just turn the because there should be a presentation.
Okay. There we go. Recording. Awesome.
Excellent. Hello, everybody. I am Sue, chair of the special committee on the environment resilience calling our Thursday, December 11, 2025 meeting to order. First, will you please call the roll?
Sheriff Antobua? I'm present. Vice Sheriff Sanchez? Present. Consentman Pedro Espino is absent.
Present. You have three pressed
and one absent. You have a quorum.
Awesome. Thank you so much. I also wanna acknowledge councilwoman Peterson is here today. We have councilwoman elect Phil Davidson joining us tonight. He'll get sworn in next week.
So excited. Also, always wanna thank our amazing clerk to beyond being amazing always just dealt with some real intense IT issues. So yay for them. Grateful for you guys. I know who fingers crossed.
We have wonderful solicitor here today. And then members of our policy team, thank you guys so much for being here, and tons of members of the public who will swear you in in just a minute, and also from the mayor's team who will be sworn in a minute as well. Thank you all for being here. Let's get started. So can we please read item number one into the record?
Item number one. An ordinance in amendment of chapter 23 of the court of ordinances of the city of Providence in Chatter, streets, sidewalks, and public places as amended to change article one section 23 dash 35 relating to utility permits.
Thank you so much. So I am the sponsor of this amended ordinance. Folks have it in front of them, and they saw it in advance. Oh, they showed up. Hope I saw it in advance.
Will not be voting on this tonight. I just wanna make a note that we did receive some pretty late, comments, and I want to respect that people sent in comments. So I wanna have a little bit of time to, digest those, before we vote. But we will vote for starting in January. But before we move to continue it, I would love to hear if anyone has any comments or questions or thoughts from the committee.
This is Justin. Yeah. Oh, I thought this is. Oh, yeah. Can I please have a motion to substitute in the version we
Justin? Oh, I'm sorry. Second.
Motion is second. All in favor?
Do you guys and this is just for committee members or council folks since we have members of public care, they might not know how committees work. Do you guys have
any questions or comments? And thoughts? No.
I just, I mean, I just wanna thank you, as the sponsor, Councilman and Andrew Law, for all your hard work on this. I know we've been working on it for quite some time now, and it seems like a couple of concerns came in. So I think, you know, definitely just wanna commend you for, you know, being that listening ear as always and trying to to get through this and and get a comfortable sign. I know this is something that's important for all of us across the city. So anything that we can do as community members, definitely, you know, just let us know.
Cool. Thank you guys so much. We will definitely have a meeting in January. We can definitely touch base with each of you ahead of time to talk to any changes or concerns or anything that comes up, and I'll read you all the comment. If anything comes up, let me know.
But other than that, can I have a motion if
you can Do you wanna accept the testimony?
Oh, sure. Yeah. Yeah. Entering the record. Yeah.
Do we have to do each one separately? Yeah. Or I think we have okay. So we've received several pieces of testimony officially, and you have them in front of you. We'll accept them as an exhibit collectively.
It's a motion to label these as exhibit.
Any opposed? Cool. I've had it. And then can I please also have a motion to continue?
Excellent. Excellent. We will take this back up in January after we make some minor changes, and I look forward to getting this over the finish line for our residents who I know I hear from them all the time that they're eager to see this get done. So, thank you all so much. This oh, yeah.
Can we please read item two into the record?
Sure. Item number two, presentation on the storm water task force recommendations. Presentation by Priscilla Gala Cruz, director of sustainability, and Sheila Duomori, chief of policy and resilience.
Excellent. So I am really excited about this presentation. We have a lot of materials in front of us. And you guys might remember we've discussed this briefly before. The mayor, had a task force on swell water, and, both councilman, Anthony, and I represented the council on that task force.
Yeah. And there were many, many other people in the task force, which, both, director De La Cruz and chief Dormity will discuss. But there are a number of recommendations and exciting next steps underway that they wanted to share with us on council and get our thoughts and feedback. And so I'm excited that we were able to invite you guys here today to make this presentation. We hope to do this a while ago, and all all things happened in the city at the time they should happen, and today is my dad.
So I'm always like, should've happened six months ago. It's my bad. But can we please swear in a few folks? Sure. Whenever and I know we're having some technical difficulties.
Claire Claire, do you want us to take a moment so we can get the OWL working? Or since there'll be a presentation up, I just wanna turn the video off so it's not just on like, you don't feel like people are just staring at your face.
I don't want you to feel self conscious.
Yeah. The owl is experiencing some technical difficulties. So as you're giving the presentation, y'all, if you could just use your, like, outside voice so that it gets picked up on
the recorder and also on Claire's computer. That is real. Should we wait a sec?
No. You can keep going. I'm just gonna play with it because it'll definitely be clogged.
