Providence Special Committee on Environment & Resiliency-Thursday, January 23, 2025-5:00 PM

Like, my what's name? Yeah.

Yeah.

It it I think it was a lot of. Think it was. Was.

We're gonna This is... I'm... Yeah.. I don't need to sit here. Okay.

We're gonna call for the special committee on the environment resiliency, our regular meetings with Thursday, January 23. It is about 5PM... Five at two. Who please pull the roll?. President.

Vice chair Sanchez?

Here.

Councilman Anthony? Present. Councilman Espino? Present. Councilor Royce?

Present.

We have five present. We have a quorum. Awesome. Thank you so much, and thank you to the, online Ken Cho from the office. And we also have director here today as well as deputy director as well.

And so can we please read item number one in the agenda? Resolution approving and adopting the 2024 hazard mitigation plan. Awesome. And my understanding is that director has a few things she's gonna share with us.

Oh, it's gonna work.

Okay. She's much. She couldn't be here in person, but thank you for being here with us for what we need, Claire. Ward 3.

Good evening, everyone. Sorry I couldn't be there

in person, but I am

very happy to be joining you all virtually. Thank you, councilwoman. So I just wanted to start by giving a very brief overview. I know you've been given, it should be a three page document that had a quick outline of the summarizing the process of the plan update. I see some shaking heads.

No?

That's Was Mike supposed to send that ahead of time?

Oh, sorry. I thought it'd been distributed.

I thought I thought I'd seen something, but it's not in our package. He's right. Can get it to it. We'll follow-up, and I'll make sure we meet after we describe it. Yeah.

No worries. I... I'll give a quick summary of it. So the multi hazard mitigation plan is a comprehensive hazard identification and mitigation plan that we update by statute every five years. The plan must be approved and adopted by city council in order to have us be eligible for a variety of FEMA mitigation grants, including the building resilient infrastructure and communities grant, the flood mitigation grant, and the hazard mitigation grant program.

So it's a really important plan for the city, and it's also a wonderful opportunity for us to do a comprehensive evaluation of the hazards and risks that the city is vulnerable to and propose mitigation actions to address these. So we started this, plan update process in the last spring, and it took about nine months to complete the comprehensive hazard mitigation process. We held... During that time period, we held four meetings with the local hazard mitigation committee, which included multiple members of city departments, including a representative, councilwoman Andrew Boa from city council as well as members of the public and other stakeholders and partners that we have input that we needed to get input from. We met four times with the local hazard mitigation committee so that they could provide input and guidance on the process.

And then we also held four in person and one virtual online public workshop, all of which was available in English and in Spanish, to solicit, input and feedback from our community members. And we made sure that we were holding those four meetings in all different corners of the city to make the participation in the process as accessible as possible. The result of that planning process was the comprehensive update of the hazard mitigation plan. And a few of the goals that we really wanted to highlight and keep in mind, at the forefront of mind for this plan update process was that we'd be data driven, design intelligently, and then make sure that we're connecting systems and people. We also wanted to prioritize community at the forefront of the plan.

In line with that, we did add a few updated hazards to the hazard mitigation plan this year. There were three additional hazards that were added, including infestation and invasive species. We changed it terrorism to be expanded to terrorism and active threat, and we added electric electrification as a hazard of concern for the city and our population. One of the major focuses that we had comprehensively across the plan update was having a focus on future conditions. And what that means is we were making sure that we were incorporating climate change impacts and expected effects in all of the different hazards.

So in the prior plan, we had climate change broken out as one section. And in this plan, we incorporated climate change impacts and expected impacts across each of the sections. So flooding, hurricanes, ice storms, all of the different hazards, we incorporated an element of expected climate change impacts in them. So we wanted to make sure that that was really at the forefront of everyone's mind as we work through the planning process. We also added 19 new mitigation actions, and it's important to highlight that we wanted to have a very robust list of mitigation actions in this plan.

That does not mean that we must accomplish all of these. It doesn't mean that we have the resources or the capabilities currently to accomplish all of these mitigation actions. But by having the mitigation actions detailed in the plan, it does make us more eligible to submit for federal grants to fund these mitigation actions. So as you look through the the listed actions in the plan, keep in mind that we do not expect nor do we have the resources to accomplish the comprehensive list in the next five years. But by putting these detailed actions into the plan, it does increase our chances and our competitiveness for federal grants to fund mitigation actions.

So that is a very quick overview. I wanted to pause and see if there are any questions or if there's anything else that you'd like me to address.

Yeah.

I... On the electrification, can you just, go into detail what what... And just losing electricity. Is that what we're speaking of?

So the electrification is actually looking at the impacts of lithium ion batteries and increasing electric vehicles. So electric vehicles are much more prevalent now than they were five years ago. Lithium ion batteries, I'm sure many of you have become aware of the lithium lithium ion battery fires that have happened. There's actually been a number, unfortunately, of apartment fires, particularly in New York City, some of which have been fatal that were caused by electric bikes and electric scooters. So, in addition, electric car fires are extremely difficult to put out, to the point that they will reignite after being submerged in water for multiple days sometimes.

So if we have a electric car fire on 95 Northbound that shuts down 95 during rush hour, that would have a tremendous impact on city operations. So by adding electrification as a potential hazard, we want to be looking more comprehensively and in more detail at potential impacts of lithium ion batteries and, electric car fires.

Thank you.

I just wanna say real quick since I was on the committee that director ran a really extensive and, like, comprehensive process and had... I know I was really impressed by the level of conversation happening in those meetings, and things like this would come up where something must be like, yeah, full expectations. We have climate change. Boom. And then --.

And these other these other tests coming up and being super transparent about that process. I just wanna say that passing... Us passing this is incredibly important to leverage federal fund... Federal funding and support Claire's work. We're very sure to serve his work, which is just so vibrant city.

So I just wanted to say she did an amazing job with this, and maybe it's not a habit. And if haven't read it, he'll do again.

Yeah. Well, and I wanna I wanna thank all the members of the local hazard mitigation committee because we had 32 people that committed their time to working on this. And we had a consultant that was working on the plan with us, and they said that... And they do this. This is what they do all over the country.

They said that they had never seen such a robust, engaged, and well educated, well informed, committee. So they were very impressed with the number of people from across the city and across the state that were dedicating their time and attention to our plan and how much everyone truly cared about the plan. So they were very impressed by that.

I guess my question is, where can we see the plan? I mean

Yeah. You should've, you should've received the, the digital version of it. It's 300 pages, so we don't print copies of it because, the environment. But it's available on the Pima website. It was posted for thirty days for public comment in the revision process, and it's currently available.

I can drop it in the chat if you wanna pull it up now, or it should have been distributed by email as well.

I'll get back to my computer. I'll. It would have been forward, like, sent it when she finished it.

Yeah. Okay. Okay. And and is it possible since we're gonna be taking action on this this evening? I mean,

I hate to make you do it, but

is it listed the action items. You said there's 16 of them. Is it is it easy to run quickly through that list? Or

Yeah. So there are 19 new ones that were added. There were a few that were carried over as well. But, sure, I I can run through the the headlines of the 19 that were added. So the first one was to create an adopt a storm drain program, create and update a lithium ion battery outreach campaign that's related to

the

electrification one, upgrade the sirens at the port to improve public alert and warning, install a lightning warning system at all city parks, conduct a public awareness campaign around natural health hazards, create a post earthquake dam inspection process, create a prioritized investment list to harden critical buildings, create an all hazards design standard for critical buildings undergoing renovation, create an inventory of critical buildings, provide generators at various critical buildings, maintain a working relationship with the fusion center, and continue to invest in technology, techniques, and systems, continue to train and update plan policies and protocols based on national best practices and lessons learned, create a citywide stormwater master plan, enhance plans and protocols regarding cybersecurity, establish a maintenance standard for dredging of the Pleasant Valley Parkway, regularly dredge the Pleasant Valley Parkway, regularly exercise the Fox Point Hurricane barrier road plates, Review and update plans, policies, and procedures regarding storage of battery powered mobility devices, and strengthen the city's tree canopy.

Sorry. Can you just say real quick why the council is voting on this? Like, why it's important to do a complicated vote?

Yeah. Absolutely. So, according to the federal code of... Federal regulations, which outlines the requirements for the hazard mitigation plan, the plan has gone through the FEMA process, and it has been approved by FEMA. And they do something called approve pending adoption, APA.

And in order for the plan to come into effect, it must be adopted according to CFR by the governing body, when this, in this case, means the city council. So city council must adopt by resolution the updated hazard mitigation plan in order for us to be eligible to submit grants. And right now, we have approximately two point three to two point five million dollars worth of grant projects that we need to submit, by February 1 for the building resilient infrastructure and communities. That's... We also have a $160,000 that's already been awarded to us, but they can't distribute it until the plan is approved and adopted.