All right.

Well, at 1032 a.m.

on April 23rd, 2026, we will officially call the community health meeting to order.

Madam Clerk, will you please call the roll?

Councilmember Castillo.

Councilmember Avarete Gavito.

Councilmember Mesa Gonzalez.

Councilmember White.

Chair Galvan.

Here.

Sir, we have a quorum.

Thank you so much.

First thing to do, we have to uh review the minutes.

Any uh changes to the minutes.

If not, can you get a motion to approve?

In a second.

All those in favor say aye.

Aye.

Any opposed?

Any abstentions?

Great.

Uh next to move into public comment.

Madam Clerk, do we have any public comment?

Great.

All right, then we'll move into item number two, the update on San Antonio's heat resilience playbook.

Committee, my name is Laura Patiño, and I'm the director for the Department of Resilience and Sustainability.

With me today is Doug Melnick, Assistant Director for our department, as well as many other partner departments as a key testament to the interdisciplinary nature of this work and heat management.

So this presentation comes.

Thank you.

This presentation comes following the council consideration requests from April 16th, 2025 for tracking and preventing heat related deaths.

So today's briefing provides an update on San Antonio's heat resilience playbook, its connection to the 2025 Council Consideration Request on Heat Rated Deaths, and the city's summer 2026 heat communications and response plans.

Briefly, I want to take the time to highlight the reasoning behind a heat resilience playbook.

San Antonio has experienced a series of records.

We are experiencing hotter and longer heat seasons with more frequent extreme heat days and documented increases in heat related illnesses.

This means a direct impact to public health.

On the slide depicted, published by San Antonio Metro Health Department in their heat related illnesses dashboard, we can see the number of heat related illnesses by month reported.

Since 2022, we have reported nearly 2400 heat related illnesses, categorized by dehydration, fainting, heat cramps, heat exhaustion, and heat stroke.

Those impacts are not evenly distributed.

Using Metro Health data as well as UTSA's heat vulnerability mapping, we can see that residents in hotter, lower canopy, and higher vulnerability areas face greater risk.

We utilize this map to understand where interventions need to go across the city of San Antonio.

So to take action, we have developed the city's first heat resilience playbook.

The heat resilience playbook is a city's implementation roadmap for extreme heat.

The playbook has 52 actions, and they're divided into new actions, existing actions, and improvements.

I'm happy to share that over 80% of these actions are ongoing.

All departments that are reflected in the implementation of these actions are depicted on this slide.

And we have identified specific leads as the work continues to move forward.

This is work that our departments are already implementing and built within their day-to-day operations.

This graphic depicts their contributions and further demonstrates the level of interdepartmental alignment and collaboration that needs to take place in order to advance extreme heat and that continues to advance this work.

Being prepared and resilient to extreme heat requires all of us.

So San Antonio's heat resilience playbook is comprised of two overarching goals, safe and prepared San Antonians, and cooler neighborhoods.

It has four objectives, 11 action areas that lead to 52 actions.

These are our organizing principles and allow us to focus on human-centric heat response and inference infrastructure-centric adaptation to the built environment.

Within our four objectives, we aim to increase awareness and outreach through approaches that ensure San Antonians are connected and equipped to navigate hot summers.

This includes training, communications, and data, heat relief to provide access to resources for the most vulnerable, our indoor and outdoor workers, and the general population, our built environment to strengthen and adapt homes and buildings, and our parks and green spaces to provide cooling benefits and maximize quality of life through tree canopy and land resources.

To show how the playbook is moving into implementation, I wanted to highlight a few examples today.

So under Awareness and Outreach, we will be addressing two actions heat outreach to the most vulnerable and health dashboards for heat.

For heat outreach to the most vulnerable, the action consists of launching a coordinated heat risk awareness campaigns to reach San Antonio's most vulnerable residents.

Various departments are already conducting heat outreach to the unhoused, the elderly, children, and other vulnerable populations.

This effort will allow us to not only align our cross departments but also understand the outreach mechanisms that work best and provide those tool kits and skills to other departments.

To date, we have completed two surveys, one internal and one external to understand the barriers.