Good morning, everyone.

We are going to get started with our work session.

Good morning, Miss Bryan.

And good morning, everyone.

This is a work session of the El Paso City Council for Monday, September second, twenty twenty-five.

It is nine oh five AM.

Mayor, we have a quorum.

It looks like we're up.

Okay, uh, once again, Nicolas Rada with Environmental Services.

I'm here to provide a update on the median maintenance activities through uh environmental services.

Um, this is part of strategic goal three to promote the visual image of Al Paso.

Um, this is per council direction at the council meeting on eight nineteen, twenty twenty-five to provide a presentation on city existing schedule, priority list of weed abatement, number of crews currently assigned, and geographic coverage estimate timeline to clean citywide and staffing.

It provides a visual image of media's walking paths, islands, downtown trees, and cul de sacks.

So it's not just the meetings that are maintained by our meeting group, it's also these other items.

Um, every time there's an island, you know, at a traffic uh intersection that has um any landscaping, um, also walking past that are designated as walking past throughout the city of Al Paso, we assist with the maintenance of those.

Those are the islands when you're in the different neighborhoods that we maintain.

There's also often landscaping associated with those.

Um into miles, but technically, we run uh it's about fifty two hundred fifty two thousand eight hundred square feet per mile if you think the average mile um or c uh median is about ten feet wide, but uh my presentation's gonna be in square footage because that's what we actually work with when it comes to is there still an echo because we have a lot of people.

All right, Nick, let's give another try.

Is there still an echo?

Is there an echo?

No.

Okay.

Okay.

Back again, like I was mentioning, we maintain the the medians, walking past islands, downtown trees, and cul de sacs.

This equates to approximately 18 million, uh 18 million 18.3 million square feet of coverage that we currently have throughout the city, which it grows every year as we accept um uh improved the medium city projects and through uh state projects through Techstot.

Um that's an estimated through uh Text uh maintain state roads, that's about six point two million square feet that the city uh of Al Paso maintains through the the partnership with TechStot.

Um this is a complete map of all the medions, islands, um, walking past uh everything that uh the median groups does throughout the city of El Paso.

As you can see, um it covers a great portion of the entire city.

Um Text Ot medians, I wanted to include those in there to let everybody know that we maintain those also anytime they improve those.

That would be Alameda, Saragosa, North Loop, Montana, McRae, Mesa, Dyer, MLK Jr., Baisano, Gopia, Pershing, Delta, Transmoun, Donovan, Socorro, and West Side.

A lot of these uh within the past few years have been updated through Techstone.

So they have a brand new um mediums placed in there with vegetation and and additional irrigation that we must maintain through the the con the agreement that we have through TechStat.

Um so the ESD maintenance staff currently has 47 full-time employees uh with seven vacancies currently, and we have uh sufficient equipment for six crews deployed throughout the city to maintain the mediums uh year round.

These employees are funded through the environmental fee.

Uh currently, so right now, since you know once the rainy season starts, we do start overtime at those times.

So they work Monday through Friday, 6 a.m.

to 4 30 p.m.

And then we do voluntary overtime on Saturdays for those that want to come in and do additional work uh to earn additional overtime.

The majority of the time we do not get any volunteers on Saturday because in speaking to our staff, they they prefer to have the two days off in order to recover to come back in full force on on Monday to do the overtime throughout the week.

So automatically they're already getting 10 hours of overtime during the week, and they're out there every day doing the best job as possible.

We also have additional crews that we brought in through our beautification group, which I'll mention in future slides, and then a third-party contractor that assists us.

So the regular maintenance activities that our media maintenance groups do is we we cut grass, pull weeds, remove any dead plants, collect trash and debris.

A lot of the trash and debris gets collected in the in the bushes.

That's where the majority of the debris is that you might have seen driving throughout the city.

Uh we poon trees and prune uh bushes, perform minor rock wall repairs because um some of the mediums throughout the city do have rock walls, and we we will have issues where the concrete wears out or the rocks move or even an accident that we'll we'll manage and take care of.

We'll blow out all the landscaping rock too to make sure we try to get as much dirt as out of it.

So the the one issue we see is that during those windstorms in the the spring months of Al Paso, it'll blow in a lot of dirt into the medians, and that's really the the breeding ground for weeds.

That dirt, you know, all you need is a little bit of dirt to see.

They blow in the seeds also, and when the rainfall occurs, that's when we we do see sprouting of weeds in the in the medium.

Uh we inspect and repair irrigation and we spray herbicide during the spring and summer months because it's heat activated, so we only spray during those months, and then during the fall and winter we spray pre-emergence.

So if there is weeds in the medium, it'll reduce the amount of growth that we have starting in the springtime.

In addition, uh starting this year earlier, um six months ago, we were able to get two additional vehicles.

So we do have two crews that just go around the entire spirit city, and all they do is spray herbicide and all the medias to try to prevent growth as much as possible.

So it's just two crews that are just constantly driving around trying to get ahead of them.

Um what they typically do if they know we're gonna be, let's just say on dire, they'll go to dire ahead of time, spray it so they could kill the majority of the weeds before our staff gets out there and just starts uh pulling them or mowing them down.

So we're getting ahead of it before we get out there, and then you know, and then once we're done with the the cleanup of the median, the actual crews also have herbicide uh canisters on their vehicles, and they spray the median afterwards.

So we're getting it before and then we're getting it after.

The the only restrictions with the herbicide, which is it's hard for Alfasos.

If the wind speeds over 10 miles an hour per per state law, we're not allowed to spray because it'll travel past the medians and we're not allowed to do that.