The St.

Paul City Council Policy Committee to Order Roll call, please.

Councilmember Bowie.

President Naker.

Here.

Councilmember Joost.

Councilmember Coleman.

Here.

Councilmember Kim.

Councilmember Yang.

And Councilmember Johnson.

Seeing four present, three absent.

Well, good afternoon, everyone.

Thank you so much to the guests who joined us today.

We are excited to uh hear from you momentarily, and I'm sure we'll be joined by more of our colleagues here in just a minute.

We're kind of coming off of lunch.

Um we have two items on our agenda today.

The first is the death mitigation ordinance proposal, and so I would welcome up our speakers who are here to speak on that, and I'll let them introduce themselves as they come up.

And I help steer in partnership with residents of the Southport area, the Westsiders for Environmental Justice Campaign.

Um and uh like President Naker had mentioned, we're here to propose a dust mitigation ordinance.

Um I'll call I'll call um my fellow presenters up as their sections come up.

So before we get into the actual like nitty-gritty of the ordinance, we wanted to provide some context about the area and the the community um that we're speaking of.

So the Southport uh neighborhood or the Southport area is here on this map.

Um it's located on the far east side of the west side, five five one oh seven.

And if you look at these oh well, of course, this is acting up now.

So these streets that pop up here, all those all those streets are residential areas.

Um and the main thing to highlight is Highway 52, that red line running through so active railroad, and then the uh Southport Industrial District um here, and then the the airport, the South Port uh St.

Paul Airport.

And we like to show folks this because it just it shows how many uh polluters are surrounding this this neighborhood, this residential neighborhood.

Um with that said, residents who have been living in this area for generations and decades have faced and had to carry the burden of this nearby industrial activity.

Um so being lots of dust in the air, uh smells of burning smells, sewage smells, weird chemical odors, um, lots of noise and vibrations and the shaking of homes and foundations, um, and then heavy truck traffic due to the industrial activity that is in the area.

Um we look at the uh definition of an environmental justice area stated by the state of Minnesota through the cumulative impacts bill.

This area of the West Side specifically qualifies it has two um uh two meets two of the standards uh to qualify as an environmental justice area.

So eighty-seven percent of the people in this area are people of color.

Um, and forty-six percent of the households in this area are below the two hundred percent federal poverty level.

Um we think this is important because if you look historically at how the city was planned um and redlined and frankly, the environmental racism that uh created the city that we live in today.

Um it's not uh it's not uh it makes sense.

This this how this neighborhood is comprised makes sense based on how things were planned back in 1935 and before that.

Um and it shows that the people who hold this burden are um people of color and lower income folks.

So residents have been documenting their experiences, and I'll just play these videos uh to get to get uh through this.

But this video is originally two minutes long of this dust.

This is someone's back window of their house.

Um it goes on for two minutes, and this is uh one example of dust in the area.

Here we have trucks that uh pick up this dust and um from the ground once it settles, and all the traffic will pick pick this dust back up.

There's a couple examples of that.

This truck drives by, you see all the dust that is being thrown into the air.

Uh siding of homes is covered in in filth.

Um this is from Samantha that they had their sighting power washed.

This is a town home association.

They actually stopped paying for the power washing because the dust would have turned so frequently that they didn't think it was worth uh continuing to invest that money.

Same thing with vehicles.

Um one of the neighbors, Katie, uh, sent me this.

This is last last year, actually.

She's like, I washed my car two days ago, and it's already filthy two days later.

Go through this quick.

So when we look at where this dust is coming from, we can't help but notice the big brown uh spot on the map next to this uh neighborhood.

Um and these unpaved surfaces in this area, we think are preventable sources of dust.

Um if these surfaces were paved, then we we don't think we would see as much dust pollution.

Get through this quick.

So we have purple air sensors in the area provided by the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, and these are screenshots of some of the um data that residents have gathered.