The Green Cross Code Man Makes A Comeback, And You Better Listen Son.

[Austin Vermont]

Today is the day. After a more than a three month hiatus away from baseball, MLB players will report to their team facilities. There, they will first be tested for the coronavirus, as baseball makes its first steps toward playing a 2020 season. But questions remain about how the restart will play out. Considering baseball has eschewed the "bubble" plan to play in teams' home stadiums across the country, how are players working to prevent an outbreak? What will spring training 2.0 (a.k.a. "summer camp") look like? How will the necessary rule changes affect the product on the field? And what could bring it all to a screeching halt? Jesse Rogers provides the answers to these questions, and more. Then, Joon Lee explains that baseball's recent focus on analytics has also led to an increase in white male Ivy League graduates being hired in front offices.

The Green Cross Code Man makes a comeback, and you better listen son.

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>> Mayor Leffingwell: Amen. Thank you, pastor. Please be seated. Before we begin today, i would like to take a couple of minutes of personal privilege to talk about tomorrow, which is DECEMBER 7th. It's the anniversary of the attack by the japanese empire on the united states at pearl harbor and other places. A lot of folks don't remember that part, but it was actually a simultaneous attack on several united states military facilities. And my personal story is that my second cousin, my dad's first cousin, was a victim on that day. He was a bomber pilot in squadron based at clark air force base in the philippines. THAT WAS ON DECEMBER 8th. Of course, it was across the state line so december 8, but it was actually the same time. And he was killed as his squadron had been alerted and was running across the ramp to man their airplanes to try to get in the air and mount some kind of response. So he along with many other americans were killed on that same day at that same time and as a result of that congress declared war on the empire of japan. Shortly after that germany declared war on the united states and we were plunged into the most devastating war our nation has ever seen. My cousin, his name was edward gary, was a hero. He was from san marcos, texas. And after his death the air force base in san marcos at that time was named for him, edward gary air force base. He also has a street in downtown san marcos named for him, edward gary boulevard. And he also has a dormitory named for him at his alma mater at texas a&m and i think all that is very appropriate that we honor not only him but so many others of that greatest generation, those children of depression and war who basically saved democracy for the world to come. kennedy once said, a nation is known not just for the men and women it produces but also for the men and women it honors, the men and women it remembers. I want to say just one more word talking about that honor and remember part and I want to mention an organization called honor flight austin. Which my office helped establish earlier this year with the guidance of the city's veterans coordinator gunnery sergeant alan bergeron, who is a full-time city employee working on these issues. Honor flight austin is an organization established to take those members of the greatest generation, our world war ii veterans, to to see the memorial that was erected in their honor in 2004. The world war ii memorial. And I have to say I was very honored and privileged to travel in october with 50 world war ii vets from austin to washington, d.c. These flights come at no cost to these vets. It's a nonprofit organization that was established to raise money to pay for these guys. And what a great experience it was for all of us. We had 50 vets, as I said, ranging in age -- the youngest was 84. He lied about his age to get in the army during world war ii. And the oldest, very properappropriately, I think, was age 93, an army nurse based in north africa during world war ii. Her name was isabelle. She was probably the spryest of the lot. I have to say the most moving experience of my life was when we got off the airplane in washington, d.c. At reagan national airport, and there's a welcoming committee, also volunteers, that met us up there, a guardian for each vet to escort them around and see that they were able to get where they needed to go and they got there on time and all that stuff, but the reception that we got as these vets got off the airplane was very moving and it was moving for me and more moving for them. So I just wanted to say that because I do think it's important that we continue to remember that day and remember that event and remember how important it was to the history of the united states. Thank you for the indulging me on. So a quorum is present, so without objection I'll call to order this meeting of the austin city council on thursday, december 6, 2012. It is 11 minutes after 10:00. We're meeting in the council chambers, austin city hall, 301 west second street, austin, texas. We'll begin with the changes and corrections to today's agenda. First, on item number 16 will be postponed until december 13, 2012. Item 32 is postponed till december 13, 2012. Item 47 is withdrawn. Item 48 delete the words "zero waste advisory " on item 66, postponed until december 13, 2012. On item number 68, delete as co-sponsors councilmember kathy tovo and mayor lee leffingwell. On item number 71, item number 71, add as a co-sponsor councilmember bill spelman. On items number 115 through , that's the time certain for those items, there will be a request to postpone those UNTIL JANUARY 17th, 2012. On items number -- items 94 through 98, there will be a request to postpone those ITEMS UNTIL JANUARY 17th, 2013. Our time certain items for 30 we have two briefings. First a briefing from the office of sustainability and second a briefing by austin energy, an update on the electric vehicle program. At 12 noon we'll have our general citizens communication. 00 we'll take up our zoning matters. 00 we'll recess the meeting of the austin city council and call to order a meeting of the austin housing and finance corporation. we'll have our public hearings. 30 live music and proclamations. The musician for today is the world famous woode wood. The consent agenda for today is items 1 through 76. I will read later in just a minute the items that have been pulled off that consent agenda, but first item number 61 I'll read into the record. That item will remain on consent. Those are our nominees to boards and commissions and waivers. To the construction advisory committee, robert carson fiske is councimember spelman's nominee. To the m.b.e. and w.b.e. Small enterprise program procurement advisory committee sherri marshall is mayor pro tem cole's nominee. To the zero waste advisory commission, daniel -- daniela ochoa gonzalez is councilmember martinez's nominee. Intergovernmental body, to the capital metro authority board, ann stefford. Waivers of the training deadline established by section 21-23 b of the city code for a person appointed to a city board on or after august 2, 2012, and on or before december 6, 2012, if the person completes the training required by section 2-1-23 on or before march 29, 2013. Fortunately we have that in writing for those of you who didn't quite follow that one. The following items will be pulled off the consent agenda for discussion. Item -- items 4 and 8, whichno carrierringconnect 57600 morrison and tovo requested this be set for a 6:30 time certain. Item 69 pulled by mor lee leffingwell. Item 7 to be pulled to be heard after executive session. Item number 71 is pulled off the consent agenda due to speakers. So that is our consent agenda. We do have several speakers signed up to speak on consent items beginning with councilmember morrison.

>> Good morning, mayor, mayor pro tem, council. I'm here today to provide an update from the office of sustainability. I hope it will be a pleasant counter point to some of the previous conversation. And I'm the chief sustainability officer for the office of sustainability. And what I wanted to do before moving into the bulk of the presentation was just take a moment to really reflect on how much leadership austin has exhibited over many years related to sustainability. This is a timeline that just highlighted a few of the things that have happened that I think really demonstrate how far ahead of the curve our city often is in regards to sustainability. It certain doesn't hit everything. We could probably draw a timeline that would go around this entire room and try to fill it in with all the achievements that we're sustaining now and planning on into the future. But a few of the highlights may include things that i think we tend to normalize these things and forget that their innovative and are used to having them around. In 1996 the adoption of the balcones canyon land habitat protection plan, that was one of the first habitat preservation plans in the country. In 2000 the approval of the mueller redevelopment plan, that neighborhood is the largest leed for neighborhood development project in the country and obviously still underway. In 2007 the adoption of the climate resolution by council, which the carbon neutrality goal by 2020 for city operations, the only other city in the world we know of that has a goal that aggressive is melbourne, australia. And one more highlight, starting in 2011 our ability to meet one of the directives in the climate resolution to power our city operations with 100% renewable energy, we are the only city in the country that owns our own utilities that is doing that. So there are a lot of things for us to celebrate and to be proud of in our long legacy of leadership and part of my job here is to do that celebration and also amplify what we're doing and continue the vision into the future. And one example of how ripple effects have occurred from the things that we have done as a city, going back to the establishment of the austin energy green building program in 1991, it was the first such program in the world that was created by municipal government. That program is still going strong and it has reached a 38% saturation in the single-family residential market, but it really kind of laid the groundwork for the creation of the leed rating tool of the u.s. Green building council eight years after our program was created, leed was created. And this just gives you a sense of the volume of leed projects across the united states and it doesn't even show what's happening in 135 countries across the globe now for green building. So the key points I wanted to hit on today were just to spend a few moments talking to you about the office of sustainabilities' mission and then I wanted to highlight the action agenda which you should all be aware of. We've been talking about this for awhile now. You've received in previous memo communication about it. I wanted to hit the highlights of some of the projects that are being tracked as part of the action agenda. So just a little bit about the office. Speak spent quite a bit of time and energy area the last two years really refining the mission and work program of the office of sustainability. Early on we moved the climate protection program into the office from austin energy and we have several different kinds of functions that I just wanted to mention briefly because i think sometimes people are still not sure what it is we do. Everything we do is focused on collaboration across the entire city organization and also outwardly with strategic partners in the community. Mostly today I'm going to be talking about the functional area of providing a o'list stick framework at the top of the image and then also a little bit on incubating new ideas. But we also spend quite a bit of time implementing the city's climate protection plan and tracking the implementation of all the departmental climate plans that relates to tracking progress. And then we spend also quite a bit of time on education and technical assistance. A lot of the technical assistances internal to departments. For example, we asissed the police department with the creation of the carbon neutral fleet plan. We worked with resource recovery on the development of the ordinance for the single use bag ban. On the educational side, we do internal education with staff, but also a lot of educational programs in the community. We reach around 10,000 people per year through educational programs and about 100,000 people per year through web-base and social media. And so as you can see from the way I've been speaking we focus on internal city operations, the sustainability of that as well as sustainability more broadly in the community. And one of the things that we've spent quite a bit of time emphasizing is the definition of sustainability, which we've rolled out across the entire city organization. It's at the bottom of the screen here. That's the definition that we're encouraging everybody to use. It appears in imagine austin comprehensive plan. And really emphasizes what's called the triple bottom line of sustainability which brings together these three distinct elements. Often time we think of the environmental component of sustainability when we hear that word, but we're trying to emphasize creating the balance not only between the environmental issues, but also between economic issues as well as social and community issues. So you can use the three p's or the a's to remind you what the triple bottom line is, people, planet, prosperity or equity, environment and economy. I would also add that the whole concept of sustainability really i think is very much related to being a best managed city as well as reaching our overarching mission as being the most liveable city. So a big part of my job has been getting my arms around all the things that we're doing across the entire city organization, all departments, all 12,000 staff. Just because we have an office of sustainability sustainability, obviously that's not all being delivered by a small office, but by the entire city organization and everybody is art pa of it. Trying to create a comprehensive inventory of all those things and understanding how they fit together and being able to explain them in some sort of a comprehensive way has been a pretty significant challenge because there is so much going on. So one of the ways that cities who perhaps are not as far along as we are might have approached this would have been to come in with kind of a blank slate and they might have been said we're going to create a framework and then try to fill it in with a lot of activities and programs to meet the objectives we set forth in the framework. That would have been very difficult for us to do because we could have created this framework and then tried to cram all the things we're trying to do into it and it might not have ended up being a very good fit. So instead the approach we took was really to identify all those things and build a framework around them to create kind of a custom fit sustainability framework, if you will. And I think one of the strengths of this has been that it's really given us an opportunity to think about how we as a city identify and define sustainability and how broad that really is. And I think we're defining it more broadly than probably any other city at this point in time. So the framework that we created, some of the reasons we did this were to create that coordination to have a way we could track through performance goals and metrics what we're doing, provide annual progress reports to you and to the public, and within that, those set of goals, we created 10 areas of innovation and I'll explain to you what those are. Within the 10 areas of innovation there are four major signature initiatives, so 40 in all. And over 150 -- I think about 180 projects and initiatives that we're tracking. One thing I do want to add is that this particular information and inventory that we're tracking today on our website mostly deal with the city's outwardly facing sustainability programs and initiatives. We're currently in a process of doing an inventory using the same framework for all of the internal corporate activities that we do, but that's a different conversation, so I wanted to make that distinction. So these are the 10 areas of action that we've identified. And quite a few of them are things that you're going to see in other cities, sustainability plans. There are things like mobility, energy and climate, water security, ecosystems and green infrastructure and zero waste. They're all extremely important and really I think a huge foundation of what we're building on. But in addition to those things, we are including things like arts and culture. The only other thing city that define arts and culture and sustainability is santa monica. The green economy and innovation, health and safety and liveability and complete neighborhoods. So obviously in the short amount of time I have with you today I can't tell you about all 10 of these or all 180. What I've chosen to do is highlight a few projects which relate to that last circle which I don't think i mentioned when I was showing you kind of the mission and the activities of our office. And that deals with incubating new projects. So so many of these projects are being delivered by other departments and in fact the briefing right after this is going to be a briefing on the electric vehicle program from austin energy. That initiative is contained within the sustainability action agenda. So there are a lot of different things you can hear about that you might be interested in hearing about that are part of the action agenda, but those would be best presented by some of those individual departments. So there are a few areas, though, where our office does leed projects. Most of what we do really is coordinating with others and trying to track what they're doing. The ones I'm going to talk about today are four projects where it kind of relates more to incubating new ideas and in some cases I think we might lead these projects initially and incubate them and then they might spin off and be taken on by somebody else, either another department or maybe even an external partner. So the four I'm going to hit on today are in the four areas of schools in use, green economy, complete neighborhoods and energy and climate. So as I was mentioning there are four of these signature initiatives in each category. So in this category of schools and youth and we also can think about it as learning, we have children in nature, which contains a lot of our initiatives, particularly in parks and watershed protection that deal with getting children and families outside. We have something on youth and careers, arts and music education, and then also green schools. No carrierringconnect 57600 it's a bit of an evolution from something we had previously done called environmental awards. There will be three in three categories of elementary, middle school and high school. There's small 3,000-dollar grant in each category. We're utilizing the boards and commissions as our judges and we will be announcing the results soon. We had 27 applications this year. I think this program is really going to grow and has the potential to attract significant funding from outside funding sources. The boards and commissions judges have been very enthusiastic and they said they've never had a more difficult judging project to pick three out of the 27 because they were all such great projects. And then the there were four categories in the awards. There was an individual, business, nonprofit and then a city category. The business category we'veless transitioned that into something that we call austin green business leaders. So that program is still relatively new, something our office is leading. Basically it was launched in august of 2011. We have 55 members who have gone through the office and more in the pipeline. Part of the purpose is to create an umbrella for all of the different programs and incentives that the city you want ornately has that are for -- currently folk focused on. And in one place where an owner can easily find that information and then also have access to a peer to peer network. So the business is pretty easy. They sign up, download a scorecard from our website, they do a self score, get recognition and the other purpose behind it is to cross-promote and cross-market all these different programs. So this is just a visualization of all the different categories on the scorecard. It includes commute trip reduction as well as things related to healthy working environment. We're collaborating with a lot of different departments on this as well as externally with capital metro. And this just gives you a flavor of some of the gold members. There's levels of certification so these are some gold members and we're finding a lot of large corporate participants, but also a lot of small businesses. And the small businesses, a lot of times are those that they really don't have as much time or staffing to be able to go out and do the research to access all this information. We've been teaching a series of seven classes with the small business program on green business practices. So we're very excited about this program and we'll be reporting back to you as it progresses. If you know of businesses that you think might be interested I hope you will tell them about it. The category of liveability and complete neighborhoods is next. And there's a lot to talk about here. Once again we don't have time. We've got the mueller village, we have the green building program, we have a whole lot in the area of ending homelessness, but an area that you probably have not heard much about yet, so I wanted to tell you about it today and it's something that our office is leading, is something called the seaholm eco district. Eco district is a new program. It was created by the portland sustainability institute. We competed nationally to be selected as one of 10 cities to participate in something that they're calling the institute. We had grant funding to go to portland with our team and spend two days learning about eco districts and learning from these other teams about what they were doing. An eco district is really focused on large scale sustainability. It's not a rating system like leed. It's different of the. The example here is the pearl in san antonio. I don't think it's an eco district, but it could be one. There's a lot of focus on capacity building in this initiative and a lot of focus on public-private partnerships and it's really seen as a way to test things at more of a neighborhood scale. From my perspective and I've worked in the green building field for a long time, we figured out a lot at the individual site scale. There are a lot of challenges when we start to scale up sustainability, multiple property owners and we try to cross property lines, it deals with a lot of infrastructure issues. So this is really that middle scale. We've figured out a lot. This is really at the district scale and if you add up all the districts you would get your entire city. These are the categories in eco districts and a couple of things, we've had an initial partner meeting with property owners and developers in the seaholm neighborhood and in fact we're including some of the already completed projects such as the gables, which is now adding another phase, and spring condominiums. But one of the things that these partners are interested in a couple of highlights, one would be how can we brand the neighborhood and how can we provide messaging and education across the tenants and visitors that will come. Can we have something like a district dashboard. You could have an individual building dashboard that would show you your performance on energy and bert, but if we really maxed out rooftop solar in the neighborhood we could have a dashboard that showed how the entire neighborhood is performing. And then there's another concept called eco concierge that focus on once we build all these things what happens with that neighborhood? How do we expect people living and working in the neighborhood to behave? Do they do something or and how are they part of the solution? So the eco concierge is another concept that's gotten a lot of interest. So in the category of austin energy and climate, there's once again a lot packed in here on renewables, which includes the solar incentive programs, green choice. It includes building energy retro fits with low income weatherization, the ecad ordinance, it includes zero energy capable homes which is another component of the climate resolution and that's a lot of code work being led by austin energy. But the one I wanted to highlight being led out of our office focus on local carbon offsets. So a carbon offset you probably know is a reduction in emissions of greenhouse gases that's made to offset emissions that have happened somewhere else. You may have seen an opportunity to buy an emissions -- a carbon offset when you're purchasing an airline ticket, for example. These are three projects that were done in 2010 with it was really a pilot to see if we could -- if there was interest in creating small local projects that would provide carbon offsets. And the large scale carbon offset market there really aren't any projects that are available locally here in austin. They're usually very large projects like methane recovery in a landfill. The smaller projects usually aren't a part of that. We were trying to test this. We have three projects that were funded through a competitive process, tree planting with tree folks and two solar installations with nonprofit organizations. So we found out there was interest and what we decided to do, and you got a memo on this back in september -- incidentally this is another area where we're continuing to tull fill the many different directives that were part of the climate resolution. The resolution said that we were directed to create carbon offsets for citizens and organizations here in austin and also we were supposed to focus on carbon neutrality for visitors and travellers and festivals in the city. So we just recently have launched this program, it's still in development, it's called positive impact on climate and community. Picc is our logo and it's a guitar pick. I'll explain that in a minute. One of the things I thought about when I came two years ago is we're known for being the live music capitol of the world and we're really known for being green and is there a way we can bring those things together and leverage toes those and have something very dial milk if we bring them together. So the idea was to bring them together with local sustainability projects. So we have partners that have signed up to work with us to create the program. We're still working out the details, but those include most of the very large event organizers, including austin city limits live, circuit of the americas, south by southwest, c3 and we also are partnering with the environmental defense fund. The environmental defense fund is providing our kind of nonprofit environmental oversight to help us make sure that we are being rigorous with the projects that we are selecting and that they are going to provide tangible carbon offsets. We're excited about working with all these partners. We've done some preliminary calculations, somewhere in the area of a million ticket sales, probably a low number for the events these organizations put on. Even if we only had one dollar per ticket generated, we could be generating a million dollars a year if everybody signed up for it. I think the idea is really that -- I would like to see it be a voluntary contribution through your ticket purchase. You would be given a chance when you're clicking the purchase box to add on something to really leave a legacy and a tangible value to community, especially if you're somebody coming in from out of town. They real they're having an so we're excited about that. We will be reporting back to you 2013. We will be selecting projects. And incidentally, wait this works, the office of sustainability and the city will maintain a competitive process and put out a call to community for projects. We will help manage the selection. And then we will offer up those projects to the partners and they can select which ones they want to fund through their ticket sales. So the financial transaction all go through the event organizers not directly through us. So wrapping up, we will be also reporting back to you around earth day with a progress report on how we're doing in all of the 40 areas. We have an online tracking tool that staff is using to keep us apprised of progress on things we're doing. We have a downloadable matrix on our website that details all of those. You also have a copy of the poster in your packet that we created as a public information kind of communications piece that has -- we tried to use very simple language so that it could communicate to anybody. And also along with each one of the 40 we have what we call a citizen call to action. So if somebody wants to get involved it's kind of like what can I do? And it's in spanish and english as you will see on both sides of the poster. So anyway, we'll be reporting back with these progress reports. This will give you a sample and it's preliminary of what it might look like so you can see how we're doing. This is a good segue into the next briefing because plug-in electric vehicles as I said are a part of the action agenda and we're tracking and collaborating with the team on what they're doing. So that wraps up my portion of the presentation. Are there any questions? Comments?

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