hi i'm nora the mayor of maplewood maplewood received a grant of one hundred eight thousand dollars from the minnesota state arts board for our kids city project we're collaborating with  and a multicultural artist team for after school and weekend arts workshops young people from diverse backgrounds come together to laugh learn play and create a stronger cross cultural community consider uses the arts to bridge cultural divides and to inspire kids citizens to revitalize maplewood on december nineteenth maplewood mall hosted a laugh lab with the puppets we bring children am their adults into the power of playfulness through the arts and we are working with the maplewood parks and rec department all year long to turn maplewood into kid a creative city revitalization project putting kids at the forefront but thanks to funding from the minnesota state arts board they're going to be doing  the last time you laughed and more kind of laughter was it was it a giggle was it a chuckle were due in hysteria there's all different types of laughter so the point of kid city is to take the power of playfulness and spark connections our crowd cultures and our crass generations so this is the beginning this is the launching point of kid city this laughter lab here in the spring working with  people in shaping the future of maple w the maplewood area historical society held the lecture with archaeologist jeremy nino at the maplewood library the group has been working on the fish creek neighborhood preserve the area contains important archaeological sites evidence of people making their home with their goes back twelve centuries to the woodland culture let's take a look at the lecture fish creek itself we're looking at a space come on in have a seat starting here at carver lake and going down crossing four ninety four it's been channelized in a lot of places goes through this part of the fish creek nature preserve you'll have a better map of than a second our site is generally about here and then it goes and ends in the mississippi river this whole space has not been overly developed luckily that didn't occur and actually there was a project that that spurred this archaeology work that we're talking about tonight that happened in two thousand and five where they were going to be doing a bunch of development and that project didn't happen and then a couple of years went by and now it's part of this larger preserved area so that's where we're located this map and you know it's got a lot of stuff going on with it focuses in a little bit you've got carver lake up in the upper right the mississippi river flows down here on the left and you've got several different properties owned by many different entities that all together make part of this fish creek greenway so you have the fish going through the whole entire area the places that were going to be developed as part of this two thousand and five project were these two locations here and the site that we're talking about tonight is at the very corner down here of area so we're going to be talking about some excavations that happened in two thousand and five by some environmental solution there a cultural source management firm that still operates in the twin cities they were doing archaeology work they found two different sites one right about there the other one down  the corner is this one down in the corner whose designation is twenty one are a fifty four that we're going to be talking about tonight all right so as i said in two thousand and five the area was part of a larger maplewood crossing's development it was going to be developed for housing project the landowner was a company called cope are and what happened is they because they were doing somewhat wind changes they had to get an army corps of engineers permit and that permit triggered a process that included archaeology a lot of archaeology today is not being done by academics a lot of archaeology gets done as a business and it is driven by environmental concerns or part of something called the national storage preservation act that thinks about cultural resources in the same way that we think about natural resources so when we have projects that either incur federal funding or have federal agencies involved with them archaeology gets done and so there are lots of different companies here in minnesota that do this as as a business and that's what this project was so for a couple of days in two thousand and five this company as some environmental solutions came out and did their work and they cover both areas eighteen b that you saw in that previous map and they've did find some archaeology in the past so that's that's how it got started and we had thirty members of the community there the first day we tried to answer that first question about does the site extend farther out so to do that we put in more of the shovel tests into these areas that we weren't able to test before and then the second day we wanted to answer the question about density how many objects we're talking about do they extend deeper below that plow zone so we put in a test you know we're going to watch a video here for a little bit i'm going to talk over the video min to turn the volume down and and most because it's me talking on the video and so as we double talking so i'm going to throw again you're digging a hole about the size of a toilet seat about thirty five to forty centimeters across with the spade you take it down about six to eight inches at a time to put into an archeological screen we have certainly screens a screen as quarter inch mash window screening in the bottom so we're collecting everything larger than a quarter of the size looking through a very meticulously that first day i mean it was hot they were doing sweat was pouring off of people you can see from the soil so a lot of these so you can see they're kind of reddish there are lots of of rock and things in this this part of minnesota is covered by glacial till part of something called the lobe and we have materials here that have been pushed down from portions of canada so we have lots of raw materials that have come from other places that are in this drift material and are going to see some examples of those and makes a nice cylindrical i asked them lots of questions like how much dirt is in the hole try to get them to do math and things there's no dirt in a hole that's the big in archaeology joke right when you're done you fill it in and then you take a lot of detailed notes which we had video going we had photography going we of course had normal schauble test information we did these tests about five meters apart from each other about fifteen feet in the pool and the plough zone area which had been mowed for us very nicely so we could get an idea of just how to do archaeology the first day so get oriented this site that was the first day of the second day we came back and we set a shaded area which was badly needed and so we basically dug a three foot by three foot square and we went down four inches at a time about ten centimeters at a time meticulously recording all the information everything we found we found lots of different things are going to see some pictures of those in just a little bit what's nice about having to dig a three foot by three foot square is a lot to look at the opportunity we do have different kinds of shovels for that work at four screens going at the same time lots of people got involved we had a video cameras out documenting that day so or so what i'm doing here in this picture is one of the things we're doing is recording the soil of different colors that's called in one cell book and that keeps a has a systematic way of doing universal coloring for soil so when we called something a certain color type in that book anybody can go back to that book look at that color and say aha i know exactly what color they're dealing with i'm doing something very scientific there i'm listening to the soil it's not voodoo i see what out what i'm doing is i'm listening to the amount of sand in it because it was made up of sand silt and clay is and recording the amount of the texture of the soil and how much the different soils at the top here this is the basically the top of the modern soil horizon where grasses and things are growing or a year and then below that there's a plow zone that goes across it and then below that is some original soils that have been going around for thousands of years and then below that is sterile soils that have been here for twenty thousand years since the glaciers pushed those things around so in a very short period of time you've got a lot of time death you're looking at twenty thousand years of history in two feet so that's just a that was just a little video to give you an example of the kinds of work we're doing shovel testing and units and i'm just blathering on in that over a  right so from the just those two days of work and again we only put intentional tests on the map in a second ten shovel test and one test unit we found almost seventy objects the vast majority of those objects were prehistoric it's age unless you want to do carbon dating on it but then fifty two of the objects are definitely pre contact or prehistoric in nature so let's look at the site map a little bit and see fish creek coming through these little green dots that are kind of hard to see our  basically slope right here so the say this is the original site boundaries and they did the show testing here and that's where they found the site the first time we did more shovel testing and just to get used to what sheila testing was all about that first day that have impacted fish creek but let's talk mostly about the prehistoric stuff so in terms of lipsticks we've found more ceramics than one thinks are our lips are a mix of raw materials that we would expect from coming down on that grand lobe of stuff being drifted down from canada and pushed by glaciers twenty thousand years ago so we've got courts and we have still stones so stone again you know and materially gets pushed in this glacial till but then we also have some other materials that come from places to the southeast of where we are not too far away but we're just as southeastern minnesota wisconsin iowa we have some prairie sheen shirts so that course comes heated it to change its chemical structure and make it easier to fling them right so it's a really high quality piece of material the rest of the stuff cts is not a high quality material right courts is difficult to work with  is not that good either so we've got we've got some not very good materials and we have one really high quality material it's in this collection which is kind of cool but this is the tip from a broken projectile point of some kind we don't we don't know right maybe we could find some more if you want to see some examples of some other lithic that are from just about a mile away we also have some in the splay case were brought in by a local landowner it's great his he's got all the list thinks we have all the ceramics we should put these two sides together and we could actually tell a lot about our history so the listings are interesting and they tell a story of local resource procurement you're basically working with glacial till you're finding cobbles you're testing those cobbles and making tools and then you're retouching and reusing those tools when they break or you're bringing with you raw materials from slightly to the east ok the ceramics which we have many more of them they're not very large most of the pieces are a quarter size or less so they're pretty small and they're they're very thin and they're hard that's when the reasons they they've persist in the environment as long as they have but you notice that all of them have this kind of patterning on them right that's called cord ruffling or cord marking basically the ceramics are being made in a fabric bag and as they make it you're see impressions of this fabric bag on the outside of them and some of the pieces have really deeply the chord impressed lines on them this could be a for decoration or it could just be a repairs to the fabric bay that was being used or it could it could have just been for tightening of the ceramic vessel when it was done it doesn't necessarily mean decoration but it could be beginning about a thousand c to about eight hundred years ago this period called the woodland and during the woodland we see some pretty big changes the things that are driving this change clear and simple are people populations increase when people get used to living in this environment this very diverse the changing environment that they're living in they start to see more people on the landscape and we see changes in the size of the project all points we see the size of the of the areas the camps that they're living in and what we see during this period is that the carbon that is still on the inside some of the ceramics there is very very very small portions of also file of material phylis are basically the silicate structures of plants things like grasses wild races and things like that when they take up water they sequester the silica that's in the water and they cannot get rid of it so they build it into their cell walls and they so they're so also to commit a glass on the plant dies the glass souls are still there and  they very particular shapes to different plants so we have people call file with experts to look at that we could do some of that or of course we could convict conduct additional research at this site or we could do a much larger which i think we should do broader look at more of the region especially moving towards carver lake getting permission from multiple different landowners both public and private and try to find we know there are political sites or we've just not had the opportunity to look for them yet so i arst this site is still potentially eligible the national register a formal phase two basically the second step of doing this archeology has not been completed what would that look like for this basically more of those test units that we put him in to put in a few more of those test units and then we could try to make a determination eligibility unfortunately this site isn't very large and it's not very sexy in terms of coolness of all i mean it's great for us we're very excited about it bob is one of the most excited people w we should let it maintain its potential eligibility it just sounds better is potentially eligible we should protect it right so we go through the process saying well yeah it's eligible but it's not going to make it it sounds better this way keep let's say it's potential and it definitely is not only can this site tell us more about the peoples from the specific time period in their in their living in minnesota but it also has soils that have not been impacted by us on the landscape right those two things alone research hosted the event which was moderated by representative rick hansen the event featured speakers from the minnesota department of natural resources the minnesota department of agriculture the minnesota board of water and soil resources the minnesota zoo the university of minnesota the maplewood nature center and local b capers the form focused on policy and regulations that impact you mayor and what a beautiful facility and we have some other guests here from elected officials that are helping me host this it's a representative joanne ward here and  represent fisher and center we are also helping host one and he is saying as as an elected official is we can opportunity to visit with the citizens and hear what's important to him and i hate to play with though the term but clearly one of the big buzzes going on here in our state is bs and what that means i remember a couple years i went to school in england a long time ago but i love following what's going on in europe and obviously you know we always we kind of heard about it there first in europe what was going on with the populations in and europe well  you know lo and behold of course no surprise it's a major major issue here and i want to so we're trying to bring that here and it's i know that my district is hungry for information and i know the legislature hungry for information and so one of the neat things for me as a legislator as we get the chance to meet experts so what can we do about this now i'm a conservation biologist and i am a strong proponent of the fact that conservation doesn't require just talking and sitting and listening to people talk it requires action so we need to address habitat loss we need to create sources of nectar and milkweed for monarchs and if we live in areas for monarchs over winter in mexico or california address their need for overwintering sites so the picture on the top there might look like a car inside the infield and you might be thinking why is she show that but that is actually a milkweed field and that guy is cultivating milkweed to produce milk we seed for habitat restoration we need to educate an advocate that's what we're doing tonight he would go on the tour around the state to pesticide applicators and teach programs on pesticide applicators safety but also pollinators even way back way back a long time ago and she also has about three taken up by the plant and it gets expressed in the pollen and nectar so we all know about the stomachs all herbicides are systemic you spray it on a canadian thistle it dies there are many herbicides there's twenty seven different ways they will the different modes of actions of different kinds of herbicides that kill that plant ok so they've been out there for a long time but we haven't had systemic insecticides so when these were proposed and when the chemical companies started to develop them everyone thought isn't this great we're not going to have drift from spray we're not going to have insects being killed because there have spray going over them an ag field of the chemical it's going to be well i into the plant to control the pest insect however somebody forgot about if it gets into the leaves why can't to get into pollen and nectar and so i started this research back one thousand nine hundred ninety eight worked with the what it was then called the com conservatory and what we did was we bagged plants and we put little ladybird beetles in there after they treated it with systemic insecticides so my first paper show that when a plant is treated with a systemic insecticide those little ladybird beetles ninety nine percent of the good bugs out there that need pollen and nectar which feed on those plants and die primary emphasis is to save wildlife to connect people animals in the natural world to save wildlife and that doesn't matter what kind of wildlife it is or where it lives and so we really want to be able to emphasize what we're doing now locally here and so the primary emphasis the word working on right now are not just  small butterflies or the or the big tigers but it's or the bees it's really all of the above and i'm going to try to tell you the story of a couple butterflies that were in our own minnesota backyards in the greater state of minnesota and are now largely disappeared these small little butterflies are probably ones you've never heard of these are one of the skipper's that karen alluded to earlier these are dakota skippers they were just added to the u s threatened species list last october and they are classified as a minnesota endangered species i'm go tell more their story and some of the other species that depend upon next these are prairie butterflies and prairie is really a defining feature of the state of minnesota it once covered about a third of the state of minnesota in tremendously rich ecosystems not only  bud ground plant diversity in the wildlife that depended on them like the bison that were roamed across the state which we are now working with minnesota d n r to reintroduce back into state parks and as part of cooperated breeding programs but also the below ground component of these and the rich roots and the very complex ecosystems they performed so next the problem is though that most of that is gone we now was so historically in yellow we had the western third in the southern third of the state were prairie but only one percent of that is remaining this is now largely been converted for massive crop uyghur culture so these little fragments in red on your screen are the last little pieces so about one percent of the left and that's a real big problem for those animals that can't get around and those plants that can't get around so monarchs have the ability to migrate across all these you know get fifteen twenty miles down the road to the next he's a prairie little butterfly is that we're going to talk about today just do not have that ability well thank you for the invitation i'm very happy to be here i thought we'd i'm with the minnesota department of ag as representative hansen mentioned and i thought wait go over some things such as doing a special registration review noids and also once these b m p's were developed we'd be using those in educational programs at i do have some examples of this pollinator report but it was looking at some of the gaps that we had in pollinator habitat and addressing  finding those and presenting that in the report but also providing some ideas or proposals in that report to the legislature to have them look at some of these things as well and greg talked about how we've transitioned over time where we focus a lot more on diversity now with conservation and one of the benefits of having all these flowers here is out there filling a niche where otherwise maybe this holes or other weeds might fill in there but they're also providing a lot of pollinator habitat at the same time there's also the new state buffer law in minnesota and so we'll be focusing on pollinators as part of that as well and so communities that we restore can really be high quality pollinator habitat we use diverse seed mixes that we've developed for the states so whenever we're replacing lost wells we're working on getting high diversity back into for the past three years they had been incubating the programming that is now pollinate minnesota we think christie allen small business and she'll be talking more about that work after us everybody it's good to be here my name is lexer and i work with an organization called pesticide action network and we work here in minnesota and nationally and internationally alongside different communities who are impacted by pesticide use to figure out how to change our food system so that those harmful impacts aren't happening anymore so bees are one piece of our work that we do and we love doing it here in minnesota so let's go to the next life so i think the place that aaron and i want to start we're talking about sort of the advocacy piece of this right and given everything that we've heard tonight so far why is it important to have advocacy work be a part of the picture and i think the first piece is as we've heard tonight there are these multiple effects that are coming together to make to kind of honeybees and native pollinators we know there are issues around habitat around pesticides around diseases and parasites and the way i understand the science is that if we don't tackle all of those different factors we're not going to be able to turn around the problem right and the reality is that right now we're seeing a lot of action around increasing habitat a lot of great work to increase habitat across the se important research happening to tackle issues around diseases and parasites and we need to take on pesticides as well if we're really going to make this happen and so we need advocacy work to move that for right is that is everybody still awake and interested in this good yeah ok so there's a lot of redundant information in my presentation about the legislation but i'm here tonight to speak to you as a beekeeper who has been directly affected  fact my business has been impacted greatly by pesticides by the legislation and has really shaped the way that that we are moving forward river minnesota so they're almost four hours north of the cities and like i said they're commercial beekeepers so they do move their bees to the hall min's every year pollination i don't know how many of you know about this event but it's the biggest pollination event in the world and a lot of commercial beekeepers go out there to bring their bees there because it pays their bills and you know bees don't make as much money as they used to and so that income is threatened when i first started working with my aunt and uncle would be seven years ago now the minute i stepped into a beehive i was i was hooked and i  knew what i wanted to do for a living and but i but i didn't really want to take twelve hundred beehives to california and pollinate all men's because as many of you may or may not know that's a pretty unsustainable situation that  beekeepers are in right now and it's precarious and kind of scary so it sounds and they find that it is valuable data we got really excited during our training because at the maplewood nature center we had amazing native b diversity  in our gardens right in front of the nature center when we took that out to our fish creek site which is a brand new restoration it's completely different so there's going to be lots of people will use a protocol like this regionally we'll be able to compare data from community communities so we know we're going to go beyond our fish creek site and do it at several other sites in the city of maplewood and then in the in addition to the adult education one piece of the puzzle is where to we also teach school children so in the next three years we're bringing eight hundred school children out to the fish creek site to learn about pollinators to help with some the habitat enhanced mean the nature center is also doing classroom sessions with the kids and we find that they're crazy when they get out in the field so we really have to set the stage give them a little bit of training in the classroom before they get out to the fish creek site and my colleague oakley our naturalist an educator she's here with me tonight as well as our park director so we'll be here to take any questions that you may have slater thank you to new city council members were elected in november two zhang is a minnesota native born and raised in st paul he has been a resident of maplewood for over twelve years to as a graduate of william mitchell college of law he has a bachelor of arts and economics from st cloud state university to worked for the policy and community development division in the minnesota housing finance agency he also worked for minnesota legal and the public health law center to serve as a trustee on the ramsey county library board of directors bryan smith is a graduate of the university of minnesota with a b a and political science he received his m b a and finance and marketing from the curls and school of management at the university of minnesota he interned at the white house press office in one nine hundred ninety seven and with congressman martin sa a company i'd like to welcome brian and to to the city council our city council and staff have embraced initiatives including sustainable maplewood energize maplewood and the green cities  all city departments and staff work together to develop protect our environment trash collection and recycling are important for our business and all our citizens maplewood is a leader in environmental an economic development as part of our sustainable maplewood project city commissioners and staff toured recycling facilities and learned more about where our trash and recycling goes we toured resource recovery technologies they produce r t f or refuse derived fuel herea cycles are removed from the waste stream and the fuel source is processed r d f mainly consists of a combination of paper and plastic products that are burned to produce electricity saving hundreds of thousands of tons of trash from entering landfills we also toured strategic materials where our glass is recycled and made into reasonable  gets tested by a quality department would take a small sample and what we do with that sample is we we go through it by hand and measure what's in there for trash what's in there for usable glass it stays pretty flat i don't think it's moved much in the last ten years or so all and centrally at what we get to where we get to this point here in our plant it's it's coming out of the cost of about nothing you know it looks messy but it's actually really not messy you know glass is heavy and most everything go carts were by weight so when you look through here when you when you take out the paper and you take out the plastic there's a lot of glass usable glass right now james or about seventy percent of what we're looking at here is what we're going to recover out of it but there's forty two plants that's what strategic we've got to up in canada and if you don in mexico but most the you know we're told my goal is to keep everything from one to landfill in a kind of comes on economics and what it takes to not a cost to to somebody at all so we would see clean glass cleaner glass come from one source but dirtier klos more likely coming from a different source most of what most of the polling that we bring in it has come from single stream will talk a little bit of all volumes in the summertime bruce will bring in four hundred fifty tons a day and now this time of year and as we this i would say this is we're probably sending out a broad three hundred tons here in the summertime months we're running three chefs twenty four hours and right now we're running two chefs are working for temps and if the plan was running right now we'd be hollering at each other and we'd have dust masks on so we're going to walk through a little bit i'll kind of tell you a little bit about what goes on at the plant going to walk up stairs and to the glass sorting machines attorney really wants to see and that's when james  take over and he's our sorter expert and he'll kind of shows how the sorting machines work and then we'll look at the final product and we'll get you to the next two or you could see right here in front of us is our hopper solo out hopper with the material that holds about half an hour forty five minutes worth of glass and then the glass starts on its way up through the first conveyor up of the top of the first compare and there's a magnet up there a natural light so there's a camera inside here through a series of mirrors that cameras facing this way and there's a mirror on the back which they are like here right here on this the exact camera is looking directly at that light source so as take it's it's pretty rounded off and by the time it gets to this point the city of maplewood has been a member of the ramsey washington suburban cable commission for many years our city council and staff have recently decided to end this relationship and take control of our own cable franchise agreement if you are a comcast subscriber a maplewood you pay a small peg fee peg stands for public education and government that revenue makes this kind of municipal programming possible your city council and commission meetings are made available on cable channel sixteen and on line that will not change there will be some changes in programming on local cable but not in other comcast cable channels continue to tune in to channel sixteen for your city government programs and other local programming thanks for watching