Speakers labeled via automated voice-based diarization + AI name-matching against the city's official roster. Automated transcription can still mis-hear a name during fast speech (e.g. a rapid roll-call vote) -- clear near-misses are auto-corrected, but this is not manually verified line-by-line. Treat names as a strong best guess, not an official record.
[9:40] Chair: This so no one actually has to look at themselves, I appreciate that. Soon, oh my goodness, actually I
[9:47] Committee member: have gotten to like clicking hide view for myself in every meeting I'm in. Oh, Dan is
[9:57] Chair: now we will have a forum. Dan's here, hey Dan, I don't know if he can hear us yet, and now I need
[10:03] Committee member: to put it back so I can see, but you can still click hide self view and then we don't have to look at our own selves. Yeah, let's do that, right, where is that? There you go, you're right on it. Oh hey, that was like magic. Yeah, now Dan's much larger, hi Dan, hi Dan, okay, you're gonna get villages today because we, you're our quorum. Boom, yeah man, so much power, so much power, let me tell you. Okay, so a few minutes late, I would like to call this meeting to order. Jamie will record the attendance. I don't think we need to do introductions because you've been with us before, and our first task is to vote on the minutes from our July meeting. So there was no August meeting, but we've had a July. Do I have a motion to accept the July meetings? Excellent. Do we have a second? A second, fantastic. Do we have any comments or questions about the July meeting minutes? Hearing no questions, let's vote on those minutes. It will be by roll call because we have
[11:16] Chair: one on Zoom. Yep, hit it Jamie. All right, Lydia, do you approve them? Yeah. Braun? Yes. Dan? Yes.
Unfinished Business
[11:29] Committee member: Our meeting agenda was, I mean, this is the meeting agenda. Does anybody have anything to add to the agenda or questions about the agenda? We don't need to vote on that. Public comment, are you here to comment or to listen? Just to listen. Awesome, well welcome, as always feel free to interject, we're pretty good. This is a, this is an open meeting, conversation is acceptable, encouraged. Old business, data centers process. Yeah, I'm gonna let Autumn take, oh sure. So data centers
[12:01] Chair: went to town council, they moved that forward, essentially banning data centers, creating the definition for them, and then not allow them in the zoning districts that would allow the uses that they could fall under. And so it'll go to planning board for a public hearing on October 19th, and then back with us on October 21st, and then the plan is to do an extended Council, so we'll do a public hearing Council on the 21st and then a secondary. Any [Committee member: questions about] the data center situation? The definition was both sides, no, the definition in, I should have included it today, but it was actually borrowed from GP fog's definition, and it had the exclusions for server rooms and things like that as well, but it didn't have anything to do with size, but just
[12:50] Committee member: Outright, yeah, except which is a good thing because they probably decided now that they're just going to do a million small ones as opposed to a half a million large ones. I will say there was definitely
[13:02] Chair: a general acknowledgement from the council that this might not be a forever ban. There may be some changes with technology and new things now, problems yeah, that are causing
[13:15] Committee member: causing the bans to come into existence. Sure, okay, so we, I just should probably report that we did send our memo and got responses from two people indicating support for that memo, and so and now it's in process. They did, they did at the meeting thank the sustainability committee. I thought that was really nice for the work that folks here had put in. And just as a sort of comment, it went super smoothly, the conversation last week. There was very little discussion. I mean, I think all the counselors spoke in support of the ordinance. It was more unanimous than I expected. Thank you for being there, Dan. Much appreciated. Anything else on data centers? Moving on to the metro pilot soft launch happened. Theoretically we could have come here this morning. Did anybody pull that off? I'm not, you know, okay, I am in the zone and I got the app a couple of weeks ago when I first got the information about it and was able to open it up and requested a ride and it says there's no rides in your area and I was like oh right because it didn't start and so I opened it up again yesterday and it says I'm not connected and I need to connect to the internet and I've rebooted my phone and I've, I've done all the things. I had the similar experience on Monday.
[14:54] Chair: I think since you downloaded it and today they have released a new app. So I downloaded the first app on when it first launched. I got it on Monday because it was the first one that popped up in the app store and I was getting the same thing and I'm like obviously I'm connected to the internet because I downloaded this right so this is not
[15:19] Committee member: the correct app. That is not the correct app and the other one looks exactly the
[15:23] Chair: same. I don't know if their work like obviously it's very new so they want to work with the app store to hold it to remove the old one but if you search GPM m connect okay that should come up in the app store and that is the current app okay and does
[15:41] Committee member: That one incorporate the payments as well because there had been split two apps, one for payments and one for rides. It looks like there are still two apps, okay, and I have trouble with a second app as well because that's the same app that's used in Durham, North Carolina, where I had the app when David was in college there, and there doesn't seem to be a way to leave Durham, North Carolina and instead be in Portly, Maine. So I'm currently only able to pay for rides in Durham, North Carolina, so I'll use cash. That's fine. What's the app called? I'm not finding it there though.
[16:17] Chair: So it's GPM Connect, and also I can, and this is why it's a soft launch because
[16:28] Committee member: because I have GPC Connect, I'm not finding that. So on-demand, yes, try that one. Sorry, I was just
[16:41] Chair: reading what it said on my actual. Let me go, maybe here there is a, I think that is their QR code. Well, this was the, so it's Metro Connect, Greater Portland app, unless this is the, that is the old one though, so even their thing hasn't been updated, their brochure, because
[17:09] Committee member: that's what I'd use to get the app when you first sent this out. Oh, but now it says there's one that looks just like that. I need to install. Yes, it looks exactly the same. Okay, so I gotta just, let me uninstall it. I'm sorry, we're
[17:22] Chair: using meeting time to do something. It's fine, we flew through the first time, and this is all, you know, it's good, like anybody that watches might have these same tissues. Okay, yes, so I've
[17:34] Committee member: uninstalled the first one, and now I'm installing it again in the way that looks exactly the same. I'm still not going to take it home because my car is here, I need to take my car home, and also
[17:43] Chair: just in terms of the payment issue, it's free right now through the end of October.
[17:48] Committee member: Oh, okay, so I can, I have until the end of October to nail that down. Yeah, to get that. Where do you guys want to go? I'm, I got an account. Yeah, I'm still, yeah, I'm still installing. Okay, I know
[18:00] Chair: I was like, do I have a meeting at coming up at public works? I can take. Yeah, let's do that. 's
[18:06] Committee member: a perfect idea. Okay, so as one might expect, soft launch is not like, yeah, it's to work out all the bugs, it's to work out all the bugs, and so we've worked out one of the bugs, and quite frankly, if people use that old note, if they haven't installed the app before, they'll probably be fine.
[18:25] Chair: Maybe it depends on what, like I said, the old one popped up first for me when I only found one now. Okay, good, so they might, so maybe Monday they were able to remove the old. Excellent work, I just
[18:35] Committee member: Downloaded it right now and put my info in, and it looks like it looks right to Starbucks in eight
[18:43] Chair: minutes it wanted to know why I wanted to go though, it was like because they sell coffee.
[19:01] Committee member: Okay, well, okay, so this is super exciting, and I would encourage each of us to try it within the zone, because even if you don't live in the zone, you could try it from within the zone, just to, you want to go grab coffee after this, just to see how it works, so that we can provide our testimony to the community that we're excited about this, that
[19:25] Chair: we've used it and encourage others to do the same especially right now where it's free and people can kind of get the hang of it and then the fixed route starts next week okay there is kind of a launch event happening next Friday the 2nd at 9 00 a.m here at Town Hall and so I did circulate to the committee the like an RSVP link if you're interested in attending they're just trying to give a sense of who will be here but yeah I mean I think that 's really exciting that you know we'll and again the fixed route will also be free for the first month or so, that people can get the hang of it, try it out risk-free, and see how it goes, kind of get used to it. But yeah, very exciting that we have good transit service in Scarborough.
[20:21] Committee member: Okay, and is there anything that we need to be doing to help with outreach?
[20:24] Chair: reach? So we do need to connect. Angela and I have been chatting about connecting with Metro because we've heard feedback from like the senior community. I was speaking with someone at one of our Sustaining Scarborough tabling events this summer that like, oh, I can't go anywhere because I don't drive. And I was like, oh, well, transit is coming. And she had no idea. And she lives right across the street at Bessie School and or Bessie Commons. And like that will be very convenient, there will be a stop right there essentially, so I'm trying to get Metro to help us get the word out with to like the like senior homes and communities within the microtransit zone and close to the fixed route, so that they know that this service is now available. Scarborough has an age-friendly group, so we're working through them also to help get the word it out to that portion of our community. I've sent information to the library hoping that they'll put
[21:23] Committee member: stuff out. Does community services coordinate the activities? Yeah, community services coordinates
[21:30] Chair: The senior activities. Yeah, they're working with community services through their kind of age-friendly program. Is there a lower age limit on this? No, there's not. So Metro doesn't dictate the age of anyone that can ride independently. They really leave it up to the individuals. Parents can decide at what age they're comfortable with their children riding alone. Okay.
[21:56] Committee member: It may also be worth trying to contact somebody in the Ecos Club. I don't have any connections there anymore, but just to let them know to see if that's something that they want to advertise at all in the context of the high school. I probably wouldn't go any lower than that with active advertising in the schools and let that be a parental thing, but for high school kids that maybe ride the bus in and have a late sports practice or something, it could be super useful. Yeah, could be super busy at that moment, which would be a good problem to have. Like, our goal right now is to have the problem of having it be busy, right, rather than the problem
[22:34] Chair: of having it sit and languish. Yeah, I mean, and even if the child doesn't live within the zone, maybe they could get to someplace within the zone that's closer to their home, so the parents aren't driving all the way here to pick them up. It's a, yeah, shorter commute. Even if we just use it in the zone for a few weeks like that, or Duncan have like a board, Starbucks does 20B. Yeah, like to put up like a fire or something and could have got here for you, could have taken Scarborough ground says too. Yeah, as a community, you can like, when I just went to book my run, can I book it for more than one person? Okay, then finish it. Yeah, I know when I was in there it was asked how many people were riding. Okay, awesome. Has Piper Shores been in touch? So Piper Shores isn't within the zone, so they're not going to be able to benefit from round one, right? But yeah, there's a lot right around the Oak Hill area that would benefit from it. So Metro had said that they were going to take the lead on kind of marketing and I Think that they're, while it's just the soft launch for this, the first couple of weeks, and they're working out some of the bugs. I think that they're not going really hard just yet for some of the issues that we've already discussed this morning. Yeah, so we just do need to touch base with them to see what their kind of outreach and marketing plan is to get people familiar with it, other than seeing the big blue bands around town. We are also going to, I think there's a plan to have Tom Hall take a microtransit trip, and we'll follow his trip to see how it goes. I think our communications manager is working on coordinating
[24:24] Committee member: that. Okay, and then let them know that some of us are hoping to try this as well, and if they need other people to like have quotes or whatever, yeah, they can come back to us. Yeah, definitely. And if
[24:36] Chair: you want to just, if you have anything that you want to share, feel free to send it to me. Also, I think it's like the info email address at Greater Portland Metro goes to their community engagement person and operations, and so if you have any feedback that you want to provide directly to them, they're open to it and have asked for it. I can't remember if I forwarded you all the email about the, launch, the fixed route launch next week, or if I just sent additional information, but there was some information or tips in that email about like specifically what kind, what kind of like bugs they're working out, and some of it is like timing and just getting their drivers familiar with Scarborough in the micro transit zone, any issues with the app or anything like that. They're looking for all of that feedback because they want this to go as smoothly as possible, and hopefully everyone recognizes that this is very new to Scarborough, and so there will be some challenges that need to be worked out, but hopefully we can, they can be addressed pretty timely. Excellent, Jamie, I'll come visit you to get, okay, perfect. Yeah, we can do it after the meeting.
[25:45] Committee member: Obviously, Higgins Beach is not, it is not in the zone, so I'm not going to use it, but I'd like to be
[25:51] Chair: able to demonstrate. Yeah, people, yeah, or if you're, if you're here and you need to like be in this area for a while and don't want to drive, like there's lots of ways to benefit from it, right?
[26:04] Committee member: Okay, so that is exciting. I did, anybody else notice the message about RSVP for the Friday morning thing? I didn't notice that, so I will intend to attend that. Well, let me look, but I also am kind of behind on my emails. It's been chaotic, let's just say.
[26:36] Chair: I'll go, maybe it's in my drafts folder. Maybe I never sent in it.
[26:40] Committee member: Anything is possible, but in any case, if you could send that- Yeah, I'll resend it. Just because I seem to have missed it and would like to be able to do that. Okay, anything else about transit? Woo, transit. Oh, I always have my same question about transit. Has anybody done well, I guess microtransit will help on this. Anything about perking availability for folks who might want to use that or outside
[27:14] Chair: So I believe that they've coordinated with Cabela's because that's kind of their endpoint. I'm not sure about anything along Route One. I think that they were going to be talking to Main Health, but again, Metro was doing all the coordination about that, so we can check in
[27:32] Committee member: with them. Okay, I mean, microtransit would have solved my problem, right? Okay, great. Any other Metro Transit questions? Yeah, that would be a good thing for them to bring up on October 2nd, like, and park at Cabela's, you are not going to be towed because you're
[27:53] Chair: part, you know, you are a micro transducer. Yeah, and that's that will be the end point for the fixed route, and I'm not sure, I think it actually may be like the Turnpike Park and Ride that they've coordinated with, which is already available, but Cabela's lot is so enormous that like it seems like yeah, that shouldn't be reassuring when they get into snow season
[28:15] Committee member: and they're like, hey, this car's parked for all day. It's abandoned. It's like, no, it's a microtransit. Right, yeah.
New Business
[28:23] Committee member: Okay, well, super exciting. Hooray for us. Moving on, we're really on a plow today. New business is the climate action plan. And we were asked to review the goals, strategies and actions. I didn't do that. So if somebody else did that and can guide us this in a review of the goal strategies and actions, that would be super useful to identify actions for this committee to take on. I'm gonna, I'll pull it up and I'm gonna share in a minute
[28:58] Chair: so Dan can also see, but it takes me a little bit to do this. Fair, find my mouse. It's beautiful. Yeah, the consultants did a really nice job with the layout, the design of it. So just a plug that this is available for, it's out for public comment right now. So the link in that I sent with the email. So there is a link to directly to the plan in the agenda. If you go to sustaining scarborough.org, there's also like a comment form. So if you have, if the public has comments, you can submit them through that form. You all are also welcome just to email them to me. I'm kind of, I'm compiling them, reviewing them, and we'll pass them along to our consulting team. Team to address once public comment period is over. We haven't really set a specific time. We are doing our town council workshop on October 21st. Originally we were scheduled, we were going to do it last week, but we kind of got bumped for another topic. So we're now looking at our second meeting in October for the Climate Action Plan. And so we'll have to, I need to kind of talk to them about, or talk to Tom about how he envisions the process for adoption, whether it'll be kind of the next meeting after that workshop will be first reading, or if they'll do first reading directly after the workshop. I'm not entirely sure. Usually we like to have a little bit of time between the workshop and first reading. But since it has, will have been out for public comment for over a month by that point, they may be comfortable moving it forward sooner than that. So this is kind of the culmination of about a year of work, pulling together the, all of the data related to energy use in Scarborough, doing a lot of community outreach and engagement, working with our advisory group, which Jeff from this committee was a member of. It was a pretty extensive group. We had probably about 40 people from town staff and the community and organizations and businesses in Scarborough providing input on the plan, the goal strategies and actions. And so really wanted to focus today on our outputs and what we'll be focusing on over the next several years in terms of sustainability. So we, our consultants did pull together. I'm going to just try to do this without making anyone sit. Go down to the last page of this. I don't like the two page layout automatically here. All right. So these are the five actions that we have, that we asked our consultant to kind of like build out for us with a little bit more information and guidance. So these are kind of the five things that we're going to be working on first, but that doesn't mean that there aren't other things in the plan that we're, that are going to take a backseat. These are just the ones that have kind of been built out and better defined for us. So first one is launching an energy coach program, basically having volunteers help residents understand what options are available to them in terms of energy upgrades and efficiency projects, kind of the whole gamut. They will be trained, there's like this is a model that has been used in other communities around the country, and there's training available. So we'll be working on recruiting volunteers. We're actually going to apply for a resilience corps fellow, an Americorps fellow, to come help kind of get this project, this program started and off the ground, because there is going to take some, a lot of coordination on the front end to get this ready for launch with the public. And then incorporate life cycle costs into decision making. This has been kind of what we, this committee has been talking about for a long time. We talked about it as part of the advisory group. Our finance director is interested in supporting this effort and helping kind of figure out the formula and how we go through that process. So we're going to be moving forward with that one. We're also going to plan to adopt a zero-emission vehicle and equipment policy to guide the transition of our municipal fleet, so that's going to take a lot of work on our end. Also to get chargers in place, make sure our buildings where charging needs to happen have adequate electrical systems in place and all of that. That so lots of kind of steps before we can get to actually implementing a policy, but policy is coming, which is really exciting. We discussed maybe starting a little bit smaller with our community services maintenance, grounds maintenance equipment. That might be a little bit easier to and less of an investment for like mowing equipment, as opposed to every municipal vehicle being an electric vehicle. Working on trying to increase organics. So composting, now that we have garbage to gardens, that's awesome. So we can really promote curbside composting. And so really doing a concerted outreach effort to get people removing food waste from our waste stream. And then lastly, kind of tying it in with the vulnerability assessment. Really going through a process to prioritize which municipal assets we need to be addressing first, thinking about sea level rise and storm surge and all those things. So those are like the big five that we're starting with first, but obviously there's lots more within the plan. And that's kind of what we can either, like, this group can either choose one of these to really focus on and help support, or we can look for another one through the goals, strategies, and actions. And I'm happy to walk through those, since we do have the time. You
[35:47] Committee member: know, yeah, 40, yeah, 40 or so people in the working group. Is there a plan to select, you know, you know, six or eight of those people and have them volunteer for like an advisory board to go through and be available to you and to town staff, you know, as you implement? So we haven't
[36:15] Chair: necessarily taken that step from that group. I mean, this, the sustainability committee could certainly be the advisory group. That's kind of why this body was set up, was to help advise the town for like efforts such as these. And then we can pull in others if there's a specific topic that we don't have the kind of the knowledge or expertise sitting around the table. We can bring in others to help advise and provide input. And certainly like having representatives from the business community would be helpful and things like that, because we are, this isn't, this isn't a Scarborough town plan, it's a community plan. So everybody has a role to play in the implementation of this plan. Yeah, and we tried to make that pretty clear looking through the, through the narrative of the plan, basically saying, you know, this is, this is kind of like Scarborough town piece of our overall emissions. So it's a very, obviously very small piece of the pie compared to when we look at residential, business, all of that. So yeah, just getting building awareness that everybody has a role to play and in this plan. Yeah, we did something similar to
[37:31] Committee member: this in Cambridge in 2000, and so they brought in all kinds of people for that climate action plan in 2000. Then they had to implement it, and the city staff drew some people from that initial group, and they could contact them in the evenings, like because they're busy with work, you can't make it to a Wednesday morning, and the universities as well, they were, they were all over the place, but they could call up and say, hey, you know, is this U.S. Green Building Council thing with that, you know, we're running into an issue here. You've done this on a hundred buildings, can you help us and these people? And they just like moved it along, that's great. And then in 20, 2010, they did like a whole reboot, like this is what we've done, and so many things have changed in 10 years, and it's what we can do. But that advisory group, it's very, it's informal, but these people that were part of the initial plan, they heard all of these discussions, and so they have that knowledge and they can be there to support you as you're
[38:55] Chair: trying to implement and you run into a speed a bump you know that is great feedback thanks for sharing that so yeah i think that there 's going to be we're going to have to work through this and figure out kind of what works for us obviously there's going to be some low-hanging fruit that we can kind of jump on and start working on more quickly than others so but always good to have others with experience and knowledge to kind of serve as resources so our first topic in here is clean energy and efficient buildings. So our goal is that we are primary, Scarborough is primarily powered by renewable energy, so want to expand and update the zoning ordinance to ensure clear permitting process for energy storage projects and allow for larger standalone projects. I've no, this has been going on for days, I don't know what is happening for the renovations to the front, okay, I don't know if the owl is picking it up, but yeah, that's great. So we cut, this is somewhat similar to what we did with our solar ordinance, just kind of expanding that to allow for storage projects and other types of renewable projects. So
[40:10] Committee member: clarify, I'm confused, and this is for municipal buildings only, or this is for all buildings? This
[40:19] Chair: is for all, like some, there are strategies in, not every strategy is for everyone, but there are certainly strategies for, residential buildings, we're gonna like see a little the
[40:32] Committee member: buildings mentioned here are not just municipal, they're not just municipal buildings, and like
[40:37] Chair: When we're talking about Scarborough is powered by renewable energy, we're talking about the town as a whole, as a whole, and having like the now the ability to do community choice aggregation where that Scarborough is has the opportunity to basically decide where we are buying the town's electricity from will help us reach that goal. I know that this group it's very new, this group wasn't entirely sold on it when we learned about it back in the spring, but so in here I'll jump down to this at the action 1.2c like looking working with GP cog and seeing if they would be available to kind of help on a regional level, kind of lead this process rather than every community in this area going through the a similar process to potentially buy electricity for or broker electricity for their community. Can we go back to 1a and it says for allow for
[41:39] Committee member: for larger standalone projects so there must be some limit at this point in time on storage
[41:47] Chair: projects right and if it's not explicit in our ordinance it's not allowed so right now we energy storage isn't really spoken about in our in our ordinance unless it's like an accessory so theoretically there could be a standalone project like prior to us updating our solar ordinance solar could only be an accessory use you couldn't just like say I'm going to develop a solar array on this parcel and that's the only thing that's going to happen on this parcel so we had to update our ordinance to allow that so we'll need to do something similar to allow that no I
[42:22] Committee member: was like they've already got something in there but they said it's only you know yeah you could
[42:27] Chair: just do the smaller it's like battery storage yeah but and only if it's like in conjunction junction with another an existing use so we could not today have someone go out
[42:44] Committee member: and build a storage unit that then all it would do is provide electricity when the power's out
[42:52] Chair: right okay now right yes okay yeah thank you that's for the town is building it for the president in Gorham no I think it's a private developer for CMP right I mean CMP will be the main recipient yeah but this like battery storage obviously offers grid stability and all of that so like it's necessary and there aren't that many that have been developed yet so and then looking at renewable energy solutions locally and statewide so again collaborate with GPCog and CMP P to expand electric transmission capacity, identify funding and install solar arrays on municipal building rooftops and publicly owned parking lots. That's obviously something that we have talked about quite a bit and would love to see more of in Scarborough. And then thinking about new community choice aggregation and if this is something that we want to pursue in Scarborough to help us meet our renewable energy goals.
[44:03] Committee member: I'd definitely like to work on that, number one.
[44:07] Chair: The community choice aggregation or buildings as a whole, Dan?
[44:12] Committee member: I think that whole section. Yeah.
[44:17] Chair: Dan votes for strategy or goal one. Awesome. So does Lydia. I'm shocked by you two wanting to do those.
[44:25] Committee member: I feel like that's why I'm here.
[44:28] Chair: That's totally why you're here, Dan.
[44:30] Committee member: I just want to see what else there is.
[44:32] Chair: Yeah, all right, so looking at making our buildings more efficient, so established incentives to encourage new development to achieve performance levels of the main stretch code. So we, the town has not been, hasn't, has been resistant or hesitant, I should say, to adopt the stretch code, so higher energy standards. So maybe we can incentivize some of the people to meet some of those standards. Partner with community organizations like Project Brace to expand access to free or reduced cost home energy audits and weatherization efforts. Launch the community energy coach program. I said that we're working towards that already. Incentivize oil transition in all residential and commercial buildings, prioritizing properties most vulnerable to sea level rise. We have about 800 buildings right now, or mostly residents, that are vulnerable to sea level rise that are still on oil heat. And so really doing a concerted effort to try to target those
[45:39] Committee member: individuals and encourage them to electrify. Never let a good emergency go to waste. This is maybe the year to do some of that work. Yeah. Who knows what El Nino is going to do. It's either
[45:52] Chair: going to be the worst thing ever, but I'm just thinking in terms of oil prices. Oh yeah, that's
[45:57] Committee member: that oil prices make the math feel nicer. Yes. Yeah, for sure. And then again, the life cycle
[46:05] Chair: costs, we're going to start working on that, so that as we're building municipal buildings or doing municipal upgrades, we are thinking about the long-term cost of the systems that we're putting in place and not just what's the cheapest right now. Yay. And then establishing energy performance targets for new and renovated municipal facilities, very closely related to that, happening with the schools. It's not happening with the schools yet. I mean, the, I think they'll probably have a geothermal system Because the well and again it's like four schools right or three schools there's lots of renovations happening so but the consulting firm and engineering architecture firm that they've chosen is very big on geothermal so there will be I'm sure that there will be geothermal systems in our schools for us all right so land use and transportation so buildings and transportation are the not surprising because this is how it is everywhere the largest emitters of greenhouse gases so I'm not surprised that these are one and two in our goal strategies and actions list so looking at choosing active like in getting more Scarborough residents to choose active transportation and transit options which so very exciting that we now have transit for them to choose and so I love one a Yes. So a redesign of Route 1 to advocate for or to include safe bike and pedestrian infrastructure. I can put a plug. We do like 1-1-C, develop the trails and sidewalk master plan. The town has funded that. We just haven't had the staff capacity to move it forward. Autumn will be hiring a long-term planner and the long-range planner in the near future, like January, maybe March,, probably at this point. Autumn's going to run the program.
[48:11] Committee member: Autumn's going to have to do it.
[48:13] Chair: We lost our developer review planner. I have retirements. We're going to get there. We're going to get there. We're going to get there. Yeah, it's just reality is that it's in the way of all of these things that we want to be able to do. so that's coming but that will obviously help us identify where the bike and ped routes need to be and how to make them happen and do a more kind of comprehensive look at town rather than just doing it sporadically and opportunistically I would I'm not sure
[48:46] Committee member: where it is in the plan but is there something about the shoulders of roads we live over off Holmes Road Holmes Road it's nice paved road but the shoulder is non-existent and when you bicycle on that road you're sharing the lane with your pickup trucks going 40 to 45 miles per hour you know I live on a road like that and they have the sun in their eyes and they're checking oh late for my meeting as I you know yeah and I'm all for bicycling and encouraged encourage bicycling but I don't want to die on Holmes Road yeah just had the same problem up in Pleasant Hill neighborhood yeah but there are no way to note that I think the town I think it Was the town worked on Broad Turn Road a year or two ago, and between Holmes and Route One, Broad Turn has these shoulders that are like this, like you can actually ride a bike out here, so you have half a chance of making it alive. But Council just accepted a complete streets policy.
[50:01] Chair: and then wait didn't we do that a decade ago well we have a complete we just did a full actual and different Street types and then we also have in that improvements or changes we should make to our traffic calming policies so we're working on that actively to figure out some of those places you maybe shouldn't bike on but there should be an alternative route and so that may be what comes out of this trails and sidewalks so there's a way to get to a to b but maybe homes and road is not the choice because we don't have the right of way to do the shoulders or
[50:37] Committee member: something. Yeah, I understand, and it's like a 10, 20 year process, but eventually I could ride a bike from there over to Cabela's and catch the train, the bus. Yeah, that is the goal, I mean I
[50:54] Chair: mean Holmes Road already speeds are high already on Holmes Road, you make the road any wider with the shoulders and they're going to get even higher, and so that's why, like Autumn was saying, maybe that's not where we're gonna send the bike traffic to get you there. Yeah, but hopefully the master plan will identify where those routes need to be and give strategies to make it happen. Thank you. And then looking at, again, safe routes to school, doing more bike ped infrastructure around our schools, expanding bus routes, which a lot of our schools are now served by Metro. There's some resistance, I think, to having more kids riding school buses, which is really interesting since covid there's been a real reduction in school bus ridership there's also a real struggle to find bus drivers so i think that 's part of the resistance on the school department side that they just they can't staff bus drivers to add more bus routes so lots of challenges that we're going to need to work through related to that goal it's going to
[52:06] Committee member: take some serious incentivizing to get parents to put kids back on buses. Yeah, because it's, yeah, and to get kids to get back on buses, like COVID broke us. Yeah, lots of change, lots of changes.
[52:20] Chair: Since COVID and then expanding supporting expansion of regional transit we've kind of talked about that already but in here is again leveraging existing parking lots within key last mile destinations to create opportunities for micro mobility hubs or Park and rides wait a
[52:38] Committee member: minute back oh sorry I'm jumped ahead go ahead carry on that's all right we'll get there so
[52:44] Chair: yeah the and then we will work with Metro to kind of evaluate ridership of the pilot to determine long-term service options that's that's part and parcel to our pilot anyway, every metro wants it to be successful town administration wants it to be successful, so that we will continue with the service once the 3 year pilot ends. And the only way we'll do that is if people use the use the service. So we need to get people on the bus all right and looking at moving on to evs. So expanding our ev ready ordinance to include more municipal facilities beyond schools. schools so right now school's really interesting that's called out which was an oversight on our
[53:30] Committee member: part when we were putting that together so we need to that was what I was reading when I started to
[53:34] Chair: interrupt you yeah I mean I guess technically like we do have office buildings in there and so technically this is kind of Town Hall is kind of an office building you know but like but yeah if it's like caught make it more obvious that more municipal facilities should like if their new facilities are built need to be EV ready than just the schools
[53:55] Committee member: And we should bump up our efforts to get chargers installed in more of these municipal facilities. Yeah. And particularly schools. Yeah.
[54:06] Chair: Schools, but also I've been wanting years, I want them at our beaches. That's kind of the destination in the summertime. So people go to the beach and park for a couple of hours if they're coming from out of town, they should be able to charge their car when they're on the beach. Our previous community services director was hesitant about that, but I think our current one, our new one is, more open to that. So, thinking in those terms, and that really is a.
[54:34] Committee member: Commercial activity, like, there are companies that will install and manage those. That's not something the town needs to manage. Yeah, just need to just opening it up and we're there to that. It's allowed and then we've got the power there. Yeah.
[54:47] Chair: Todd was probably concerned about making sure people who weren't EVs were not using the parking spaces. Right. Does that work like enforcement issue? Does it work like, am I thinking of handicapped? Yes. Yeah, there would be dedicated EV spaces and probably not a lot of them. Like I would see a starting at Heard Park, Pine Point, because that is the biggest lot. Lot and doing maybe doing a pilot there to see how it works, but yeah, having a couple of easy spaces, having the meter, putting in like the smart meter so you get charged more if you're sitting there parked and you're fully charged, yeah, things like that I allowed
[55:31] Committee member: Someone to schedule a nine o'clock appointment for me. I have a state. No worries. Thanks. Thanks for being here, Bill. Okay, so yeah, this part is ours as well, that the goal one on transit. There's a transportation committee. Well, what is the transportation committee done with EV stuff? That's been mostly this team hasn't
[56:02] Chair: It that has been this group, but the transportation committee definitely supported
[56:06] Committee member: Supported EV efforts. Right. Like we led and they supported in the way that they led and we supported on the transit situation. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. Okay. So, and that would likely stay here because we're the ones who have developed that expertise. We may as well hold on to that. Right. Okay.
[56:20] Chair: Yep. And like we already kind of touched on the zero emissions vehicle policy. Let's see. Launch clean transportation education campaign. So really just getting the word out, trying to do some EV myth busting. There's so much misinformation out there. So and I think you know having the town adopt and incorporate more EVs into their into our fleet will help us kind of walk the walk in addition to talking to talk, but trying to get more information out in the community about you know it's if you're not going like four miles and needing to charge anymore, you can go 400 miles before you charge, and how often are you filling up your gas tank at almost five dollars a gallon? So again, opportunistic right now to be talking about EVs with gas prices so High and then again using our in-lube fees and our sustainability Reserve account to expand public charging at key destinations like beaches and
[57:26] Committee member: Rec facilities. I don't think it even costs us anything at most of those places. It probably
[57:30] Chair: probably wouldn't if we are if we are going to partner with a company to come in and manage the but if there's any that we if we want to do any more like we have back behind town hall we've got free eb charging looking to that fund to help support some of that perfect and then our climate hazards so looking to like push development to our growth areas make sure it's high density we're kind of we're trying to do that as much as possible it's for creating a coastal overlay zone as recommended in the vulnerability assessment. Should we call it something else, assessment, or should we like, it's my short-term rental words, coastal overlay zone. I already have it created for short-term rental. Well, we can do like a coastal hazard zone or coastal, maybe vulnerability zone, coastal flood zone. I like that. I know it's like, let's be obvious, is if you're in the flood zone, yeah, so you need to build higher design flood elevation on newly adopted sea level rise projections. So right now we do go above the minimum for our design flood elevation. I think we're two feet, really we should be at three feet, and we're well on our way for three. One D, yes, pro, yeah, right, we'll be able to cross that one off hopefully November 4th. I do have to say having the documentation from our meeting in February where this, that data center item was first brought up, did help provide some evidence when we went through the moratorium process to say we were already talking about this before the, data center was proposed in Scarborough. So go advisory group for bringing that up during our first meeting in February. So the next one is our municipal
[59:35] Committee member: operations and waste management. Stop on by the numbers part before you go there, because I was surprised to notice that only 25 of the total waste generation is covered by municipally
[59:52] Chair: provided residential curves. Yeah, I was surprised by that too. So I have a question into our consultants about where's the rest of the garbage coming from. I don't, I guess businesses don't
[1:00:02] Committee member: commercial, yeah, that's saying only 25 of the town's trash comes from residential pickup
[1:00:07] Chair: essentially, or from our curbside pickup. So we don't do curbside pickup for multi-family and
[1:00:13] Committee member: we don't do curbside pickup for commercial development, and I would, I guess I was just sort of top level surprised that there was that much additional trash out there beyond what's in the, that's the like private household stream. Yeah, interesting. Okay, I just wanted to draw attention
[1:00:32] Chair: To that there's a yeah and our recycling rate is 20 where the statewide average is 36 percent. It's
[1:00:38] Committee member: pretty sad Scarborough that's 20 of 100 or 20 of the 25 percent. Oh
[1:00:48] Chair: of the 25. That's really bad. Yeah because that's what we don't know what the other right we don't have we don't have data on the
[1:00:56] Committee member: private collection right. Okay anyway I just wanted to look at those numbers. Some of those we might
[1:01:03] Chair: be those might be some of the by the numbers stuff. I think I understand what they're they're saying but some of them need some wordsmithing and reorganization because they can be a little
[1:01:14] Committee member: bit confusing. So is waste management going to stay with this team as well? Yes. Okay. Yeah.
[1:01:21] Chair: That's why we moved from our, one of the reasons we changed our name from the Energy Committee to Sustainability Committee because it wasn't obvious. Which is what it was supposed to have been
[1:01:30] Committee member: from the start but we just didn't get that through council. Well we did later. Eventually. Yes. Okay.
[1:01:36] Chair: Okay. All right. So our goal is that Scarborough integrates sustainability data and principles throughout its operations and regularly communicates progress with the community. So this is really just what are we doing, getting the word out, letting people know the work that this group and the town as a whole is doing. We are continuing to work with the consultant that worked with us on this plan to develop a dashboard. board so it's going to be through sustaining scarborough.org but we're building it out more to really help us tell a better story of the work that the town is doing related to the climate action plan but all of our planning projects that we've undertaken over the past eight or nine years so it's going to have kind of tell the story and how the sustain of the sustainability leads through our comprehensive plan our traffic, what is our transportation, town-wide transportation assessment, our open space plan, our vulnerability assessment, the upcoming trails and sidewalk master plan, and kind of bringing them all together to tell a story because there's interconnection with all of them. And so we're going to hopefully within the next six months have a new kind of like online dashboard that has information about all of this stuff. We're gonna be trying to get kind of stories and testimonials from people who have like been doing things related to the work that we're doing within these plans. But on the back end, it's going to give us an efficient way to track our progress on all of these plans that we're working towards implementing. So we see it as a huge benefit, both for the community. So hopefully people will go there and have a better idea of the type of work that the town is working on. And then a really useful tool for staff. So we know so to give us a better way to track how all of these are happening, as opposed to having goals, actions, and strategies lists for 5 or 6 different plans that we need to keep track of everything will be in one place really excited about that and then working on we need to develop the sustainability team framework tool to guide decision making processes around town projects. Processes and budgeting. There are some examples out there from towns in Massachusetts, where basically it's like a checklist assessment, or any project to understand kind of the sustainability impacts or benefits of various projects that we might be
[1:04:13] Committee member: undertaking yeah Jamie I was trying to find metric tons per capita with Scarborough yeah like they have the 319 000 metric tons yeah what if you divide that by the population of Scarborough where are we at I haven't done
[1:04:38] Chair: that calculation but that's a good question so I can I can do I mean our population is what, 22,000 now, 23?
[1:04:44] Committee member: 20, closer to 24. 24, yeah, so that's like 13 and a half metric tons. That to me is, speaking for myself, that's a really relatable number. Yeah. Like I look at 319,000, like, whoa! But if I say, me as an individual, I'm I'm in the 13 to 14 tons carbon per year and I want to get my personal goals to get to 10 or you know to five and eventually to zero but that is something like school kids could work on you know it's a project for school kids like do an inventory of your family's carbon footprint see where you are compared to the average and see what your family can do to get below the average so then they do some of that in the yeah in the yeah and I
[1:05:47] Chair: feel like our consultants may be able to add like that calculator to our dashboard so that they can go in and just like answer a few questions and
[1:05:56] Committee member: there's some pretty standard yeah drop-and-go calculators that's a good idea on this comment everyone wants to know like if i live here or there am i where am i compared to average like is it more efficient living at the downs you know where i share walls and it's new construction as opposed to great big yeah sure mansion out old road on solid waste. Yeah. I just wanted to come back to, we had a conversation years ago about the feasibility of charging people differently for different quantities of bins, at least. And I mean, some of this is my fault because when we had the compost pilot, the curbside compost pilot, several of my neighbors got additional bins that they are still using they never gave up yeah that they're i have one neighbor that puts out two oversized trash like they come in three sizes which most people don't know has two of the large size for both garbage and recycling that are out every effing week and they're not maybe they're not all the way full and they might not be all the way full that's got to be something in each of
[1:07:17] Chair: them if they drug them to the grip to the side but that's that's the only size they have right
[1:07:23] Committee member: there are there are three sizes but i mean that household specifically
[1:07:27] Chair: those are their bins so those are what they just put out every week but they have two of each
[1:07:31] Committee member: oh that's insane yeah so that's like each hour yes that's like you bring stuff from works you don't have to pay to get it again all the way i mean when i moved here we were limited to no more than why don't we pick that up 875 gallon because we don't have a limit and anybody who wants like there's the standard size I don't know what the gallons are I don't remember anymore the standard size that most of us have but you can request the larger size and they'll just bring it to you and swap it out or you can request the smaller size and they'll just bring it to you and I had the smallest size for so many years even with two kids in diapers and two teenagers and now I just have two teenagers and I had to get the standard size because they're just slobs but there's no financial incentive for anybody to try to make that kind of a reduction and there's no financial penalty for these neighbors of mine that have vast quantities my childhood hometown i mean theirs is ridiculously complicated because you can choose every week or every other week and the lid color tells whether it's an Every week bin or in every other week bin and they have separate bins, they have three separate bins for garbage, recycling, and the composting bin includes yard waste, so that's actually the largest one that my folks have, and there's a whole chart that tells you which days, and then they're paying differently for these different services. Does the cost or savings show up? It's on your tax. Well, I don't, I actually don't know exactly how theirs is billed. Yeah, and I don't know how we would do that in our context, but I think it's worth doing another round of exploring how that might be done, because financial incentives are helpful and every bin has a barcode, right? Yes, yeah, so if it's met numbered you can track it. Yeah, so in any case I just wanted to put that out there again and see if that's something that could be, I don't know where it fits under this, but it's something I feel like we should be discussing. Yeah, I'm not entirely sure, I mean it's in 2.1, right? Yeah, it's not on any of these, but I just wanted to throw it out there again, but we're still charged by weight, right? We are, yeah, so the town is, yeah, so the size
[1:10:13] Chair: is not the biggest, the biggest way to reduce the weight of trash is to get the organics out of it, so to get as many people doing herbicide or backyard composting as possible with the
[1:10:25] Committee member: food waste out of there too, massive recycle bins that have cardboard boxes that haven't been broken down, right, way anything, right? Yeah, no one breaks down their cardboard boxes
[1:10:38] Chair: these days because we're all getting a million of them and who has the time. Can't see those
[1:10:43] Committee member: my husband does. All right, thank you Casey. Okay, so if that could be added in or at least kept as a note somewhere for an exploration and while we're on the weight subject, there's a limit that written on the side of the bin, when they pick it up does that tell you what the weight is?
[1:11:08] Chair: No, everything is weighed at the, at eco main. Yeah, there's no scale.
[1:11:16] Committee member: Why is there a weight limit on your, on your bin? It says no more than whatever, two. Oh, I have no idea.
[1:11:26] Chair: Yeah, like if I fill mine up with rocks, like would they say anything? Well, I, yeah, there's a weight limit to what the truck can actually, yeah, can actually lift. Yeah, but they're not actually
[1:11:39] Committee member: probably weighing it, and the limit printed on it is probably significantly lower than what they can Actually lift, yeah, no, maybe just a reminder to us to not, yeah, whether when they actually, oh yeah, no, it's not being waited to go into the truck, it's just a, they may not be able to pick this up if you're throwing stones in, right, but it rocks. Oh, I remember now, it was no more than 12 bins of 75 gallons in a week that we were allowed to put out when we moved here, and I went through the math of how long it was going to take to throw out everything that I own. It was basically, yes, I don't know if someone had actually tried to throw in more than that and that's why we had a rule, but I was startled to find out we had this rule, but that was prior to the transition to these. I feel like it's changed now. Yeah, it has. Okay, anyway, sorry, that was just an aside, and that's really funny though. Yeah, dealing with kind
[1:12:40] Chair: of litter and misuse of our public trash facilities at our beaches, that is an issue. You're not down at Higgins Beach in the summertime, you may not realize. Preparing to participate in the state's extended producer responsibility program, so that's basically producers need, are needing now, need to pay for their packaging, hopefully encouraging them to use less packaging. But then the municipalities will benefit because the state's going to implement like a grant program to help us improve recycling systems and facilities. That is supposed to come online in 2027. But as yet the state has not found a partner to kind of manage that program for them. It just went back out to our state producers, all producers, and most in it's at a certain scale. So most in-state producers aren't going to hit the minimum threshold. Told it's going to be like, well, probably more like the Amazons and like, and then it's just like the packaging itself, so like Bounty paper towels and things like that, like stuff that comes in packaging that is not easily recyclable, they're now going to have to pay for that
[1:13:54] Committee member: but there's not really good models for that. This is one of the first. Yeah, it's, they're doing
[1:14:00] Chair: it like and i think quebec has an epr program and have for years and that's what main based
[1:14:05] Committee member: their program on. There's not like an existing infrastructure in the United States to implement this, and so that's where it's been past. Yeah, adopt
[1:14:19] Chair: Municipal sustainable purchasing criteria, yes, that will obviously be our, I've already spoken with our purchasing manager about that, will be taking that on. And a zero waste program to educate staff to reduce overall waste production. I need to go do audits in all of our departments for what's being recycled and what's not being recycled. But yeah, we can certainly do a better job at Town Hall and in our other facilities reducing our waste.
[1:14:54] Committee member: I think you have to be careful with how you set up those incentives. IBM for a while had like incentives to increase the rate of recycling, and the way some units managed that was just throwing fresh paper in the recycling because that increased the rate at which they were recycling. Brilliant, awesome, that's silly, that's, but I mean the unintended consequences, like it wasn't possible to do what they were asking in other ways, and so that's how people
[1:15:28] Chair: create things to our cycle, yeah, our thriving natural and coastal resources, so we conserve and sustainably manage our natural resources, that is the goal. So enhance our tree canopy, so conduct a tree inventory and create management plan for town-owned trees that prioritizes native climate out of adaptive species, equitable distribution across the community. It's a good time to put in a plug that we have a newly formed tree board that we're looking for members to join, so if anybody is interested in can like providing guidance to the town for our meetings a year, meaning quarterly, yeah, that's a for princess and four, maybe that is a requirement as part of our Tree City USA designation, so we need to have an established tree board, so we still have a couple, at least two, I think, seats open. I think we have five. I thought we had three people. We need seven. Right. I don't know if we have three. I think we have two.
[1:16:39] Committee member: I think we have Andrew and Kate. I don't think she's invited. Yeah.
[1:16:44] Chair: Kristen. I think Kristen, she sent the... Oh, okay. I think we have three, actually. So we need seven, five full members and two alternates. So if anyone's interested in joining the tree board, that will help us meet action 11a and 11b
[1:17:01] Committee member: I thought we were going to do something for private property as well as that, doesn't
[1:17:07] Chair: That's not on here because we already have it. We just passed an ordinance about tree cutting on a camera. Oh, is it? It moved through planning board on Monday and it goes to council in October. Okay, for a second. So that's coming to address. It's not for single-family homes though. Okay, yeah, it didn't, it's for commercial, it's for tree clearing, it's for streetscape buffer, maintaining natural vegetation, but it doesn't include private residential parks. Okay, looking at our water resources, so proposed town-wide ordinance that restricts the use of harmful pesticides and other long chemicals. Continue to develop and implement a locally supported watershed based management plans. So we have three, so three in our for our urban impaired streams. Redbrook is being updated currently. We've got one for Phillipsbrook and Long Creek. We are a member of the Long Creek Watershed Management District which is implementing a watershed management plan. I've wondered if we should be like, you know, how
[1:18:17] Committee member: Portland has the little spray paint things that say that sort of extraordinary stencils. Like we kind of need those because the ones in my neighborhood go straight, all of them do, they
[1:18:28] Chair: all go directly into waterways, right? Yeah, it's a great project. Yes, for schools, school or eagle
[1:18:36] Committee member: Eagle Scout. We did that in Cambridge. It went around stenciled on Sunday morning. It was really good. Before we could get permanent plaques.
[1:18:47] Chair: That's what I did in my old child. This would be work, but is there a way to create a list of ways communities could get involved and put that on the website? Like that example? Example, yeah, that could go on the dashboard. Yeah, you want to do more kind of things? Yeah, these are specific things you could do. Yeah, and then just talking about sustainable landscaping, invasive species, green infrastructure. So we are in the process of developing a low impact development ordinance for commercial development, so there will be a lot of green infrastructure. So that's basically stormwater systems that mimic either are the natural environment, like vegetated buffers, or mimic the natural Environment so using soils and plants to collect and treat stormwater runoff before it goes into our waterways. So things that we are already doing some stuff related to this certainly can be doing more. The conservation commission is working on developing a what are we calling it like a sustainability guide for homeowners or just for like for healthy landscaping practices and things that like anybody can do what and I should I say homeowners it's for residents so whether you're a homeowner that has property to work with or a renter and you know there's every something everybody can do plant more native plants and pots you know help pollinators things like that. So they're in the process of developing that hoping it will be ready in the spring. Oh thanks and lastly resilient and healthy community and so this is really thinking in terms of how are we preparing for our climate events so either heat waves or terrifying worst. Yes. So providing information to the community about emergency preparedness, doing community outreach campaign to raise awareness of climate hazards and how to prepare for them, engaging with youth and trying to identify service learning opportunities for them around this emergency preparedness looking for community partners to help with some of this. The library has been an amazing partner for this type of work and cooling centers and they're just kind of well situated in the community to assist with work like this develop a crisis and emergency communications plan that was also a recommendation of our vulnerability assessment and then thinking in terms of our infrastructure again this is very connected to our vulnerability assessment so adopt our sea level rise projections for planning purposes so anytime we're doing a municipal project this is the what we need to be scaling our projects for culverts and things like that develop our vulnerability response framework to help guide decision makings on how to protect municipal assets that's essentially looking at our vulnerability assessment deciding how what are we addressing first because there's a lot as you can imagine implement our the recommendations from the vulnerability assessment and invest in nature-based solutions such as living shorelines to prevent coastal erosion lots of other kind of nature-based solutions other than living shorelines that we're looking at resilient sized culverts as a considered a Nature-based solution anytime we're trying to do soft projects instead of hard projects, are like doing restoration projects, things like that. Those are all nature-based solutions. Okay, I'm sorry I missed, yeah, chance.
[1:23:00] Committee member: Action 1.1.E, develop a crisis emergency complaint. Does the town, or is this the appropriate place for the town to work on cell phone receptivity throughout town for residents? Because minor emergencies when Spectrum is offline, line, and in our neighborhood there's like one bar of service, so in an emergency like communications it's like, yeah, and I don't know if I bug Verizon, if I bug AT&T, or if I talk to the town and say if you're upgrading your radio communications can you put on the lower part of your tower or can you lease that to one of these private carriers? Because I thought about this when 9-11 anniversary came, like first thing I did, it's like, where are my kids? And how do I reach them? You know, everybody was, you know. So I don't know if this is appropriate for this plan or if there's another part of town government that works on that. Of yeah, I because there are a bunch of gaps, Pleasant Hill neighborhood is terrible no matter, but it's terrible, there's lots of gaps all over town, and in Pleasant Hill neighborhood there's two different services, and if you have one you can't use it in the other part of the neighborhood, and if you have the other one you can't use it in this part of the neighborhood, and so like I have the one that works well in my house but it's nothing just like six streets down.
[1:24:46] Chair: Yeah. Yeah, I'm right there with you. I have zero cell service at my home.
[1:24:52] Committee member: How do you manage?
[1:24:54] Chair: I do Wi-Fi calling and we just got fiber internet, which will hopefully be better during outages.
[1:25:03] Committee member: And we're not eligible for that yet. So, yeah. So quickly from the top.
[1:25:07] Chair: That's a good point. I'll keep that. I think that would be part of the communications plan,, and we'll definitely, I'll, I mean I don't know who to talk, like who is responsible for that, but that's something that we will, that should be probably say the radio tower that's going to be on the, ballot, the ballot this fall, look at that too. Yeah, I'm all for that, I'm just like.
[1:25:28] Committee member: Absolutely. Communication. So, okay, so from the top, this committee will need to focus on pretty much everything in clean energy and efficient buildings. I didn't mean everything, but clean energy and efficient buildings is ours. In transport, transportation, EV infrastructure is ours, and then waste management is ours, which is just over half of this. But we probably need some sort of a plan to have a touch point on each of those issues so that we're actually driving and
[1:26:08] Chair: making progress on them. Well, and I think also we can maybe spend our next meeting like thinking about a prioritization, because we're not going to address all of these all at once. It's, I think that's definitely going to be necessary. Yeah, unrealistic. So, kind of identifying the one or two items that this committee wants to kind of focus their time on will be very helpful, and also for me that will be very helpful, because I am the one sustainability staff person. Yes, you are.
[1:26:47] Committee member: Well, that was super useful to get through that. I just want to draw attention to the fact that we are now about six minutes behind our schedule. I think this was a perfect use of our time, but I just want to bring us back to wrapping things up. Let's devote much of the next meeting to really digging into some of these issues and identifying our priorities and starting to like make our, yeah, I really encourage all
[1:27:17] Chair: of you to spend some time and go through the plan as a whole and provide comment either through the comment form or, if you would rather just email them directly to me, you can do that. The comment form says we are not going to be responding to individual comments. We're not even collecting people's contact information, so we'll have no way of doing that, but I am reading through all of the comments and incorporating them into my kind of feedback for our consultants to address in the plan. All of the comments probably won't be able to be addressed, but they'll definitely be reviewed and considered through that process. Perfect. I'm just going to do a plug too. It'd also be really helpful for you guys when you, so I know you want to tackle them all, but ideally you would put a list of your priorities together to submit for council to consider in January for their goal setting, and then they can sort of say this is our goal, because you, the worst thing to do is spend a year working on something that When it gets to council, you don't have support for it. Yeah, so but it would, it's helpful for them to take your plan and now that you're going to have this, it's awesome, and prioritize those and submit that for that, because we ahead of January. Yes, yeah, so that's when they'll do their planning and we generally
[1:28:31] Committee member: So it's September now, we'll have an October meeting and we typically have just one between November and December because things get so bad. Yeah, so we have two meetings in which to identify some priorities to present to council ahead of their priority setting for the new council. So that's our task. I would encourage everybody to actually read this top to bottom. My apologizing, apologies again for not having done in advance of this meeting, and we'll spend our time next time doing that. So quick round of updates then. Town council, we already heard about what's going on with the data center situation. Is there anything else on town council's plate that we need
[1:29:16] Chair: to be aware of? No, other than like I said, the workshop for the climate action plan will be October 21st, so encourage people to attend that meeting to learn more about the plan and process and kind of moving things forward from that point. Okay, October 21st, and that's
[1:29:37] Committee member: town. Oh, I have, it's on my, somebody put on my calendar, yes, because originally I had sent
[1:29:41] Chair: everyone a calendar invite for the 16th, so I updated it when the meeting got moved or the
[1:29:46] Committee member: workshop, so yeah. Okay, so that was automatic and super fun. Planning board, anything we need to
[1:29:53] Chair: know? There, Wentworth and the middle school went to planning board on Monday for advisory opinions. The next three schools are slated for the October 19 advisory opinion, so if there's any concerns or
[1:30:04] Committee member: anything you all like to check out for that, do we have somebody sitting on the building committee? No, we don't. Okay, so we don't know what we might have concerns about at this point.
[1:30:16] Chair: No, I mean everything, it's, they've been public meetings, right? There's a process. Yeah, there's probably, I would think that there's notes and minutes from those that anyone wants to like read through them. I don't think anyone wants to sit through the recorded meetings.
[1:30:35] Committee member: Okay, well, that's something we probably should wrap our brains around, but I don't know when are you,
[1:30:39] Chair: you know, the two schools Monday night, we had one member of the public show up, was one comment.
[1:30:46] Committee member: So I mean, we were much more deeply involved in the new Wentworth process because Rick was on that committee, and so we were aware of when there were issues and battles about sustainability issues, and we're just out of that loop this time. Rick is the planning board chair, so we still have that. Okay. All right. Okay. Transportation committee, anything beyond this
[1:31:12] Chair: pilot? I'm sure that's what's sucked up all their time. They're also doing, Maine DOT has started the process to look at, they're calling it their Portland West project. So kind of the next iteration The restoration of the born connector project has been moved out of main term pike in authority and to dot and so dot is doing a study to understand what the issues are, and to come up with some recommendations. So there was a meeting last night about that process in Gorham. And that is the other item that the transportation committee is focused on. I believe the goal is to incorporate better bike ped facilities and whatever solution is come up they come up with four there's like four different proposals now and it's all you can find it and look at them but it's like the do nothing the minimal but do nothing expand the right away and big time expansion so there's some different options I can send the link to kind of that project page to you. Well that's interest but it's on it would be on DOT's website. Okay. Conservation commission like I said they're working on a sustainability guide for residents that's their focus at this point that's what we've been doing for the last couple of meetings and then I can jump into Scarborough Public Library I brought they've got but they did a whole flyer of sustainability events that are coming up. So I brought some printouts, if anybody's interested. So the Halloween clothing swap is scheduled for, costume swap is scheduled for October 3rd. Oh, they're there.
[1:32:54] Committee member: I know. I'll get some stuff there. The Dolly Femmel costume. Yes. I have been begging for this, and I have a closet full. I have four children, and they're all loving it. Right. That's so fun.
[1:33:07] Chair: So the library does not have space to accept them ahead of time. So yeah, I may, if you want to get them to me, I may talk to Elsa and see if I can drop them off maybe like on Thursday or something. But they, most people will bring them the day of the event. I'm not, I'm going to be available on the third, so I can't be there. But yeah, I love how that's coming right up. Yeah, it's next weekend for all of us. Scary bro row. Oh, that's adorable. Then the other one I want to highlight is they have invited Keith Carson, the former meteorologist from Channel 6, current science communication director for Maine Conservation Voters, is speaking at the library on Monday afternoon about how to talk about climate change. So that one will be interesting. Keith is awesome. I had the opportunity to meet him a few months ago and he's just super knowledgeable, super friendly, really enthusiastic. So highly recommend sending this tomorrow. This is great and it's just like one month. Yeah, they kind of are helping us out since we are not, we are not doing Sustainable Scarborough Day this year. They had already kind of been planning to do some sustainability events around that time, so it's awesome that they hold this together, this flyer together and
[1:34:33] Committee member: we'll be doing some of it in our next dillyastic, our next meeting is scheduled for October 28th, same bat time, same bat channel. And with that we can adjourn. Thanks all and I didn't mean to like cut anybody off if people have other things we want to talk about, let's go off recording.