Travis County Commissioners Court
November 21, 2006
Item 13
Let's go to that next item.
>> I'm here to share a little bit of good clean air news, so --
>> he needs to call it up.
>> one benefit the county judge has is to read the item before we discuss them. 13 is to receive and discuss annual report from central Texas clean air force and related air quality issues and take appropriate action. Okay.
>> okay. Girks monk.
>> good monk. I am here to go through the first ever clean air force annual report. We have been around since 1993 and this is our first ever. It is a bit primitive in format and we are looking at all sorts of improvements for next year. If you wouldn't mind going through this document with me. I'm going to hit some of the highlights. I'm basically here to show how your funding is spent through the clean air force. We have a list of the officers and board members. We have 39 board members, 15 of those are executive committee. We had the pleasure of getting judge Biscoe as our chair and we have very much appreciated his leadership and enthusiasm for this organization. Brett Davis is our vice-chair. So moving on to to page 6. We have what cleent air force does. Many of you are familiar with what we do. Some people aren't quite as familiar. We do a variety of thing. I wear many different hats as the executive director. But a lot of what we do is educating the public on air quality issue. We pave the way for the inspection and maintenance program, trying to get people to understand the reasoning behind that. And we are unique in that we are able to bring together governments, businesses, environmental groups, health-related organizations all at one table to try to find workable solutions to our air quality issues here in central Texas. So that's kind of our unique angle that we bring. If you go on to page 8, this is the 10-year trend. The design value that Commissioner Daugherty referred to, how we've gone up and down and currently we are below the 85 parts per billion a mark, historical 38 does go up and down, and clearly as adell mentioned, three parts per billion will not gb for good for us whatsoever. So leading into that, one of the thing that has not really been accounted for is the impacts of our voluntary measures, which is what the clean air force is trying to accomplish. We have currently under early action compact nine and 162 voluntary measures across the five counties. Those voluntary measures have not been factored into our reduction. This is something we're working on to try to get more sophisticated tools to basically capture the results from the voluntary programs to we can show how we are helping with hard numbers: I'm going to go through a number of our voluntary programs. Our ozone action day program is -- we've grown from basically when I started working here at the clean air force in 2003. We had, I believe, 406 people that were getting those alerts and we're now up to 44,000, so we are significantly getting out there in the public trying to get people engaged. This is also our program where we work with the tv stations and the newspapers to try to get them to constantly relay this information to the public so they're aware of when ozone season happens and what they can do to help.
>> can I ask a question? When it talks about that the clean air force offs a free notification service to participants by e-mail when an ozone action day is forecast for the following day.
>> right.
>> do you really think that if you get something -- if you send 44,000 responses out that the following day you're going to have people go, oh, I got that last night, I'm going to do something didn't today? I mean, realistically is that -- as a matter of fact, I think that our transit authority didaway with their owe owes -- their free ridership.
>> right.
>> so first question first, what do you think that really does for us to get an alert the day before and say, guess what, tomorrow I'm taking my bicycle to work?
>> that's a great question. With our clean air partners, which I was going to mention, we have basically 106 clean air partners. These are businesses and organizations here in central Texas that are proactively engaged in the fight for clean air. And they have -- that represents 170,000 employees. So part of that program is to alert those employees to these ozone action day alerts to form car pool buddies if you will. That they have different programs set up at dell, a.m.d., expansion, when there's an ozone action day alert, that day they actually plan ahead, their car pools for the next day at these large businesses. Does that surprise you? It surprised me.
>> does that surprise you?
>> I think that's pretty neat. To be honest. I thinkit's a great idea. It's a little farfetched to think that --
>> I was right there with you in the beginning and I've been very surprised what people are actually doing the day ahead. I touched on clean air partners program there. We are particularly proud of this program because in 2003 we had 46 partners and we now have 106 and we are not stopping. We're going to keep going with those businesses and organizations to try to get them engaged. And like I said, they're all doing this part be it not paving the roads during -- not paving the parking lots during ozone action day season, forming car pool teams. So again, san antonio has actually tried to start up this program for a couple of years now and have not been able to do it. So we have been working diligently and very hard to get this up and going, so we're very proud that we've been able to get these businesses engaged. Look at page 14, 13 and 14, this is our let discount program, which is very popular with the public. We in -- in 2005 we sold 230 lawn mowers. These are the clean burning electric lawn lawn mowers. In 2006 we doubled that and in 2007 we're hoping to get up to 750. So this is just a very hand's on outreach opportunity to talk to people at home depot, let them know that there's other options for their lawn care, perhaps plant a seed of a baby tep to hybrid vehicle. I know lawn mower, hybrid vehicle is a little bit of a juch, but to get them thinking about other ongses out there besides gas powered options. And our adopted school bus program is one of my favorite programs. This is the -- this is where we tried to get our clean air force buses for the health impacts of our children. And through this program we've been able to replace 66 highly polluting diesel buses. These are buses that are 1991 or older. The epa estimates that one of the 1991 buses pollutes as much as 110 that cars. So these are the dinosaurs we're trying to get off the road as soon as possible. Through this program we've been able to replaks plais six 66 of those buses with the clean burning buses, and again these have not been factored into how this is reducing our ozone. This is all part of our 2007 plan is to find out how this impact is really helping.
>> [one moment, please, for change in captioners]
>> we will continue to do this throughout this process. Basically those are our voluntary programs. Going into 2007, the continued success of these voluntary programs will be all the more important since regulatory-wise we have done pretty much all we can do as a region. The clean air force is behind these programs and thank you to y'all for supporting these programs. And as you can see on page -- 25, our contributors are 51% of them are board members and 49% are non-board members. So we have got a nice healthy balance there, we feel. And on page 26 is a list of our different contributors and just want to say thank you very much to Travis County for your support of these programs. We are out there doing good things. Looking to do more good things in 2007. Especially during that critical ozone season and if you all have any questions, I would be happy to answer them.
>> okay.
>> I'm wondering, related to electric lawn mowers, that is the other alternative is to completely get people to not have grass. That is to use different kinds of xeri scaping. I am wondering if we can look at, yes the individual consumer, when you talk about 44 lawns that move from gas to electric, if you think about the impact that could be out there thinking with txdot on our highway right-of-ways, the central Texas regional mobility authority has just approved a pilot project with the ladybird johnson wild flower center which is now at the university of Texas ladybird johnson wildflour center. That is to actively and proactively look at aggressive management of right-of-way with wild flowers that do not need not only the water, but also the -- the maintenance schedules. I'm just wondering if that's something that you all have given any kind of thought to is that it's -- that it's not just about -- about what goes with mowing of grass, but also to really that could be something that could be a much larger scale in cutting down the amount of maintenance and the amount of right-of-way that is here in the -- in the central Texas area. Looking very closely at what happens with that pilot, because they may expand it to the Austin district. Because it's -- it saves money, potentially could save some money and also water. So I think that it's one of those does multiple good things on multiple levels too that is a great --
>> that, too.
>> that's a great comment. One of the things a packet that we give to each person that is there to purchase a mower, we have a city of Austin, I don't know the green thumb guide for the city of Austin is there to talk about some of these other options. We also have some information in that goodie bag that they receive, but I can see making that even a -- a wider push. So I think that's a great, great addition to this program.
>> they are working with u.t. And the wild flower center and will be looking at highway right-of-way, then of course the next thing would be to looking at our county right-of-way in terms of getting away from the more traditional kinds of things. Just going to be a whole lot easier for the road and bridge folks to take care of because it's a different kind of a mowing schedule.
>> right.
>> and it's pretty.
>> critical ozone action day events that we have here, especially within the five county region, I remember we had different persons coming in, representing different portions of -- all of the other counties, a lot of this, these things hadn't really come together, but during that time we were warned about how we were going to get the communique out to make sure that ozone action days are here to -- these are the things that you must, that we would like for you to do ozone action days. Travis County appears that it has pretty good communication when -- to get this message out. My question, though, is what about the other counties? I really have never heard any report from them one way or the other of how they addressing ozone action days and surrounding counties, because we are kind of all in this together, so it just -- so I wanted to bring that up. It's -- can you respond to that?
>> yes, I can. So our county is similar to Travis County, we have got contacts within those other four counties that relay that to their staff. We also have clean air partners within those other four counties for instance dell and Williamson county. They are sending that to their employees, so those counties are getting the ozone action day message and if they are not getting it through e-mail, they are getting it through tv or newspaper hopefully. They are participating in this program. Does that answer your question?
>> yeah. Just wondering how they were getting the message out.
>> similar to Travis County, with the county staff sending it out. I know adel you will be, you did some of that this year. Just basically through the county contacts and through our clean air partner contacts, then through the 4,000 plus signed up, alerts throughout our five counties.
>> thank you.
>> any other questions, comments? Thank you very much.
>> thank you all, very, very much, really appreciate your support.
>> keep up the good work.
>> stay out of --
>> [indiscernible]
>> thank you.
The Closed Caption log for this Commissioners Court agenda item is provided by Travis County Internet Services. Since this file is derived from the Closed Captions created during live cablecasts, there are occasional spelling and grammatical errors. This Closed Caption log is not an official record the Commissioners Court Meeting and cannot be relied on for official purposes. For official records please contact the County Clerk at (512) 854-4722.
Last Modified:
Wednesday, November 22, 2006 10:29 AM