, do it however we want. But yeah, I wanted to make sure we had a chance
- to have that discussion in case people did want to see something a little more formal or structured.
- Yeah. OK. It sounds like we all go to the Coliseum and the last person standing is the chair. I don't
- anticipate a lot of contested elections based on the ones I've been part of so far. Is the Coliseum
- available that time of the day? OK. Well, it sounds like everyone seems pretty happy with just how we've
- done before, pretty informal. So we'll plan for that. Again, think about what you might want to do.
- if even if you weren't necessarily planning to run for something. Any questions about the process or
- anything related to elections? I will say that if anybody wants my position, either of the two that
- I have right now, I'm fine with that. I have no stake. I have two jobs right now. My spouse is a tax
- preparer. I have no time. So don't feel bad.
- running for something or nominating yourself for something that at least I am sitting in. It's fine.
- I will say that I was planning to run again. I don't want to discourage anyone else from running if
- they're interested in it. In fact, if somebody is very interested in the chair position, I'm interested
- in keeping things fresh. Would also be open to a co-chair kind of situation. So if that's something
- that might interest you, think about that. You running for treasurer again?
- You don't have to answer right now. Okay. Any other final thoughts before we move on? Okay. Perfect.
- All right. All right. So that brings us on to 7C, which is the O'Neill capstone statement of work and
- scheduling of the presentation. So maybe I'll just hand it off to Alex. Do you want to take a few minutes to
- So Alex, we have the statement of work from the Capstone students. And then Alex had some suggestions
- for some modifications that could be done to that. And he sent out a memo explaining what those are.
- And the students are only available for a specific date that they could actually present the final results
- to us at the end of the semester. So we're hoping to hold a special meeting for them to present us with
- that. Alex.
- I think that if we expressed that, if that date is unavailable to us, I think if we said, I'm sorry,
- I know you wanted Tuesday, April 28th, I think it is. But if you want council chambers and you want
- these things to line up and you want the best presentation, it's going to be the evening of Thursday
- the 30th, I think that that will be fine. We should try to honor their request of the 28th, but I
- imagine that won't be a huge issue if we can't, because that is not a normal meeting date for us. Yeah.
- Yeah, it would probably be at the end of the month, though, right? So it'd be a special meeting. Yeah.
- Regardless. Yeah. They need to finish it, which means it needs to be the end of April, because that's
- the end of the semester when they will finish it. And it can't be at our meeting in May, because they're
- students, and they won't be here anymore. Probably most of them will be graduated and will have left the area.
- requested a specific date and time already? They requested April the 28th at 5 or 5.30. I'll check for
- room availability. I have talked to the environmental council about this project as well. They
- are interested, so if we could see about having some type of co-hosted thing and then
- invite whatever council members might be interested in coming. And ideally, if we could do it in the
- council chambers, that would be amazing because it gives it gravitas. Yeah, we want to give the students
- a good experience. I mean, if it's two commissions. Yeah, it will need to be. Yeah. I mean, I don't
- know that we'll get a quorum of either commission to a special event, which I don't know if that means
- we can't have the meeting. I don't know, but. As long as we notice it, right?
- I mean, this is like a receiving information sort of thing. So in a sense, it's technically business,
- but we are the clients for this. So as long as BCOS is there with Quorum, I would think that would be
- fine. And if the EC doesn't get Quorum, they're not really doing business. If they are worried that
- they might have Quorum, they should definitely
- Oh, it should be noticed for them, yes, 100%. Yeah, so then as far as statement of work goes, I know
- that we have had research questions that we kind of circulated, and those were talked about some previously.
- The statement of work is certainly pared back from that, which makes sense. Our research questions were
- very far and wide.
- So there are some aspects. I know I had a council member who asked about those students looking into
- things like if we started a sustainable energy utility, what would be good neighborhoods to target to
- begin that work, to pilot it in, and things like that. And a lot of those types of details that are
- more operative, the students are not really planning to look into that.
- you know, how the city needs to structure a new or expand utilities. Like, do you establish a new department?
- Do you expand utilities? That is beyond the statement of work that they specified. And I think that's
- pretty fair. So I didn't have any problem with that. The things that I did see, they had, I guess,
- We've got my memo up. So there are the five pillars, which are in Indiana State Code for the Indiana
- Utility Regulatory Commission to consider decisions around, oh god, I'm not gonna be able to remember
- these, reliability, resiliency, environmental affordability, and something else. So they brought that
- into it, which I think is a good framing.
- how sustainable energy utility is created. It will be regulated by the IURC, so it makes sense to bring
- that into the project. It's not something that I had considered. But they had a very qualitative assessment
- of fair, good, I don't remember the total range, but they had that very qualitative assessment. I think
- that being able to convert that into quantitative indicators of some type would just allow for much more
- robust analysis on our part and it just gives everything, it's much clearer as opposed to, they're gonna
- look at sustainable energy utility, kind of a baseline of not just doing existing programs and then
- some other programmatic suggestions and rank all of these things on these metrics. And it's like,
- all right, well, if two things are both good, which one's better? And that kind of detail is lost.
- This is very common, that type of scoring in utility integrated resource planning. And it drives me
- crazy and I hate it. I agree. Very reasonable to suggest, but if that could be something more quantitative,
- I think that that would just give all stakeholders a better sense of what's going on.
- The ability to compare. Yeah, yeah. Financial modeling considerations. They were talking about using
- LCOE, which is like very default for the field, but it is becoming a bit outdated, especially with clean
- energy. I don't know if it's that reasonable to ask them to do things harder than levelized cost of
- energy because
- Electricity. Anyway, I don't know if it's really reasonable to ask them to do things that are harder
- than that, because they are graduate students, and some of the suggested replacements for LCOE are much,
- much harder analyses. But a value-adjusted LCOE might be a replacement for that. And then kind of looking at
- LCOE and incorporating projected energy costs. They had researching existing energy costs and doing
- LCOE. And I was a little worried that some of the, if this is financially feasible, would then fall
- down to is the LCOE, which is how much lifecycle analysis, what the cost per kilowatt hour is of a technology.
- So if the LCOE is lower than the current existing electricity costs, then go. It's like, OK, well, if
- LCOE isn't robust enough, and if you're not looking at projecting forward energy costs, then it doesn't
- really capture that. And the city doesn't need to know if the clean energy is cheaper than the existing
- Duke energy.
- The city needs to know, I phrased it in there, I think, pretty well. Where are we? The city needs to
- know the affordability of the running of the utility. So the more useful analysis would examine if the
- utility is affordable to run. So taking in some more robust measures of costs
- I guess I'm not understanding the difference between affordability and cheapness. So the cheapness is
- just like the cheapness of the electricity to deploy. The affordability would take into things like
- municipal cost of capital in a more robust way. So the city needs to know. Infrastructure maintenance
- costs. Infrastructure maintenance costs should be an LCOE, but like a municipal
- organization has affordability. I am not municipal finance. You pay for things as a municipality in
- a different place than you do as an investor-owned utility. Some of the calculations there, I think,
- could be a little different. My last point, and I think this is maybe the one that's most
- confrontational. There were a couple of places where it's mentioned the benefits to both the city of
- Bloomington and Duke Energy. And Duke Energy is not the client. I don't want to be antagonistic to Duke.
- I hope that Duke is not listening and does not see the recording of this and has no knowledge of this
- project. But I want to ensure that
- The project is looking at the benefits to the city of Wilmington. And that it, yeah. I think that the
- language on Duke suggests a change to managing regulatory and utility friction. Because Ann Arbor did
- this, and they had their utility sign off on it and agree to it and things. And that is amazing. If
- we can get Duke to do that, that would be insane.
- the golden outcome, but. And is their utility also an investment? Yeah, DTE is comparable to Duke Energy.
- But yeah, so I think that that reframing is my preference, but I worked in solar for a while, and Duke
- was absolutely somewhat, not like local Duke, but
- Duke as a giant holistic entity was somewhat antagonistic to my line of work. So I maybe have a different
- view of that relationship and everything and don't want my bias in that to show through. You all attended
- planning meetings for this, correct?
- Why didn't you go to the classes? I went to a class and introduced myself as the client, but that is
- the only hands-on that I've been with them. I met with the professors a couple of times leading up to
- it. Justin and I came and met with the professors once as well. And one of the professors came to a
- meeting. Yes, one of the professors came to a meeting here. I noticed this language too and was a little
- bit stressed by it, so I appreciate your suggestion for a change.
- Do you have any idea where it came from? Is that something that is led by the faculty, or is this sort
- of a standard that they were applying that they weren't doing anything conscious about, or any sense
- of where it came from? I think that the faculty is generally being pretty hands-off in letting the student
- lead this. But I would say that the faculty member who came here probably would be encouraging us to work
- try to work closely with Duke on this and see if we can work hand-in-hand. He comes from a little bit
- more of the industry background. And I think he, I am, this is a complete conjecture, but my guess is
- he would approve of us leaving benefits to Duke Energy.
- And it is, I would say, there is an idea of doing that, like the benefits to Duke Energy. We are part
- of the Duke Energy system. Putting on energy that is beneficial to Duke Energy is beneficial to the
- system. It is beneficial to the whole. It is not a bad framing. It's just, yeah. I agree that this commission
- is the client and this commission serves the city of Bloomington.
- energy, even if it's good framing. Yeah, I'd back you up on that. That's a good change. I hope they
- make that. Just let us know if your electricity's on when you get home. I just were at my house and
- fixed a loose wire on their grid. And my grid is more stable now. Let's see if that stops. Yeah, if
- anybody else has other feedback, feel free to.
- reach out to me. I told them that I would get them feedback tomorrow morning already, but if I get them
- additional feedback in the near future. Once they are going, we do not want major changes to the project
- that is going to hurt their ability to do this. But yeah, once. Yeah, so let me ask if anyone thinks
- they might have feedback now, or you're expecting to look it over later. Yeah, having any. OK.
- Because if we were gonna make some changes to it, it'd probably be better to do it here. We're all together
- Scope of this in general is specifically about the what is it? I see you So it's what they're really
- doing here is looking into that and as a comparative case to Ann Arbor and trying to make a recommendation based on
- the sort of factual lay of the land in Bloomington, Indiana. That's the sort of thing. Could it happen?
- Could it be happening? It's a feasibility study. Gotcha. And how would that fit into the current ordinances
- and laws? And this was commissioned by us or brought to them? I brought it to them through my role here.
- OK. And so it would be a thing that came to this commission that could then potentially inform the commission's
- sort of recommendations. Yeah, the commission is the client. And then based on what we get, we will
- make recommendations to the city resolution or whatever. But what Alex was talking about before is that
- they also, because they were presented a public meeting to us, we can invite members of the
- city administration to hear that too. Thank you. Yeah, we should probably try to get not just council
- members, but city staff there.
- I mean, obviously, you were shot in front of the mayor. Awesome. OK, any other thoughts on this? Everyone's
- happy with it? Yeah. OK. Excellent. Yeah, this is great. Thank you very much. Yeah, this is good. I'm
- really excited to see how this turns out. This looks awesome. Like, I read the statement of work, and
- it's detailed. Yeah, I read the statement of work, and I was like, I'm excited. Awesome. Great.
- Thank you, Alex.
- All right, our next topic is Earth Day 2026. So last year, we had a part of a booth, I think.
- We had a table. Yeah, part of a table, or a whole table. We had a table, and me, and Quentin,
- and a poster, and some stickers. Yeah. And that was fine. Yeah, so we had presence at Earth Day, which
- was a city event last year. It was great. It was a good. We took all of, I wrote out all of the various
- kind of like
- work priorities that we had identified as a commission, topics and areas that we wanted to work on as
- a commission, and ask members of the public to take a sticker and vote on what do they think is the
- most important as a way to open that communication. I ended up just talking to a lot of people explaining
- what is this commission. I also had some QR codes and NFC cards for people to apply
- for vacancies or come to our meetings, see when our meetings are and things like that. Mostly it was,
- what are you? This is what we do. So I've gotten an email from the city staff that is organizing and
- asking if we want to have a presence there. So I want to see if the commission, I can't commit to being
- there the whole day again. So I just want to make sure that other people can be there. It's like four
- hours? Yes, April 18th, Saturday.
- Setup would be expected to take place sometime between 11 and 1130. And then the event starts at noon,
- ends at 330. So it would be in the pavilions where we'll have the vendors and the booths. I can be at
- the booth at the end.
- Okay, as long as other folks can get there. And then I'll also try to, we had talked last year about
- getting some additional materials. I can, I'll communicate with the city staff about getting that, seeing
- if that's still feasible and within budget and all that. Yeah, I also have something on my schedule
- that day. Okay, great. I can easily cover. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Especially if it's a Saturday, that's,
- yeah. Yeah.
- Yeah, last time I was like, it's fine. I'll be there the whole time, which I just can't do that this
- year. I can be there for at least part of it. And I just wanted to make sure that we would have coverage
- so that it wasn't like an empty table. But it was a really good opportunity, I think, for education
- and outreach. And I did get a few people to scan the code to apply for some of the vacancies. I don't
- know that they applied, but they opened the website. That's a win that wins a win. And I still have
- those materials, so I'll bring them. I can make sure they're there. That's great.
- And yeah, in terms of some supplies that we can use for other times that we have booths and stuff, since
- we might have the name changing very soon, just, yeah, maybe get, well, you can, I guess, kind of put
- together the plan of what we buy or whatever, and I think you've already put most of that together,
- but yeah, we'll hang tight to see what council does before we push the buy button. Yeah, but I will
- fill out the form so that,
- Oh, yeah. Perfect. Okay. Thank you for doing that. Do we need any other materials or anything like flyers
- or whatever? I was going to try to work with the city to order some seats, but that's why we're saying
- we'll wait until we find out if there's a name change because I want to put our
- We don't have a logo, but our website, our name. I love that. And I found a vendor, and they're in northern
- Kentucky, so they're very similar biotype. I forget the actual word. Eco-type. Eco-type, thank you.
- So we'll have natives. They're natives, and they're also natives that are cultivated in a similar
- zone and geology to what we have here, so more likely to germinate and survive. I love that. Awesome.
- Well, thank you very much, guys, for volunteering to help with that. That should be great. All right.
- Anything else on Earth Day before we move on? All right. That brings us to resolutions for second reading
- and discussion.
- still ahead of schedule. All right so next up we have resolution 2026-01 to applaud the city's response
- to the 2025 lapse in federal funding of SNAP benefits. So we did the first reading of this at our last
- meeting. I don't I think at that meeting I might have maybe I sent out a memo accompanying this and
- I just didn't this time but
- Hopefully people had a chance to read it. But essentially we're just thanking the city administration
- and the city council for the work that they did when the federal funds lapsed near the end of last year.
- And SNAP benefits were stopping getting paid out. And so the city administration donated, I think, $46,000
- to food banks, Hoosier Hills.
- and city council shared a bunch of resources you know at one of their one of their meetings and encouraged
- folks to help donate not just right then for that moment but also in kind of a continuing basis you
- know as a community resilience sort of thing so this is just saying thanks for doing that that was great.
- Yes thank you and
- Maybe before we go any further on this, I'll ask for a motion to approve this in a second, and then
- we can discuss. So is there a motion? Motion to approve. OK. And a second over there. OK, perfect.
- All right. Thoughts? Feelings? Amendments? I could scroll down to maybe the operative clauses that are
- People ready to move on to vote? OK. All right, so we're voting on voting to adopt resolution 2026-01.
- OK, and we will have to do a roll call for what we usually do for resolutions anyway. OK, Tara Dunderdale. Yes.
- Yes. Justin Vassel, yes. Matt? Am I allowed to vote on this because I'm not back in? I'm only in the
- three month slot. Yeah, you still get all the hours of the commissioner. Christopher? Yes. Yes. Zach?
- Yes. Yes. Councilor Moralo is not here. Quentin? Yes. Perfect. Yes. Alex? Yes. Yes. Shanghai is not
- here, unless online. I don't think so.
- Diana yes yes and Ross yes yes okay okay the resolution is adopted the vote is nine four zero against
- zero abstentions great thanks all right so that brings us resolutions for first reading and discussion
- so we have resolution 2026-02
- So this is the big one. I tried to set out as early as I could so people would have a chance to look
- at it. Now, normally for the first readings, we just introduce it and basically just vote to advance
- it to the second reading. And we save all of our discussion and things like that for that time. But
- I thought since this is number one, it's detailed. It's long. And number two, it's also timely. So I
- wanted to give folks an opportunity to at least discuss a little bit now, even if we won't be voting
- on it until next time.
- So do I have a motion to, I don't know, advance resolution 2026-02 to a first reading? We'll say the
- motion's there. Do you want a second? OK, perfect. All right, so now I'm going to, well, I can introduce
- a little bit. So I've got this memo. Folks should have this memo in there in some of these sheets that
- I've left around that tries to kind of put things down in just a couple of paragraphs.
- But we're doing a handful of things with this resolution, really four things. Oh, yeah, thank you. Yeah,
- so this is essentially
- about the flock cameras that a lot of people have heard of. That's sort of the specific issue. But it's
- really also, even though it does touch on flock specifically, it also offers more general thoughts on
- mass surveillance sort of technology and the impacts that that can have on the social sustainability
- of a community. And so there's a lot of ground that's covered in the whereas clauses. One of them that
- really struck me is that there's actually a decent amount
- social science research out there that shows what kind of effect mass surveillance cameras actually
- do to community fabric and the integrity of that fabric. People start behaving differently. People stop
- trusting each other as much if you just put a camera on the corner of the room, because now they start
- to think that there must be a reason people need to be watched. Maybe they're not trustworthy, right?
- It's very subconscious sort of stuff. That's one example. There's a lot of clauses here that
- hit on a lot of other examples for why this is not conductive to social sustainability. Jumping again?
- Sorry. Here, I'll try to reshare. So with that, let me open it up to the room. Thoughts, general discussion?
- I have a couple of questions. Thank you so much.
- or like the work in the memo and also the work of drafting the resolution. I really appreciate it. I
- had a couple of questions that I don't know if you know the answer to. But do we know the value of this
- contract, like the dollar value of what the city is? I know the one contract, which was for the security
- trailer, was $50,000. I've seen reference to another contract that the police department has that was
- existing prior to that.
- I haven't been able to find that contract, though, so I don't know what the value is. But we know there's
- roughly 40 cameras, so whatever the cost of those are, plus whatever services, replacements, and that
- sort of thing. I'm wondering if it's worth it. This resolution is already doing a lot of heavy lifting,
- so it might even be a subsequent resolution, but maybe recommending a redirection of those funds into
- a more well-established
- community resilience practice, rather than just, well, it's not Flock, but it's this other vendor. And
- it's the same thing, like a specific alternate use of the dollars that is not the spiritual twin to
- what we're asking them to stop using. I want to strongly endorse that, because just today, someone from
- Syracuse, New York,
- just today in Syracuse, New York, they voted to end their flock contract and begin a contract with Axon
- or whatever it is. So it's just like there's only one counselor who voted against either contract. I
- think that would be integral to the teeth of this. So it would be worth it in this resolution to make
- that kind of decision? That I think you all are probably in a better position to answer than I am, but
- I think the idea is very sound. I think that would be something. To answer your question, I just jumped on
- online, put it into AI, and it's about $2,500 per camera per year is the estimate that I'm getting.
- So I'm talking $100,000. And that's not including install. That's the contract. That was my other question
- was, does the city own the cameras, or we lease them from the vendor? Or do we not own them? I believe
- FluxModel is at their least. OK. So it's the vendor's model. OK. If this is of interest.
- Somebody already did a lot of good research, but I have a friend who, this is a special interest of
- theirs, in town, might have some of this information if that's of interest, sharing. Yeah, absolutely.
- It absolutely would be, yeah. Could your friend potentially come to our meeting next month? Or give
- public comment? Yeah. I don't know how likely that is, but yeah. Even if they want to type something
- up a letter? I can be a vessel. That person can wear a mask.
- Yeah. To the point about the budgets and stuff, the way I understand it is that city council didn't
- specifically authorize this amount for that contract. It went into some specific account. At first,
- I think it was through hand, and then the police department has their own budget. And then they decide
- how they want to spend that money. So we could say, OK, take that dollar amount and put it over here, but then
- They could just use some other fund to do it, I guess. And it's not like there's an RFP for this, where
- the city was like, we need this service. Yeah, it's a sole source. It was sole source, yeah. But then
- maybe it is worth adding a clause about ending the contract and not replacing it. Not replacing it.
- Yeah, yeah. If you just had one line like that, it would work. Yeah.
- Can you grab that recommendation? We would bring that in a second reading. Yeah, there is, in section
- 2B, I put this piece here about this model legislation that the ACLU came up with. And I haven't, I've
- sort of gone over it at a surface level.
- there there's a lot there but you know I think there's there's things that that council could do where
- they say like okay it's it's not like we can say hey this pot of money you know you can't contract with
- this company or hear this pot of money like you can't do what you want with that. Thank you. There's
- a comment from somebody. Okay that's from the checkbook data yeah yeah. Thank you. You know but you
- could say like for certain types of technology maybe council has to review
- any contracts or something like that. So there's probably something that could be done there. Unfortunately,
- we're not able to take comment from the public at the stage of the meeting, but thank you. But yeah,
- that's a good point, Tara. Other thoughts? My only thought is I'm very proud to have my name on this.
- Thank you, Justin, for doing most of the legwork on it. I think this is exactly the sort of work we
- should be doing. I'm very proud to have my name on here. This is all one site.
- like sustainability, you can't have sustainability without social justice, without, you can't
- have sustainability in a surveillance state, like it's the same thing, it's the same fight. And so I
- think this is exactly the sort of work we should be doing, and we are, I think, the first city body
- that's even addressing this at all, that will be taking any action of any sort. So we might be starting
- a domino effect, I think, because it's really powerful and important, and I hope we pass it. Yeah. I
- think that's echoed by the petition that was shared during public comment today,
- just the sheer volume of people who, in just a few hours, were endorsing discussion on this this evening.
- Do we know, I started to think about the disclosure, do we know if that's subject to FOIA, the locations
- of the cameras? I don't understand that it is. I don't know. So in different locales around the country,
- there's been some luck with that, like with open records requests, and there's been some
- Well, barriers, right? So it kind of depends at the moment. There are resources online. There's Dflock,
- which is a website that is a crowdsourced posting, right? So it's not guaranteed to be accurate, necessarily,
- but gives you at least kind of a good idea. You can go out and see if they're actually there, right?
- Yeah. I believe, for me to get here, I went through Class 3. Over. They're ubiquitous, all over the place.
- Oh, was that in your report even? It was something like 25 uses a day. Oh, yeah. Near the top, I cited
- some stats. There was an article just yesterday, I think in the Herald Times. Police had looked at it
- 9,000 times. That's maybe what I saw. Which is 25 times a day. They were accessing it. So it's kind
- of an incessant use. But apparently with a case number for each time. So it's in a lot of cases each
- day where they must need to know where people are is the thing.
- So I don't know that I trust them. So that data is available because other Flock customers make their
- audit logs publicly available. And so when, say, like, IUPD or Bloomington Police Department searches
- one of their cameras, they show up in that log. And so you can see some of them. And so a lot of them
- do have case numbers. Some of them don't. I think that must be the same data set that the Herald Times
- was using when they were compiling their stats.
- I was going to say, so one thing I appreciated about the way this was conceived was situating it in
- an SDG gives it a kind of terra firma that is the language of governance that would be helpful, I think,
- in terms of advancing it. Another thing I had been thinking about in relation to this was this is a
- little more abstract, but like, you know, scope three emissions are essentially an effort to do like
- structural accounting for
- you know, sustainability practices, not just keeping it in terms of like what you're using in a single
- business, single house or whatever. There's a similar kind of thing here in terms of political economy
- of this kind of technology. There is even a kind of environmental angle you could take on this or a
- sustainability angle you can take on deploying the sort of energy and the rare earth expenditure, the
- whole political economy of the thing is like another
- potential umbrella that this falls under in terms of that larger definition of sustainability that I
- agree with you is why this is pretty ideal for this kind of a body to address. Other thoughts? Concerns?
- Is there anything about this resolution that concerns anybody? Maybe that's two out there.
- No, I was just worried about the money just being redirected into the exact same thing with a different
- vendor. But I'll draft a recommended amendment, assuming we advance this. Yes. OK. Line versus whatever.
- IU is also piloting license plate or technology on their campus in their parking facilities. The chemicals
- as well, I think. Yeah.
- just as part of the ecosystem of jurisdictions in our community. All right. I was actually going to
- mention that about IU. I know they're looking to pilot it as a way to not rely so much on the tags.
- They are dirty scanning those to a certain degree, I guess. I don't know, the one thing about it
- And this, Nina, not that I want to make for realist technology findings. One thing I keep thinking about
- is, like, one of the most unsustainable things we do as a society is so much driving. It's like if there
- was one thing that makes it less attractive, it normally wouldn't bother me, I guess, is kind of the
- thing. But I also don't want to be the precedent for mass surveillance. So I get that point as well.
- Yeah, it turns out their New York cameras are also designed to take actual video and scan faces and
- things. So it's getting to the pedestrians as well. All right, any final thoughts before we move on
- to a vote to advance to a second reading? I just want to reiterate again, thank you to Justin for doing
- this. Yeah, this has been on my back burner for like six months and I've been
- Accumulating research and starting to put it in there Yeah, it seems timely so I thought okay, I better
- finish this off and get it out the door I will say that I'm very very happy to be joining under this
- mantle Having this being one of the first things I can do
- is extremely encouraging in terms of the nature of the work that I wasn't sure what the sort of nature
- of the work would be overall. If it's along these lines, I'm very excited to be a part of it. So thank
- you for doing that. Excellent. I'm very happy to hear that. I also just appreciate how this resolution
- really reiterates the holistic approach of sustainability rather than just the environmental part of
- it, which I think is
- easy to lose some of the other economic and community-based resiliency things that are represented by
- what we stand for. And I think in tandem with the recommendation that we codify the resilience, the
- community resilience piece into our name, because it's already in our mission. And making sure that's
- also reflected in our name. That's a strongly worded letter to change our name. It's a little different.
- But I think that they're part of that same kind of values of the commission.
- I think since this is a long one I put line numbers on it maybe I'll send out one of those spreadsheets
- that people can just copy and if they want to suggest changes they can write the line number and their
- comment and then just send them directly to me and then I'll put them on one big spreadsheet and then
- we'll present that to everybody at the next meeting when we go to pass this net that might make amendments
- a little easier we can do them in batches or something. Yeah exactly exactly.
- We also have to do elections. That's another argument for doing the elections in the informal. Yes.
- No candidate statements necessary. All right. We'll move on to roll call vote then for this. So this
- is to advance to a second reading. Tara? Yes. Yes. Justin? Yes. Matt? Yes. Yes. Christopher? Yay. Yay.
- Zach? Yes. Yes. Council Member Aralo is not here unless he's
- to make sure. Is there anyone else? No. Quentin? Yes. Yes. Alex? Yes. Yes. Shenghuai is not here. Diana?
- Yes. Yes. And Ross? Yes. Yes. Okay. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. Okay. Perfect.
- Well, we will have that on our next agenda for a second reading and a vote. All right. That brings us
- to report from Staff Liaison. So I'll hand the floor over to you, Julie. Great. Just a couple of quick
- things. We've opened grant applications for the Solar Energy Efficiency and Lighting Program for nonprofits
- and small businesses. We've opened Bloomington Green Home Improvement Program. This year, the residential
- rebate program. We don't have the federal tax credits
- for energy efficiency and solar for home improvements, but the city is continuing the same level of
- rebates that we offered last year. The budget for that is $175,000, by the way. And then we've also
- reopened the Sustainable Neighborhoods Grant Program. So if I'm not mistaken, I think the budget for
- that one is a little smaller this year, but I'd have to check. But yeah.
- The Sustainable Neighborhoods Grant Program would continue to encourage applicants to reach out to members
- of the commission for support with applying to help navigate that. City staff continues to be able to
- answer questions. We just can't necessarily help anyone write it per se. So look forward to your support
- with that. We'll be working on outreach for all of those programs.
- And then lastly, ESD is planning to fund installation of solar panels municipally on the Animal Shelter
- and Allison Jukebox Community Center. The respective departments need to manage and coordinate
- the installations and what companies they're going with. But ESD is going to provide the funding for
- those installations through our municipal energy efficiency budget this year. So we're excited about
- that. Yeah, that's all I have. Thank you. How are folks?
- uh, like directed to, to contact the commission. Well, I think technically we say you need to reach
- out to sustain at bloomington.in.gov. So if I were to see an email that says, Hey, I'd like to talk
- to a commission member about help. I would just redistribute it to you all and see, see who's available.
- Any other questions for Julie? All right. Um,
- Well, it's only 722. We're on to member announcements. Does anyone have any announcements that they
- want to tell the rest of the commission about? We've got eight minutes to kill. Just outstanding work
- from you, getting us through an agenda of that size. I really want to recognize how it is. I don't know
- if that's on me. Sometimes these things just happen. I was expecting us to go over for certain. I'm
- as surprised as everybody else is. And you do business.
- All right, in that case, is there a motion to adjourn? Motion to adjourn. My kids are apparently having
- a horrible, horrible night at home. My wife wants me back. All right, is there a second? Second.
- All right, I think we do have to do an actual roll call vote. Sorry. All right, Tara? Yes. This is to
- adjourn. Yes. Justin, yes. Matt? Yes. Yes. Christopher? No. Is that a yes? Yeah. Yes. Zach? Yes.
- Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.
- That's 801. Our next meeting is at March 10th, 2026. We are adjourned at 7.24 p.m. Thanks, everybody.