Good evening, my name's Don McWilliams, I'll be the chair of the environmental board tonight
for our March 11th meeting.
Some of you are hybrid, some of you are in the room. For those of
you hybrid, if you have questions, please raise your hand virtually and I'll keep an
eye on it and we'll call you. As we see hands raised for those of
you in the room, please give your little sign up and follow up again as
I see the signs go up. Casey, can
you call attendance for us? Tommy Anderson. Here. Nancy Davidson. Here.
Tommy Dubow is planning to join virtually. I don't believe I've heard
from. Karen Khan has an excused absence. Mina June.
From Don McWilliams. Here. Alex Lee Tigner is planning to join virtually.
Anne Newcomb. Here. Keith Gonzalez. Here. And John
Smith. Here. And it looks like Praj
is here. We have Quora. In
your packet, are the minutes from the last meeting,
does anybody have any changes? I have one little
observations as a reference to I warned something I called it
spelled I as an
eyewitness.
The idea being the volunteers are the eyewitnesses on the ground to radio in their
observations. We'll make that correction. Anything else?
Hearing none, that'll be the only question. Do we have anybody for the public comments
tonight? No one online. We did receive written comments
from Ann Fletcher on the ICAP, so we'll be capturing those in the ICAP comment
tracker, but just reference, take a look at Ann's comments. Those were the only public
comments we received. Okay. End to our agenda items. We have three tonight. We're gonna
hear about the stormwater management program plan from Mike and Evan, Ray's Quest dad.
Cascade Water Alliance is here to talk about their conservation program. And then we're gonna
get another update on our program in action. Yeah, Stacy. So Mike, Evan, you guys
ready? All right, good evening, everyone.
Let me just share my screen. All right, yeah.
Thank you all so much for having us here this evening. We are here, as
mentioned, to speak about the 2026 Stormwater Management Program Plan for the city.
We're part of the environmental group in public works, just to give you a little
bit of context of where we're housed in the city. And my name's Mike Vermeulen.
I'm senior regulatory program specialist for the city. And I'll be speaking
first and then Evan Brumfield, our Groups manager will be speaking at the end.
I'll give you a little bit more background on what we're going to be talking
about here. So first off, going to be giving some background information on what our
NPDES permit is. It's a long acronym. So I
like to give a little bit of context what it is and why we have
it as a city. And then Every year we like to give a
recap to the board of our annual report and our upcoming management program plan. So
it's looking at what happened last year and what we have coming up this year.
And then a part of what we have coming up is our updates to our
stormwater addendum for the city and also code. And that is what Evan will be
speaking to. And after that, we'll be happy to take any questions that we have
with remaining time, but we are going to leave that till the end because we
do have quite a few things to go through. So I want to make sure
that we have time for that and are respectful of James's time as well after
us. All right, so what is
NPDES? If you're not familiar with it, it is our National Pollution Discharge Elimination System.
We are a phase two community in Issaquah. Really what that means is that, or
what it is, is a permit that we're administered from the Department of Ecology to
us. They give us the permit, but they are delegated authority to do that
from federally the Clean Water Act. So it is something that we do to protect
our waters here. It regulates stormwater discharges to waters of the state.
because that might just sound like some alphabet soup and a lot of words you
might not be as familiar with. This is a picture from the EPA that I
think does a pretty good job of talking about stormwater and what it is and
some of the reasons why we are so invested in making sure that we are
keeping it as clean as possible. So stormwater is any water or precipitation that flows
over the surfaces of our built environments. So this would be rain, snow, or sleet.
when it hits things like our roadways and travels over the surface into our stormwater
system, it has the potential to pick up pollutants and it ultimately winds up
in our surface waters again. So, you know, Issaquah Creek, our lakes, that sort
of thing. And because there is the potential for pollution to have this system and
to convey this stormwater, we need to have, the permit from the Department
of Ecology that says we are going to be reducing the
discharge of pollutants from our stormwater system to the maximum extent that we can.
So I'll be referring to this instead of our NPDES permit just as the permit
or our stormwater permit inside of the permit, there are a number of different
program components. So we have nine, this permit term, and
those are looking at addressing the reduction of pollutants from a number of different ways.
So those are stormwater planning, and I'll be giving more in depth on this. I'll
be going through each of these in the upcoming slides, but there's stormwater planning, public
education and outreach, public involvement and participation, mapping and documentation,
Elicit discharge detection and elimination, controlling runoff from development,
stormwater management for existing development, source control program for existing development, and
operations and maintenance. So as you can see, it's a number of
different components with different ways of addressing pollutants in our stormwater.
And this is again just saying we're going to be looking at our annual report.
So looking back at the last year, forward at the next year and then Evan
will be speaking to the addendum and code. Each of the slides I'll be going
over are going to be roughly structured this way there's going to be you know
which component are we looking at in this case it's stormwater planning a little blurb
about what it is and what like the main goal of this program component is
and then you know again looking at 2025 and 2026. So Stormwater
planning, what's it all about? It's about informing and assisting in the development of policies
and strategies as water quality management tools. You know, working across the city
towards protecting our stormwater. So in 2025, we didn't have any
notable updates coming through this program component. So it was really focused on continuing to
coordinate across departments and to implement our storm and surface water plan.
2026 is going to be, you know, continuing those strategies, continuing that coordination and really
looking into and scoping out what the update to our stormwater management action
plan is going to be looking like. That's in 2027. March 31st
is the deadline for that update. That was rolled into our
very in-depth and like more comprehensive storm and surface water master plan that we did,
I believe it was in 2022. So that covered a lot and we're looking at
how we can update that for the new requirement in 2027.
For education and outreach, it is what it sounds like. This is providing education and
outreach on behaviors which contribute to a healthy watershed. In 2025,
We participate with the regional don't wait to inflate campaign. This was really focused on
bringing awareness to the pollutant 6 PPD or 6 PPDQ, which is a comes
from degradation of tire wear particles and is one of the leading contributors to
especially coho salmon death in the area from stormwater runoff. And
this is all about. telling people that if you pump up your tires more often
and have them more filled up, you'll have less tire wear coming off and contribute
less of that pollutant to the watersheds. We also, and you'll be hearing about
this from James after we speak, be learning more about the partnership we have as
a city with Cascade Water Alliance We partnered with Friends of Issaquah Salmon Hatchery on
our From Canopy to Curb program with them this last year, where we, and especially
they, promoted our Adopt-A-Drain program and Tree Giveaway program.
We had a number of different business outreach programs, and then also our Dumpster Lid
program, which was a permit requirement this last year to
update our behavior change program and we're opting to or choosing to continue our dumpster
lid program which is all about keeping dumpster lids closed in different
businesses across the city to basically keep them from filling up with rainwater and then
having the chance of contaminating or releasing one of my favorite stormwater terms dumpster juice.
So we updated our strategy and schedule and began implementation this year on that.
For our stewardship actions, Green Issaquah has 67 restoration events, which planted over 2000
trees and our adopted drain program, which is still fairly new to the city has
133 drains adopted and volunteers removed just under 1000 pounds
of debris from storm drain from around storm drain. So not opening them,
but you know, like raking leaves off of them. In 2026,
our plan is to continue these current strategies and programs. We don't have any upcoming
deadlines in 2026 for education and outreach.
Alright, public involvement and participation. 2025 it was really about making
sure you know this is every year we post our stormwater management program plan what
we're talking about tonight. And also our annual report and make sure that those are
submitted to ecology as well and made available to the public, we have a 2026
deadline to document methods that the city uses to identify overburdened communities. So. We will
be. able to provide you updates on
that next year with that upcoming deadline there. Mapping and
documentation is again what it sounds like making sure that the city is maintaining a
online, online maps for our stormwater system. So we've continued to do that and this
year we also have updated and will be submitting outfall information that now includes
outfall size and material. So if you're not familiar with what stormwater outfall is
that that would be where stormwater system releases any stormwater into surface
waters. And for 2026, we have a upcoming
deadline to map tree canopy coverage on city owned properties. This is well underway and
we've been working with our parks department to do that as part of a larger
overall mapping of tree canopy across the city.
Our illicit discharge detection and elimination program is designed and all about preventing,
detecting and eliminating spills and illicit discharges across the city. In 2025,
we had 79 spills or water quality complaints or notifications that we responded to.
We visited 122 sites for pollution prevention visits. So this is all about
helping businesses have things in place to prevent them from ever having spills. And we
screened just over 12% of our stormwater system for illicit connections. 12.1%
is notable because we do have the requirement to meet at a minimum 12%
every year of the city screened. In 2026, we'll make sure we
meet that percentage requirement again. We'll continue those current strategies of responding to spills throughout
the city and reporting them. We also have a couple of deadlines that
are really focused in on making sure that the city has
more procedures in place around post-emergency firefighting cleanup.
One of those is focused specifically on PFAS. We already have
been talking to Eastside Fire Rescue have confirmed that they don't use PFAS in any
of the foams here, so we will get that documented as we need to, but
we're also going to be focusing in more on making sure we have post-emergency
cleanup procedures outlined to minimize those discharges to our stormwater system.
For our controlling runoff from development construction sites, this is one of those, or this
section is one of the ones that leans more heavily on our permit group in
the city. So CPD, it's focused on implementing and forcing
programs to reduce stormwater pollutants from development. So in 2025,
we reviewed as a city 200 permits and we inspected 113
construction sites for erosion and sediment control. And then we had two enforcement actions as
well. 2026 is going to be just making sure that we're
meeting all the permit requirements and continuing our strategies. And this will be
for the 2026 plan, the 2027 deadline to adopt a new stormwater manual is what
Evan will be speaking to after my section here.
For our retrofit program or stormwater management in existing development is the other name for
it. This really focuses on addressing stormwater in areas that have development already there.
This was a new permit section that was, or program component added in for the
current permit term. But 2025 was a big year for us because
our Northwest Birch Place Sorry,
stormwater treatment vault finished construction was installed. So this meets our
requirements for the permit term. We had the requirement of having 6.6 equivalent acres met
and we've got just under 30 with this one project. So this treatment fault,
it's a picture of it being installed there on the left side of the screen.
It's an underground vault that removed contaminants from roads and other hard surfaces.
So though we've met that requirement, we're going to continue to seek funding for additional
projects that we have outlined in our capital improvement plan.
For our source control program, this is one of our business inspection programs in the
city. It's similar to talking about pollution prevention assistance. It's focused
on keeping pollutants from leaving different businesses in our city or other developed
areas and entering. our stormwater system. In 2025, we're required to have 40
source control inspections or visits, and we had 69. So we did well to meet
that. These were again, similar to the prior year, focused predominantly on food
service and automotive businesses in the city. 2026, we're gonna continue to
meet that, the requirement of total number of inspections, including inspecting all those
that have credible complaints and we aim to every year also update our source control
inventory. So we're working off of the most up-to-date information we have.
And this is the last program component that I'll be going over, I believe. So
operations and maintenance. In 2025, we
met all of our requirements for private facilities. a facility
being like a storm. It could be a rain garden for instance.
On private properties, we inspect 94% of those in our inventory. On our
city side of things, we inspect 96% of city facilities and
just under 2000 catch basins were inspected. And for pervious surfaces
maintained, we maintained a, A little bit over 60,000 square feet of those
this year. In 2026, we're going to continue to meet all these requirements and
continue having conversations internally about the 2027 street sweeping program that we'll be
bringing online for the stormwater permit as well. So working very closely with our
streets group and then stormwater group around that.
And I'm gonna pass this off to Evan, but after his section, excited to field
any questions that y'all might have from my update.
All right, can everyone hear me okay? Yes. All right. My name is
Evan Brumfield. I'm a Environmental Regulatory Program Manager for the city. So as
Mike mentioned earlier, by June, 2027, we'll be updating our
stormwater design manual as well as accompanying stormwater codes. These updates are
required for the city to do typically every five years. So as we get a
new MPDS permit, we have to update new stormwater standards to meet that new
permit. So in order for us to maintain compliance with our permit,
we'll be updating our Issaquah Municipal Code, Titles 16 and 13.
Those house our stormwater standards and codes. Our stormwater
design manual is within our Title 16 code and in Issaquah our stormwater
design manual is made up of two separate documents. One is
our, one is the Ecology Stormwater Management Manual of Western Washington. Right now it's the
2019 version. And the second document is our stormwater design manual addendum.
So as I mentioned, the 2019 manual, that's what we have currently in the city.
We will be updating to the next version of the ecology manual, which will be
the 2024 manual. And this manual provides guidance
on measures necessary to control the quantity and quality of stormwater. ISQA uses this
manual to set stormwater requirements for new development as well as redevelopment projects.
Land developers and development engineers use this manual to design permanent stormwater control plans.
They also create, this manual is used to create construction stormwater pollution prevention plans
and determine stormwater infrastructure. Businesses will use this manual to help design their stormwater
pollution prevention plans as well. So then that second document is
the stormwater design manual addendum. And this is, we also call it just our ISQUADDENDUM
or the addendum. While most of the ecology manual pertains to Issaquah,
there are areas where we want to be a little more locally prescriptive. And so
this addendum allows us to be more locally prescriptive of stormwater requirements that
help fit Issaquah better. And so these are areas where we can go potentially above
and beyond the basic stormwater requirements. Ecology manual
requirements. And so yeah, an example of that is we have
discharge requirements from construction sites, like a certain muddiness of water.
The Ecology manual essentially is 250 measurement. In
Issaquah, it's 100 measurements. And so we try to be more locally prescriptive to
protect our water and our environment. So where are
we at in this process? We're actually at the beginning. We've met internally in
staff to kind of identify some areas that we potentially might want to look at
updating. And then we're going to pick off this process by coming back
to you, the environmental board, to different boards and commissions, as well as the council,
to seek feedback on areas that we maybe potentially want to go above and beyond.
as well as just give a brief overview of what these mandatory kind of updates
are and what they're going to look like. Next
slide, Mike. So that kind of
gets us to the end of the presentation for questions, but real quickly sounded like
maybe there was some questions on maybe what a stormwater pond is and kind of
how they operate. in Issaquah. So I was going to give just a very quick
overview of what a stormwater pond is and kind of how they work. No, no
one pond, no pond is the same. And so this will be like super high
level, but essentially there's two functions to a stormwater pond.
One is to capture or collect stormwater and slow it down basically and to
slow the release of the water from going further downstream, whether that's in further down
into the stormwater system or into a water body. And the second is to to
treat stormwater. And the way that works is by by capturing and collecting that that
stormwater and slowing it down. It allows settlement to occur, which allows settlement
or pollutants to settle down to the bottom. But it also can trap oil within
the pond. And so it kind of acts as yeah, those two kinds of functions
to basically capture, collect and treat. And in the city, we
have both public and private stormwater ponds. On the public side, our
public works team, they inspect them annually and then maintain them as
required or identified in the inspection. And then on the private side, our environmental team
in Public Works as well, we inspect these ponds. The timeframe we
inspect them is a little different than the public side. Some sites on the private
side are regulated by our MPDS permit, and so they have more stringent inspection
timeframes. We typically inspect those annually. But then we
go all the way down to every three years to then some are just as
needed or as requested by the property manager. So there might be a property turnover
and there or maybe a new very invested HOA and they're wanting to get their
stormwater system inspected. We will go out there and inspect the system for them and
provide them with guidance and a list of contractors to help them maintain their system.
So that's kind of very high level of stormwater. Happy to answer
more questions, but it sounds like, yeah, we're going to open it up for all
sorts of questions and discussion on both stormwater code updates and Mike's
MPDS kind of annual reporting. Thank you, Mike. Thank you, Evan. Yeah, we
do have some questions. Tom, first of all. Okay, thank you. Yes, I'd
like to go back to the page where you talked about 2025 actions, 79
spills responded to. Can you give us a little bit of a breakdown of the
nature of those spills? Like I'm kind of expecting the majority of them happened on
public roadways, for example, that versus private
property, you know, like a parking lot of business. And what about natural
spills such as a little land soil or something? Is that included in that or
is that categorized and covered somewhere else?
Yeah, thank you. So I don't have like
percentages for the breakdown off the top of my head, but a lot of those
really are on the roadway from things like vehicle collisions.
It's hard to say what percentage of them, but a whole lot of them and
these. You know it varies year to year what percentage is public
first private we we respond to any of them that come through to us of
any size, so you know in these 79 responses
and that's not quite the right slide apologies um. That includes
times when we get a notification through our C-click-fix portal that is just, hey, there
is a sheen that we found on a roadway with no ability to figure
it. If no one knows where it comes from, but they see a sheen, we
still go out and record it, and we oftentimes report that still as well. So
these do come from a lot of both private, public, don't know the total split.
A lot of them are roadway ones. Other ones, you know, there's every
year a handful of water main breaks, so potable
water going to the roadway as well. That's another typical one that we might see.
Yeah, off the top of my head, those are the ones I think of immediately,
but definitely vehicle collisions. And then we'd So this year we did
have a natural spill, as you call it, reported. And that was
a, I think it was an abandoned mine that had water flowing out of it
into our roadway this year. So yes, we do respond to and report those as
well. So the mine, was that on Spock
Mountain
or the mine at full? Yes. One more little question. Of course. the weeds maybe,
but so I've been involved with building a few houses in Issaquah and they all
were required to have dry wells to manage the water flowing out of gas spouts.
And I've observed in recent times here, houses often don't have dry wells that are
allowed to spill onto a splash block or whatever. Is there been like a shifted
philosophy away from dry well because they're hard to maintain or something or or what
has changed in the last 20 years or so? The philosophy
of managing the water coming out of the down spot. I said you come off
mute. Yep. Yep. Okay. So actually I would say
it's the opposite. A lot more dry wells are going in as well as infiltration
trenches in the city. So a lot, all
I would say I shouldn't say all, but a single family home being built in
Issaquah will either have dry well or they'll have an
infiltration trench put in that is basically all underground,
letting the stormwater infiltrate into the ground. Yeah, I mean, there are areas of town
that, I mean, you will see splash blocks and stuff. Some of those are handled
by maybe a regional stormwater facility. And so that's handled on
like a case by case basis and through our permitting. Okay, thank you.
John, I think I'll be next. There are a number of stormwater ditches and retention
ponds around Isquah and there are some along roads, things like that.
Some of these pass through PASTROOM COMMERCIAL PROPERTY OR BORDER COMMERCIAL PROPERTY
OR MULTIFAMILY RESIDENTIAL PROPERTIES. WHO HAS A RESPONSIBILITY TO KEEP THESE CLEAN?
ARE THEY CASE BY CASE? YEAH, YOU'RE JUST
ASKING ABOUT DITCH MAINTENANCE? YES. AND IF IT RUNS, YEAH, SO
IF IT'S A CITY DITCH, WE MAINTAIN THOSE. WE INSPECT THEM AND DO THAT. PRIVATE
SIDE, Again, it would be kind of handled as well with our
pond inspection program. So we inspect basically the whole site when we go onto a
private side. And some of those sites are regulated through the MPDS
permit. And so we would have more frequent inspections with them. Some are like as
needed as they come up. So I would say it
depends on what side it is and what's going on. And then You know, if
that you know what looks like a ditch might actually be a stream as well,
and so that would kind of factor in some decisions as well. Yeah, I write
a. Grassroots litter cleanup program in its law and there are certain areas around town
that are. Pretty bad and they they are are hard to keep clean.
I think the inspections in certain areas need to be done probably quarterly. and the
owners need to be notified to take care of their property, especially in
central Issaquah in particular, around some
of the parks and such there and the commercial areas. I'd be happy to
give you a list of places that could be
worked for a better term. Yeah, I mean, we're always happy to know, you know,
where those areas are. I'd be curious to know what you're seeing.
Is it, you know, are you seeing overflow happening or is it just vegetation?
Sometimes these, like I said, these ditches are actually natural areas of their streams. Sometimes
they're They're designed to operate a certain way to treat stormwater
with vegetation present. And so there is a lot of different intricacies definitely going on
with just a ditch. Yeah, most of what I'm seeing is litter that's generated by
fast food restaurants primarily, or gas stations, beer cans,
coffee cups, food containers. So it's plastic.
plastic and aluminum and paper. Yeah, okay. Plugging out of these streams
in retention ponds. Another good example is I've always wondered who owns the
retention pond at Tibbetts Park. There's just full of softballs by one of the
softball fields by the Yeah. Got some
home run hitters. I love you
doing. Actually, they're foul balls. They're foul balls, yeah. Evan is submitting these
concerns on C-Click Fix the best so you guys can do the reporting and have
that data or just contacting you. I'm guessing that might be easier so you can
kind of determine who's on point and have that data for reporting. Yeah, yeah, C-Click
Fix is great. that um that that'd be great um the Tibbets pond is just
for information is a city owned pond so um yeah uh C-click fix always
good for that okay all right thank you
thank you so Mike I have a couple of questions for
you uh so in the IDDE I noticed you have There
was a 12% screening requirement was mentioned, and I was wondering what that is. I
didn't get that. Yeah, of course. So the
requirement is to basically look through or look into 12%
of our stormwater system to see during dry weather if there's any flow
occurring. So what this would look like is the person doing the inspections could go
out let's say to a neighborhood and open up a catch basin so one of
the storm water grates and when if you expected to see no water flowing through
there but you did see water flowing through there for instance it might be a
good indication that maybe there was a connection that shouldn't there shouldn't be into the
system or maybe there was water being discharged into it from somewhere else so
That could be a case of like a tie in where another
utility like sewer is going into the stormwater system, or it could be, you know,
maybe someone is just discharging a lot of water into the city's stormwater system as
well. So this is a preventative measure to go out and screen a certain amount
of our system to make sure that we don't have any of these things going
on, or if we do to make sure that we are able to correct them.
Right, okay. And then another question I have is, and I don't know if
the commercial small businesses, to Jonathan's point, especially
small restaurants or small food shops, I don't know if they have any NPDES
requirements. My other question was, food and trucks or equivalent mobile
businesses, do they need to meet any stormwater pollution prevention requirements?
And I think a word under, you know, your permit or your screening. So the
question, just to make sure I have it right, is do mobile businesses need to
meet the requirements under a stormwater permit? Correct. Yes, they do.
And so I'm guessing the small businesses or food center, commercial, any commercial business,
large or small, has to meet those requirements as well, right? Correct. Yes, yes.
And it can be harder sometimes to, you know, if someone,
if there's a business that's mobile, it could be harder to see if they're like
violating any of our permit conditions or to reach out to them. But there are
a number of, or there are people share information around that. If there are repeat
bad players, you know, that go around the local like Eastside communities.
And then also we do our best to respond as quickly as we can to
provide education to these, to the mobile businesses or
other small businesses communities as well. Because I mean, we take that education first
approach because you know, might not always know. So if someone's mobile, it's important for
us to like be able to tell them where they can discharge of their wastewater
if they need to. Okay. Thank you. Yep, yep. Thank you, Baraj. Nancy, I
see your hand up. Hi, this is Nancy. I should probably turn my camera on
too. I was a little curious. At the end of your presentation, you talked a
little bit about updating the stormwater code and if you could go above and beyond.
And the question I have for you is, given the interest of the council to
try and do things to help out redevelopment of the central Issaquah area. And
they're talking about loosening up some of the regulations. How's that going to impact? I
mean, how are you going to play between what the council's now looking to do
to get development in central Issaquah versus trying to go above and beyond and protecting
the streams? Yeah, great question. We're having those same
discussions internally as well of how we're going to thread that needle.
And what we can do is make the recommendation, right? And so it ultimately does
go to council of what they deem that they wanna do. And so we have
the base requirements we will have to update. And then we will figure out if
there are areas where we can go above and beyond that do also
go along with what the council priorities are too. And so we haven't figured out
what those areas are yet. Um, we, when we met internally to kind of identify
some potential areas, um, this was all before all that kind of guidance
came out. And so, um, you know, we're going to meet again internally and start
having that conversation, uh, with the flavor that council wants now. So, um, yeah, we
haven't had those, those discussions yet internally since that guidance has come out. So I
guess the question I have for you then to follow up on that is, you
know, when you come forward to places like the Environmental Board or Planning Policy Commission,
are you going to bring us your original ideas of where we can go above
and beyond? So because I suspect I will be asking to see those before they
get the influence of what the council is looking for and perhaps the development community
is looking for And I guess the question will always be, are we going to
have two codes, one for developers that are trying to redevelop central Issaquah and
one for the rest of the community or how this is all going to work?
Because I think there's some significant challenges ahead with the direction the council is taking.
Yes. Yeah. It is our intention to not have two codes.
We don't want that. We want one. And so that's our intention. That's how we're
setting out. Yeah. I mean, also, you know, full transparency, what we're going to present
to you as well. We're not going to try to, you know,
we will present to you our original ideas for sure. And again, that is going
to be up to the council to decide what they want to do. And so
we have recommendations as staff that we will try. to show what
we have seen using this stormwater manual for the last five years in areas
where we've had difficulties working with developers, some potential gray
areas that we see. Those are areas that we'll try to identify to help
the permitting process to streamline, to make it faster, right? So right now there is
a lots of back and forth on potential gray areas wasted
time happening, internal discussions, trying to figure out what this means, where we can clarify
that and then make that permit process go a lot smoother. So yeah, that's what
we're trying to do. Great. Look forward to it. Thank you very much. Yeah.
Nancy, one more question for you. All right. Thanks, guys. This is Ann Newcomb.
So years ago when I used to deliver mail on the plateau, a lot of
people were hiring companies like Camlon and True Green to come in and
spray chemicals on their lawn and things. So I don't even know if those
companies are still in business, but there's probably other companies that do the same thing.
How does Issaquah address runoff from chemicals from people's yards?
Is that something that you guys look at? Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, that's, I
mean, just from the homeowner perspective, we try to educate on, you
know, fertilizing techniques and not over fertilizing or certain times a year to fertilize, right.
To use the correct fertilizer, to not use a weed be gone, you know, so
it's just a non-selective herbicide that's getting placed, right. all over the place.
So there are yard care techniques that we educate on and we have workshops on
natural yard care and stuff like that. Yeah, and what you're referencing, like
I call them the lawn painters because they just come and paint your lawn green
with all the different stuff. That would be, that's that mobile business that we
have difficulty with as well. So a lot of times we get the complaint, we
show up, they're gone and then we try to track them down and we provide
them with education on what we expect in this aqua. Good job. Thank you. Any
other
questions? All right, I don't see any other questions for you guys. Thank you very
much. Appreciate it being here. And I'll be sending out my questions. Evan sent me
today the link for public comments is live on the stormwater management program plan. So
I will send that out along with the C-Click Fix link. All right,
next up we have James Ampspatcher. Did I get that right? Ampspatcher, good job.
It's a tough one, I know. James is the water efficiency director.
Yeah, let me share my screen here. Thank you all for having me today. I
really appreciate it. I want to give you all a brief overview of Cascade
and then I'll dive into our water efficiency program. Again, my name is James Amspatcher
and I am the Water Efficiency Director at Cascade Water Alliance. And
the advance here. OK, so Cascade Water Alliance is a municipal corporation that was formed
in 1999. with the mission to provide water supply to meet the current and
future needs of our members in a cost-effective and environmentally responsible manner through partnerships,
water efficiency programs, acquiring, constructing, and managing water supply
infrastructure, and fostering regional water planning. So Cascade has seven
current members. Those include the cities of Issaquah, Bellevue,
Redmond, Kirkland, and Tukwila, as well as Sammamish Plateau water and
Skyway water and sewer district. Oh, I forgot to mention before I started, I'll leave
time at the end if anybody has questions, but if anybody does have questions, feel
free to pop in and ask them. Don't be bashful. In
addition to any independent water supply sources owned by Cascade members.
Cascade currently purchases drinking water from Seattle Public Utilities. Cascade did sign a
contract with Tacoma last year and will start taking water from Tacoma in 2041 and
that will be to replace the declining supply and our current contract with Seattle. Also
in 2009, Cascade purchased the White River Lake Taps Reservoir System as a
future municipal drinking water supply. But the new contract with Tacoma will allow us to
defer developing the Lake Taps Reservoir until at least the 2060s.
In order to make existing water supplies last as long as possible, Cascade developed a
water efficiency program to encourage people in our member service area to conserve water as
much as possible. So next, I will walk you through the different components of that
program. First is our school programs. We
contract with both Nature Vision and Sustainability Ambassadors for those programs. The nature vision
programs are mostly grade school and middle school. Sustainability ambassadors is
mostly geared towards high school students with some middle school students as well.
Nature vision classes, they have both in-class and virtual programs. The
virtual programs were really developed during COVID so we could reach people. They're still an
option, but last year we didn't have any. It's all been in-classroom programs.
We offer 500 of those programs within our member service area each year.
And in addition to the in-class programs, they offer watershed field
experiences. So classes can get out into their local watershed to explore and learn
about the importance of keeping those safe and clean, as well as
the importance of conserving drinking water. They also have what they call blue teams,
Those are where an educator will go in not just for an hour and teach
them and leave. They're actually going in and spending four to six hours. They're going
in multiple times with each classroom. And so they get a lot more hands on
education. They get a lot deeper with them and those culminate with presentations given by
the students. The sustainability ambassadors program, there's a couple of components to
that. First is the youth ambassadorship. We have a number of youth ambassadors within our
member service area who are trained up to in sustainability practices
and then trained on how to use marketing and social media to
spread that knowledge to their family, their friends, their peers at school.
and it's been a great program for us. With Sustainability Ambassadors, they also have
learning labs where teachers will come in and work with them to develop curriculum
that not only those teachers who help develop it can take back to their classroom,
but it's also on the shelf so other teachers can come in, plug and play
into their own classrooms with real-life examples from within our region.
We also offer free irrigation assessments to park schools,
commercial buildings, multifamily homes, homeowner's associations, pretty much any but
single-family homes. It's just cost prohibitive to be able to send someone out to
perform an in-depth irrigation assessment on a single-family home. But
for all others, we do that. contract with someone who will go out and do
a very thorough investigation and write up a report that we will give them
on what we're finding as well as what fixes we recommend so that it can
reduce their water usage. You know here in these photos are just a couple examples.
The top one is over watering, the bottom one their irrigation system is watering the
streets. We hate seeing things like that so we'll try and and give them as
much information in the report as possible so that they can fix these issues and
stop wasting water. We also do a lot of
focus on water efficient gardening. Outdoor water use, so in the summertime
during peak demand, users end up using
about twice as much water as they do during the rest of the year. And
that's obviously the time of year where we're not getting rain that's replenishing and refilling
the reservoirs. So focusing on outdoor gardening, but since that's where so much
water is used when it's really needed the most, has been really helpful for us.
So first we have Cascade Gardener classes. We offer both online and in-person classes. The
in-person classes are during the time of year when it's nice in the summertime. where
more people will get out and want to be outside. And then during the rest
of the year, it's predominantly online classes. The online version started during COVID and the
numbers just spiked just because it's so much easier for people to attend. So we've
continued doing those, but we still want to get people outside and be able to
meet with them in person and within the community. And then we also have a
monthly Cascade Gardener newsletter where we're providing gardening tips, promoting our
classes and teaching people how to garden using Water Wisely.
We have partnered with Tilth Alliance to develop the Soil and Water Stewardship Training Program.
That's a nine month program where we have a group of a cohort of
stewards who go through training. They meet twice a month,
usually on a Saturday and then Sunday. On Saturday they will learn all the new
techniques and then on that Sunday they'll go out in the community and work on
projects using their new skills. We also have a lot of online videos and resources
available for people on our website. We co-fund the garden
hotline, which is a regional hotline that people can either call in or submit any
gardening questions they have online and get answers to those.
We've partnered with King County Housing Authority and provided a lot of training to
their building managers and landscapers for buildings within our member service area.
Last year we launched a new program, it's called the Lawn Be Gone Grass Removal
Program. Grass yards utilize more water than anything
else. And so we are trying to encourage people to either remove or reduce the
size of their grass lawns. And we're doing that through a rebate program where
single family homeowners can receive up to a dollar, they can receive a dollar per
square foot up to 500 square feet. for removing
a portion of the grass lawn and replacing it with native or drop tolerant plants.
And for commercial businesses they can receive up to
a maximum of a thousand dollars to do the same thing. With this we create
an online guide on the right here. This is a photo of the cover of
that guide. It's an extensive basically instruction manual teaching people how to
remove their grass lawn and replace it with native or drought tolerant plants and gives
them lots of tips, lots of plants options to use. We also have
developed a number of videos, instructional videos to help them with that, as well as
additional resources we continue to develop and add to our website.
We also offer water efficient products in a couple of different ways. First is
through a rebate program. We partnered with PSE to offer rebates on
water efficient washing machines, faucets, and a number of other things.
And we also offer free water saving devices on our website.
Here's some photos of examples like water efficient shower heads, toilet leak detection dye tablets,
shower timers, and we've got a lot more on there as well.
We try and get out in the community as much as possible. We are sponsors
for the container showdown at the Northwest Flower and Garden Festival that happened a couple
of weeks ago and really try and share the message of
gardening using water efficiently. And we also get out
to each of our member service areas to at least one event each year.
And so in Issaquah we always attend the Issaquah Salmon Days. We've been
able to connect with a lot of people, which has been fantastic.
Finally, social media. We utilize that to really extend our reach.
We're on Facebook. You can look us up at We Need Water or on Instagram
at We Need H2O. And we put out regular content. share water
saving tips, promote our programs and events, and really use it as a way that
we can easily engage with the community when we have limited resources and aren't able
to be out in community all the time. So I know I mentioned our website
a bunch of times. If you would like to go check out, we have a
whole water efficiency section of our website, and our website is
cascadewater.org. We've got a ton of useful information on there. And with that, I'll
just open it up if anybody has any questions.
Question for you regarding your youth education programs.
Does your organization push material to the school districts or do they simply provide a
resource that the school districts can pull from? Yeah, so we have
educators that will go out into classrooms. So there's a number of ways we engage
with schools. That's the main one is we offer 500 programs a year where we
have educators going out into the schools and providing education. We also have things online
where teachers can go and they can, like we've got one school that
does lots every year. They're coming back to us asking for more supplies. They'll, send
their students out to their homes and perform water audits and then come back and
see what needs to be replaced. And then we will send them new shower heads,
new faucet aerators, different things like that so they can put in their home. And
they're actually calculating how much water is used by each of those. So
there's a number of ways we connect with schools. We're always doing outreach and trying
to get more schools involved. And if we do have the demand, we'll
definitely, like I said, we're doing 500 a year. If that demand goes up, we'll
work on getting that funding to increase the number of programs. Okay. Does that answer
your question? I just think it's very powerful if you can reach children early in
their lives and be consistent and provide continual education through
their development about the needs for PROTECTING OUR WATER
SOURCES. ALSO I KNOW THAT SOME OF THE HIGH SCHOOLS HAVE CLUBS THAT ARE
I BELIEVE ISQUA HIGH SCHOOL HAS AN ECO CLUB THAT YOU COULD ENGAGE WITH BUT
THERE ARE DIFFERENT LEVELS YOU CAN WORK WITH CHILDREN. I THINK IT'S JUST
VERY POWERFUL AND IMPORTANT. SO KEEP THAT UP. THANK YOU. YEAH, DEFINITELY.
I AGREE AND THANK YOU FOR THAT COMMENT. I am a firm believer in that
as well. I think it's really important. We want to reach children. That's where you
can really change a lot of behavior. And so we put a lot of focus
into our school programs. And when we do go out to events in Issaquah, we
have flyers talking about our school programs that we hand out in case a teacher
doesn't know about it. We do work really hard to reach out to
all the teachers we can within our member service area, but we know that we're
not connecting with all of them. So we figure if we're out in the community,
if parents come by our booth, handing them that flyer and saying, hey, if your
kid's class isn't already participating in these programs, them this information. They can
sign up. It's totally free. We'll send someone in. They're great programs. Teachers really enjoy
them. They fit into the curriculum really well and follow all of
the state education standards. So, yeah, thank you. One more comment, James.
That plant behind you could use a little bit of water. No, that's
my job is to conserve water. So that's why I've got it. Yeah, that's a
very good job.
Yeah, what is your current forecast for when water would start flowing from the Lake
Taps reservoir to the east side? Yeah, so the
earliest we would need to start working on building
that out is in the 2060s to be able to receive water in the like
around 2080. I don't know the exact year, but it's somewhere around 2080.
Our current contracts with Seattle, the contract is a declining
block contract. So we'll continue to receive less and less and we'll be ramping up.
We'll start taking water from Tacoma in 2041 and that will just ramp up
and increase each year. And the pipeline that we are about to
embark on constructing, connecting our system to the Tacoma system
will take out a large chunk of what we're going to have to build to
connect to Lake Tapps. Okay, thank you. Yep, no problem.
Any other questions? Yeah, I'm just curious. Where does the water come from? Is it
Lake Young's and Cedar River? Yeah. Yeah. So currently
it is from two systems, the Cedar system and the TOLT,
the South Fork TOLT system. And so you mentioned Lake Young's, so how that works.
The Cedar River Watershed is a closed watershed. It's closed to public access.
And water is diverted at Landsberg, if you're
familiar with where Landsberg is. And then it goes into pipes at Landsberg,
gets chlorinated, and goes through a pipe to Lake Young's and gets discharged into Lake
Young's. And then when water is needed, it gets pulled back out of Lake Young's
and treated and then sent to Lake Young's. And then from the South Fork Tolt,
it goes up near the Duval area, where that water is diverted and treated and
sent into the system. So is Lake Young's just a holding pond then, or was
it a lake before it started piping water into it? Yeah, so
it was a smaller lake. It got... They increased the
size of it, Seattle, the city of Seattle did, when they discovered the need to
have water a little bit, kind of a storage facility closer in to the
system than trying to get it all the way from the cedar. And so
normally the water does, as I mentioned, go into Lake Young's. It's kind of, is
treated as a large reservoir or holding area before it's treated. There are times a
year in the springtime when they will have algae blooms and they'll sometimes actually bypass
Lake Young's and send the water directly into the treatment plant and into the system,
the distribution system. Interesting. I used to live in the neighborhood. One time
I slept. I went swimming.
There's a fence around the whole thing. Can't get in there. Well,
you can. Thank you. One last question for you, James. Do you know the
percentage of water that Cascade delivers to Issaquah versus what they pull out of wells?
I do not. off the top of my head i'm not sure if
anyone else here has the answer i think it does depend you know year to
year but i i i don't want to provide any information because i am not
sure no problem thank you
yeah yeah um i i can get you definitely the most accurate number but i
at one point it was i believe 60 is cwa uh 40 is groundwater um
But yeah, I'll definitely get back to the board with what that number is. Yeah,
thanks, Evan. Any other questions for James? No, thank you, James.
Appreciate your time. Thanks. Have a nice evening. Thanks, James. Thanks, Mike. Thanks,
Evan. The rest of our meeting is going to be
spent on a couple more ICAP action reviews. And then David's going to give us
an update on the metrics.
Great, we were originally planning to give you all breaks from the ICAP this meeting
and then the Transportation Improvement Program got pulled. It's going to be
delayed a couple of months and actually the timing worked out well because we have
a presentation to a council committee next week on the ICAP. So this was a
great opportunity. We wanted to take advantage of the time to run through. content that
we'll be talking about with the council committee and get some initial feedback from the
environmental board. So tonight I'll just go through another process update. There's
been a lot over the last few weeks and then we have I believe it's
six actions that we want to talk through with you all and get some initial
input prior to meeting with the council committee next week. Our question for you tonight
is any feedback on the additional actions and they are primarily transportation,
land use, and then buildings and energy.
All right, so as a process
update, so as you all know, we've been a
bit of a roadshow with other boards and commissions over the last several months. And
back in the fall, we proposed a number of ICAP action concepts, the Park
Board, Transportation Advisory Board, and the Planning Quality Commission. The Environmental Board
then reviewed the feedback that we received from those other boards and commissions. And then
over the last few months, we've been bringing you all section by section of the
plan. really honing in on various focus areas to dive in
deep to the targets and actions. In February, David and I met with the Council
Committee. It's the Planning, Development and Environment Committee, PDE Committee. It's made up of
three of our council members. They, at that meeting, they requested that we
return in March and that we bring policy concepts that are likely to have
the biggest impact on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, focused primarily on
transportation and buildings and energy. So following that direction that we received
from the committee, we went through a process where we reached out to our climate
network. We looked to other cities
and started to bring in those big ideas. We then took those
initial concepts for additional policies to the Transportation Advisory Board and
PPC the last week of February for their input. So based on
the input that we received from the Board and Commission, we've
revised our recommendation and what we're planning to bring the committee to recommendations
we feel are right-sized or Issaquah, and we'll be
presenting those on next Tuesday to the committee.
So just a little bit, this goes a bit to Nancy, the comment that you
brought up with Evan and Mike about wanting to see those initial concepts before
they're scrubbed. We were not going to present those to you all tonight with those
kind of big policy ideas where I'll talk just briefly about some of them. In
the meeting packet, the memo has the link to the PPC meeting
materials where those were presented, and I can send those out to the board. But
really what David and I did was look around. We knew Seattle, Denver,
Vancouver, Berkeley. Those are some of the cities that have really implemented some of these
big, ambitious policies. And so we pulled in some of those ideas. These were things
like going above and beyond the Washington state standards
for energy efficiency and commercial buildings. Saylor has a program known as BEPS, the Building
Energy Performance Standard. Emissions. Emissions, thank you, because they look at emissions.
So that was one example. Another was there are cities that have requirements when a
goes out that you have to meet a certain energy efficiency requirement for the equipment
that replaces it or a time of sale when you're selling your house you have
to meet certain energy efficiency requirements and most likely make some upgrades to your equipment
and appliances. Another one we looked at that we'll talk about here in a moment
was Redmond has passed a requirement for new multi-family buildings to have
percent of the parking stalls EV ready, meaning the conduit and electrical
capacity is there to install a charger. So those are the types of policies we
were looking at. And then through those discussions with TAB,
Commission, and then just kind of internal reflection on what we think
might work in Issaquah, those are the recommendations that we'll talk through with you all
that we're going to break next week. So I'll
walk through, there's four, I believe, transportation and land use recommendations. I'll
walk through each of those and then we can go back and talk through them
one by one. And then we'll do the same for buildings and energy, which we
have two recommendations. So the
first one that we're looking to bring to council is around removing parking
minimums. This would start with evaluating the feasibility of
what the impact would be, both in terms of the impact we think it would
have on reducing emissions from single occupancy vehicle use,
as well as impacts it might have on spillover parking where car doesn't
have a parking space at their place of residence, are they going to then be
parking a nearby business around the street? So there's a lot of analysis that needs
to go into this, but essentially what would be proposed here is to evaluate
the impact of removing parking minimums at new multifamily or retrofitted multifamily
buildings. Based on the input we heard from some of the other
boards and commissions. We wanted to look in particular at certain neighborhoods, but then
also consider the opportunity where staff on a project by project basis could make that
call if it's if it's the right the right call for that particular project.
I think we really think the market will drive the need for parking where if
a developer feels like they need parking to rent out the apartments, they will in
that parking, but for other projects, removing the parking. This might make them less expensive.
Does she go or? Let me go through the four and then we'll come back
one by one. And then the next one was
around multifamily charging. So I mentioned earlier Redmond has 100%
EV ready requirement for parking stalls and multifamily.
That while it is less expensive to put in the EV ready
parking stalls at the time of development is still an added cost for development. So
what we think may be feasible is a program that really focuses more on that
technical support and incentives to increase the amount of charging capability at
multifamily for vehicles and then also bringing in this need that we've
talked about for scooter or bike charging.
The third is really identifying ways to expand
EV fast charging across Issaquah, a focus particularly in the retail areas.
This is really to ensure that there is access for those that don't have charging
at their place of residence. One of the policies we had looked at in
Vancouver, which actually was passed and then they have pulled back on it and not
implemented it, was requiring gas stations to put in charging or else
those gas stations would be charged to higher business fee or business tax.
We don't think that's really right in Issaquah, but instead we really do want to
find other created pathways to expand charging access,
especially in areas of the city where folks may want to spend 20 or 40
minutes while charging their vehicle. And then the third one
in this area is really looking at how can we make
energy efficiency improvements, renewable energy easier to implement in the city. So that would be
taking a look at our code and helping remove barriers. So some
examples of this of what we've done already is certain neighborhoods where homes are built
pretty close together. We were having trouble putting in heat pumps because of setback
requirements. This leaves between the houses that were needed. And so the city's already made
some adjustments to the code to allow for them. We think there's other things that
we could probably look at in our code that would both make to make it
less expensive to make these improvements and just easier and really help fast track anyways
for homes and businesses. So those are
four potential actions in the transportation managers category. I will.
Back and welcome comments, feedback. Concerns
and what we'll do is take your feedback and verbally present parking committee next week.
Any other concern on this one? And he did say you're going to look at
how neighborhoods were zoned as it applies to this. So my concern on this one
is just getting rid of the minimum parking in neighborhood like Old Town where people
rely on street parking and all of a sudden you have all these parts from
all these buildings that don't have parking spaces. So
yeah, please do look at it as a zoning issue there. I think
it's a great idea for buildings that are close to transit centers and whatnot. I've
seen some cities have also developed where they have a centralized park box
for anybody to use the rest of the city. They'll put them like in the
middle of a block of multi-use buildings. I don't know how they develop that. Developers
probably under that as a joint agreement.
Okay.
Yeah, my concern you raised was brought up in public comment. We heard that several
public comments to the tab and PPC around those concerns.
Other thoughts, questions, concerns?
Sorry, did you say my name? Excellent, thanks. Just on that point you just made,
I guess I just, I don't know if this is the space for it, but
I realized the, I've noticed the transit center parking garage is often pretty empty.
And I wonder if, you know, any parking congestion issues raised by, you know, reducing
minimums or eliminating minimums could be alleviated a bit by better transit to and from
transit center and using that as a kind of a parking ride for for Old
Town or if you know better parking structure or closer parking structures could be planned
in the long term.
Great.
Thank you. I will say these are not the last time you'll see these
if council committee is comfortable with the concept or some variation, we'll be bringing these
back to you in March. Right. And then the next
one is that expanding multifamily charging primarily for vehicles, but
this could also apply for e-bikes, e-scooters. And this is
instead of having a requirement for going above state code, for the amount of charging
or EB ready spots. This would be focused on really that technical support,
identifying incentives or running a city program around incentives to encourage
multifamily to put in more charging.
No, all of these are very conceptual, so that could be It
could be a building incentive where they can build taller,
have some exemptions in our code. It could be a financial incentive. We would
evaluate those different options.
Good idea. Just another idea. I was in Capitol Hill this weekend
and noticed there were certain areas along the street in a built-up area that they
had established, they had some chargers mounted on poles and
two spots that were designated for charging vehicles. So it'll be
even in built up areas of Sequoia, you put some stalls.
Great. Yes, we were the first city to install pole chargers with PSE.
The problem is we don't have a lot of poles here, which is great. And
then a lot of them are, there's a sidewalk in between. So I think
PSE is starting to look at a new technology where there would be an arm
that could swing out. So that's definitely something I think we'd want to explore and
have more of that shared charging. That could be a great opportunity for as simple
as a pod too. So, yeah. Are they getting used?
So once by East Sunset Trailhead, not huge usage.
The city is putting in a crosswalk there at some point. There's a grant funding
that. And then there's interest in improving that trailhead. So I think
we would see higher usage there. And then PSE is right now evaluating a
site on the north side of the Senior Center would be another site. So that
would be closer to Front Street downtown. So that site will hopefully be moving forward.
Right, next one is looking at really incentive pathways to
expand EV charging. Right now, I think we have some language in the plan that
talks about exploring new partnerships, but this would be looking at avenues to really encourage
more charging here. That could be again, be a financial incentive,
it could be something changed in our code or making it easier. We
explore those different aspects. Yeah. How many pass chargers do we have now? I
know there's one at Target. Good question. Yeah, they're the ones, I believe there's three
active locations, so by Fred Meyer, by Starbucks at the Meadows and then at
Target. The ones by Chipotle are not active yet. Tesla's in the middle of it.
And those are going to be fast? Those will be fast if they become active.
There's an issue there. So yeah, three main locations, I
believe. Those are the fast chargers. There are not a lot of public level two
chargers. the one I target is Electrify America
and then the Tesla one will that you know if that will have the smart
plug so you can plug other vehicles besides Tesla I believe you can I think
the ones at Fred Meyer you can now too but I'm not looking
and so are you thinking about so this is something that
rather than the city being in charge of other companies would be coming in and
encouraging other companies to come in and do it. And why are we thinking that
we need more fast chargers? Yeah, I think the, so
TAV, I believe it was TAV or PPC asked if we could get data on
usage. I'm not sure since those are privately, I'm not sure they'll be willing to
share that, but we will reach out. I think we want to ensure that For
those that cannot charge at home, that they have easy access to charging throughout the
city as well as folks passing through. And particularly in front of
retail areas, it can be a great opportunity to bring people into shopping areas in
the city and charge while they're visiting businesses. As I recall, one of the first
things the Environmental Board did was create some
rules around having chargers, the percentage of chargers, like if the
parking lot was redone, we have to put a percentage of EV-ready chargers or EV
chargers. So would this go above and beyond that? Yeah, so actually the state is
now above and beyond with the environmental board pass, so we had to adopt the
state standards. So this would, it wouldn't, what we're proposing here is not necessarily a
requirement. It would be to incentivize additional charging in
place. Actually, I don't think there's any requirements around the
fast charging that I can recall. So I think it's all level two.
Okay, cool. Thanks. Well, kind of expanding on
that, I know it's the, as an EV
driver and I charge at home, doing a road trip, well the strategy
of where we stop to charge is driven by what's around it. You know,
okay yeah, I want a fast charger and I want it close to something that
I want to eat at and would that be nice if I could also do
some grocery shopping for you know snacks on the trip or whatever. So this is
a major factor in deciding where I charge and so some strategy can
be used there to actually Pull people into a retail
center around those amenities. A win-win
for all of us
involved.
This is something I've noticed. Kind of a bad thing. Maybe we... I
noticed that the charters near Target, people pull in there and they dump their car.
It's going to the ditch. So as we put
in these charging stations and people sitting there for 30, 40 minutes, it might be
good to have. Yeah. Sorry to say that.
I'm
sorry, Raj. So, Stacey, one question. So, and this might
be related to what Anne was asking. So, expanding electric vehicle, fast charger access,
where is the funding coming from? Is the city involved in, you know, any part
funding for this or is it going to increase the resident taxes or how is
it working? Yeah, good question. Again, it's conceptual, but I think what we
envisioned here was finding ways to encourage private
private companies that manage, build and manage and maintain EV fast chargers to
put those in. We do manage a few level two chargers. Fast chargers are a
whole other beast and David and I don't really want to manage any fast chargers.
So this would be really working with private companies or PSE does have some
programs, so there could be some utility relationships there. Or maybe there is a cost
share, but a private company is maintaining it. We will pursue, we do pursue
grants for charging and public charging. I think we're pretty hesitant to pursue a
fast charging grant unless we have a private partnership. So the new development of the
new buildings where it's proposed to have, you know, most of the parking spaces,
available with e-charging. So those are not first charges and that cost will
be covered by their HOA or the buildings, right? Yeah, that's a good question. How
multifamily or condo manages charging? It may vary case by
case. I don't know how that's done. I know some condos, they have kind of
a separate utility bill attached to the charger or shared across the HOA. So
it really is a case by case or you may pay as you charge or
in a multifamily, they may reserve that charging spot and have added costs. So it
would be up to the owner of the building or HOA. But yeah, these
where we were thinking were more in public places so they'd be publicly accessible is
where we want to make sure so that if a multifamily condo does not have
charging access, we want to make sure there is access to our community as well
as. And just one more point. I know we talked about it multiple
times and probably it doesn't fall necessarily in the scope of ICAP, but again, you
know, all these initiatives, especially EV and, you know,
especially EVs primarily, will require an exaggerated
electricity demand, right? So it kind of boils down to that. Do we really have
a stable electric grid and, you know, do we really have a stable electricity
plan to, you know, see five, 10 years down the lane? Because, you know, You
will be building this infrastructure and if the electric grid doesn't work, you know, or
it crashes one day because it cannot meet the demand, all of this is not
going to be used, right? And a lot of infrastructure effort and money is spent
on it. So I know it's not necessarily under the ICAM scope,
but that is a basic question we have to look into before putting effort into.
Yeah, and I think it is very much within the ICAP scope. We need to
have a good relationship with PSE. They need to understand where we are going with
promoting heat pumps and promoting electric vehicles and that transition off fossil fuels. So
it's something that Maripali was really involved in discussions with PSE and
building that relationship and understanding in their mallet as well. And so that will be
important is that reliability of the grid. And just one more comment on that. It
would be just a question for Issaquah, right? I mean, this is every city who
is trying to do it. So this is increasing everywhere. So I know Issaquah does
work with some sister cities or, you know, you have some, you share some data,
right? So that may be something you might want to look into and try to
build a network of cities who want to raise this and get some answers. Yeah,
absolutely. Yeah, Bellevue and Redmond are in the process of completing a grid capacity study.
So we're hoping to really learn from that. And then from there, also work with
PSD on how can we support and really promote their energy conservation programs, their
demand response programs and see where we can really partner on that energy conservation and
bigger liability. But yeah, we'll be looking to Bellevue and Redmond study. Yeah, that's cute.
Thank you. Yeah. So.
I think so. I'm wondering if like, are you thinking before? I know you're just
putting this in the ICAP. So is there something you can say about
checking out like not not putting a new one in until you notice that the
ones that you already have because I know there's a lot of new ones already
this one in QFC like I see them popping up a lot yeah that's really
cool um but before putting more in I'm just wondering if um
the ones that have been put in could be documented as being utilized yeah yeah
um so we don't over-infrastructure it
to project point. And I do think I love how
we're putting more and more in for the multifamily homes because to project point,
maybe we don't want to stress the grid out during peak times. And so if
it's someone's home, then they can take advantage of the
time-varying rates and plug it in it's less expensive and nobody else is using electricity
from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. Those are two
thoughts. And then so I did hear on the radio the other
day that here in there was a comment period about it too.
Here in Washington State our tech companies
are saying that they're going to the energy for their data centers.
So energy is increasing. It's like a huge boom right now. And in other
states, the cost is being passed along to the customer. But
here in Washington State, our tech companies are going to create their own power. So
it's not, hopefully not going to interfere with the grid
that we're dealing with as far as electric cars go. I think just one thing
to add to that, Anne, is I know Microsoft is trying to build a data
center. That's what I would in Issaquah or somewhere for
their energy for their own data center. That's what I would. But we all take
companies first of all. The big ones. I think it's probably the only big
ones will do that. And just to add to your point, I think it's more
of the public usage of EV and other things which will also increase the
demand. Yeah, again, the data center's demand is way higher than the other
usage, but yeah. Yeah, it's going to be, it's increasing a huge
percentage and that's going to stress the grid all around the
world more than EVs. Yeah. Thank you.
Okay, and then last one in the transportation land use is around reviewing city code
to see where those areas we could really streamline, reduce costs, make it
easier for homeowners, commercial buildings, multifamily, do energy efficiency improvements for
global energy. Again, we've done some of this, but we want to really take a
hard look at our
Let's see. So, can it be written in somehow? So, are you looking
for more potential actions or I guess I
could add to this one a little bit. So, I know you're really
well versed and you probably saw my email in heat pumps. So, I'm wondering if
we could into the ICAP somehow to focus on using and
promoting the city using the CO2 heat
pumps, which are increasing in popularity like crazy over the past year.
They're used a lot in Japan and Europe and we're really catching on here as
well. And the reason is, and they're more efficient, so over
time, well they're more expensive right now, over time they use less energy,
they're more efficient, so it would be less stress on the grid and people would
save money over time, including the city. Because right now they're mainly for like pools
and large structures, but also being used in residential to a smaller level.
So if we could focus on using those
more, that could be written into the ICAP, that would be great. And one of
the reasons main reason for it is it's not just efficiency but
the refrigerants the CO2 is equivalent to one because CO2
is what it's measured by but my heat pump
which was just replaced a couple years ago the refrigerant is CO2 equivalent to
almost 2000 to 2088 so if it It's supposed to be circular,
but if it leaks out, that is, which could happen. Ours actually did leak out.
It was installed improperly and it leaked out. That's why the old one broke. So,
but then also we could have natural disasters like earthquakes that
could make them leak out. But I did read that like,
CO2 equivalent for heat pumps is ranging now from 600 to 288. So it's going
down, but the one that's 600 is toxic. So
I would really love to see that written in. Yeah, I wasn't familiar with those,
so I'll reach out to our energy source, what you said. One thing, as you
were talking about, I was just thinking we could to broaden it more is maybe...
language around that the code isn't restricting kind of new technology or things like
that that might be even more energy efficient maybe there's yeah you have more um
efficient and
um greenhouse gas
friendly yeah that's great thank you yeah we'll look into yeah there was one more
thing i was thinking Wow, okay, yeah, so, and
David, you could address this maybe. So when we measure our emissions for
transit, it's passed through traffic and it's also, I know you're not going to
understand. That doesn't seem right. Is there any way we could
change the way it's measured so that we have more, we can have
more effect over what our emissions are in transit. So, you know, we could like
see how many, you know, how much people are driving in Issaquah, how many, what
percentage of people have used the transit, what percentage of people bicycle or
walk, and what percentage of people, you know, have electric vehicles.
Do you think that's a possibility? We can certainly look at what
that would do in our next greenhouse gas inventory, kind of trying to adjust how
we do our transportation emission calculations. One of the
reasons we do it the way it is, is so that it aligns regionally, right?
And so that we're using a similar methodology as our neighboring
cities and entities kind of on that geographic scale of all the emissions
captured within the city. But we can look at if there are other options
that we could explore for that. When it comes to looking at kind of the
distribution of different transit forms for commuting and other
purposes, we actually do track that in the Climate Action Plan and generally pull that
from the census. So that's a yearly number that we pull directly into
our ICAP dashboard. We mainly report on single occupancy vehicle use. within the census,
it does break down, you know, bicycle use, transit use, etc. as a percent of
transit of commuting in a city. So you're sort of
doing it, but. We're still getting charged, right? Maybe
we are still calculating those emissions as part of the city of Issaquah,
and I think part of the challenge of lot of these greenhouse gas inventories is
really figuring out where where is the appropriate place to draw the line on what
emissions we should be counting versus shouldn't be counting and whose responsibility is is those
emissions right and so. The way
the current best practices are at least for transit emissions is based on kind of
the geographic assumption which. There are some
emissions we calculate that don't occur within the city, such as where our energy is
generated from, for instance, or composting happening at Cedar
Grove or something like that. But it is definitely a
tricky topic, thinking about whose responsibility are these emissions and where to draw the lines
on how we're calculated.
15 minutes. So, in just a time, I'm going to move on to buildings and
energy. Here we have two
additions to what we've already shared with you that came out of the conversations.
So, the fifth action, I mentioned the FEP program, the Building Emission Performance
Standard that the City of Seattle has. This goes above and beyond a state building
performance standard. What we're proposing is not to go above and beyond that state standard,
but instead to fill in the gap. So right now at the state level, only
buildings that are 20,000 square feet above have an energy efficiency
reporting requirement or standard in place. This program that we would look into the
feasibility would cover those buildings under 20,000 that are not covered by a
state program. We didn't set a lower threshold here, but possibly
something like 5,000 to 20,000, not including individual residential homes.
So this would be a firm where we would ask voluntarily to report benchmark care
to promote their energy use. And then what we would do as in
response would provide some technical support, provide individualized access to
incentives, connect them with PSE programs, etc. Again, very conceptual, but the
idea is kind of filling that gap for buildings that are not covered by the
state. Great idea.
It's a good placeholder is the state of the United States standards.
And then the last one was so mentioned earlier, we had looked at
programs that either have a time of replacement requirement. So if your furnace goes out,
you're required to put in a heat pump or equipment that meets an energy efficiency
standard, or there are other communities that have a time of
sale requirement. So when selling your house, you have to meet certain energy efficiency requirements
or cover the cost or receive a rebate to replace equipment.
Those programs are very expensive. They add a lot of costs to
homeowners. They take a lot of capacity to run. So we didn't
necessarily feel like they were right size for our community to run as a single
community. But instead, We were trying to think of ways that we can really reach
beyond our current heat pump program, Energy Smart Eastside, and work
with the contractors that we are not currently educating to
encourage them to do a lot more heat pump promotion and provide a heat pump
flow along with a furnace, but do more of a voluntary outreach program.
The other piece here is There are some restrictions on use of
public funding for non-income qualified
community members. We're interested in exploring if there are opportunities to provide
rebates, incentives for non-income qualified households in order to help
even out the cost of equipment replacement for a higher energy efficiency equipment and or
for instance, a heat pump, but this could apply to a stove or hot water
heater, etc. So just looking at those opportunities where we could really help
fill in the cost difference. So possible
outreach and incentive expansion as well.
It seems like it would pair really well with like harvest and the
CO2. Those
prices are probably all going to be coming down now that they're getting really popular.
Okay.
Well, that, those are the six actions we are looking at talking, we are planning
to talk to the council committee next week. Again, they're not
I'm trying to walk a fine line. They're not those big, impactful, directly reducing greenhouse
gas emission actions, but in really looking at what some of those other communities are
doing, we just aren't sure that they're right in Issaquah. We do feel like while
these may be more of an indirect approach, they have many other
benefits in terms of improving quality of life,
keeping things affordable, really looking at working in partnership
with a lot of our business community instead of imposing additional regulations. So
we'll have that discussion with the council committee. They may ask us to go back
to the drawing board or they may say that these look okay. So we
will report out after that meeting next Tuesday.
Thank you for the great feedback tonight. Do we have a
chance to comment on the tree canopy again? Yes. Yes, I will. I'll cover
that real quick right now before we do other updates from this discussion.
So we will on March. Our plan right now is March 25th. We have a
special meeting and what we are planning to bring to you all are
of the targets and actions that we are proposing in the ICAP based on
nine months of feedback. We will share all of that with you
and then what David and I are planning to do is walk through some of
those major targets that are recommended making revisions. So tree canopy
resilience and then talk about municipal target. And then similarly with the actions, we
present the full list of actions to you. I think David counted. There's probably over
70 with these now. But then we would just probably bring for discussion 10
or so that we felt were the biggest change, the biggest impact, and then leave
it to the board to flag other actions that they would like to discuss during
that meeting. So that's the plan for the 25th. You'll see kind of the whole
agenda. I
believe so. I'll double check. It is also in a different room. So we'll send
out a lot of details and on that. It's at the steelhead room, which is
kind of in between the community center and the. But we'll send if you know
where the garage is, the team cafe, it's connected to that building.
But that's that's the plan really take. we've been presenting to you all. We've been
working through TAB and Park Board and PPC and then this meeting with the consult
committee next week and then you'll get to see what's coming out of the WAP
show with that. Get a first touch. So unfortunately,
hopefully we'll get home in time from Bakes Lake, but I know it's a long
drive so I'll be rooting for that.
Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah. Yeah, thank
you. Yes, and I'll I'll keep it quick today. Next
meeting I'll provide a little bit more detail on kind of what came out of
the metrics committee that both Praj and Sridhar was a participant on.
But really the over the last couple months we had a small committee of city
staff and community members meet to discuss some of the bigger questions we had around
how do we deal with metrics and measurement of the action plan. Cities,
counties around the region, around the country handle it differently and when
Stacey and I have been working with the current I cap. There were definitely some
questions and things that we weren't sure how to deal with. So
in summary of of kind of what came out of that discussion, the committee
members wanted to make sure that as we think about the next the I
cap update we were. We've elevated and we made clear the connection
between the different metrics, so how different metrics discussed in the climate
action plan actually are all connected and work up to our ultimate goal of greenhouse
gas reduction. Additionally, recognizing that this is a longer plan and things change,
new technology comes up, our understanding of data changes. trying to
ensure that we are articulating that there is going to be flexibility and can be
flexibility in how we're measuring the climate action plan and actions and targets and things
like that to accommodate changes that are likely to occur over the next
five to ten years. The main recommendations that will be
reflected hopefully in the material that comes too late in March are to
consider elevating the current overarching climate action plan target
to a plan level target. So right now, the greenhouse gas reduction target sits within
overarching climate action, elevating it to be a target for the entire plan so that
we can better connect all of the focus area targets up to that. That would
be alongside more of a qualitative assessment of climate resilience and
thinking about how we are trying to ensure that we are adapting to climate change
as well. The committee recommended that we can
and should use both quantitative, so number based metrics as well as
qualitative metrics for the measurement of actions. Stacy mentioned I did count. We have over
71 actions in the climate action plan, and so instead of trying to associate a
number with every single one of those actions that we are then reporting out on
to identify a set of high. I haven't figured
out the correct name, but high priority action metrics that we would be measuring.
And then for many of the other metrics using more of a qualitative assessment on
whether or not we are implementing those actions. For high priority metrics,
those would be kind of those metrics and actions that we
can more easily measure and that the city has more control over. So making sure
that we're focusing in on measurement of where we out the levers of change
for improving climate action here at the city. So the city, so we're
looking through the climate action plan to identify kind of what some of those high
priority metrics might be. And then the final piece here is making sure that we're
publicly reporting out on our plan level target on greenhouse gas
reductions, our focus area targets, which are VMT reductions, tree canopy,
things like that. And then any high priority metrics we establish. But then
most other measurements reporting internally on city work plans as
we are developing those on a biennial basis. And so making sure that we're
not overloading our public communication of our metrics and really trying to focus that in
on those metrics most associated with our our plan level targets.
That's kind of where we sat. Prod, did I miss anything? No, I'm impressed. You
actually it almost seems like you memorized the slide and you got all of it.
So that's great. That's great. That's that's good to hear. So
yes, that's where we're at. My hope is that when we talk about this again
later in March, I'll get to show you a little bit more of what this
could look like and mean instead of just speak on it. The final thing I'll
mention is we did talk about public reporting of metrics and kind of how we
could update the dashboard to continue our improvement on how we're
publicly reporting on that. And so the metrics committee gave me some great ideas how
we could sure that the next iteration of the dashboard is updated and relevant and
useful and as straightforward as we can
make it. Any questions on the metrics committee, initial
comments on the metrics committee recommendations?
Very quick update. Well, actually two volunteer opportunities and David will do a project update.
One, we're still looking for a representative to work on a committee for the Shifshawa
and Art Project. If you are interested, please let me know by tomorrow. Otherwise,
I may reach out to a new youth rep that we'll have on the board
to see if they might be interested. And this, again, is a reminder is working
with Sister Cities and the art board to develop a process to
recruit youth art for a new change will shift showing. So, Leticia, what's the time
coming bring for that and what's the budget? It would be probably first
meeting in March and then probably about three to five
meetings between now and October and then possibly helping run
like an in-person opportunity for students to come in and create art this summer and
then some kind of showcase and exchange in the fall. So when
between March to October, which period is going to be more world commitment required?
When is that in the student? Yeah, I think it'll be spread. So a lot
of the planning now, possibly helping host an in-person event this summer and then
an event. Maybe I don't, the group will decide if they want to judge the
art or just have all art displayed, but that would happen. And so the the
one table work with the art committee and the sister cities commission and staff will
be supporting also. Anybody from environmental staffing or?
Yes, I'll be helping as well as the art for liaison and sister cities commission
liaison. Happy to touch on the Arts Commission is going to be available.
Correct. Yeah, yeah. I said board. Yeah, Arts Commission. Sorry.
And then the other, so if you're interested, feel free to reach out with questions.
They're definitely looking for someone soon so we can schedule that first meeting. The second
opportunity is sustainability fair is April 25th. We had a really fantastic environmental board
booth there to showcase to the community what the board does. wondering if the board
was interested in hosting another booth. We have, I think I still have the
trifold so we could kind of use what we did last year. We would need
board members to sign up for shifts or, and, or if they, and if they
want kind of create any new materials, but we have at least the materials from
last year. Well, I have to say you made it really easy on us.
I'd be happy to help out day up for sure.
Okay. I'll get back to you. I have some travel plans, so I'm not sure,
but I'll get back to you. Seems like at least a couple folks might, it's
probably a booth that could be on its own for a little while if we
need or David and I can float in or out. We'll put a volunteer there,
but it seems at least like a couple folks might be able to join. And
it's our birthday. Yeah. Great. And then David has a quick project
update. Yes. So we are working We're working on the installation of the
Pickering Bart solar project. It was actually supposed to get started on Monday. Our solar
installer is coming from Ellensburg, so has not yet made it over the past this
week, given the blizzard. We are hoping they can get a truck of
of some materials over tomorrow. We will see. But the good news is that this
project has fully made it through permitting. We are. ready to begin the
installation as soon as the pass clears up and that installation team can make it
over. So if this week does not happen, it will begin
next week on Monday. So if you drive by Pickering Barn, you might see folks
working out there on the roof installing that solar system. Hopefully we'll have a little
sign out front, but make sure to check that out either. next week or at
the sustainability fair. We're really excited about it. This is our first solar installation that
the city has done since the building of Fire Station 72 in 2011,
I think. So it's been a long time and it's been a long time coming,
but the project is ongoing or starting as soon as snow
makes the pass accessible. assuming it's completed next week, we are planning to do a
ribbon cutting on April 7th. So we'll send out, once things are underway and we
aren't anticipating delays, we'll send out an invite. It'll be at 2 o'clock on April
7th. It's a Tuesday, so during the middle of the day, but if folks are
free, we would love to have an invite there. So we'll send out an invite
for that probably late next week. It would be cool if you could somehow incorporate
in your design some sort of metric. that show how much energy is being
generated on the wall, like a little ammeter or something that show how
much power. Yeah, we are discussing a metric on kilowatts of
solar installed on city facilities, and we have talked about the solar kiosks.
Yeah, so that is something we're considering through some solar projects, can we incorporate that
into there? And it's something that we're thinking about for the Senior Center Solar and
Battery Storage Project, which has both the fund data, how much solar is being generated
there, as well as what the capacity of the battery is, kind of what it
can really do for the facility at any given time. So a lot of cool
potential for community engagement around this data. And will this be
community solar because mostly building or
will it just go back to PSE grid? Both of these projects will be used
for the Pickering and then the Senior Center project. All of the energy generated will
go towards the facility. So it will net meter. So at times when it's generating
electricity and the facility isn't using that much, it will be sold to the grid
and then essentially we'll get the credit for that. But the Pickering project is designed
to meet the the vast majority of solar of electric demand at the facility.
Awesome. Yeah. Does it use much electricity?
It uses a fair amount. Off the top of my head, I don't
know how much electricity uses, but. The
system is around a 63 kilowatt solar system generating
the range of 63,000 kilowatt hours.
Great. How exciting. Very exciting. Thank you.
Thanks. Thank you.