City Council Work Session

Rusty RussellThe Sprout Initiative has been begun, and the production of a state of the urban forest for two years running, and culminating in an almost completed and soon-to-be-adopted urban forest master plan. The city can be very proud now of its designation as Tree City USA. We are working closely with the comprehensive plan as it relates to the items that you see listed. will be a driving force in what activities we want to engage in moving forward in support of the urban forest. The ramping up of staffing and completion of the various assessments mentioned puts us in a good position to chart the future with precision. The urban forest master plan is ready, and I understand you will be hearing about that at your next meeting next Tuesday.

Thomas PetersonWell, and I would maybe call out as a bit of a success story here, the urban forest master plan development, which has specifically involved a lot of what we call co-development and co-design, bringing experts and non-experts together from a variety of perspectives to make decisions. And that's the kind of thing that it seems to me could be enacted more broadly. So great to hear that. we're going to talk more in a little bit about solid waste enterprise fund and things like that but I think perhaps a question for our city manager not to put you on the spot is the general strategy that that's a part of is transitioning cost centers to revenue centers taking things that here before have been just outlays and finding ways to turn them into revenue sources and generators.

So look forward to anything more you can do on that. My final thought here, I'm thinking most of my questions related to forestry We will probably wait until next week when we go through the urban forest master plan. But I do just have one point of clarification, and that is that when I went through the area of focus on forestry, I'm not sure I read this as clearly as I might be able to, But the question mark was whether somewhere in there we have a very clear intentional goal to reduce the amount of tree canopy and forest loss in the city and I didn't quite read that loud and clear again I think that's a very big question mark for the master forest plan, but can you tell me whether that is something that is

Rusty RussellWell, I think one thing we have to remember is that tree canopy is just one of the measures of the health of the forest. And there are qualities of tree canopy as well. There is certainly an interest on the part of the committee to work closely with urban forestry and the urban forest master plan as it relates to that. I was sent that same report and I was struck by it. our plan within the Urban Forest Master Plan is there will be a metric for the tree canopy, how we want to approach that and how we want to increase that. But the quality of that canopy is also an important aspect, and it ties very closely to the plans the city has for development, for other activities within the city that will impact the urban forest,

Daniel Alexanderstaffthat's where we are. The public hearing on the urban forest master plan would stay on. And then as it relates to the actual work session, we've taken A through E and reduced it to A and B. And so I think overall you see a pretty, you know significant reduction in the agenda understanding that when we get to the meeting on the 17th some of these items we've covered with you before in terms of presentations the way we would function on the 17th is all these would be open for you to discuss each of these items that we have on here whether we presented them or not so you know that's that's the way this is you know pretty much laid out from a broad perspective you know we've had some conversations again on meetings