[MCM00001610_SPEAKER_11]: Gaston is not here. So, Benji. I'm here. Barry Ingle.
[Barry Ingber]: Present.
[MCM00001610_SPEAKER_11]: Loretta James is not here.
[Unidentified]: Kathleen McKenna. Not here.
[MCM00001610_SPEAKER_11]: Lucas, Luke McKinley is not here. Martha Andres is not here. Bob Payne?
[Robert Paine]: Yes.
[MCM00001610_SPEAKER_11]: Jessica Parks is not here. John Rogers, not here. And Pong Thasimi, I'm here. So that constitutes all of us, I think, right? So, yes. All right. I am going to leave any vote on previous meetings agenda to later in case we have more people and we have quorum. So I would suggest that we move on to the item on the next item on the meeting, which is administrative updates from Lisa, if she has any.
[Alicia Hunt]: COB, Erika Vandenbrande?rEfne Hi. So I'll also introduce Lily Wirth, who is here and she's staffing the meeting. I had mentioned earlier that I have to leave at 725 to go to the Zoning Board meeting on the 40B. But Lily will stay with the committee all evening and manage the Zoom. And she's been doing the minutes for the committee for the last few months. And Lily has let me know that she's happy to keep coming to Energy and Environment Committee meetings and helping with the agendas and the minutes for the rest of the semester, at least. Lily's primary role with us is transportation. She sits both in our office and in the Transportation Engineering office. She has a desk in each where she goes back and forth, and she's a graduate student at Tufts.
[MCM00001610_SPEAKER_11]: Also, I wanted to express my deep appreciation for Lily being here and taking a minute and listening in and making it worthwhile. Thank you so much, Lily. Appreciate it.
[Alicia Hunt]: You're welcome. I appreciate that too, because Lily does sit in my office, so it is very easy for her to come in and check on things. And we do use Microsoft Teams to talk in the background. So as I had expressed last month if something comes up she can actually message me while I'm in the other meeting with questions. So around, we just talked in our office talked about hiring and interns, we do have positions posted for Economic Development Director, a full-time housing planner, and a full-time CPA manager, and we are still taking resumes for all of those. We have not quite yet posted the position of climate and policy, climate and zoning policy staff. which we, I think I let this group know, we have a one-year grant to fund. The intention, the grant assumes that it'll actually be filled for next fiscal year, but if I'm able to, I'd like to get it posted in the next few weeks, and if I can get it hired sooner, we would start funding that position sooner. So that's... And it's the time of year when we start posting interns. I actually did just confirm. So we have put in for a Tisch fellow again. Some of you know that most, this is a program through Tufts where they fund a student could be undergrad or grad for 10 weeks during the summer. Part of what they do, which I find very helpful is they post it. It's of a lot of interest to students at Tufts. They get a lot of applicants. They screen the applicants for us. So they usually only send me two or three applicants out of all the number that actually apply. They only send me the top two. So that's very helpful. From year to year, I've actually given job offers to both, depending on sort of the needs of the office and the finances. I have been told that there are a number of applicants for that position again this year, and they are reviewing those applications now. So that's very promising. And we actually helped the engineering office submit an internship as well for that, so that they could also get a Tisch fellow this summer. And there are also applicants for that, I've been told. So we'll be posting other stuff. A lot of our current students are very interested in staying on with the office, which always makes it easier for us because they already know how things work and they already know how to do stuff here. That's great. Those are our administrative pieces. The comprehensive plan is now official, the way it becomes official in Massachusetts is it needs to be adopted by your planning board. And our planning board is the Community Development Board, and they adopted it two weeks ago. So you may have seen a press release go out on that the mayor's office is looking to do some additional outreach on it. One of the things is to create a comprehensive plan implementation steering committee. I am really trying it We have a new senior planner who would be managing that, but she is also currently our housing planner and our CPA manager. So I am trying to backfill those positions before I put new things on her plate. So that's coming. Those are sort of the next steps.
[MCM00001610_SPEAKER_11]: That's a lot of pieces you have to move around, yeah.
[Alicia Hunt]: Yeah. And then the other thing that I thought, and you can tell me Paul if you guys want to talk about this now or later but it's actually an update from the city council meeting. And I thought that it would be just helpful to share this information with you all.
[MCM00001610_SPEAKER_11]: Because of the paucity of attendance in this meeting, I would recommend, personally at least, that we delay this until next meeting where we might have more attendance. But then again, the meeting is recorded and of course it's available for public consumption afterwards. So if you think that that would help, by all means go right through.
[Alicia Hunt]: Yeah, let me just share with you sort of a more of a technical informational update because things may move faster than the speed at which this committee meets. So you guys may be most of you are where there's a stretch code. The state passed a net zero stretch code. We weren't happy with the net zero stretch code, but now we're calling it an advanced stretch code. And it's better than the current stretch code, right? It's not the net zero people we're pushing for, but it's more advanced building code than we can otherwise have in the city.
[MCM00001610_SPEAKER_11]: Can I interject and ask you to just define what a stretch code is?
[Alicia Hunt]: So, so the viewing public so the useful thing to know is that. So in some places in some states in this country, and other places around the world, municipalities can define what's in their building code themselves. In Massachusetts, the municipalities have no control over the building code. It's a state building code. And we cannot make it any stricter than it is. And back in the early 2000s, people wanted a more advanced energy building code. So the way they did it was they said, here is a more advanced energy code that municipalities can choose to adopt if they want to. And so it basically meant rather than having, because there are 360 municipalities in our state, 360 building codes, there are two, the regular, the base building code and the stretch code. At this point, actually, it turns out that a very large majority of the municipalities have adopted the stretch code. And so they talked about, they basically made an advanced stretch code, which we were hoping would be this net zero code. It's not exactly. So now if communities want to be more progressive than everybody else, they can adopt this stricter building code, energy-wise. It's all with the energy.
[MCM00001610_SPEAKER_11]: Which gives it that Monica stretch. Right.
[Alicia Hunt]: This is now an advanced version of the stretch.
[MCM00001610_SPEAKER_11]: Over and above the...
[Alicia Hunt]: So it's a new opt in because every time the building code was updated by building professionals in internationally, Massachusetts would update a more advanced building code, and we, we kept stepping up in our stretch code kept stepping up. Um, so now there's this new version that's an opt in again. And so, anybody who wants to partake in it. So this is, I will say, on my radar, I had been going to some webinars about it. But with everything else on our plate. We're like, we will get to this. But the city council got ahead of us. And at last week's meeting, they actually voted unanimously that my office provide them with the language they would need to adopt the more advanced stretch code. So I actually have one of the other graduate students, Rin, has been putting together a little bit of a kind of what you need to know, what you should know about that presentation or memo for the council. Because partially I just want to make sure they understand what they're adopting. And then the language that they would vote on to adopt it. So we're getting that. There's actually a coalition, an electrification coalition around the state. And we in the office have joined that so that we're on their email list and getting their notices. It's also the group that's working for the fossil free version for the no natural gas. So I'm sort of getting looped into those conversations. now. So it is actually likely that before the next Energy Committee will probably send them language to adopt, because I sort of feel like it, my gut was that it was the right thing to do for Medford. And if they are asking for it, let's, let's move that forward. Why wait?
[MCM00001610_SPEAKER_11]: Well, makes sense.
[Alicia Hunt]: So, so I thought you all should know, I did have one member of the public, reach out to me about that stretch code. A few weeks ago before it was on the council agenda, and I told him that it's on my radar I'm looking at it, but it wouldn't be bad if the city council heard from members of the public before they heard from me. It would kind of make them interested, more interested in hearing. So I don't know if he if others reached out to the city council, sending them, telling them that people are in support of it is definitely good for them to hear that. So, just letting you guys know that I don't know if they need encouragement. It never hurts to tell them when they're doing a good job, especially when people like to tell them when they're not doing a good job.
[MCM00001610_SPEAKER_11]: Thanks so much, Alicia. Appreciate it. So the next item on the agenda is Review of committee meetings for dates for 2023 but I'll, I'll delay that to our next meeting because that requires, I would assume, a quorum. So, again, the next item after that is. suggested priorities for our group in 2023. There's a list of them in the agenda details that I sent out. But again, we will delay that. And next item on the agenda is updates on tree and leaf blower ordinances. Anyone know about those. I know Loretta attended the meeting with Trees Medford. But if there is any updates from anyone who might have gone to any meetings or knows anything, I can, it would be nice to know.
[Robert Paine]: Hey, Paul, I wanted just to before we get too far, I just wanted to ask Alicia about that. Are we going to get as a committee, the text of that proposed wording for the next meeting?
[Alicia Hunt]: I can certainly forward it to you guys if you would like. I can tell you that I have a document that Rin prepared for me today that I have not yet had a chance to look at. Um, and, but I could certainly send you guys what we're going to send or copy you all when we send it to the council, if you prefer. Um, yeah, I was just taking a quick peek. Oh, she wrote, she put together a 12 page document for me so that it's much too technical to send to the council.
[Robert Paine]: So if we want to discuss it at the next meeting, we should have it probably by
[Alicia Hunt]: In a couple of weeks, if it's available, yes, I will tell you that her summary information is not too technical for this committee, it's just probably more than what would be needed.
[Robert Paine]: Well, it'd be nice to know okay what's the difference between the stretch code of the advanced risk or that would be a good thing to know. Yes, yes.
[Alicia Hunt]: And I don't think that I could summarize it in simple words, right? Like, I feel like I need to give you a little bit more than that. It has a lot to do with HERS ratings. It has a lot to do with having solar, being ready, or being ready for solar, so being all electric. The idea is that if you followed it, and then you were all renewable energy, then you could be net zero. So either all electric or solar and all electric. And do you think it- It's a big picture of it.
[Robert Paine]: Does it, I mean, last meeting you were talking about something being too far, too fast. Is this- not so too far too fast?
[Alicia Hunt]: Right, that would be banning natural gas.
[Robert Paine]: Okay, got it.
[Alicia Hunt]: That would be more than we're prepared to do at this time. This allows you to use natural gas as long as you're like electric ready and you have a low enough. So are you familiar with what HRS ratings are?
[Robert Paine]: A little bit, yeah.
[Alicia Hunt]: A HRS rating is an independent energy rating of a single family home. And the lower the number, the more energy efficient the building is. The idea is that how much energy you use in your house has a lot to do with how you use your house. And this rating was designed to look at an unoccupied house and rate it. So that, like, give it like a baseline, regardless of who's living in there and what they're plugging into the outlets. The lower that number is, the more energy efficient it is. So it's sort of like if you use fossil fuels, but you have a real low rating, that's okay. You can have a higher rating if you're all electric or if you have solar. And the numbers aren't hugely different from each other. And then it varies by, you know, Sorry, I'm looking at the size of the building. I actually have a table in front of me, but it's, like, I would rather, we'd be better if I prepared a presentation. You can tell that I'm a little, trying to talk off the cuff to it. It's a little tough. I'm just glancing at, so I just saw this document. I don't mind sharing this document with you guys. It's all correct, it's just, the technical for the general public.
[MCM00001610_SPEAKER_11]: Sure, sure. Would you be amenable to making a small presentation on it later?
[Alicia Hunt]: Yes, and I might actually ask Rin if she wants to do it because it would be a great experience for her. Okay, excellent. One of us would.
[MCM00001610_SPEAKER_11]: Okay, so so let us know when when you can, you know, manage that, and we'll include in the agenda.
[Alicia Hunt]: I realized as I was talking that I had actually on a completely different topic and administrative update for you all. We had run the harvester energy festival dates by the mayor, and she is fine with our date in October, but she also said that she'd actually love to meet with the committee and talk about how can we engage a broader audience at the energy festival like she would love to throw around some ideas with the committee. So I did tell her when the committee meets, we'd love to schedule, have her come to one of these. And I did, and I know that this meeting almost always conflicts with school committee. So I did go out on a limb and suggest to her that if we couldn't make that work, that the committee might be amicable to a, like a special meeting to talk with her just about the energy festival. If that's how we could make it work in her calendar.
[MCM00001610_SPEAKER_11]: Sure, I'm open to that. I can send out a poll for folks to vote on that if that's something that's acceptable to folks and sort of gauge interest in that. But yeah, that would be fantastic.
[Alicia Hunt]: Right. And if we couldn't get a full quorum committee for that, maybe it'll be the subcommittee of the people who actually would like to discuss that with the mayor. So I was hoping to get her to one of these meetings, because you guys are interested in, I think, would be a great thing to do anyhow, but there is this conflict. There's one tonight. So I think the first and third Mondays.
[Robert Paine]: When does the school committee meeting start?
[Alicia Hunt]: 6.30 and sometimes they have extra meetings earlier. So they actually had a six to seven, they had a five to six meeting and then they had a six o'clock meeting tonight. So I think they're- I think they actually started their main meeting at six. Yeah.
[MCM00001610_SPEAKER_11]: You're right. We could meet at six.
[Robert Paine]: Yeah. If we could get half an hour, one of these months, we would probably, that would probably be a better solution than have another meeting.
[Alicia Hunt]: Right. They start school committee at six. I thought it was 6.30. They used to and they decided they now start from six to seven and they do it creative stuff and then it's seven they always say that any public real public content doesn't start till seven because as a they actually have to meet and. approve budgets and minutes for meetings and stuff like that and reports of subcommittees. So they do a lot of those things first and then presentations of the public start after seven and new business is after seven by their rules.
[Unidentified]: Okay.
[Robert Paine]: Well, we could, if we could vote, we could move one of our meetings like in April, since we can't vote on the March one, to the second Monday of the month, and then we could get a snagger. So that would be what I recommend we do. If we have a quorum next month, we could have our April meeting on the second Monday of the month.
[MCM00001610_SPEAKER_11]: Do you want me to send something out on that?
[Alicia Hunt]: Why don't I ask her first and make sure that she doesn't have something else then?
[Alicia Hunt]: That's a good idea. Available. I'll ask her if she would, if she would be available, then we'll see about moving the meeting.
[MCM00001610_SPEAKER_11]: Okay. Yep. Okay. All right. So, so you'll be in touch with us regarding that. Yes. Thank you very much.
[Alicia Hunt]: Lily will help me remember. Sure.
[Barry Ingber]: Okay. Just to let you know, I'm, I have an obligation on the second Monday.
[Robert Paine]: So every second Monday.
[Barry Ingber]: Okay.
[Unidentified]: Right.
[MCM00001610_SPEAKER_11]: Okay. Updates on tree and leaf blower ordinances, anyone on that I can The only thing I can tell you about the tree ordinance, or rather, Trees Metford meeting, I should say. I don't have any updates on the trees ordinances. Alicia might be more up-to-date with that than I am. But I was looking at the meetings of Trees Metford, and they had received some money to plant some trees in the cemetery. And there was obviously a bunch more that was discussed on the minutes that Amanda sent out kindly. But the thing that I've brought up before is that we need less trees in the cemetery and we need more trees in South Metford. And so whatever we can do to facilitate that would be good. So that's my feeling about it. So if anyone has any other things to say about that, please chime up.
[Robert Paine]: Paul, I brought up iTree because there was a webinar where iTree was touted as a way to value or set a value for every single tree rather than guess, well, if it's so much of a diameter, you know, what, you know, if you had to set a fee for whether you cut it down, you could, you know, certain trees may be, you know, not worth very much. And, you know, depending on their location, whether they're crowning out other trees, et cetera. And then you'll tell us about that, but it seemed like that was an intriguing tool that the ordinance might want to consider as a possible avenue for enhancing the logic of how it rates or how it sets fees.
[MCM00001610_SPEAKER_11]: Sure, sure. It's the thing about it that you have to realize, and I'll get into it in a minute. When I when I stopped the start the thingy with you. It's. It's that it doesn't give you rates or numbers on how much it costs to do planting. All it does is that it gives you an idea of where the paucity in trees are in the areas that are under consideration. And it uses data from 2001 and 2011. That's the latest data that they have. This is satellite data, I assume that they have. I am assuming that since this is a 10-year thing, there should be another data update soon. But I have not been in touch with anyone that is behind the eye tree platform. Thinking about it right now, that's probably a good thing to do. I will endeavor to do that and give you an update on whether there is a new database that could be used to measure the tree planting and canopy coverage and tree equity in Medford and any other town, if you can think of. but here we are concerned about Medford. So I'll endeavor to do that next meeting. So given that, I would suggest we move to the iTree software kind of coverage, if folks are okay with that.
[Robert Paine]: Sure, I think the webinar I saw, maybe they had auxiliary tools to assess a value. And I can't remember, I might have sent out the link to the webinar to the committee, but it's been so long, I can't remember.
[MCM00001610_SPEAKER_11]: Oh, you mean the, I'm sorry, I might have that up. Are you talking about the Green Energy Consumers Alliance presentation or?
[Robert Paine]: No, I think this was one where there's a, maybe it was Lexington or some community had a webinar about, about tree, maybe consideration of tree value. And there was somebody who came on who was from the USDA Forest Service who had developed iTree. And he provided various things about it and said, well, we can actually value every single tree you have.
[MCM00001610_SPEAKER_11]: Yeah, the software actually does that it gives you a carbon footprint for every tree, how it's negotiate how every tree negotiates pollution in terms of carbon monoxide reduction, carbon uptake. other parameters dealing with pollution, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, and various other parameters. So, There's really two things I want to point out with iTree. And I did send out a sort of a presentation on it. I don't know, this was over a year ago when I first joined the committee. I was all enthusiastic about iTree and whatnot. And it's fairly comprehensive kind of software. So it does. you can actually incorporate a bunch of statistics in there to get ideas about where trees should be, including census data on poverty and income. Well, poverty, well, income. So it's from that perspective, it gives you a sort of a very in-depth idea of where tree equity should be prioritized. So if that's, if folks are okay, I can pop into this and share my screen and we can look to see how the software works. There's two There's two modes of it I'm going to discuss. One is a tree canopy coverage part. And there's another part that's under tree canopy coverage is more of a survey. So what you will see is that you essentially ask the software to take measures of points in a given map. So here we're looking at Medford. And it then takes surveys of random points assigned to that area there. So it could be anywhere in that the software, the algorithm decides where that's going to be. But it's randomized. to cover that area. So then the more points you ask it to do, then the more accurate your projections are going to be. And you'll know what I mean when I get into this. But I'm going to start sharing my screen, unless there's any questions before we go into this. Anyone?
[Unidentified]: No, no questions? All right. So I'm going to share my screen. All right. So this is, can everyone see my screen?
[Robert Paine]: I see it, but I see something in front. Let's see. On the lower left there's a box. Okay, let's see.
[MCM00001610_SPEAKER_11]: Can folks see this? It says welcome to iTree Canopy.
[Robert Paine]: Yeah.
[MCM00001610_SPEAKER_11]: Excellent. Okay, so OK, so this is iTreeCanopy. And I'm going to start with a project here. And we're going to look at Medford. And so the first thing you have to learn, you have to understand about this is that I'm actually going to remove that. So here I've selected Medford already. Let me see, I can. Okay, so I'm going to go and ask the software to find Medford again. And there you see it's a method is right in the middle here, I hope everybody can see my mouse can everybody see my mouse yeah good. And then it's going to ask the US boundaries, if you go and check for county subdivisions. it gives you this layout, which is essentially the cities all around, and Medford is right in the middle there. And then what you can do is to bring this up here and then go to, hold on a second, select. I'm going to select Medford and go next. And then here you see a listing of the kinds of areas that the software actually looks at. So just before I move on any further with this, I just want you to know that you can The way to use this software is actually go and get it from the, just type in Google and say iTree. And then you go in and install the software here. You can see it on my selection on the left bottom side. You can see that you can, it comes with various modules that you can see over here. The two that I've used is iTreeCanopy and iTreeLandscape. I'm sort of playing with the other ones right now, but I'm not as educated about those as I am about these two. So iTreeCanopy and iTreeLandscape is what we're going to cover here. So anyways, Once you install the software, you click on the module you want, and it takes you to the site, like here, iTree Canopy. And to go back to what this lists, it essentially has cover classes. It gives you abbreviations and more specifics on whether it involves tree coverage or not, tree and shrub. The cover class tree and shrub obviously includes tree coverage. Glass herbaceous doesn't, and neither of the other ones do either. So the thing you want to do is when you start this, is to go and ask it to give you randomized points along the map. on tree shrub coverage. And then also do it also do other ones, like probably the best ones to choose is impervious buildings and impervious road and water and soil or bare ground. And this data it gets from satellite pictures, I assume. So we'll move on from this screen to the next. And here it asks you, OK, well, this is a step three of the configuration. And then it asks you for available locations. For some reason, it doesn't know that you've selected Medford, Massachusetts. So you have to say United States of America. And that is in the United States of America. And then it says selected locations. You tell it to cover all rather than rural or urban right now. And currency code is obviously US dollars, symbol is, you know, the US dollar symbol, and the measurement units can be either in English or metric. And here down the bottom, you have description of air pollution benefits that it can calculate carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, ozone removal, particulate matter greater than a certain micron size, sulfur dioxide removed annually. We click Next. And now you have the map of Madrid right in front of you. It's outlined in red. I hope everybody can see that. And then way to get information out of this map here is to essentially add cover classes to it. So you click on the plus sign here at the bottom. Can everybody see me moving my cursor on the plus sign? Hopefully you can. You go click. And now the first cover class you see is, it gives you an ID for that point. You say cover class tree and shrub. Here you can choose other ones. You can choose grass and herbaceous, impervious buildings, impervious road, impervious other. I'm not entirely sure what that is. And water and soil bare ground. So all of these can be, every time you say, now that you've actually selected tree and shrub, every time you say save, You see the little pointer in the middle there is a yellow marker there. Can everybody see that, that site?
[Barry Ingber]: Question, Paul. Yeah. So we're looking at a parking lot right now, largely. Is that an impervious road or is that an impervious road?
[MCM00001610_SPEAKER_11]: No, you're asking it to look at a picture And then assess where there is tree and shrub. It might include impervious road. In the assignment, when you select the cover class, it looks only for tree and shrub. So in this picture, it'll find tree and shrub. If you now go and tell it to find impervious buildings or impervious road, then it would look for that, okay?
[Unidentified]: Does that make sense? Hello? Hello anyone.
[Barry Ingber]: remarkable. But you were saying you didn't know what impervious other was so I was just wondering if impervious other included things like parking lots or if that was.
[MCM00001610_SPEAKER_11]: Oh, impervious parking lots. I would imagine it would mean road or buildings, but you're exactly right. It might be parking lots. You're completely right. I don't know, honestly. So I can only tell you what's, you know, the selections are obviously, you know, have more of an obvious kind of description on it, but in these previous other. I'm not sure, but the best thing to do is to actually go in and actually select those and keep doing it. So now you can see that now I've asked it to ID a cover class. And this would be a first point. So I'm asking it to do an ID of a cover class tree and shrub. And it gives you, for this point over here, it gives you latitude and longitude. And you say Save. So now you've saved one point. And after saving that point, you see this little, green marker and right in the middle of where that site, the yellow site was. Now you say, add again. And now it moves randomly to another place in your selection, in your map selection, which is Metford. And now again, it asks you to save it. It gives you a site in the middle there, yellow site. You tell it to save it. Now you've selected two points with the longitude and latitude. And you can see now you have two selections over here in the entire Medford area. Now, the question to ask is how many sites, how many selections do I need to get decent data for the coverage of the entire area? My educated guess is, and playing with the software, is that you need at least 25 points to do this. So you keep going on, and it gives you another point. It picks another random point on the map. These are obviously pictures from satellite. These are satellite pictures. And then you say Save. So now we save the third point. Now you can see you have three points saved. And you keep going. Tree and shrub, you keep going until you get, and I'm not going to go past 10 because we don't have the time and it's rather a boring exercise to do this, but I'll go up to 10 and I'll show you what the map looks like. So now you've selected 10 points in Medford. to look at tree coverage, tree and shrub coverage. And if you, I'll save this one too. And if you go to the right corner here, right side of the screen, it says view results and you say report. If you click report, you'll see what I mean. No. You see that now you have the map of Metford on the right side of the screen. And on the bar graph, I have an area that it's covered. But you see 10 points. hasn't really covered the entire area of Medford. So you need more randomized points to cover an entire map of an area. I have seen in discussions that people say, oh, you need up to 100 points to do this. I'm not an expert in this, so I can tell you that I haven't seen much of a difference going past between 30 points and 50 points, which I've done. And of course, you can see down here, it gives you a report on the various parameters that we were talking about. So each of these points, it looks at based on satellite data and determines whether there is tree coverage. And then of course, makes a designation in the statistics over here and gives you some parameters to look at. But like I said, that's not enough. So if we go back, to the previous screen, and you can see the points that I've selected here in the satellite map of Medford, I can go on and add more of this cover class, which is tree shrub cover class, and then go and look at the report. But what you want to do is to, is not just to use that tree and shrub, but you want to also look at, and if you click add again, you can click look at impervious buildings. And if you say save, now on point 11, you have a point that has a cover class that covers impervious buildings. The glitch in the program is that you would be tempted to go and say, create new record, click the plus sign, but you see that the cover class that you selected previously as in Impervious Buildings, is no longer selected. So it doesn't hold that selection for Impervious Buildings. So now if you want to look at a different cover class, you have to actually go in and click Impervious Buildings and tell it to save again. And then if you want to add again, you have to go again. And because you see the first selection is tree and shrub, it always defaults back to that, unfortunately. And so you have to go in and press impedious buildings. So you say save, and on and on it goes. And I don't want to bore you anymore with this, but that's how you get. And if you look at the report, of course, you'll see that I have made three selections of impervious buildings, and you can see the three selections here on the map. So in order for you to get good statistics on an area that you want to look at, you need to select and keep reiterating this process until you get, and here you can see that I've used 10 on the right side of the screen. In the list here, you can see that I've used three impervious building points and I'm using 10 tree and shrub points. You need many more than this to get a proper valuation of an area. And I've done this exercise before, and you end up with a fairly decent valuation of an area. you know, information on all of these benefits, tree benefits, in terms of air pollution, tree benefit in terms of carbon reduction, carbon sequestration, and also in how much of it is stored in trees. If you go further down, tree benefit estimates, these are the hydrological estimates of tree benefits. And this is the blue table right at the bottom over here. And you can look at that. And like I said, the more points you put into this software, the better it can calculate these outcomes here for you. So tree benefits, the carbon pollution and hydrological benefits of trees are calculated by this software. So if you go back and say, oh, well, I need, in order to get a better estimate, I need you to look at, say, how much water I've got. You say, again, you press plus, you go Save. Now, of course, 0.14 would be a cover class of water, and you do, again, Again, like I said, there's a glitch in the software. So the selection of the cover class is not maintained. So you have to go back and do that. And yeah, so it's a bit of a drag. But you end up with a fairly decent coverage depending on what you use. And then you say Save. And if you look at the report again, you'd see now you have two other parameters showing up on a bar chart, and you can see the errors on that. So you essentially want the coverage to get to a point where you don't have a large error in how it calculates that particular parameter. Right. So right now you can see with the three that I've covered in impervious buildings, I have a huge error bar over here, which essentially transcends the actual size of the bar. And with the other two parameters, obviously I don't have enough at all. So I have only one selection. So you essentially want to be in the 60 to 80% covered range for each parameter, each cover class before you make assessments. So any questions right now that I can answer from anyone? Or I've managed to bore everyone to death with this. I hope I haven't.
[Robert Paine]: Paul, this is Bob. I was wondering if you, I was under the impression you could zero in on a given single tree and get some statistics about its carbon contribution.
[MCM00001610_SPEAKER_11]: I have not been able to do that. But like I said, I have only looked at the canopy, i-tree canopy module and i-tree landscape module. Yeah, so zeroing in on it on a particular tree, that would be a massive amount of data that you'd have to accumulate in order to do that. So I'm not entirely sure how the software would calculate that even but Yeah, so yeah, if you, so no, short answer is, if the software does that, I don't know how to do it, so.
[Robert Paine]: Okay.
[MCM00001610_SPEAKER_11]: Yep. Okay, so does anyone have any questions about how to do the canopy coverage in ITRE? I'd be happy to tell you what I knew now, so. And of course, don't forget to always save your project. If you don't, and I've done that many times, it's just a complete waste of your time. Particularly you go in and click over and over again on cover classes. And then if you forget to save, you end up with losing your construction, essentially, in the software. And you don't want to do that. OK, so that is sort of a lowdown on how to do iTree. And if you look at the report, it gives you, like I said before, I'll go over it, it gives you tree benefits, air pollution, carbon sequestration, and hydrological. These calculations are made based on data that has been accumulated, I assume by No, I'm not entirely sure who actually calculates this data, but it's there. So it would be probably a good idea to find out who actually calculates this data. But anyways, it gives you sort of a layout of where your town is in terms of coverage of canopy and whatnot. So if you, I'm going to go in and give you a, hopefully you can all see my screen still.
[Unidentified]: This is the eye tree analysis that I did before. Yeah, no, I'm sorry, this is the, this is the canopy coverage, let me see. This is
[MCM00001610_SPEAKER_11]: This is boring stuff here, so let me just... I'm sorry, give me a minute if you don't mind.
[Unidentified]: I'll try to find the presentation that I made before.
[MCM00001610_SPEAKER_11]: I won't. I'll find it next time and send it out. I'm not going to waste too much time on this. All right, so moving past this, I want to show you how to use iTree landscape. And again, once you install the iTree software, it gives you all these modules over here. So iTree Canopy, Design, iTree Echo, Hydro, and iTree Landscape. And these are the two that I've played with. Like I said, I'm playing with the others too. So I'll go to iTree Landscape. and just give you a quick rundown of this. Again, you get this welcome to Aichi landscape and then you get started. Again, you have to put in the map of Medford. Here you have Again, you have to go here to the right and select county subdivisions. And then you put in Medford, Massachusetts. And you tell it to process. Oh, sorry. Select. All right. And here it is, Medford is selected again. And if you go and click on census places, then you can go in, in this software here and select either the whole area or if you go block groups, you can actually see the block census groups in in Medford, and this actually you have to go in and select a bunch of, or rather if you want to do the whole thing properly, you have to select more than one area in order for it to do comparisons. Like I showed you before, you have to first go into county subdivisions, go in and find Medford. Then you go back here and you say, look at census block groups. And the only reason you have to do that is because it uses a comparative method to look at the various areas, the landscape areas inside Medford. At least that's my understanding of the software. If you need any more technical details, please, I won't be able to assist you with that. This is as deep as I get with this right now. And it's been a bit of a learning curve for me. So I hope anyone who wants to go through this and manage this a little bit more, can get more out of it. But like I said, you go through essentially and you pick the various census block groups in Medford. And this is actually quite interesting because you learn about census block groups. And I'm not entirely sure if this has anything to do with gerrymandering, but it may or may not. I'm not entirely sure, so I won't make any comments about that other than to say it looks... Census blocks look kind of a... very unevenly divided kind of thing. But if anybody understands this better than I do, then by all means chime up. And so here I am. I have to pick different blocks. And the only reason, like I said, you have to do this is because it uses a comparative algorithm to compare the various points in the map and whether they're covered with tree coverage or not. So then you say, OK, once you've selected all this, you say process. And you can see I've selected 54. And it gives you this little bit of information here. So you've picked up a lot of sections. It processes this. And I'm sorry, you have to wait a little bit for this to go through its thing, but it does get through it. And it generally doesn't take any less than half a minute or so. But it says here that it might take upwards of 30 minutes. So thankfully, this is a small area, so it won't do that. But still, there we go. It's done this. A little bit more processing. So the difference between landscape and eye tree canopy is that the eye tree canopy uses the satellite pictures to essentially pick the areas and look at tree canopy from a very physical point of view. The eye tree landscape, module, as far as I can understand it, incorporates data from a whole bunch of different things. And that includes census data, which of course has its own various subcategories. So now if you say you've selected all this, you say, and down at the bottom here, you can see that you're going through the process. This bar, this blue bar gives you the notion, give you an idea of where you are. So now you can come down here and look at various things you can, but you don't really at this level, you don't want to go in and do all of this right now. what you want to do is to go to the next level. And here, remember, you're looking at land cover. You can ask it to use 2011 data, or it can use 2001 data. But if you say high-resolution data, it could use, I think it might use the 2011 data. So again, I'm not too clear about that. the data that I've gotten has been with me selecting 2011, which is the latest data that they have. If you go next, some processing takes place.
[Unidentified]: You have to wait a bit longer. Some more waiting. Hopefully everyone's awake. Yes. No.
[Robert Paine]: Oh, yeah, we are.
[MCM00001610_SPEAKER_11]: Okay, good. Right.
[Unidentified]: So now you have, you have to do the selection. I'm not sure what's going on right now.
[Robert Paine]: Paul, if we ever get back to this, you might for the rest of the committee, maybe take screenshots of relevant.
[MCM00001610_SPEAKER_11]: Yeah, yeah, I'll definitely do that, absolutely.
[Robert Paine]: You don't have to wait.
[MCM00001610_SPEAKER_11]: No, exactly right, exactly.
[Robert Paine]: You know, like Julia Child used to do, you know, she presents the results of the baking.
[MCM00001610_SPEAKER_11]: Sure, sure. No, no, you're entirely right. And I just did this just so that you can go through the process in real time on how to get the data from the software itself. So here we have, based on pre-selected criteria, and this is a custom scenario that you can update. You can see that the map shows essentially, what does it show? It shows tree stocking level, two things it shows on the map, and tree coverage per capita. And you can see that just based on these two criteria down at the bottom here, You have a massive amount of green area on North Medford and West Medford, and a lot of tree paucity in South Medford. And really, the bottom part of Medford is fairly barren. you know, I'm excluding the parks, obviously, but there isn't much there. So I would just say that you can play with these two criteria here and you can ask it to do you can see an enormous number of things that it can actually calculate in this map. Here, I'm just looking at tree stock levels. If you go down here, you can tell it to prioritize planting levels based on tree coverage per capital, population density, population below poverty line. And all this data obviously comes from the census data that is collected and is incorporated into this software. And based on satellites and various other information, and of course, weather data, you can see rainfall, interception, avoided runoff, various other things. you can do. But what I found the most compelling about this is to just based on these two criteria, and I won't get into it anymore, is that you can see essentially the map of Medford. And this, in terms of where new trees should be planted, And the areas where there is a darker coloration of red are obviously areas that we desperately need trees in, and the lighter levels of pink obviously less so, and so on, until you get to green. And I won't get this, I won't go past this too much longer because it's getting a little too much in terms of detail, but you can see that the priority and it gives you a based on this analysis, it gives you a current prior prioritization of scenario of planting scenario tree planting scenario and obviously in green areas. It's you don't need any planting in the green areas and those green areas incidentally cover the the cemetery. So, hence my comment earlier about not having to, not prioritizing planting in the, in the cemetery. Not that I'm against planting in cemeteries of planting of any trees, of course, the more we have the better. But if we're going to prioritize parting, then it should be where it's needed in the city. And this clearly gives you an idea of where those have to be. And it gives you also nicely a percentage point based on the blocks that is selected up here in this map over here. So long story short, I will give you a summary of that. And this is essentially the... I don't know why this is not... No, it's not it.
[Unidentified]: High tree analysis, there we go. So...
[MCM00001610_SPEAKER_11]: So here I used in this eye tree analysis, I use three parameters to do the analysis, minority population density, tree coverage per capita, population below poverty line. And you can see that if you use these three criteria, there's less pink and dark red here. than it was before, and it really focuses on where we need to have trees planted in the city of Medford. And if you, of course, just look at canopy and plantable space, well then, much of Medford needs that. But this is less of an informative criteria than the previous one, scenario one. And there's, of course, a third scenario which essentially tells you to look at, I've picked canopy and poverty percentage. to look at Medford. And this is another map that you get based on those criteria in terms of where to prioritize tree planting. And again, things that I've gone over with saying that these four areas, very poor tree coverage. And you can see that in the map, obviously. So the point of this is that we need a lot more trees over much of Medford. We have a 25% canopy coverage. We need to bring this up to about, I think, if I'm not mistaken, to about 35%. Make a comment on that, which is that
[Barry Ingber]: If we take the Middlesex Fells out of Medford, because it's not a local park, I think we should include local parks, but I think the Middlesex Fells belongs to the state. And if we take out the census tract that includes the Middlesex Fells, your canopy coverage for the city will be way lower.
[MCM00001610_SPEAKER_11]: Yes, yes, indeed. Yeah, you're exactly right. If I take that out, and you can do that clearly by using the blocks, by not including that particular top block in there. And like I said, 25% of canopy coverage is concentrated in north of Medford. And of course, low-income areas in Medford need more attention. And I've essentially pointed out the rest of these conclusions. So I would be happy to answer any questions, but that basically concludes my presentation on this. Thank you. Yeah, not at all. I hope that was informative.
[Barry Ingber]: Thank you, Paul.
[MCM00001610_SPEAKER_11]: Yeah, of course.
[Robert Paine]: It'd be interesting to know if Alicia had to leave, but I don't know if she's aware or could use some of these tools to better inform her office. Yeah.
[MCM00001610_SPEAKER_11]: I hope, I mean, if I'm correct about the, I think I did read that in the city plan for resiliency, there is a couple of pages where they discuss in very concrete terms, the use of publicly available databases to drive City policies regarding trees and various other environmental things. And definitely the ITree software gives the city that option to do that analysis. in a very real terms. And of course, you can combine that with stuff that I presented before. Google has a environmental insights sort of analysis that it does on cities. And I asked Google a couple of years ago to actually do that for city of Medford and they, it was, it was able to give us like, give me transportation information and, and, and. solar coverage on the city of Medford. And that's also can be included in any information that the city requires to make policy changes to or policy decisions about, you know, impact of things that are going on right now. So right now I'm trying to see if I can not share my screen anymore i don't know what the hell i'm stop sharing OK, hi, I'm back. Hopefully that was helpful. I know I can go off on a tangent, so I apologize for that. So yeah. If you want to play with it, with this software, by all means, go to typing i3 and then download the software. You have to make an account and download the software and let it install, get past your security and whatnot. And it does that. And it gives you this. these fancy tools to use to do analysis. And like I said, it's only for 2011, they have data from only 2001 and 2011. Based on that range, I would assume they have another set of data coming on board. So hopefully that'll be soon. I don't know. We'll see.
[Barry Ingber]: Well, thank you for putting this together. I'm going to excuse myself. Yeah, of course. Thank you. Everybody a good night.
[MCM00001610_SPEAKER_11]: Yeah, absolutely. Okay. So. Adjourning the meeting.
[Robert Paine]: I just want to mention for Lily's benefit. On the minutes. You should probably put the time we started in the time we adjourned. Just to be complete. I don't think the. necessarily exactly at 630 and ended at 830. So I don't know what it was last month, but I noticed whether we didn't know when we adjourned, but we'll just put in something, I was assuming something, but include that in the future minutes.
[MCM00001654_SPEAKER_16]: Excellent. I will do that going forward. I believe last month we were on time but I can't remember.
[Robert Paine]: Yeah, no one's going to care. Why don't we just make up a number. I guess this is being recorded, but uh.
[MCM00001610_SPEAKER_11]: Oh, don't say that.
[Robert Paine]: Yeah, right.
[MCM00001610_SPEAKER_11]: There are millions watching this presentation.
[Robert Paine]: Yeah, sure. No one's watching.
[MCM00001610_SPEAKER_11]: No cynicism allowed either. OK. All right. All right. OK. All right. Great. Thank you so much, everyone, for being patient. And thank you so much, Lily, for recording all this. Appreciate it. Thank you.
[MCM00001654_SPEAKER_16]: Absolutely. It's my pleasure. Thank you for presenting.
[MCM00001610_SPEAKER_11]: Not at all. You guys have a decent evening, and I'll see you next month. Bye-bye. OK.
[MCM00001654_SPEAKER_16]: See you, everybody. All right.
[MCM00001610_SPEAKER_11]: Bye.
[MCM00001654_SPEAKER_16]: Bye.