Well, we're here tonight for an open house for our environmentals commission's climate action plan. And they're very interested in learning from the community what they're passionate about and what the focus of the group should be this evening. So, tonight is like a listening session. Um, it's an open house just to invite members of our community in and we want to make sure that everyone knows about our group and knows about some of the goals that we have. Um, we have a survey right now that we are asking people to fill out just to gather as much of the needs in the community as we can from lots of different voices. And then based on that survey, we can kind of prioritize some of our next moves and next steps that we want to do to make yeah Lauderdale just a sustainable, welcoming, and thriving community. It's been a priority of the city council for a while to have an environmental commission because there are a lot of things that the city could be doing, but they wanted the the activities to be grounded in what the community wanted to do and see done. And so, a little over a year ago, the members of the commission volunteered and and began meeting. and they've uh done a variety of things over the past year, but this uh climate action plan was something they were asked to do because Ramsey County applied for a grant so they could assist any of the cities in Ramsey County with the climate action plan. And so it was especially geared towards those of us who don't have separate staff to just work on environmental issues. And so from the information gathered tonight, that will go to a consultant that's being paid for by the grant. So they can do the overall logistics of pulling the information together and data together from databases that the state and um that council have to fill out the whole climate action plan in a very professional way. And then it'll come back to the group and the city council to review and make sure it reflects what the group wants and what the actions the group want to take are. You know, Lauderdale has always been a community that is very passionate about environmental sustainability. We've never even used herbicides in our city parks, which puts us in a very unique position when we're thinking about how to support pollinators, how to make a difference in the world, whether or not we want solar panels on the roof of city hall. We know that there's a lot of work to be done to maintain a healthy planet and to repair damage that's been done. And we also know that cities are at the forefront of taking these kinds of actions and this commission has been so amazing in the way they have just jumped in together as a group and taken so many actions that when they've put together add up to really meaningful change and impact and that's why they want to hear from our community about the specific actions they should be taking going forward so that we can all work together to make this a better world. Yeah, we have kind of a range here for my table, I guess, of things um about like the the land, like things we can do to actually like to the earth itself to make our community better. And then how can we use some of the built structures and improve our infrastructure in the community to best meet the needs of our people? And then how can we um also kind of move around our community in better ways. For example, one is just making sure we're really thoughtful about the number of garbage trucks moving through our streets and alleys and just being mindful of what what is the best for our community. >> Well, it's really important even the people my age because the next generation will not have trees and green space if people are going to allow the construction or not take care of the land as it is. Even the park that's got this beautiful hill in the city here on this side of Larpender. There's all kinds of activities that happen there. Even though it's not a natural woods, it it's a lot of pine trees. There's yoga classes, all kinds of good stuff going on in there. So, any green space we can save is super important. But people need to learn about conservation, too, with their watering, composting, and I heard someone say they have five garbage trucks going down their alley. That should not be happening now. So just making more aware of the things that people can do as individuals. The sustainability commission is really focused on a couple of things and those are pollinator habitat and trees and those are attainable things to work on, but they're also very impactful because we've lost so many ash trees and now oak trees. And so they're trying to find a way to do projects to bring more trees to people and help them get them planted in their yards so that they can grow and become bigger and replace what we've lost. Well, there has been so much support and enthusiasm and excitement and you can hear the hubhub in the room. This room is filled with folks who've been here taking time out of their evening on a cold winter night when there's lots of other competing interests for them to do tonight and um really being involved and giving their feedback about about the next steps for this plan. So, and this this commission has also hosted other um open houses and community events, and we've had fantastic turnout, and we're just so grateful to live in a community like this one.