The Advisory Parks Commission met on November 17, 2025, at Moonshine Park, with the meeting called to order at 6:00 PM. The agenda included presentations from the Sustainability and Recreation divisions, along with routine approvals, round-table comments, and staff reports. No public comments were made, and no old or new business was discussed.
Excitement though. All right, I'd like to call the advisory parks commission meeting for November 2025 to order. Let's rise for the plush leaders. We've got an agenda. Any corrections to that was posted? No, Chair. All right. Do we have an approval of the agenda or motion to approve? All right. Agenda's approved. Last minutes from September 15th. I believe those were updated and reposted. So I think they're all correct. Any further updates? If not, I'll take a motion for those as well. I was in here, so I'm not gonna pressure up. All right. All right. All those in favor. All right. Minutes approved. Visitors to be heard not on the agenda. Seeing none, we'll go on to presentations. Thank you, Chair. Our first presentation tonight is from our sustainability division, uh, led by our sustainability coordinator Gillian Catano. Um let me pull up your presentation here, Jillian. There you go. Now let her take it from here. Good evening, Chair and Commission. Thank you for having me here tonight. My name is Gillian Catano, and I'm the city's sustainability coordinator. I'm here tonight to talk about our sustainable Egan initiative. Um I'll start with a quick introduction. Like I said, my name is Gillian Catano, and this is our our small but mighty sustainability team. Uh we welcomed Kelsey Barajas to our team earlier this year, and towards the second half of my presentation, I'll get into some of the work that she does for our team and for the city. Uh so tonight um I'll be discussing uh an overview of Egan Sustainability Initiative, some of the history of how we got here and uh the work that that we do. Um we'll jump into talking about Egan's Climate Action Plan, one of the uh biggest uh pieces of our initiative that drives our work, um, and then share with you our current and upcoming projects. Uh so with that, we'll jump right into looking at um the sustainable Egan Initiative. The vision for sustainability in the city of Egan is that Egan is a resilient community that values natural living spaces and environmental stewardship. We really appreciate the work of this commission and um supporting that vision and um all of the parks and green spaces in Egan. Um that's been a value of this community for a long time, and our sustainability work hopes to enhance that and and collaborate with uh the works the work of our parks department and um support this commission as well. Uh for many years, uh the city of Egan has been participating in sustainability programs across the state, um, one of which is the Minnesota Green Step Cities program. Egan was one of the first city cities to join this program. Um Egan has been participating in this program since 2010, which is the first year the program launched. Um in this graphic, um, you can see some of our our key highlights from certified green buildings in the community to electric vehicle charging ports, um, new trees that are being planted, um, renewable generation, uh, renewable energy generation in Egan, uh city uh city acres of open space and tree canopy cover. So we're really proud of participating in this program, and we hope to continue doing so. Um, a new part of this program that launched in 2024 was the uh Green Leaf uh Gold Leaf Program, uh, which is a program that supports uh climate action. Uh so EGAN decided to join this program as we've been participants in the Green Step Cities program for many years. Um and last year we were awarded five leaves, which is kind of a silly way to just uh participate in the program, but it just shows that we've um been a part of starting our climate action journey and addressing climate change here in Egan. Uh so that's something that we've been participating in.