Lessons from the Field Lab

TxTC Staff: thanks for listening to this sneak peek. If you'd like to hear more about the partnerships in Southeast Texas, check out the podcast Lessons from the Field Lab. Lessons from the Field Lab. came together with researchers, practitioners, community members. and university faculty. studying air quality, flooding, extreme heat, the ecosystem, social dimensions, and the vulnerability across Texas. Hey guys, check out this sneak peek into our new podcast, The Southeast Texas Urban Integrated Field Lab, funded through the Department of Energy, Give it a listen. Katherine: So yeah, those early meetings with the site ⁓ we brought in big maps, made big regional map, asked task force members to mark areas they knew of, like intersections, parts of towns that had seen pretty severe flooding in the past, to mark areas that they had challenges with their quality, took all that data, went back, ⁓ mapped it. ⁓ And then that's when we layered in the data from the scientific team those 20 sites. ⁓ does income data look like? What does socioeconomic data, demographic data look like in neighborhoods? What existing do we have about air quality? What existing information do we have about flood levels during the Harvey event? And then brought that back, and ⁓ then they through, ⁓ made ⁓ map each of those sites. ⁓ and then went through pros and cons of all the sites and also information that only local residents would have had at that point, right? Are there potential community partners who would be willing to help us implement these strategies, right? Are there hurdles that you know of or obstacles that would prevent us from being able to work in this area for various reasons? So kind of tossed all that together in multiple kind of rounds of conversations and facilitated exercises. TxTC Staff: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Katherine: So that was the site selection piece and then the phase, I guess, of the co-design piece. And we didn't really get to the fourth phase, unfortunately, but I can talk about that too. But the third phase ⁓ was through and then getting input on various flooding air quality mitigation strategies. And we did that in meetings. We also did that through a survey just to make sure that we input from every force member, which I think eventually we did get. And for that one... the facilitation strategy we came up with, actually when we were brainstorming in person at the annual meeting last year, was a deck of cards. Each card would have key information about the strategy in a photo or a map or an example. good information, but not overwhelming amount of information, and a format that you could compare across strategies. TxTC Staff: Mm-hmm. So we did a lot in those two hour meetings. Yeah, because I remember getting those set of different sites. But then I remember we actually ended up like pairing them down to a couple of sites with the task force. And then that created lots and lots of discussions. Do you remember, can you tell us something about how... Katherine: Yes, we did. We did. Yeah. ⁓ my gosh. TxTC Staff: we pared it out as a team and how we took that data whenever we gave the scientists those sites, they gave us back some data and then we pared it down even smaller to focus on specific sites. ⁓ Tell us about that process. Katherine: Right. Yeah, lots of back and forth of, you know, community members identifying a particular intersection, taking that back to the scientific part of the team and saying, okay, we're thinking about this area, and then making a judgment of, okay, how are we going to draw the boundaries on this? Does that look about right? Taking that back to the task force members. Does this kind of what you had in mind when you marked this intersection? Was it generally this area? Yes. Okay. Bringing it back to the technical team and then ⁓ layering in all that data. ⁓ And then bringing it back to the task force members and saying, hey, here's this one particular intersection that you guys were interested in. information about equity flags in this area. Here's information about air quality. And then in that in-person meeting, there was one in April 2024 that wasn't at. Definitely some little bit of horse trading, little bit of like, well, let's ⁓ together these two sites. Well, let's prioritize this one. ⁓ TxTC Staff: Yeah. Katherine: I think when we went into that meeting, were hoping, not hoping, but we had thought, okay, we'll just come out with one pilot site. We don't want to over promise. That's such a key part of all this work to try not to over promise. So let's start with one pilot site. And then of course, at the end of the meeting, we decided to do two because it felt equitable to do one in Port Arthur and one in Beaumont. It felt like there was good energy there potential community partners. TxTC Staff: And we were able to match those sites with some of the courses at the university to kind of visualize ⁓ of the potential strategies and ideas. so I think there's some really cool products ⁓ that come out from that.