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.