So, we're in our last week, we're raising the crossover so we can head back and we're still on track for a four-wheels hour. By the end of the week, I think actually, well, I think for Wednesday, but I'm attempting to build these beds. So, we're back at play this Friday to work out a three-water bill, which is 96, which is really turning into a remodeling of the distribution system. We're not doing revenues, that's verbatim with finance. We're just going to do the budget, based on the last budget, and then those committees will head for there. So, Thursday, looking to finish the PFAS bill. And so, in order to help prepare people for that, I wanted to show you the next draft of the PFAS bill that came out of last Friday's testimony. And I think we're getting pretty close to finishing this. So, I'm this, and I'm water, I'm just passing it. And any one, all of us, there are review things sooner rather than later. And if you see anything that's later even added, or the concern that would prevent you from supporting the bill that you're developing, please let me know as soon as possible so we can address them. So, yeah, probably good. So, that's, we have water, PFAS. This time of year, as you know, let's counsel today, this is in short supply. So, while we're getting drafts, while we're keeping those two drafts, water and PFAS moving, I wanted to take some time and tee up our bill that we passed the week before we get back. And that is a testimony to the PFAS bill. So, again, since we don't have counsel available, I'm just going to send it. I'll think about it very much. Walk through on the next one, 13. Acute agent and provision of plastic. Carry out bags. Expand polystyrene lips. And we'll use plastic straw. So, I'll wait for you all to get that. Should I have a, I'm here. Yeah, we're doing the same thing. It's true. So, for today, just like to introduce the topic, that makes sense. And you'll see why, if it sounds ambitiously nice of you all in two weeks. I think part of the reason I think that's possible is that we don't try to nail everything down. We set ourselves on a pathway to figuring things out. So, taking it from the top.  This is A, B, C, S, A, C, N, F, R, S, S, L, N. We're working together with those later on. Walk through carry out bags, disabilities, expand polystyrene, service products, et cetera. So, instead of digging into detail on the definitions, the concept is that we have, as we've been learning, plastics is an environment at an increasing rate. And the fundamental ecological challenge with the public health challenge with it is that they don't break down. They turn into smaller pieces, but they're not returned to constituent elements that nature can then rebuild. The thing I contrasted with my mind is that we have millennia of leaves that fall on the ground. They disappear because they microflora and fauna consume them, recycle them. They move on. Plastics just turn into smaller bits, finding that bio-accumulating throughout nature and their concerns about their, ultimately about their health effects. So, given that we live for an awful long time, we're not there. So, there's a possibility of finding a healthier alternative that continues like that. So, that's the goal behind the bill. There are, I know people have been talking to you mostly about plastic bags, single-use plastic bags, but while we're working on it, that's only one of the streams. And so, this includes plastics that are really single-use plastic, related to things like coffee cups, all sorts of food that gets carried out these days in plastic. We used to have doggy bags, now they are plastic clamshell containers, et cetera, et cetera. So, the idea was to make the program more comprehensive and to take our time in doing it. And the reason for that is in my mind that we have, that's incredible that we hear from successful programs. And so, we wanted to respect and build on the municipalities that have gone ahead, look to them to learn from them about best practices. Frankly, we also want to learn from them about pickups, as they try to implement something. Where do they run their problems? Where do they not? And so that we can create a state-wide program that builds on best practices. And because it's a more comprehensive vision than just single-use plastic bags, based on past work in this committee, it's my conclusion that whenever we start talking about state-wide changes to our solid waste system, that there are potential unintended consequences. There are certainly partners whose business and operations are affected. So, let's make sure we know that we're putting something together that works for everyone. And lastly, I don't know the full analysis of what the alternatives are and what the implications of it are. So, for instance, when someone said, well, we should just go back to paper bags. I would want to steer us in that direction, but we didn't go look at paper bags and what is it entailed to create paper bags? What are the implications of using more paper, et cetera? What are the cost implications? Business implications? And then practically speaking, if we're going to have food establishments in stores all over the state switching over a longer period of time to get there, I think that would ensure that vendors could be sourced and people would be able to continue to offer food just without or minimalizing any kind of disruptions to their businesses. And then last, because there may be at the end of this year roughly 12 municipalities that will have to move forward on their own versions of various plastic bands, eventually we'll be creating some, we'll have a patchwork system for regulation in the state. So from a business perspective, it will be, once we settle on a plan, it will be helpful for business to harmonize those regulations around the state so that we don't have a town A losing customers, town A with a plastic band in place losing business to town B that doesn't have any such plan in place. Edge effects? We're always talking about that. So just want to be conscious of it. Who knows? It would be one of the things we would need to address. So looking at the bill just briefly, it says it lays out the definitions at the front, flag a couple things that I think we'll want to look into as we learn, you know, there's more to learn. So for instance, page two, line nine, expanded polystyrene goes through a definition. I don't know if that definition includes, say, technically appropriate description of the various different types of containers that we can see out there. So there's this polystyrene foam, but there's also, as I was referring to before, there's plastic set of those clear, sort of plant-shell containers increasing the future and so forth. Single use, page three, line eight, generally recognized by the public is an item that is going to be discarded by news, but just want to make sure that we get back to that one and make sure we're not a definition that's potentially ambiguous. There's a threshold in sub-10 there, store a retail establishment over a thousand square feet. That's a relatively arbitrary number. So I can say, are you for larger or smaller? Then in the prohibition of products, you know, so A, it says, restores more used plastic bags. B, vendors won't sell all these expanded polystyrene containers, service products. And then C, service establishment won't use the total containers. In D, we get into a provision on single use plastic straws. So they're made aware during the development of the bill that there are people who, they have a disability that is more than a drink. They need to have a straw. I understand it. Banging plastic straw is the thing that's most helpful for them. So we don't want to make it difficult for anyone who's not, which can be accommodated. Rather than having default use of the plastic straw. Simple penny penalties compared to our original conversation about this have been dramatically reduced. I'm figuring it's a subject for future discussion, but they tend to do much lower penalties, including starting with the one. There's a rulemaking in order to implement the non-fighter-solid waste laws and we need to do that to rule. And it's a working group with no interested parties. It's the LCT, from the Welfare Association municipality that's already done a ban. It could be all waste haulers. And maybe we want to add others. I would consider we might have a member of the house and a member of the senate on it so that we will have someone who is well versed in the conversation. Before the report comes back out of the streets on January 15th this year. So that's it for that. I don't know if there are any quick questions. So I do just want to say I appreciate you taking the lead on this. We had a chamber of commerce meeting then a few weeks ago. It was interesting, one of the topics that came up, which I think is sort of a little bit of an unexpected positive consequence of this. Is it something that a lot of parents see their children interested in? There was a little girl that brought a petition, had 150 signatures from the local elementary school on this issue, wanting to make certain that plastics stay out of water waste and things like that. So I think it's a topic that again is a co-sponsor. I'm in favor of it, but I also appreciate that this is something young people are talking about as I think we've seen the shift in, let me name it a shift, but a real commitment to environmental issues from younger generations. Maybe we can have that little girl call in or come up and she can show her petition. Maybe that'll convince Donna to say yes. Maybe I'll put tears. Well, and you remind me, so in the middle of everything there's a group that's working to get on the ballot for the meeting and see if they have more signatures and a lot of back. And the group that's working on it is, I think it starts at the elementary school there at our elementary school, middle school and high school students. They're probably colleges right there. They're college students on the team. And they're people in the town including Martians School. So it's been, frankly, a very positive thing to see a group of people say, we're interested in this and we're not waiting for government to sort this out. We're going to get going on our own and try to push things along. With that, I'd like to invite Mr. Burns to join us in the table. Good morning for the record. My name is Paul Burns. I'm the Executive Director of the Vermont Public Interest Research Group, or V-PURG. And I appreciate the opportunity to be here today. V-PURG is the largest consumer and environmental advocacy organization in Vermont with approximately 50,000 members and supporters all across the state. As part of our mission to protect and promote the health of Vermont's people, our environment, our locally based economy, has done work for policies that prevent waste, encourage reuse, encourage recycling whenever and however we can. And so it is entirely consistent with these long standing policies of ours that we offer our very strong support for S-113 today. I appreciate the leadership of Mr. Chairman and Senator Campion and others who are no doubt going to be supportive of this measure. I think it's really important. This subject of plastic pollution and single use plastic bags in particular is something that I have personally been working on for many years. As a matter of fact, in preparation for a radio program that Senator Gray, you were also on Vermont Public Radio recently on the subject of single use plastics. It caused me to look back and uncover an article that had been written about work I was doing at a press conference that I held in February of 1990 on the subject of plastic bags and for your enjoyment, I brought a copy of this article today from the Syracuse Herald American Wegmans Bounces DeWitt Plastic Bag Protesters. So that was me.  Yes, Senator Campion. So... What happened? It was in them. So this is a... I probably want to not share that with others. I will submit that for the record. This is a topic that people have been aware of for a long time of the problem of plastic bags in grocery stores. So they didn't really make their introduction into grocery stores until the late 70s. It's hard to remember that now. But until that time people were using paper bags at the store or they brought their own as a matter of course at that time. But in a very short period of time these bags have kind of become omnipresent in grocery stores and obviously in other retailers around the country and around the world. So it really was the 70s where in prior to that was paper and even people would bring their own shopping kind of bag. That's right. European what we see I think a lot in Europe now still people bring their own bag. And then of course you're beginning to see a lot more of that again in this country. But as I'm sure you know the problem of plastics though they've been around for more than a century they really took off the broad widespread use proliferation and development of plastics until after World War II around 1950 that you saw plastics really take off and according to National Geographic magazine since that time the world has created 9.2 billion tons of plastic. Most of that plastic 6.9 billion tons has become waste that is it's no longer in its useful form. So of the 9.2 billion tons that have been created 6.9 billion tons has become waste and of that which is no longer being used for its intended purpose 6.3 billion tons never made it to the recycling bin. So of the 6.9 that is waste 6.3 was never recycled meaning it either went to a landfill to an incinerator or it's in our environment somewhere today. Are you going to submit Yes, I will submit written testimony of this and some of the other pieces that I will reference. I won't submit this but I encourage you to look at National Geographic is a number of things on this topic but most recently in June of 2018 they devoted an entire issue to this and as you see they have a picture of a plastic bag which is kind of representing the tip of the iceberg in terms of plastics and particularly the problem of single use plastics today so it's kind of an interesting graphic there but lots of excellent and well sourced information there. Would you be willing to leave that for the committee? Is that okay? Now to be clear there are different kinds of plastic as you know and there are many different uses for plastic some are better than others many medical devices today are made of plastic that you touch in any given day that are made of plastic you would be surprised to think about the types and kinds and opportunities that you have to touch and use plastic and we certainly are not here to say that every single use of plastic is a bad thing but some are much better than others and when you remember that about 40% of all plastic that is being used is thrown away after a single use I think it reinforces the idea that this legislation S-113 makes an awful lot of sense and of course plastic bags which have a typical useful life of about 15 minutes on average and have been derisively called urban tumbleweed they have become the poster child really for single use plastics a necessary kind of plastic pollution and it's been said that we are drowning in plastic pollution and that's pretty close to being true global plastic production is increasing at an alarming rate it's an angle like this that you would find in terms of the increasing use in production of plastics in fact more plastic has been produced since the turn of this century than had been produced in all previous years combined that tells you how sharp the incline is in terms of the production of plastic generally and this is worldwide plastic is choking our oceans it's fouling our environment it's killing wildlife hundreds of thousands of birds and marine animals die each year because of discarded plastics so-called garbage patch which is a gyre in the Pacific Ocean made up of plastic fibers largely is almost unimaginably large and it puts it at larger than the entire country of Mexico for instance and it is not the only one there are many others out there if that weren't enough we must also face the reality that plastics are threatening our own health as well I've got just a sampling of recent headlines to help I think make that point for you just to and I will submit these as well from the Guardian newspaper it says sea salt around the world is contaminated by plastic studies show okay well that's salt plastic fibers plastic fibers found in tap water around the world you say okay well that's tap water maybe I'll just go to bottled water the World Health Organization launched a health review after plastics found in 90% of bottled water alright well so you can't drink water the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel found that tiny bits of plastic are now in beer beer is no longer an alternative to plastic center so we want to keep that in mind that plastics are everywhere in almost everything now that you're eating or drinking national public radio has a story that many plastics are everywhere so these things are have you take a look I will submit these electronically as well a simple search you will find many many more articles that provide evidence of the severity of the problem of plastic contamination so may I ask in your work aside from folks that are manufacturing these bags who thinks it's a good idea to continue well what's the opposing to trying to get a sense that you've been in this for a long time I think you will find folks who have come to find that these plastics are pretty convenient and I think that's part of why they are out there so to leave a store and if you haven't remembered to bring your own bag or it never occurred to you to bring your own bag the position that we have now moved to where there maybe was a time where people as a matter of course brought their own bag and never would have fought to depend on the store to provide them the thing to take it I think our culture has shifted so that we now have an absolute expectation that the retailer will provide you with the means of taking away everything that you purchased in that store and plastic bags have become a convenient way to do that with the handles and so forth and so paper bags now can have handles as well and so that's one convenience there if you needed a bag but I must say that our preference is not to have people shift from single use plastic bags to single use paper bags if what they're using now is plastic to Senator Bray's point the best environmental solution is not merely to shift to a single use paper bag it is of course to try to remember to bring your own bags that can be reused many times so I think that that matter of convenience is something but Senator Campion I would say this is one of those times where we are finding a tremendous reservoir of support among citizens out there for this idea we are not convincing people that it's a good idea to get rid of single use plastic bags or straws or polystyrene they are talking about it already around their dinner table they see every day on their news feeds more evidence of the problem we are talking about tiny bits of micro plastic in our water and in our food but people are also seeing the wildlife that are being killed 60 minutes did a thing just weeks ago on wildlife being killed and the terrible problem plastic pollution is a very popular popular video because it is shocking and it shows a straw in the nose of a sea turtle you may have seen these things but that is part of what makes kids see this and they say we cannot allow this to continue to happen I agree completely that children once they make this transition that cultural shift is happening not just with them but with their parents and with others that they are around our biggest restaurants in fennington county have shifted toward paper straws and I don't know if that was hard I haven't spoken to them but I think the boroughs house and I believe well I know for sure the public house has shifted many many we have seen that over the course of last year just this past summer we launched a campaign to promote the straws upon request idea we partnered with businesses, restaurants and bars in helping to promote that I want to give credit to the number of restaurants in stow for instance that had already made that shift and they participated with this in this media event in Brattleboro the restaurants there duo and others had been making this change they helped to contribute I think to the public support that led Brattleboro to make the change and eliminate the use of bags but many of them are making the same shift on straws and going more broadly than that as well there are a lot of people a lot of anglers in our area Orvis all that connection that again related to fish and wildlife it's not only I think environmentally but economic development wise you want to be able to pull fish out that again don't have this kind of contamination that's right again as senator great mentioned these plastics don't go away it has been said that if the pilgrims had come over with their plastic bag and their plastic cups and forks and knives and other utensils and so forth made of single use plastic it would still be with us today it might have broken down into smaller bits of plastic sometimes called micro plastic maybe sometimes too small to see but when it is that size it's still large enough to attract other toxins that are in the environment chemicals that are exacerbating whatever problems may be toxic problems may be in the plastic bits itself and that then becomes a concentrated small particle of plastic which is taken up by wildlife and we may eat those fish it may not be something that you see but ultimately it's bio accumulating in the bodies of animals and ultimately people so I wanted to quickly say this legislation then addressing the problem of at least some of the most widely known single use plastics is right on the mark it's not the complete answer I will also submit an editorial from the Los Angeles Times just from a recent days where they talk about the fact that straws and bags aren't enough they recognize the fact that California has gone ahead of us in addressing both the issue of straws and bags but that really is just a beginning to the solution I think that's out there with respect to 1.13 we certainly support the section dealing with polystyrene as it is now with respect to straws I appreciate the fact that you have made the straws available to those who need them because of a disability I think I would also urge you though we've heard some concerns not only that they want access to straws in the disabled community but they don't want any stigma associated with a request for a straw so I'm not I think I might urge an amendment to that language if you make straws available upon request nobody's going to check anyway that would get at the lion's share of the problem just so the restaurants are no longer as a matter of course putting a straw in the drink we're also seeing straws many restaurants and bars now shifting to alternatives metal paper, glass etc pasta so there are alternatives available with respect to bags again I noted that we would like to see something that would help to encourage people to use reusable bags to get back into the practice of using the reusable bags and so many places have instituted a small charge on the paper bags so that there is an incentive not merely to shift from plastic to paper but to do something to encourage people to bring their own bags back and I think you'll see that a number of other municipalities states and others are moving in that direction and we support that idea as well I do not believe that it is absolutely necessary to have a working group as it appears in this legislation because of the tremendous number now of municipalities of other states and of other national governments that have taken action here I think there's much that can be learned if you do that that working group could advise the agency and so forth so I we certainly would not oppose the bill if it had it in there I'm just not sure that it's necessary at this time I think that the principal reason for it was plastic bags would seem like pretty much free of that one out but if we're going to use all the other single use containers coffee cups to clean all containers in the evening we'll be happy to talk more about that in a second so you said banning plastic bags and straws is a solution but they're a step what is the solution? well I think it just you will find that there are even more plastics out there and so that maybe goes to what Senator Ray was just talking about but these are some of the most visible and some of those that we can most readily see alternatives available today so I think it makes sense to start there but as you shift culturally I think we will identify more and it is not a way of saying that we need to get rid of all plastic I just think these are all petroleum based products and we keep in mind that we should use as little of that petroleum as possible for uses that are used for moments and then last forever in the environment for things that we really needed for smart out comment that report was written before I was born you got this a long time Senator that's what I'm saying the other thing do you have any resources in your health impacts I mean I think that's another reason for us to want to take more testimony or soil soils was affected by accumulation I don't know that much about that I just was for myself flagging it weird this committee has become increasingly conscious of toxic exposures that are pervasive microplastics may be yet another flavor of that yes and Senator I mean part of the point there again is that you're talking about the fact that they may pick up other toxins that are just in the environment just as dust does in our airborne environment now children who are touching surfaces that may have dust you're not just worried about the dust you're worried about the toxic chemicals that are hitching a ride on that dust same would be true of these microplastics that are in the environment and just one last example I know you've got another witness who's actually the author of that report Senator that I think is up next that you'll hear from on the phone so you should ask her about that report from 1990 but we're about to release some information about plastic beads for instance Mardi Gras made of plastic largely single use plastic items as well that contain significant quantities of brominated flame retardants lead and a host of other toxic chemicals and in fact in New Orleans along the parade groups there for Mardi Gras they have found a significantly level of lead right along the parade group because of these beads that ultimately drop to the ground get crushed and leave high levels of lead there too thanks very much really there's a lot more to learn thank you for helping us get started thank you we're going to she's on the phone good morning is this Judith Aink good morning good morning I can barely hear you good morning my name is Chris Bray of chair and athlete I'm on the speakerphone in our committee room and we are just introducing a single use plastics bill so straws bags polystyrene containers etc and where this is a first look at the bill and we're trying to create some context for the entire discussion including why this is a useful thing for us to do for ourselves good morning Judith good morning I can hear you all much better now thank you should we just go around the room so Judith has a sense she's a colleague of mine at Fettington college good morning Judith good morning Senator Mark McDonald on Chris Bray Cory Karen Franklin great so the floor is yours great thank you all Senators it's a real honor to be speaking with you and I'm so impressed with your bill and really applaud you for focusing on this issue which is so important on many levels just quick on my background I began working on environmental issues a little over 30 years ago although it just feels like yesterday I began working in the environmental community public interest research group New York Perg I then helped senior positions in the New York Attorney General's Office Deputy Secretary for the Environment in the New York Governor's Office and most recently served in the Obama Administration as regional administrator for EPA Region 2 I'm now teaching at Bennington college delighted to have Senator Campion as a colleague and I want to offer an open invitation for any of you to come to Bennington college and sit in on one of my classes and I think the most inspiring thing you'll see is a large number of young people who are really paying attention to this issue if you haven't take a look at National Geographic the cover story in June 2018 it does a really good job of laying out the urgency of this issue what it didn't deal with however is that plastic pollution is also a climate change issue because plastic are made from fossil fuels for a year made from oil and chemicals now it's made from chemicals and ethanol a waste product from hydrofracking I think we all need to do everything we can to deal with a climate change issue I'm sure you know of the UN report the scientists who alerted us that unless we dramatically reduce carbon emissions we'll be facing catastrophic climate change in just 12 years so the climate changes are important but also the water quality issues unfortunately we're turning our oceans into uncommitted landfill and few people understand the scope of the problem I'm starting to call it the silence emergency every year about 8 million tons of plastic enter the ocean 80% of that waste comes from land sources so when I first heard the statistics I thought is there all sorts of illegal dumping out in sea by boats but that is not the issue at all the issue is plastic waste that goes off of city streets and washes off of beaches and I want you to imagine it this way let's say a plastic bag gets through it's littered into a river goes through a sewage treatment plant it eventually makes its way to the ocean it doesn't exist just as one plastic bag what happens is the wave action in the sunlight has an effect like a paper shredder so that one plastic bag can be cut into hundreds of different little pieces of plastic that don't easily degrade and then become available to everything in the sea fish, turtles, seabirds and eventually humans the United Nations has documented 663 species are impacted by plastic pollution and unfortunately the problem is just getting worse more than half of all plastic ever created was produced just in the past 15 years and the generation of plastic is expected to double in the next 20 years and that's largely due to the use of ethylene the byproduct of hydrofracking so it feels like this is a window in time you know we don't have a lot of time to get ahead of this but we all have to do something scientists have told us that in the next decade for every three pounds of fish there will be one pound of plastic just think of that for a moment three pounds of fish, one pound of plastic and that plastic is going to be very small and available in the environment scientists also tell us that by 2050 there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish so what are we going to do one thing I want to emphasize is we cannot recycle our way out of the problem only about 90% of plastic are recycled so that 91% are not we're not likely to see action at the several level so it's really up to local governments and state governments to act I recently had the opportunity to attend a meeting of the Benton County Solid Waste Alliance which represents local governments and talk to them about local laws to reduce plastic pollution and there was I say life for an interest in general support for that but almost every local government respirer said this is something that the state needs to act on but it's too hard for us to tackle locally not sure I'm on board with that but I wanted to convey that message I'm not against all plastic, I think plastic is used in medical devices which is important and car bumpers that make cars lighter and use less gasoline but medical devices and car bumpers are not what you see littering our streets and our wetlands and our forests and our roadways what you do see consistently plastic bottles food packaging straws cigarette butts those filters contain plastic and then of course plastic pollutants I don't think behavior change is enough I applaud people who take individual action to reduce their plastic footprint and some stores are really stepping up but we really need laws to reduce plastic pollution. One that is very comprehensive and on the books there's moments with each New Jersey I'm very interested in your bill which I'm calling the plastic trifecta because you're dealing with a big free of straws, polystyrene and bags and I just have a couple quick comments on your bill and then I'll wrap up. Thank you. I looked at the New Jersey bill back in the fall as a prequel to getting this drafted so we're building on what others have figured out. Yeah I can see that at the far end. It's kind of intellectual recycling. So just a few real quick comments and then I'll wrap up on the bill. One is the idea to have a working group not sure you need that but if you do I would give it a charge to do public education and real retailer education on all free parts of your bill. Not just bad. And I would also add some environmental voices to the prestigious group that you identified and they got the committee. On page three of your bill your definition of store 1002 of retail I would just delete that and have all stores covered by the provisions of the bill also on page three and I think this is the most important recommendation I have which is definitely ban plastic bags but you should consider putting a fee on paper bags because we don't put a fee on paper bags what happens is most consumers shift from plastic to paper and do not embrace reusable bags which from a sustainability perspective is what we really need I've also been talking to some stores about what they think of the various bag proposals and one supermarket had some experience with the boroughs amongst bag law which is simply a plastic bag ban and no fee on paper and their experience was that 85% of their customers shifted from plastic to paper and not to reusable so it's a missed opportunity and then for the stores paper bags are more expensive than plastic bags so they're their best about added cost when you see a shift like that on page 4 of the bill draws upon request I would add a signage requirement ask your Vermont agency of natural resources to provide a template to retailers and restaurants so they can just put up a very clear sign that says if you have a physical disability or a medical condition you can request a plastic fraud and my final point second to last point is the civil penalty on page 4 being a little low to me you might want to bump up a bit and then on page 5 the effective date of July 1, 2020 I think one year is more than enough time to prepare so you might want to just have the effective date be one year from the time the governor hopefully signed the bill into law that's all I've got happy to take any questions and also very happy to continue the conversation and serve as a resource for senators and staff on some of the textile issues related to plastic pollution great, well that's very helpful thank you and thank you for offering up some edits in some of those cases there are things that others have flagged and some that I was flagging on our walk through to say there's someone arbitrary like the thousands square feet you know, let's come back and revisit that I do have a question about I don't know if this is outside your Bailey whip or not or maybe you can just tell us there are resources available have we figured out what the health impacts are of plastic really microplastics of living things not completely I'm happy to send you a very interesting report that just came out last week entitled plastic and health that didn't cost of a plastic planet it was by the Center for International Environmental Law and others and what that report and other information has told us is that it's not good to breathe in plastic or eat plastic there's been some recent limited studies I know this looks a little yucky but it was a study of human stool samples and all of the samples had plastic in them so we know that we're ingesting plastic food packaging is a major concern we know that plastic packaging also has toxic additives in fact the FDA says that plastic food additives are legally an additive and that chemicals migrate into food I mean I've looked at a number of the studies PSOA and urine samples plastic is in our body what we don't know with precision is what it is doing to us because there are so many different types of plastic and you're either breathing in or consuming with water or solid food especially seafood you're consuming some plastic there was an engineering study about two weeks ago that concluded that doctors are pretty much ready to say that it's impacting our digestive system but beyond that it's an area that is emerging I'm willing to go out on a limb I'm not a doctor but I'm willing to say I don't want to be consuming any plastic in my food for my beverages well thank you I have a quick question that I was thinking at there was because Massachusetts I think it's 80 something counts that's done plastic bands a group down there had created a spreadsheet with cells in it that you could edit your local population and they would give you figures greenhouse gas emissions for instance oh great but one of the surprises to me was that for I'm assuming that Vermonters don't behave all that differently than Massachusetts residents but if the model applies it suggests that Vermonters use roughly 332 million plastic bands here which was an Iowa I'd say and we spent about 13.3 million dollars buying already so they're not zero cost as we think about alternatives we want to make sure that we don't lose sight of the expense related to what we're currently doing yeah and nationwide only about 5.5 percent of plastic bands are recycled so what you'll hear from the manufacturers of plastic bands is the answer is recycling and I think on plastic bands and polystyrene and straws that should not a viable response we are fortunate about 345 local government nationwide have banned or put a fee on plastic bands but we can tease out some of that data and see what works and what doesn't work in my experience what works the best is banning plastic bands and putting a fee on paper so we get that shift to sustainability which we very much need and in terms of bringing your own bags to the store which I'm sure most of you do it's like the early days of recycling you know you just kind of get in the habit of doing it and it is no big deal does anyone have a question for who's that no thank you very much and if you could send along whatever resources you mentioned to the junior human our training assistant that's great we'll share them on our website and make sure many members have access to yeah I'll do that today thanks for the opportunity I hope we can continue the conversation yes well thank you as I mentioned we're just getting started so I'm thinking we'll sleep again terrific yeah this is so important please take with it the more I read about the health effects the more I am inspired to try to get laws like yours on the books because there's just a range of issues here and we need to scale it up and we need to move fast so a statewide approach is terrific thank you thanks again have a good day you too let's take a quick temperature check of the committee in terms of in general are people for this work I'm sort of shocked to say at least in more way yeah yeah no I just wanted to touch base I hope that was a bit interesting because I am too thanks so thank you and tonight I'd like to invite Mr. Warling from my mom's hometown I could plug it in morning so thanks so much for making a trip up I said we'd be through by phone and I really appreciate you being here I'm just showing the person who just helped us have a better conversation so part of the reason there's a delay in this bill and a working group to learn from this panel it was all inspired by conversations I had with the press that are about Brownville's program okay impression I got was that part of its success was based on a sense of local ownership and development and moving to think forward I don't know if that's true or not so we're here to learn from what you all have done sure so if you'd like I could take a few minutes talk about the history and how we came to pass local ordinance talk a little bit about what it's like to implement the ordinance what it's like to enforce the ordinance and maybe some sort of general things that we've learned along the way and then take some questions is that fair so this is an interesting story in effect you can trace it back to the efforts of really one citizen gentlemen by the name of Dr. Tim Masiel and Dr. Masiel approached the Brownville Select Board in the fall of 2016 and said plastics are a nuisance in our community and a danger and a threat to the world we need to do something about it and the select board at that time MD or I'm trying to get a sense of this was I know him to be an educator he was a teacher at SIT what his background was I don't really know I refer to him as Dr. Masiel anyhow so the board at that time considered the request and decided that it really wasn't about overseeing the functions of the municipality but really about how we lived together as a community and so they wanted to hear from the public Dr. Masiel and some other advocates gathered signatures they put an article on the warning for town meeting in March of 2017 and the public had their say the measure passed overwhelmingly in about a two to one vote and so following that vote they came back to the select board and they said well you know what shall we do now and the select board asked the town attorney and staff to take a look at the matter being a a Dillon's rule state we started by examining our authority and we rested our authority to take action on this on two positions one there's a component of our charter that empowers the select board to regulate solid waste and there's a provision a secondary provision in title 24 which empowers the select board to identify public nuisance and to take actions to remedy those and so feeling that we were on a firm footing we began to research existing bands in other states and as the last college said there are numerous examples in Massachusetts but there's other examples in California and Texas and in fact in Europe and after reading dozens and dozens of different ordinances and laws we began to recognize that they falled into one of three categories one which was not a ban at all but rather just required retailers to put a fee on any bag that they provide no matter what its composition or makeup that was very successful I'm told in Ireland particularly in promoting the use of reusable bags there's a ban of course which is nice because it is a clear and decisive message that we've had enough of excessive plastics in our community and we want to put an end to that downside of the ban can be if you define where a reusable bag starts and where a single use bag ends retailers can take action to just increase the density of the plastic in their bag and in effect you may increase the volume of plastic in your community rather than decrease it I think that was an experience that Austin, Texas found so does that mean that if you make the single use of a lot of very thin if you make them thicker so I might say it will not be reusable or more than being handed out so you'll notice and I brought along copies of our ordinance and some supporting documentation we define a reusable a bag becomes reusable at 2.25 mils so if it's thicker than that it's considered to be a reusable bag if it's less thick than that then it's considered to be single use and that's the same standard state of California used and then the third approach that we found was just sort of a hybrid putting a ban on single use plastic bags but then also putting a fee on the remaining sources and I think your last caller was sort of advocating for that position as well ultimately what our board chose to do was to adopt a straight ban because they felt that that was most responsive to the expressed wishes of the public the public had voted in favor of a ban so a ban they would have that ordinance was passed probably in the late fall of 2017 not to go into effect until July 1st of 2018 that was initially a little difficult for the advocates for the ban but I think it was critically important to the success in that having six or seven months gave us the opportunity to get the word out it gave us the opportunity to reach out to each of the retail establishments in town make sure they were aware of it answering questions they might have it gave us plenty of opportunity to make sure that the adequate press coverage of the transition you know in our experience we have made a number of substantive changes that will have an impact on lots of people when we implemented pay as you throw when we transition to every other week trash collection when we began curbside organics collection each of these had an impact on large numbers of people and in order to ensure success we believe really strongly in plenty of advanced notice the public is capable of great change but they like to know about it ahead of time can I just check to make sure I got those dates right so March 2017 you had the vote about moving ahead with something and then you proposed council proposed a ban in fall of 2017 that passes and then the effective date was July 2018 so we had six or seven months there to get the word out so the ban was also put to a vote once you had come up with a proposal it was put to a vote by the select board in the proper method to pass an ordinance so it had multiple hearings I'm sorry the town vote said go ahead and figure this out with the actual exact so July one rolls around 2018 we've had months to be able to communicate this message to the public and to the retailers and I would say the other component that helped us to be very successful was just how dramatically how quickly how on top of it are two major supermarkets that being Hanifords and Market32 or Price Chopper I'm not sure whether it was in support of but on June 30th they were giving away plastic bags on July 1st they were not and they just turned off the time and their leadership I'm sure had an impact on many other small retail establishments to say gosh you know I guess you know the times they are changing they turned on the time so those Hanifords and and it's called Market32 today Price Chopper it's right on Canal Street and each of them were just fantastic about the transition not a big deal yeah so in terms of enforcement this falls amongst a number of ordinances that we have that it's not a responsibility we put out to the police it's we don't have a code enforcement officer who's out inspecting and knocking on doors and looking at bags what we do have though are thousands of citizens and they're shopping and eating at restaurants and retail establishments and in the first six months they would call and they'd say hey you need to check in with those folks over there and I do just that stop in introduce myself walk them through the ordinance usually what I found was the company itself we're not talking about policing oh jeez there's Marge she's on the street with the plastic bag no no no you got a call from a customer who said I was just shopping at wherever they're still using the plastic bags didn't we have that ordinance and didn't that apply to everybody sure stop in and usually what you would find is either a business owner or a store manager who lived out of town maybe hadn't heard about it maybe they had doesn't really matter you walk them through the ordinance and indicate to them the types of bags that would be acceptable paper, biodegradable bags reusable plastic bags and ordinarily I would say something to the effect of when I come back and see in a couple weeks and we'll see what you come up with invariably you'd get a call within a day sometimes the same day I've been in touch with my bag provider supplier we've come up with another option it'll be here Friday we're good and I think because of that the transition has been pretty really pretty painless I will say in addition to one of the things the caller mentioned one of the two supermarkets Hannaford's in fact started charging for paper bags not long after the transition and our ordinance doesn't speak to that but it's certainly something that they're free to do I think it's a nickel I think they're charging a nickel and you know I there's a whole lot more I think concern about these transitions than is necessary people are capable of great change and just speaking for myself you got to remember to throw some of these reusable bags in your car but it's not that big a deal and by and large the community turned changed quickly and it's the new normal did the town adopt a brown row recycling bag or something like that I know some folks in Middlebury for instance are saying they're having a design competition students are participating in the design of the Middlebury recyclable bag the town was not involved in anything like that the local downtown organization tried to initiate a sort of like a give-up-any-take-up-any kind of a thing they produced I'm not sure what quantity several thousand I think reusable shopping bags and distributed them around town with the idea that there'd always be one in a retail establishment I think in the end people just took possession of them and kept them in their use but the town didn't play any particular role in that did you have any feedback from your crash haulers or the solid waste district did you hear anything about impacts of the switch you know I really haven't I sit on the local solid waste board I really haven't heard anything from them in terms of impacts but you know it's not hard to recognize we have two busy supermarkets in a community of 12,000 people that serves the surrounding towns just those two businesses right there accounted for a great deal of plastic the exact volume of which I don't know but it's no longer being distributed in our community and it's no longer as likely to be blowing down the street off the trees on the side of the river clogging up stormwater drains or any other nuisance activity that it has been before the only surprise I would say is just how it hasn't been all that challenging right the large retailers are prepared for this they've dealt with it elsewhere and so I think for them you know you just move out of this column and you're in that column you're one of those types of towns and I think you know before too long it's going to be universal whether it's done statewide or it's pretty clear having used a reusable bag for a while that you just don't need to be consuming this single use plastic anymore it's not that hard so did most stores now sell reusable plastic bags just as part of making sure that there's an alternative available to customers who forgot or just were in the stages of making the switch there's a variety of responses some provide reusable plastic others provide paper I haven't seen any provide compostable but we provided in our ordinance for that we've got a curbside organic collection program in downtown and a local waste district as a fairly good size composting program and so some hope was that by providing for compostable bags you know there could be a a new waste stream for that I know that would be one of those things but it's a working group or not to dig into sometimes compostable things in the real world they don't end up composting because the conditions aren't right I don't know if they're a viable alternative or maybe there are many types of compostable bags in Brattleboro I think it's a viable alternative because of the curbside organic collection that may not be the case elsewhere in the state and you can mention a couple of adjustments so are there small hiccups that you had to correct but not much it really hasn't been too much of a challenge like I say there's been maybe a dozen or fifteen businesses that someone would call and say you need to go talk to these folks and in working with each of them they've been I think particularly after witnessing what the big supermarkets their transition everybody all the smaller retail establishments just got along with the program hasn't been too many hiccups I think plenty of public notice I might need to refresh my memory with that I haven't had any to use any we haven't issued any in making a transition like this particularly in the first six months compliance is really what's important and not penalizing folks so you walk in you meet with a retailer and they say my goodness I didn't know let me take steps to correct that there's no need to go down in enforcement action I believe we can I believe it's up to a hundred dollars a day but I should probably double check that penalties in enforcement looks like fifty dollars for the first and then a hundred so I haven't found it we haven't found it to be necessary yeah any questions Mr. Moreau I appreciate you coming up it's a copy of our ordinance oh absolutely background materials I'll have you set electronic copies of that I did I believe did you receive it I did I'll send it again when I get back to the office we'll check I appreciate everything we've received with what on our website people can't make it keep up excuse me there's anything we can do to help we're here you are a model so far wish you luck thank you so committee we're going to change gears we have a quick test money in the even out in the room so if we reconvene up there in five minutes that's because we need you great I'm John Adams director Vermont Center for Geographic Information here with some information about impervious surface and parcel data and data needs related to any potential or possible impervious surface fee any water so for explanation since before we made that determination we're not sending revenue down the hall in five minutes we've scheduled Mr. Adams to come in and even though we're not tasked with that or even looking at it there may well be discussions about it and I thought it would be just useful to understand what's available limitations etc so that people don't worry that we're trying to add a parcel fee to our bill in the next 24 hours I want to explain thank you and I'll give you an overview and talk to you about the status of different data sets involved with it things that if you were to pursue such a strategy you should be aware of or that you want to consider so we'll start off with impervious surface and parcel data and essentially how we get there or how we map it in the state so we'll start with impervious surface so the way essentially it works is we take our imagery our orthorectified imagery and our LiDAR data and I'll explain what that is in a moment if you don't are familiar with it we work with the UVM Spatial Analysis Lab who are leaders in the country and actually working with this and they using some various algorithms can derive very high resolution impervious surface data which we have our first draft of and we'll be getting our second draft of in a month or so and then with that we also have statewide parcel data which we've been working on and our target date for completion of that is January of 2020 so with those two core data sets you have a foundation from which to work with to potentially use in different impervious surface or parcel related fees quick question you were mentioning impervious surface maps and you have high resolution so at what level of detail can you see like to the meter at foot so I'll walk you through that in detail with these slides here so just start off with a quick explanation of what LiDAR is in case you aren't familiar with it how many of you are familiar with with LiDAR alright it's pretty good so I can go over this quickly then we essentially have we have planes that sensors that send out laser pulses that come back with points with exact locations on the earth and you can see here they'll hit the tops of trees and come back and we call it the first return until they hit a solid surface on the earth and then we call that the final return and with that we get a point cloud so you can see this is like a tree on a hill here that you're looking at here's an example of a point cloud of a national light and you can see the state house in the background so this is sort of what the raw point cloud looks like from that we can take using a number of different algorithms we can create derivatives so we can sort of strip off all the trees in the buildings and have what we call a bare earth model or digital elevation model which is very practical for modeling hydrology and a lot of other uses and that's what we can also use for modeling or mapping out impervious surface to give you a sense of the how far we've come in terms of resolution I'm not used to this transitioning transitioning slides so a few years ago we were at 30 meter resolution digital elevation model today we've come down to 0.7 meters so this gives you a sense of where we are in terms of how far we've come in the past decade or so so spatial analysis lab takes this information this is the digital surface model this is our color infrared imagery they run their models on it and this is an example of some of the high resolution lane cover data that they've supplied us with and you'll notice in some areas you'll have some trees over some roads which we actually have we have trees over impervious surfaces so we have to what the spatial analysis lab has done is derive just impervious surface and a separate lane cover layer so we're looking at two dimensions looking top down and then we have the impervious surface managed as a separate layer once we have that parcel data on top the parcel data is linked to the grand list so we have property owner information and from that you can then assign various values that run different kinds of analyses to determine how much impervious surface is on a parcel so for impervious surface our first draft is complete we hope to have second draft within the next month if you have a few numbers about it there's an estimated 142,000 acres of impervious mostly our 85% of it is from roads or spaces sort of associated with automobiles 14% from buildings 1% from railroads this pie chart here can be a little bit confusing but what we did was we took the category of parcel in the grand list so an assessor in a category residential commercial woodland etc to a parcel so we said okay we took all the impervious surface and said what percentage is on what kind of parcel so that doesn't necessarily represent you look at it and you say why is 5% impervious surface on woodland it's because most of Vermont is actually woodland and it has roads on it so that's the category of parcel and what the breakdown is about a third is on residential you know 37% on right of way 10% or 11% commercial and that's the breakdown based on the draft data that we have so far 14% on buildings does that include associated parking or that's the buildings themselves that is the buildings themselves so the the parking areas would be captured by that 85% a couple things to be aware of in terms of ongoing maintenance so if there was to be some kind of impervious surface related fee we'd have to determine how much how frequently would it need to be updated right and right now we collect imagery on a 5 year cycle for the state so if the idea was well if updating it on a 5 year cycle is okay well we can use the data we have now otherwise we would need another data source to make those updates from and that could be from a number of different places there is no sort of universal or statewide kind of permit review that you could draw in permit documents to update this from so it would likely need to be from ortho imagery you know there's been questions about can you use drones to do this drones are great for small areas and maybe you could use them for targeted areas but right now it's not economical to do on a statewide basis so that's just one question you know how frequently do we need to update it and from that you can narrow down like where what your best option is it's also a place where the technology just very very rapidly every few months so it is now possible to use lower resolution imagery to come up with extract some of that information but some of it comes down to like how accurate and how high a resolution does it need to be we're starting from a baseline now we'll have half meter resolution um that should be the highest resolution plan cover in the country when we're done so I'm excited about that what's the source of your ortho photography commercial or so the state owns it we fly our ortho imagery on a five-year cycle and we contract with vendors to fly in those five-year cycles is it planes or satellites? it's planes it is planes although it's becoming more likely that in the future it's possible to get higher resolution imagery from satellites but right now planes are the source um few other things to think about so what qualifies as impervious surface if you were to say come up with a definition that includes things like porous concrete or if you decide you want some things that can be really challenging we've mapped out over a million polygons using these automated processes and that captures what it captures and if you start changing it and we can't automate that it could become very expensive really very intensive to try to manually account for it if not impossible um and then another big thing is who is the what is the authoritative source um this isn't perfect so who gets to decide who gets to appeal if something is or isn't impervious surface what is the process and who is in charge of it should be sort of clearly defined and explained and that could be a big component of whatever administering this type of view would be I'll move over to talking about data a bit now so our goal is to have complete statewide coverage by January 2020 so that would be parcel data for every municipality in the state that we can link to the grand list a few notes about ongoing maintenance there many municipalities currently do not update their parcel data on a regular basis and the data required to update it is primarily available in paper format in the municipal land records we are working with the statewide parcel advisory board to come up with a program to keep that updated on a more regular basis but that's still a work in progress to be aware of the other big thing I think to recognize is um so parcel data is very tremendously I think in terms of quality um and these are not surveys right we're dealing with a fairly old land records management system putting together a lot of old things to come up with this index and so this is an example uh you see what looks like a right of way or what could be a road parcel and then you have the impervious surface which is almost completely out of it this is just sort of a random area I grabbed and happened to have these examples here you can see the road going out of it uh outside of where the parcel lines are and it may very well be that um the um the parcel lines aren't drawn in the exactly the right place or it might actually be that they are drawn in the right place but that the road happens to not be uh within the you know parcel where people believe so parcel data is as much an art as it is a science in Vermont and um it is not perfect so if you were to think about applying a fiat of very fine resolution you can imagine there would be some uh challenges there um also the way municipalities manage their grand lists varies quite a bit and how they categorize things and classify them when we add up the acreage of this is the acreage or the square miles uh in Vermont uh when you add up the the area that's uh accounted for in the grand list we're missing uh close to 900 square miles which is about two lamoille counties are accounted for so just to give you a sense of this is just to get if we this is gonna come to finance this proposal possibly or we might talk about it I know you've been talking in ways it means to do this it it sounds like it would almost be impossible to actually fairly put a fee and track the various service groups um do it accurately do it fairly um maybe you just you can't take a position on that I mean the information that's what I'm reading it as but the same problem with flood zones yeah I guess I'm just saying here's the state of the information and things you should be aware of right there may be a way to do it so that it's you know more fairs but I think it's important to recognize that there are a lot of limitations the problem does exist with floodways and flood zones and the federal government's maps about um on which insurance rates are based as similar inaccuracies um I mean our current grand list is based on this so sometimes we live with these problems it's evolved over time you know over a long period of time if you were to just implement it just like that there would be you know it wouldn't be easy okay um um so I think this covers some of those things can you explain for a second 30 year what I'm just trying to figure out what that meant oh yes so um the the statewide parcel project essentially was we broke up the state uh into the years roughly and um we are in we're finishing up the second year now and we have the third year municipalities uh starting I think in a month or two for their mapping um so lots of differences in terms of quality of the parcel data how municipalities manage their grand lists uh things like unlanded parcels you can imagine condominiums sometimes some have them as just a postage stamp others will assign like the greater uh acreage of the uh common land so you'll have all of these condos with the same acreage so you can just think about if we're for coming up with a system those things have to be accounted for dialed in and and they're going to be different uh across municipalities um I mean that's it unlanded parcels again so unlanded parcels would be parcels that uh would have like a zero acreage potentially in the grand list you'd think of um could be condominiums sometimes uh mobile homes for examples uh that they have a span number of parcels or tax but they don't have land associated with them and municipalities deal with these in different ways um when you were starting you alluded to the fact that people are discussing how these might or might not be used um clean water funding and revenue proposal stuff like that so I know it's a charged topic and it's not somewhere charged with solving in here but uh have you uh to the question of you know the missing whatever it was in here in 53 square miles have you seen models elsewhere that are probably dealing with similar issues that somehow someone said okay we can we use approximations or we bend or we round down it seems like there'll be ways to work with inaccuracies to come up with a solution that might be workable you've seen things like that elsewhere well if you look at south burlington for example I think they've just decided not to deal with residential parcels uh just focus on a subset or commercial parcels um you know I think Maryland has done a lot um with regards to uh stormwater and previous surface fee um and I don't I'm not very familiar with uh specifics of it but I believe some of them have more involved programs where you have a whole credit system where if someone does certain things to offset them that gets tracked so it's it's a fairly robust uh program a lot of places also have much better um are starting from much better um parcel data situations because a couple hundred years ago they decided to go a different route than Vermont and they belong to what's called the public land survey system so where they have a nice grid and they've been surveying things for a few hundred years now and we were one of fourteen states that decided not to join that system so uh and and I think this project we're moving towards uh great improvements um but others some other states maybe are from a starting from a better place than we are we'll have some of the best we'll have some of the best impervious surface data in the country we probably have uh we can't say the same about parcel data but we're doing what we can to bring it up um if we never used it for impervious surface uh for any kind of revenue thing the data has value in itself so I'm not revenue based on the impervious surface so so are you is ANR sort of a client of the center in terms of you're helping them figure out impervious surface or V-trans or how do you forgetting all this revenue stuff how are you working with other agencies now and how are they using our data well primarily part part of our role is capturing it and serving it out in a way that all these agencies and different people can use it but for one one example of how we're using it for the building footprints for example uh working with E911 so looking at their E911 points and if we have a building and we don't have an address there then you know why not then we that gets us to has that has them look into did they miss something they include that we then use that information to help us with the um census master address file which once every 10 years we get a small window which they give us their address file and we can update in preparation for the 2020 census uh making sure that we get um an accurate account for the 2020 census is critical given the amount of federal funding that's dependent on those counts so um that's just one example of where the state has more than paid for itself in terms of its utility can you go back to this chart the pie chart that have attempted to allocate maybe a certain way to the various and services that were attributed to different uh it's just escape out of here so what's that farm where it says farm free um right so farms 3.4 percent so of all the impervious surface uh and I should clarify this for 107 municipalities that we have parcel data for so of those we said what percentage of impervious is on what kind of parcel should it be like farm roads farm roads farm roads same with uh you know commercial instead mostly parking lots there or parking lots and roofs well most of all impervious surfaces roads and parking lots on all of these types of uses the exception of railroads of course and uh and the the road up there that's the roadway itself not the right of way on either side right it's not the parcel it's like we can differentiate between um building road and other impervious surface we have 3 sort of classes of impervious so we've got we just eliminated all odd numbered roads we could cut our impervious surfaces in half hahahaha you know thank you any other questions for Mr. Adams good stuff yeah thank you very much you know I have a funding question so I um sometimes I just are you fully funded and are there a single one-time dollars driving some of this work and it seems as though there's a lot of value in this work and that it's been it's taken years to develop and then it needs to be maintained so um I'm just trying to check in and see if you can say whether or not your funding is steady and sustainable and if there's any sort of precariousness about it so we are funded we have a number of different funding sources that the center draws from including the um municipal and regional planning fund that comes from the property transfer tax um the parcel data program is funded through primarily through federal highway dollars we trans as well as partnership between seven other agencies who contribute to the match um and then the impervious surface was uh and um land cover data was funded through a partnership of a variety of different funding sources the Lake Champlain Basin actually uh started the work by covering Lake Champlain Basin and doing the uh land cover there which dramatically reduced the cost for us to sort of do the add on and do the rest of the state um that was a one time funded project we don't use any of that for our operational funds that goes purely towards contracting so if this was to be maintained over time we would need to have we're starting to explore what long term maintenance of this could look like could there be different stewards who take take it on we're focused on getting it done getting it done first then having a good baseline of the permissory but thank you again I'll send him a notice is there any measure of tilled land it's plowed and uprooted um so so we'll have about 16 different land cover classes tilled land isn't a class but we'll have you know grassland we'll have um drawing a blank on a lot of our other ones grassland is cultivated it's crop land but it's not necessarily we'll have crop land we'll have you know barren land we'll have and some of those will um there's a greater margin of error than other land classes and we're still figuring figuring that out wetlands for example is one that is trickier it's all them tilled but also uh you know we can we can tell you certain types of classes with a certain amount of accuracy and others are trickier I don't know if that answers your question but that brings it in a little bit yeah thanks so thank you once again so Kenny we are done for the day and I'm sure no


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And yeah, welcome to my talk about dependence logic with a majority quantifier. And this is a joint work with Arnaud Durand, you are Continent and Harry Belfoymer. At first, I will give you an introduction about dependence logic. And I will also give a notion for dependence logic. And then I will introduce the majority quantifier. And also we'll give reason why we investigate this. And then on the other hand side, on the second order side, we will see the so-called most quantifier and the counting hierarchy. And then in the main result, we have shown in the paper that second order logic with that most quantifier is equivalent to dependence logic with that majority quantifier. And then I'll conclude. Okay, the motivation for dependence logic is characterizing the dependencies between variables. So in first order logic, you see that dependencies of variables can only expressed from left to right, so to speak. So here we can see that y2 depends on x2 and x1 and everything that is before. But we cannot say that y2 is independent of what is before, so that it does only depend on x2. That's not possible here. So therefore I have, therefore in 1961, Hankin introduced this quantifier, which is like a matrix. And that means that this y1 does depend on the x1. And y2 does depend on the x2. But the y1 does not depend on the x2. And the y2 does not depend on the x1. And in 1989, Hintika and Sando introduced this independence friendly logic with that slash quantifier here. And that means that the y2 is independent of x1 and y1. And here we explicitly say from which a variable is independent from. And then in 2007, Yokovenen introduced the dependence logic where we have this new operator called dependence atom. And it says that the x2 determines y2. So that means y2 does only depend on x2. And here we explicitly say that where a variable is dependent from and not where it's independent from. Okay, first order logic extends ordinary, sorry, dependence logic extends ordinary first order logic. And dependencies have been studied in computer science. And they've gotten more and more important. And for example, in database systems, yeah, with dependence logic, we can express dependencies explicitly in this, this is what we want. And we obtain the dependence logic just by adding this dependence atom to first order logic. And that means that we have a function from the vector t1 to tn minus 1, 2, tn. The dependence atom here is satisfied if there is a function from here from the n minus 1 t to tn. And it's known that dependence logic is the same as existential second order logic. And in terms of complexity, it captures the complexity class of NP. Okay, the semantics of dependence logic are based on the concepts of teams. And the team is defined as follows. A team of this domain of the structure is a set of assignments. And assignment is just a function that maps for each variable a value.  So for example, we have for an x from the domain and for a function we define the extension where we add a column to the team. If you imagine a team as a tabular, then we add a column to the team. And we map every assignment to a new value. And here we blow up the team. So we make copies of every assignment. And then we fill in the new column that every value from the domain. So I will present that in an example that makes it more clear. We need those extensions for defining the existential and the universal quantifiers on teams, on team semantics. Okay, then the dependence atom itself is defined as follows. It on a structure A and the team X, it is satisfied if and only if. For two assignments S and S prime. When the values of the first n minus one variables are equal in S and S prime, then it has to hold that the values of the nth variable has also be equal in S and S prime. Okay, here's an example for the dependence atom. This is a team. So these are the assignments. S1 is an assignment and S2 is an assignment. And here we can say, for example, it holds that X1 determines X2, because if we check this by the semantics, then we'll see that the values in S1 and S2 for X1 are not equal. So the values for X2 don't have to be equal. They are anyways, but they don't have to. And we cannot say that X3 is dependent on X2, because here in X2, we see these values are equal. And in X3, it would follow from the semantics. And in X3, they also would have to be equal and they are not. Here's the extension of the team where we add a column X4 and we have a function that maps S1 to 2 and there's 2 to 1. And we just add this team that's meant by X extended by F to X4. Okay, and the semantics then of the existential and the universal quantifier is defined in such a way that we say on a structure A and a team X, there exists an X phi is true if and only if for some functions, for some function, A models on the extended team that phi. So there is where this existential quantifier is used. So we say here there exists a function. And the for all quantifier is just defined very similar that we say A models for all X phi, if and only if it models the phi on the blown up team where we set in every value from the domain. So there's this for all. So here we have a formula and as you can imagine this formula is always true because we can always find the value for X4 such that it's true. And yeah, we try to extend this team. And for example, we have to fill in here equal values because they have been equal here. So they have to be equal here and then this formula is true. This is the existential quantifier and for the universal quantifier. Let's say that we have a co-domain of 0, 1 and 2. And here we have to speak about this A because we have to try every value from A. So I have to give it explicitly.  So you see that S1 prime, S1 prime prime are just copies in the values of X1 to X3 of the first one. And S2 prime and S2 prime prime are also copies in the first three values. And then in the fourth column I just fill in every possible value from the domain 0, 1 and 2. So that is the for all quantifier. Then I'll introduce dependence logic with a majority quantifier. And the semantics of this majority quantifier is that we say for a model and a team it holds that the majority of X satisfies phi of X if and only if for at least half of the possible functions going from X to A. It holds that the extension satisfies phi. So A to the X is the number of all possible functions from X to A. And we say here for at least half of them. So that means majority. And yes, with that M quantifier we add the capability of counting through the logic. Counting is something very interesting in logic and in computational complexity. And since it's known that second order with that most quantifier is equivalent to the counting hierarchy, which I'll introduce later. And it's known that dependence logic is the same as existential second order logic. We can or it's worth investigating whether this majority quantifier maybe raises the expressive power of dependence logic in a way such that it's equivalent to a second order most and the counting hierarchy. Okay, the majority quantifier. Here we have a structure with a domain 0, 1, 2, 3 and this team. And then we want to investigate whether this formula holds or not. Yeah, intuitively one would say it does hold because you can imagine more functions where X3 is not equal to X2. But then we count the number of all functions that we can extend the team with and these are a to X that's 64 functions. And then we count the number of functions that extend the team in a way such that X2 is not equal to X3 is satisfied. And here we have to say that this is only satisfied if none of the values occurring then here in the new column is equal to 0. So we have only three possible values that can extend here for satisfying X2 is not equal to X3. And then we have 3 to the 3, so 27 functions that satisfy X2 is not equal to X3. And so this does not hold. And the point is that the converse does not hold either. So the law of excluded middle does not hold here, but it didn't hold on dependence logic. So why should it here? Okay, and on the second order logic side we define the most K quantifier where we have a structure and a domain and this most K quantifier binds a K or a relation symbol. And it's true if and only if we count the possible relations for phi and if at least half of them satisfy phi then the most quantifier is satisfied. So 2 to the n to the k is the number of all possible relations which I can apply here and we say at least half of them have to satisfy phi. Okay, accounting hierarchy, that's the analog to the polynomial hierarchy and as a building block we don't use NP but we use PP and the class PP consists of all those languages for which there is a P-time Turing machine such that X is an L if and only if for more than half of the computation path of N they accept X. So here again there's this more than half hidden in it and then the accounting hierarchy is defined just like the polynomial hierarchy where we have C0 of P is just P and then the k plus 1th level of P is just PP to the kth level and then the infinite union of all this is the accounting hierarchy. And then the main result of our paper is that we have shown that dependence logic with that majority quantifier is equal to second order with that most quantifier and it is known that this is then equal to the accounting hierarchy so we have also then shown that dependence logic with the majority quantifier is the same as the accounting hierarchy. And the idea behind this is we do an intermediate step we define quantifier called most kf which is similar to the most k quantifier but it's defined over functions and then we show that they are equivalent the logic's most second order most and second order most f because we can see the relations we have here we can see the relations as the pictures or the graphs of the functions we apply here. Okay, then we show that dm is equivalent to most f and the proof is technical and so I don't go into detail here. The quantifier most f is very analog defined as the most k quantifier again we have a structure here and then we say for most of the functions phi of g has to hold if and only if for at least half of them, half of the functions they satisfy phi. So n to the n to the k is the number of all functions and we say at least half of them have to satisfy phi. And yeah, this is the proposition where we show that the logic's are equivalent and yeah, our main result here is split up into two parts where we say for every dependence logic majority formula phi there is a sentence psi of second order most f such that they are equivalent where we encode the team here as a relation for the second order side and then the converse direction we say for every phi of second order most there is a sentence psi of dependence logic with that majority quantifier such that they are equivalent. Okay, concluding we can say that adding the majority quantifier increases the expressive power of dependence logic and still there are several open questions we have seen in the paper that dependence logic with without dependence atoms is not flat. Flat means that everything that's true on singleton assignments is also true on the union of those singleton assignments and dependence logic with a majority quantifier but without those dependence atoms is also not flat so that's the kind of first order majority, if you so to speak and what about this expressive power and then do the open formulas of dependence logic with a majority quantifier correspond to the downwards monotone properties of the counting hierarchy. We thought about that because in dependence logic it's the case that the downwards monotone properties that the open formulas correspond to the downwards monotone properties of NP which D is equivalent to. And finally but I think this is the most interesting point we have just defined one specific quantifier M there are many many ways to define other quantifiers not by majority but we can define those quantifiers in terms of Linnström quantifiers and what about extensions of D by other quantifiers that's I think the most important point. Okay, then that's it.