From staff regarding the climate action plan.

There's no public comment during work session.

But if you want to make public comment or do public comment, you can do it during the city council meeting.

So I'll turn the time over to Robbie.

Robbie Hammond to begin the work session.

Thank you, Mayor.

Good evening, Council.

As the mayor mentioned, tonight we're going to have an update from Robin Strong, our sustainability and resiliency manager.

Robin has done really great work on our climate action plan.

And as a reminder, this is one of the council's priorities for this year.

So there's been a lot of great updates.

Rob is going to walk you through all of that in the next steps, and I'll turn it over to her.

Great.

Thank you, Robbie.

And thank you, Mayor.

So I'm Robin Strong.

I'm the city's sustainability and resiliency manager.

And really, I'm excited to be here to share the city's first comprehensive climate action plan for our community.

I've been working on it for about two and a half years.

So it's really exciting to get to this point where we have it finally like fully drafted and ready for full consideration.

So this is an opportunity for you to learn about the plan, ask me questions, provide any suggestions for improvement or input.

We're not going to make any decisions on the plan today.

It's a work session item.

So my goal is to bring this back for adoption by resolution later this winter.

What would you like from us today?

Just to listen.

Yeah, so I'm gonna pause throughout the presentation to ask for questions, but then there'll be some time for QA at the end.

And if you want to have discussion as well about various aspects of the plan, but it's it's pretty detailed, so I'll just kind of like try to pause as I go through more the more technical stuff to make sure you're have clarity on what I'm sharing.

Great.

Thank you.

Yep.

All right.

So to ground our conversation today, I want to start with the basics of climate change and what we're seeing locally.

Um we are uh here in Hillsborough, we're seeing hotter summers and longer uh periods of drought, stronger rain events, uh, increased intensity of winter storms and more wildfire smoke events.

And this is a result of global and regional climate patterns attributed largely to the increased levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, primarily produced from burning fossil fuels.

So a climate action plan helps us document strategies for reducing greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to climate change.

The plan also includes actions that will ensure Hillsborough is responding to and adjusting to current and predicted impacts of a changing climate.

For a climate plan to be effective and lasting, it's important to have both equitable mitigation strategies to reduce our greenhouse gas inputs, as well as adaptation strategies to help people survive and thrive as the climate is changing.

The climate plan is part of the city's strategic plan and it aligns with the city's priorities, goals, and mission.

Our plan will serve as a roadmap to implement a priority equity focused actions and increase community resilience.

We know our climate is changing, so this plan discusses how the city will reduce our contributions to the problem and help our community adapt while addressing climate risks.

So as I mentioned, it's been a long time, a long process to get to where we are today.

So I'm just gonna share some of the key milestones.

So we started the project in the summer of 2023 by selecting parametrics as our consultant.

Our first milestone was completing a community greenhouse gas inventory to document our baseline emissions.

In early 2024, we hosted stakeholder workshops to develop our greenhouse gas mitigation strategies.

And afterward, our consultants analyzed and scaled the measures to determine the potential reduction impacts and created our draft greenhouse gas emissions plan for review.

Then in fall and winter 2024, so a year ago, we refined those measures, um, emissions cutting measures by conferring with our stakeholders to develop the climate mitigation strategies you see in our current greenhouse gas emissions reduction plan.

Next, our consultants completed a climate resiliency analysis and vulnerability assessment.

This helps determine which adaptation measures we should consider for our second plan component.

We met with community stakeholders to get input on strategies to include in that plan, which was completed this past July.

Then in August and September, we conducted community outreach and engagement to get feedback and input on prioritizing our proposed strategies in both of the plan.

And I'm here now at the STAR.

So we're uh I'm sharing an overview of the plans for your review and discussion.

Um my hope is to get the plans fully refined and meeting all of your needs so we can get them adopted in the winter.

Okay.

So before going into the plan details, I want to share about our community engagement process.

So to frame the project, we used the city's equity toolkit and community engagement framework.

This helped develop our communications plan and ensure we were utilizing equity and inclusion focused strategies.

Throughout the planning process, we worked with multiple stakeholder groups, held workshops, provided outreach through community events and through the local media.