EWEB Board of Commissioners — August 4, 2020

0:01 good evening everybody my name is steve mattel i am this year's president of the eugene water and electric board and i will call the august 5th board meeting to order i'll ask that all of the commissioners uh make sure that your cameras and uh your and your microphones are on so that the rest of us can see and hear you my first uh first thing up is to quickly do it an agenda check i assume all the commissioners have a copy of the agenda in front of them does anybody wish to um make a change or alteration to the agenda and you'll have to speak up by the way i i don't see um i don't have a view of everybody the way i have in the past so if one of the commissioners wants to be recognized you're going to have to

0:47 speak up all right well hearing none we will move into our second item we have resequenced the agenda a little bit normally we go into items from commissioners today we are going to go directly into public testimony or public input so i am opening up a public input session and we'll read a brief preamble and i believe we have four folks who wish to speak three of them which will be summarized by joe harwood so let me just read this preamble very quickly for public input when your name is called unmute this applies to you linda and you only i think by pressing number six please state your name and optionally your address or ward and speak clearly into your telephone each page

1:33 will be offered three minutes to present uh her testimony please keep track of time and if needed the board president me will notify you when your time has elapsed after all testimony is heard each commissioner will have an opportunity to speak if he or she chooses although by policy we do not engage in a back and forth dialogue please note that failure of a commissioner to speak shall not be construed as support of or opposition to any speaker's testimony if a question is presented by a speaker and the board does not provide an answer an eweb staff member will contact the speaker so that the question can be addressed at a later time so um linda i believe you're first if you'll go ahead and unmute i am going to set a timer um for three minutes and uh hold on just

2:21 a moment take me that long to get it going and there it is why don't you go ahead all right thank you good evening commissioners and general manager frank lawson um thank you for the chance to speak tonight i'm linda perrine i am just outside the urban growth boundary on highway 58 uh and a volunteer with 350 eugene i'd like to commend eweb on a well-done electrification impact analysis report dated august 4th 2020 while it was a thorough look at potential impacts and adoption rates of evs space heating and water heating electrification this report has a glaring omission the potential impact of local residential commercial and community solar in eweb's future planning this report

3:07 should be amended to include the potential low medium and high adoption rates for solar pv technology over the same 30-year period indeed in the report's executive summary you state this analysis forecasts varying degrees of electric end-use technology adoption over a 30-year period why is solar pv technology excluded from this analysis on page 13 of your report you show the yearly profile of the northwest power pool carbon intensity this shows that the months of august through november have the highest carbon intensity presumably due to hydropower being lower in these months and more dirty power must be imported from other states this allows this also happens to be the same months when solar plus storage

3:53 would help offset the need for out-of-state imported power why does the web continue not to address the impact local solar plus storage electricity could have on its projected power profile carbon intensity and resiliency planning california is finding that pg is no longer a sure bet for energy production during fire seasons and many customers are turning to self-sufficiency through solar and battery storage it seems most of the west coast understands these benefits of solar but for some reason eweb and lane county continue to blatantly ignore the benefits of bountiful solar energy right here in eugene please consider amending this report to include the impact of solar and battery storage adoption rates over the same 30-year period thank you

4:40 thank you linda uh i believe that uh joe harwood is planning to read into um uh read the statements provided by three other uh folks joe do you want to go ahead yes thank you commissioner my tall uh the first letter we have today is from richard weinman 55 west 31st avenue in eugene first i appreciate eweb i appreciate the great service we get and it's easy to take it for granted i know it's not that easy behind the scenes i encourage eweb to expand into the business of becoming an internet service provider to our service area access to the internet has become a necessity for many and is a utility at this point those who can least afford an internet

5:26 connection often need it the most the pandemic has really brought this situation into focus my grandson is in elementary school because some children don't have internet at home last spring the school system was unable to provide a full range of distance learning options because it wouldn't be fair to those who are less advantaged people without a fast internet connection cannot work from home my son who lives on disability income can't afford the internet my brother-in-law who only gets a small amount of social security income can't afford the internet this puts both of them at an extreme disadvantage in doing things the rest of us have come to take for granted

6:11 creating a community internet service will be expensive and time consuming but uf has the infrastructure and in the long run the community benefit will be worth the investment a for-profit provider should not be the only option for a critical utility i hope you will aggressively begin this conversation soon it will be a long-term project and is worth the effort sincerely richard weinman the second testimony we have is from jim ball four four four four paddock drive in eugene

7:00 if eweb has access to mo more low carbon hydropower than it currently uses then eugene could electrify cars and buildings and lower its greenhouse gas emissions but would that reduction be cancelled by increases in emissions in other cities if eweb's excess hydropower is currently being sold to other utilities would electrification in eugene result in more need for fossil fuel electricity in other places could the people of eugene spend millions of dollars converting cars and buildings to electricity with no net reduction of greenhouse gases at the regional level please address this question in the electrification impact study thank you jim ball

7:49 and then our final comment comes from jim new 3072 webster street eugene eweb commissioners and general manager lawson i want to commend susan ackerman megan capper and staff for the informative electrification impact analysis report it was well written and answered many questions it was comforting to read ewebs energy supply and delivery system can manage expected load growth from electrification of commercial and residential space and water heating as well as an increase in electric vehicle charging this was a concern of the city council as they took excuse me this was a concern of the city

8:35 council as they looked to reduce carbon emissions through fuel switching from gas to electric and reduce future gas infrastructure according to the report fuel switching will only produce a marginal load impact by 2050. the eiar stated that transportation related emissions were a major contributor to the community's carbon footprint and each new electrical electric vehicle replacing an internal combustion engine results in a 2.75 metric ton reduction in annual carbon emissions in the eweb service territory however there was not a chart showing what the reduction would be if the electric vehicle was charged by a

9:20 photovoltaic rooftop solar system my concern is solar was addressed only once in the report when e-web is aware of projected snowpack levels to be non-existent by 2040 which will challenge hydro energy sourcing spatial and water heat pump systems and ev purchases are recognized and supported by e-web as a means to reduce community carbon emissions but no mention of solar promoting rooftop solar ins installations in uweb service territory should also be part of ewebs e-i-a-r and in e-web's future energy sourcing i hope a chart showing the impacts of solar rooftop installations in the service area will be added to the study thank you for

10:07 your time and this report all right thanks um thanks for the for the reading into the testimony and i guess i'll just ask briefly because that's my habit is there anybody else who happens to have called in in these last few minutes no there's no additional public comment okay well thank you in that case i will close um public testimony and offer an opportunity briefly for each of the commissioners to respond if she or he wishes we'll do it the way that uh we uh in order of how we are normally seated so um that would be oh gosh i'm not even sure it's been so long i think that means it's mindy first is that right

10:58 yes i think so um so we're not onto items from board members or are we um no we are responding thanks mindy we are responding or having the opportunity to respond to public testimony and then we'll close out um that session and move into items from board from board members i don't have any comments at this time all right well thank you um uh commissioner carlson sorry i thought dick's next okay it's been a long time maybe i'm misremembering our normal order in which we sit and if that's the case i'm sorry it's okay uh well one i'm i'm really appreciative that people are are finding ways to get

11:43 us the information so that we can get the testimony in uh this time presents a really difficult challenge in terms of actually working with the public directly you know it's it's usually very nice to have people come in and read the testimony directly so i'm glad that linda was able to participate um really appreciate your perspective and um and all of those who did send testimony in i love hearing it um i read it i look at it i i think about it it gives me a different perspective especially from those who are motivated to come in so thank you for that i will look for you know some response from general manager lawson and potentially from staff on some of the key points that

12:28 were raised so thank you commissioner hudson just a quick comment on the testimony regarding solar options as a way to meet future demand i i appreciate that input and uh would just want to note that the report that we have before us tonight is is a draft of the phase one report uh the scope of phase one if and i'm sure staff will cover this in their presentation i think was to characterize the amount of load and the load characteristics associated with potential conversions of space heating to efficient electric forms for more carbon

13:15 intensive forms and also to look at the potential load implications associated with conversion of the transportation sector and i i think in that respect the report does a good job and we'll be hearing more about it tonight i don't think the scope of this first phase was to look at how over a course of time eweb would serve that new load or what the different resource alternatives or demand side options would be for meeting both energy and peak loads associated with that new electric demand i think that work will be done in phase two and the costs and the alternatives and the implications of that i think will be reflected in that phase two

14:00 uh study and report which will be consolidated with phase 1 to give us a complete picture so uh i think at the end of the day the people who testified with that interest in solar will be satisfied with the way that we handle that i'm just pointing out that it's not something that was immediately pertinent for phase one and as much as we were just looking at characterizing the potential new electric load associated with those conversions and we'll be hearing more about that tonight so thank you for your feedback and your input and hopefully that will be uh something that's covered in due course all right well thank you uh dick i'll speak for a moment and then john you'll be um last so uh you just also

14:47 want to thank staff for making it possible for community members to participate really do appreciate that we might be in this situation for much longer than we anticipated back in march when we first shifted uh to an online version so so i'm glad to see that we're able to give community members an opportunity to listen in but also speak so um i'll just very briefly um add a little bit to what dick said regarding solar so i agree we weren't expecting it to see it in this first draft but i i know that the staff members responsible for writing it are on the line and um will be presenting it to us later in the meeting so i'll ask them to just update us on where and when we might um find information about um solar as well

15:33 as the question asked by i forget the last name but a man named jim about um how our use uh of of um clean and renewable power from the grid displaces um others from taking advantage of it when we if we otherwise would have sold it on the wholesale market uh i just want to remind everybody really that one of the values we get from this report and the reason one of the reasons why we commissioned it asked for it is so um to answer questions um that are commonly held by the community so to the extent that um these questions get answered upfront in that document i think is a really good thing um i did want to say briefly as far as i recall um currently rooftop solar in eugene accounts for less than one percent of our um generation capacity i think it's even

16:19 closer to one tenth of one percent it's pretty insignificant um and that accompl that's from uh somewhere in the range of i want to say four or five hundred rooftops some exact number i don't recall frank or others can um fill that gap in so um so just to give you some context it's a thing that we have supported all along but uh through incentives of various kinds but its impact on our total load is has been um insignificant though we should certainly um get a clear understanding of what its total potential is so i'll be interested in that as well all right well i will pass it off to john brown if he has any comments to add um thank you i have no additional comments i think my predecessors have said it well thank you okay well we will move on from the uh

17:05 public input session and uh i don't know if that i formally welcomed everybody to the meeting i see that we i know we have all five commissioners i know we have many um staff members perhaps the members of the uh public as well i can see that there's about 25 folks um in total on the line so uh welcome to uh yet another um virtual e-web meeting and uh um thanks for thanks for joining us so um with that i'll open it up um for our third item and that is items from board members we'll go in the order that i should have gone in the first time so mindy you're still first but dick you'll be second all right um the only thing i really have of note for this past month is that earlier this or last week

17:52 um steve frank and i met with the city of eugene for our what should be our quarterly meeting to talk about shared environmental interests and um i think that it was a really good meeting and we talked about three main things one was that something we talked about months before was potentially doing some kind of pilot program that would pair with the city to encourage landlords in some lower income neighborhoods to incentive further incentivize energy efficiency in their rental units so i'm not sure we weren't sure what the status was but they said that they'd the city had been talking about it so hopefully soon

18:37 city staff and eweb staff will come up with some kind of proposal or idea for that second thing we talked about was how can we make sure that when the city is talking about issues that relate to eweb like when they're talking about their northwest natural contract and they have assumptions about what that means for eweb that they actually consult with us so um i think that frank will be included in those discussions and hopefully we'll give a presentation to city council and um we just kind of stated that we really want to be brought in early with those discussions so that we don't feel like we're always chasing them down and then the third thing that we talked about steve had asked a question about the expansion of fiber in eugene and

19:25 city council had a work session on that last fall and they're a little further ahead on exploring this issue they have some information about grants and i know that in our board packet we had some information about a website of that but hopefully we'll get more information from the city on where they're at and our next meeting is going to be in late september or early october so that we don't lose kind of the thread of all of these conversations and that is all i have thank you mindy um commissioner helgeson i'll just give a brief report as your representative to the northwest public power association as you know that association exists for uh

20:11 the common benefit of our uh publicly owned utilities here in the region and uh they're an organization that provides a number of services to its membership the largest of which is a training function that brings in about half of their revenue they've done a really good job over the years of managing their costs and their dues have not gone up really in all of the time that i've served on the board in fact last year they gave us a little bit of a rebate and that notwithstanding um they like other organizations and non-profits are experiencing some real challenges in in the covid world um unable to hold

20:56 their uh their uh conventions or uh much of their training their position to be able to do that but given the circumstance of most of the utilities uh the attendance obviously makes it difficult to put their normal courses on so they're going to be drawing on their reserves over the next while as they take a revenue hit in that respect they'll continue to provide training and services as webinars and other things that can be accessed remotely um but i just give you a heads up that they're um like a lot of organizations uh in a bit of a financial uh stress uh and

21:42 fortunately in a good financial position at least to ride this out uh probably through the end of the year but it could have some implications for offerings and potentially dues next year and i'd just give you a heads up i don't think we're looking at anything catastrophic there but um given that the circumstances make it difficult for them to maintain their offerings in their revenue stream that's kind of their situation so thanks for the time to report on that and that's all i had tonight thank you commissioner carlson i don't have anything to report on this month thank you all right well i'll go next uh first i just want to thank

22:27 commissioner schlossberg uh for running the meeting last month in my absence i had the most uh fantastic uh seven-day trip down the middle fork of the salmon with my son and a bunch of friends and uh for those of you who might love rivers out there you'll know that when somebody calls to offer you an opportunity to run the middle fork you pretty much just drop everything and say yes uh even if it even even if it causes you to miss an e-web meeting i think that's the first one i have ever missed in the near eight years that i have participated there was one other that i was in hawaii for but i managed to actually join by phone so this is the first one that worked out that way and i i um it felt a little strange to not know what went on but anyways thank you mindy for running it in my absence the only

23:13 other thing that i'll say in addition to uh commissioner schlossberg's report about the meeting with um with city leadership i also just uh i guess i suppose as a private citizen and even as a staff member at the u votes just sat in on the city's work session last it was either tuesday or wednesday they do it um their sessions by zoom these days to watch them vote on their cap and also update the community on progress with their northwest franchise fee so i spent an hour and a half just watching that their city climate action plan has now passed and though um so they'll be moving forward with implementation but they escape granted staff an additional six months to resolve

23:58 the um uh the franchise fee so um or the the not the fries excuse me the franchise agreement which may include a fee um so we'll just have to wait and see for that much longer but as mindy reported hopefully um we will have an opportunity to weigh in on those discussions so that everybody's really clear about what the impacts will be from our perspective let's see commissioner brown all right thank you i've got several items number one uh recently i've had a rash of constituents calling about issues anywhere from ramping of the river design permits ruts in the roads and without exception frank and staff have been absolutely incredible in their responses and their actions and i really want to thank frank and and the staff for doing that

24:44 because these people call me and they're all spun up about something and uh when we get right back to them and and they know they're being heard that really goes a long way so thank you very much for doing that um i think it was yesterday i think frank and i and rod had a meeting with the springfield mayor and the new city manager regarding the glenwood issue and i think we're moving in the right direction we're getting close and i think frank and the sub general manager have worked out a deal so i think we're going to hopefully put that to bed and lastly um commissioner mattal thank you very much for rationalizing 30 years of my behavior my i recorded what you said about dropping everything and doing that so i'm going to make sure i play that back to my wife this evening thanks all right frank i can't see you but i uh

25:31 um assume that you might have a thing or two to say as well as provide us a bit of a covet update sure uh thank you president mattel commissioners um appreciate your comments this morning i i don't have a lot to add to what commissioners just said i've been involved with a number of these conversations and um appreciate the board's support and and to uh commissioner brown's comments you know really appreciate staff looking into the opportunities that come up when we have someone in the community who has a need that maybe we haven't fulfilled and i think that's an opportunity to learn just that much more so so thank you i did want to give the board the board has asked for regular cobit update so i just have a very quick

26:16 covet update to go through go ahead next slide please these take just a moment to get to load and get going but um one of the things that that we do regularly is we um on a bi weekly basis so twice a week we get a very detailed report from all of the different health authorities that we combine looking at trends both from local lane county by zip code all the way up through state levels and so we're we're able to monitor a number of different things this one is particularly noteworthy because you'll see that the data on the right side of the screen there was put together to align with governor

27:01 brown's statistics and requirements for school openings and so there's a requirement about around the case rate per 100 000 both at the at the lane county level and then there's positive test rates which has both the state component and accounting component this is important to us as a utility because about half of our employees have children who are school aged and so we know that this is a particular interest to both our workforce and the community and so this is just something we incorporated very directly with you know as far as fast response we we asked for this particular piece of data to be included in the report last friday i believe it was and our

27:46 report on monday had it so you know again great work by staff to look at these particular issues and this is just something that we monitor as as input to our coveted response as a utility next slide please as a quick reminder we kind of broke our response into four different phases um really an initial response which was kind of a triage approach reintegration which is where we are now reintegrating our workforce into more of a a new normal community recovery which which we'll talk about a little bit more and then replenishment of all of the the particular resources that we might have to use to get through this next slide

28:33 just the the very quick update just snapshot we are reintegrating it's a mix of both telecommuting and office work that's pretty much spent steady levels through july we have at this point good inventories of various ppe whether that's including you know fire retardant masks for example since we work with electricity sanitizing materials and etc we also we do have very high efficiency filtration which meets all the cdc guidelines and then ashrae which is the standard for which goes along with hvac equipment as far as recirculation

29:18 and we have within day daily and weekly protocols around cleaning which includes the the misting uh pre you know scheduled roughly weekly every week or two and so we're in a a regiment around hygiene we're continuing to see consumption declines that we contract a covid it's about three or four percent at this point um overall the electric utility is is down on the year some of that's weather related some of it's related to a couple of key accounts a little bit of improvement in july some of that because the heating degree days weather related consumption was a little bit higher haven't seen a lot of impact yet on water although really the summer is the

30:03 key and the highest usage points there so not haven't seen a lot there and then we are continuing to uh offer payment programs for customers you can see our aging there it's it's actually a little under 1900 now it's more like 1800 accounts which would be in a typical collections process um roughly about 1.3 million dollars that's been steady for pretty steady for the last um i guess 30 days or so we have had a number of customers sign up for uh sp the extended payment terms and other options that we have but then new ones also cycle into that to that number so we're continuing to work through that as well as offer

30:49 direct aid for customers go ahead with the next slide and that was uh the quick update so i'd be happy to entertain any questions if the commission has it and if not we can move on but i just wanted to make sure that the board knew that we were continuing to work safely safety is the highest priority for our workforce as well as the public and i have to commend our our entire staff for how they're approaching um working under new conditions well i'll open up a quick queue it looks like john brown would like to jump in go ahead john yeah frank thanks for that information just a quick question about the delinquencies i think that last month we had 3 000 and

31:35 now we're down to 1900. how does 1900 relate to a normal month so i'll just i'll give you a snapshot of last year john since it kind of accumulates over time last year at this time we were about 300 so 300 accounts versus now at um you know it's it it was at 3 000 we've been very aggressive in customer outreach we've now gotten that down to below 2000 but you have to compare that with last year at this time which was about 300. thank you any other questions comments uh commissioner schlossberg just so you know i can't see you right now so if you happen to be raising your hand i don't know it

32:23 i don't see her hand up i can see her all right well thanks frank i think um we'll close that out we'll move on to our next item um that's the approval of consent calendar a before we do that uh let's see uh mindy it would be helpful for me if you just said something because then you'll pop up onto my screen and i'll be able to see all of the commissioners okay here i am perfect thank you um all right well uh approval of consent calendar a before we do it i'll just remind folks we've changed our process a little bit these are routine items and in this uh instance it includes the minutes and two contracts uh one for pacific excavation and one for west coast distribution does anybody want um to pull for

33:08 discussion any of those okay seeing none do i have a motion to approve one from john brown a second a second from commissioner schlossberg any discussion okay well all those then in favor of approving consent calendar a please raise your hand and speak the word i i uh dick i assumed you were in that actually now i don't see you but i'm pretty sure you i heard you in there if i made a mistake let me know we will move on to consent calendar b and in this case it includes one contract an intergovernmental agreement with the city of eugene and resolution 2022 which uh makes some

33:53 slight revisions to the customer service policy anybody like to pull for discussion any of those items okay well in that case um do i hear a motion to approve again from john brown a second this time from commissioner carlson um all any discussion all right well in that case all in favor of approval please raise your hand once again and say i all right i think i heard from everybody again uh it looks like it is approved unanimously and we can move on to our next um item that's general business items and uh up um first under that category is the electrification impact analysis report and i believe it's susan ackerman and

34:39 megan capper and i will put um 30 minutes on my clock and i'll hold it up once in a while so you can see what it says [Music] well thank you so much commissioner um i'm really you can go ahead and move it to the next one anne or holly i'm sorry this is what we want to do tonight we have been working diligently on this study now since february march is when we took this one on and what we wanted to do today is to share with you our early findings from that analysis provide some context for it to talk about next steps and then receive some feedback from you just a quick reminder of all of the

35:24 information you're going to be getting tonight comes from that 40 page report that was in your board packet it's also accessible through the agenda and so um today is just the thumbnail or tonight i guess it's just the thumbnail of what is already in that larger report next this is just to remind everybody about the scope of what it is we were studying um it includes not just what we studied but possibly as important what we did not study we are looking for the impact of electrification on e-web's portfolio and its load situation from the transportation sector electrification and the building sector electrification

36:09 in transportation we looked only at passenger and light duty vehicles we did not study commercial freight vehicles or transit buses in the building sector we looked only at domestic space and water heating and by domestic here i mean residential and commercial space and water heating we did not study industrial space and water heating or industrial processes and of course the context for eweb doing the studies is that climate change strategies around the country and locally as well tend to focus on electrifying transportation and buildings as a way to meet goals and we think uh what we're learning in this first phase of this study is that eweb is well situated to assist the community with

36:54 those goals we are part of a larger regional power grid that is relatively clean because of our great hydro base so that's helpful we also have as a region and as a utility a legacy of energy efficiency programs and we are also on an average and rebate energy basis eweb is long for a while which means we can be we can adapt to some of this load as it comes next please this is just a reminder that uh this this study is part of in one of eweb's 2020 strategic goals this goal actually started the year as an electric supply planning goal but we converted this in i guess it was

37:42 march or february based on the communities and the board's interest in the impact of electrification on the region and so that's um what we're doing here we would have needed to have done this analysis in any event for our future irp plans but um this gives us a really good head start on it next one this is just a reminder that this and i'll probably remind you five times before the evening is over but this is a preliminary analysis so this is phase one of our larger analysis and the final report for phase one will come to you in october between now and then though

38:27 we still have a certain amount of work to do um including a deeper dive into the impact of electrification on our portfolio and resources we haven't yet fully uh study the impact of electrification under peak load scenario a one in ten peak load impact so we need to do that we will be scrubbing our assumptions carefully and developing our methodologies and benchmarking with other entities and in particular we will be clarifying our findings with northwest natural to make sure that our assumptions are correct so we'll be working with them on that the real point of this analysis though is to develop an analytical model and tool that the utility can use for

39:13 all of its resource planning and its community outreach interest and decarbonization that tool will allow us to examine once once we have it in place it will allow us to examine all kinds of futures and scenarios for decarbonization that people want to look at it will assist us with understanding how the regional power grid will evolve over time and it will assist us with irp planning and developing customer facing program so this is really a work in progress that's what we're hoping to get out of this next one please so this slide begins um the high level impacts that we thought were worthy of pointing out to you the first is that based on our early

40:00 look at this data and our early study the pace and impact of electrification on e-web system appears to be manageable and what we mean by the word manageable is that we have an obligation to serve all load that presents itself to us but the pace of electrification tends to be slow enough that we can adapt to it as i mentioned earlier we have uh we're long on an average angry big energy basis we also have a distribution system that at first blush it appears there is enough capacity on our distribution and transmission system that we can adapt to this load as it presents itself so what this graph does is it shows you the cumulative impact of electrification on our average

40:46 load situation up through 2050 assuming a very high level of electrification it looks like it would add about 55 average megawatts to our load that's about 20 percent of our current average load next one this is another important early finding um the the the the most important one is probably that the the real um opportunity for e-web for electrification and carbon reductions in the community come from electric vehicles we we did look at space and water heating conversions in this graph but the truth is evs

41:31 have a great market share potential under this study because there are very few electric vehicles in our service area right now as a percentage of the total that could be that is not true for space and water heating which is why it ends up being a smaller opportunity for us than the evs we we serve 75 percent of the residential and commercial space and water heating market right now and so it limits our opportunities uh to do more of that in the future next slide this is something else to understand that the technology we're assuming for these conversions really matters if residential space heating load were to convert to

42:17 a lower efficiency technology like a baseboard electric uh technology for example the impact on our load over time could be very significant as you can tell from the gray bars on this graph on the other hand if the load converts to more standard efficiency or even some of the higher efficiency equipments that are out there that would cut the impact on ewebs loads by more than half so it's substantial and it's really important next slide it's hard to anticipate the effect that electrification of vehicles would have on e-web's load

43:03 in part because the adoption rates are so insert so uncertain you can see from this graph that the potential for ev adoption ranges from a low of three percent of total vehicles in 2050 all the way up to a very high percentage uh 100 of vehicles in the service territory would be electric what we have done in our analysis is we have assumed that we have assumed what we call a high growth scenario that's that gray dotted line and it assumes that 45 of the vehicles will be electric by 2050. we got the 45 percent number from e3 e3 is a nationally known consultant that does a lot of work with organizations and jurisdictions around

43:49 the country on deep decarbonization strategies and this 45 assumption that e3 uses came from an assumption that we would be into a high decarbonization economy and a high decarbonization strategy politically that results in that 45 percent so that is that's the figure we used in making our assumptions the orange solid line is the city of eugene's forecast for electric vehicles next slide before we turn to uh talking about the decarbonization impact of electrification i just want to put this slide up here the graphic here also comes from e3 and it is just really to remind everybody

44:36 that electrification is only one of many strategies to decarbonize the power sector next slide we might spend some time on this slide but this this is the slide that describes the elect the carbon savings from electrification i think what's the good news here is that electrification really does lead to carbon savings but there's something to understand too on this slide this is the other important point which is that even assuming a high level of electrification we are still there's still quite a gap between what we would achieve through this electrification in terms of carbon reduction goals and what the city's carbon reduction goals are we don't know why that is yet entirely we are going to be

45:23 working with the city to double check our assumptions and make sure we understand what their goals are on the basis for those goals but i just wanted to remind you going back to that previous slide that electrification is only one strategy for reducing carbon so i don't know to what extent other strategies are not considered in our analysis but would be considered in the city's analysis so starting to wrap things up here i guess the important considerations are again the results are subject to change between now and final publication which will happen in october we are really trying to make sure that

46:08 we have our assumptions correct correctly identified and that we are performing uh the right amount of quality assurance and quality control in our data to make sure that it's a solid data-driven result the other i guess high level of conclusion is that carbon impacts in the later years say 2030 and beyond are very uncertain and it really depends on a lot of these assumptions so next slide the purpose of this slide is just to give you a feel for where this study fits in all of eweb's electric supply planning processes and also our upcoming contract expirations we are in phase one

46:56 right now um you can see that in the star in the bottom of the graph we will release our final report on phase one uh in october we begin phase two in 2021 and hope to have that out to you then the phase two focus will be a deeper analysis of the economics to e-web of uh and and others of electrification we will take a deeper dive into mitigation measures that might be necessary and by mitigation measures what i mean here are the sorts of customer facing programs that would help us mitigate potentially negative impacts on our loads and our other customers from electrification we will also be doing a deeper dive into

47:41 the availability of e-webs infrastructure to adapt to this and finally we'll be looking at the regional resource mix over time there was that earlier question that came up in response to public comment uh president mattel about solar assumptions to be made and i would just say that those are that's an important piece of work but it probably would not happen until later on how the grid the regional grid mix changes over time would be something we analyze uh in the future in an irp scenario and that would include an analysis of the impact of solar load on our resource mix so next slide

48:28 so now we come to the time where i get to stop talking and you guys can ask me questions there are a couple of things we're interested in learning from you one is whether there are any assumptions you'd like more information about um before we publish the phase one report in october and then a second question is whether there are areas you'd like to see us refine or expand upon in phase two i put this up here because this is megan's favorite quote and it does seem applicable so anyway thank you any questions you might have would you uh whoever's controlling the slides move

49:13 it back to the question slide so everybody can just be reminded what those are and i'll open up a cue uh but before i do i'll just stay on on my behalf um i just want to thank the both of you and uh megan and susan and whoever else contributed to the report you know when we started this process uh when you first reported to us back in february you know i think they're honestly right there was a bit of a mismatch between what it is that we felt like we needed to focus on at this point in time and where um that process was headed but you all made a you know a pivot and uh at least for my part i'm just really thrilled with the report that we have and the uh information that we're receiving so thank you for you know thank you for taking um that um request to heart and giving

49:59 us something that we can really grapple with i will uh open up a queue again i see everybody but uh dick and i don't know why that is but in any case um uh if anybody would like to jump in the queue raise your hand and i'll and we'll start there um dick if you're raising your hand i don't know uh and actually now that i think that and i don't see sonia now i don't so just so you know i can see four or five people at a time and i guess it's the last four or five people who have spoken um go ahead john okay thank you um susan megan and others that's a very good report and actually understandable thank you for somebody like me um just maybe this goes in phase two but have you considered what happens with on the regional mix if the acceleration of

50:44 decommissioning of the montana and wyoming coal happens i know we've talked about the potential brownouts and things in the region and a shortage has that come into any of your calculations or analysis either in phase one and or phase two um commissioner brown it hasn't yet but it will that's clearly part of the analysis we'll be doing in phase two and it'll include looking at how the regional resource mix uh evolves over time including the shutdown of those coal plants so yes it is something that will come up in the second phase of this first phase study okay and just to take on to that so then we'll know that if i mean if those decommissionings are accelerated

51:30 how that will change our capacity and our adequacy to meet the electrification goals over certain time periods yes indirectly it will we should have the ability once we develop this analytical method that we are developing in the context of this study to input many assumptions about our resource future that we can analyze including how does the grid change and what would that do for eweb's supply adequacy situation that is predominantly a long-term integrated resource plan analysis john looking at how how much resource we have to serve

52:15 available demand on our system that's predominantly and i and frank wants to correct me so i'm gonna let frank jump in frank you're muted i was that i was thank you president mattel so um one of the things that this type of modeling and effort will help with is that some of the issues that commissioner brown you refer to have to do with adequacy of resource in the northwest under certain conditions you know low hydro you don't have coal anymore this can actually provide input into those analysis as well this

53:02 isn't just a only for e-web type of result here when people ask us what's your load going to look like what's your resource mix going to look like then that can provide input into things like resource adequacy so it's a bi-directional benefit that that will help us all but we're we're going to look at the makeup you know different scenarios and sensitivities around changes in the electric supply side going forward both the characteristics of generation and also the carbon attributes of generation both of those change and they will look a lot different in 2050 than they do today and so we need to be able to model that and and that's going to be part of the next phases thank you

53:50 anybody else like to jump in the queue actually before we do that maybe travis or ann if you're on the line if you have any suggestions for me for how i can sort of scroll through the other 17 folks who are apparently on the line i only see three or four people or five people i guess at a time sometimes it's not the other commissioner sort of depends on who was last to speak if you have any suggestions about that president maitel i think it's a function of us having the slide displayed you should be able to see nine tiles of videos when we're not in presentation mode um other than scrolling i don't have any other other suggestions at this time okay well we'll make do i

54:35 there's a lot of buttons here i could press but i've been afraid to do that so i'll i'll i'll make do in the old-fashioned way uh dick perhaps you wanted to jump in the queue i i would like to i don't know if you can see me or not but i do see you now yeah at least you can hear me um so i appreciate the draft report i also want to um acknowledge that you've probably got a little more work to do to finalize it um i just got a couple of quick questions to start with one is i just the takeaway for me was that the amount of potential load associated with both transportation electrification and conversions of uh fossil fuel fired

55:23 space heating um the amount of load both in terms of peak energy are somewhat uncertain but probably in a range that's manageable in general terms and that's that's good news because i think up to this point we haven't had much of an idea of how much load we were potentially talking about um in mike am i correct though the the report to this point um does not really address what resources uh eweb would use or would be required over time at what kinds of costs um in order to serve this load notwithstanding the fact that it's probably manageable from a physical accommodation standpoint that's really phase two work right

56:10 that is phase two that's correct um uh i would also just add that um i guess that's it that's correct this is phase two i um i'm keenly interested in that phase two work uh in as much as that'll kind of inform us all as to what the impacts are for eweb and our customers of moving forward on this path i i'm not sure well i think we look forward to making a positive contribution to the decarbonization agenda i'm a little reticent to fully embrace that before knowing what that really means in terms of resource requirements over time and

56:57 potential impacts on our costs and our rates i i am i have no impatience around that because i understand that's future work but i would simply point out that i probably will not be on the board at that point to hear and appreciate that the results of that work so that being the case let me just point out a couple of thoughts that i have for the board about some policy level questions that we ought to all be thinking about in the meantime one is you know um should we um how should we approach uh uh working towards our contribution to the city's goals in light of the fact that we are all i

57:42 think um positively disposed to playing a an important role but yet not yet in a position to know what the impacts on our resource mix and our costs are um so that's kind of you know so how aggressively should we engage this before we've completed the phase two work and are in a position from a policy standpoint to evaluate what that means for eweb and our customers from a cost perspective and then the second thought that i have even if the rates go up it might be that in a general sense for the community as a whole that this would represent nonetheless a least cost strategy for for meeting uh carbon

58:27 objectives so not for debate tonight but just as a general policy matter as we look forward to hearing more about the costs and the impacts um is it okay for the rates to go up if if this is a viable means to meet the community's uh carbon objectives um and i don't i just leave that as an open question for us all to think about thank you all right well uh commissioners carlson and schlossberg i don't see you right now if either of you wants to jump in the queue um you know one of you go ahead and then the other afterwards okay all right uh this is sonya

59:14 uh so yeah thank you very much for the report um i read every word of it was very it was fascinating i love the pivot that you made i think the information in it was very helpful um i mean for me i didn't feel like initially when i read through the report that there were any you know different assumptions that i would necessarily make it it really looked to me like we were looking at where the areas where we can go after deep decarbonization and if the community as a whole chooses to do that what are the switching methodologies that we take in order to to do that which you know for me that that made sense that the report focused on transportation and heating because heating is actually more of the place where we have those

59:59 purchases that we have to go out onto the market there were some comments made earlier that we purchased them between august and september and i don't think that that's the case i think the generally and correct me if i'm wrong but generally when we go out on we have more of those market purchases it's really when we have a lot more of those cold snaps maybe in the summertime when we have some really hot snaps and we don't have the hydro available but primarily it's when we have those heating events and we don't have um and and if it's if it's in the winter time then we don't have solar available at that point so for me the report made sense in in that you know i mean for for us i'm looking at the report here this is why i'm looking kind of off screen in another screen

1:00:44 um that you know transportation for the city of eugene is 50 of the resource emissions and if that's i mean that is a huge low-hanging fruit that we need to go after so for me that you know that makes a lot of sense in the assumptions that are made and the focus of the report um i do wonder about the i think the only thing that struck me in that was the the feasibility of being able to get to those different places um you know i don't i don't know what the general rates are that people replace vehicles uh if i'm assuming that people aren't just you know i i bought a new car i'm going to dump it

1:01:29 next year just to get a new electric vehicle i mean people tend to use the vehicle for a while until it it goes out so i do wonder about the rates of replacement and how that matches the curve but again these are very minor uh very minor small details in which you know i think that the overall phase two of the report um doesn't really need to handle it's just something that struck out to me i mean i think you're on the right track and appreciate all the work that you've done so far to to give us this information and make this pivot i understand this and where we're going with it i think is where i'm where i'm trying to indicate too so thank you

1:02:16 uh commissioner schlossberg if you have anything to say now i can't see you but so if you're raising your hand out there you're welcome to speak great thank you um so thank you for this report i want to echo what everyone else has said um and so my takeaway and let me know if i have this correct or incorrect is that if we're looking at the um the climate recovery ordinance based on the assumptions of things that the city wants to do that we absolutely can handle the the things that we're being asked to do i know that there's been some suggestions out there that eweb wouldn't be able to provide as much clean energy if we adopted all these suggested um proposals but it looks like

1:03:01 we can do it so that's correct right commissioner schlossberg thank you for asking that question i think it's just important to say that there is still a deeper work we need to do on the peak load impact on our loads of electrification and so on an average energy basis this looks doable but what electrification would do for our peak load demand and the need to serve that we still have yet to look at and that'll come up in october okay um and i guess my other takeaway is when i look at the eugene's reduction goals and even if um even if we have high electrification we're so far from the city of eugene's

1:03:48 targets that that's another takeaway so i know you said you're going to dig a little deeper to see what their assumptions are but um that's just a really huge difference and i know that um i'm not sure what their assumptions are but i guess this just kind of piggybacks on the meeting that meetings that we've been having the quarterly meetings i would just really like to see the city work um a little closer with us to to talk about how we can de-carbonize realistically i see frank had a comment about that go ahead frank i can't see you but if you have to if you want to speak go ahead okay yeah thank you president mattel um i i agree with you mindy i think there's there's a couple of

1:04:33 of things that we have to really coordinate here you know one of the takeaways that that i have on any of these studies around electrification is that the fine print matters there's a whole bunch of assumptions that get made in these studies and we need to coordinate in fact we have meetings already planned to coordinate with the city and city staff so that they can understand what our assumptions are and simultaneously we have meetings set up with northwest natural where we want to review our assumptions around the usage cases as well so i think it's really important that you know we've we've done some educated guessing we've done some high level extrapolation of what we

1:05:19 think is going on but the details do matter and so we want to make sure we're coordinating really well with the city as well as northwest natural because we're you know we're we're talking really about fuel switching in both transportation and in space and water heating and we want to make sure those are very complex when you start getting into the whole way energy operates and so you're absolutely right we need to coordinate on on not just the city and but also on northwest naturals end all right well i'll jump in i uh i added five minutes to our um to our topic here just be so we can finish up uh i didn't have a chance to ask everybody if that's okay but i took that liberty

1:06:05 um i'll just add a couple of questions and then hopefully we can wrap up so thanks again for the the presentation and report uh one a couple things that i hear questions about frequently that maybe could be resolved in a little bit of a deeper dive in this phase one is the the potential for you know so-called climate refugees right so that is the idea that uh this is a relatively safe place to be vis-a-vis climate impacts and perhaps other parts of the country experiencing you know hurricanes and other kinds of um storm-related events might decide to move here at higher rates than we've experienced over the last 30 years i wonder if we could just do some sensitivity analysis that said well if if we i don't know what the population increase is by percentage on a year-over-year basis over the last 15 or

1:06:51 20 years but if we doubled or tripled it what would that do to our load um growth between now and 2050. so we had some sense of what that might also do to us um generally speaking uh is one thing i'd like to see in phase one and then i have a question if if there was one other um type of load that you would recommend going after in addition to eb's and the water heating component and uh what might it be what's the what's the other opportunity that you think is out there that we ought to consider including

1:07:38 well with regard to that last question first commissioner mattal i would say that um what we're really focused on is understanding how electrification would impact our loads our resources and our customers and so it i'm not sure that we are looking personally that this utility is in the position where we're trying to pursue an electrification impact um goal i don't think that's our role our role is to serve load as it comes and we have an obligation to serve when this load presents itself but we can certainly take a look at other opportunities this might be a phase two not a phase one analysis though as to what the other opportunities might be okay well and in that case uh my final

1:08:25 comment really is for the other commissioners we have two um presumptive commissioners that are joining the board and who will receive the phase two analysis and then two of us who won't be here for that and so i wonder if the other commissioners are okay with opening question two in particular up to the presumptive commissioners to provide some feedback back to susan so that when they do join the board they and three months later they're reading this report it reflects concerns that they may have had uh yeah commissioner cross i mean if we can reach out and get feedback from them you may i'm i would be fine with that

1:09:11 but it seems like a reasonable way to go you get to the end of the report and then two-fifths of your commission doesn't agree with the path you took um i i think that's a very nice gesture thank you yeah i believe we're in our staff's in touch with them frequently i am at least with matt mcrae it's not hard to reach out to them any other thoughts about that i i have a question but may just about delete the the aspect of how far they can go in directing staff or giving staff input on how they might want to see things happen if they're not officially part of the board yet is that okay frank so we don't get in trouble by having input from somebody that aren't

1:09:56 isn't duly elected yet thanks for the putting me on the spot uh commissioner brown i i you know i i actually think that it soliciting input is something that we do all the time even with the general public and the the fact that we have two presumptive board members who potentially could supply some some opinion and information is great if if they are going to actually do something that directs resources in such a way that would be a different path than this board has directed then i would i would raise that flag um with this board just um and there's a little bit of an of judgment involved there i'm i'm not

1:10:42 um opposed to making sure that we understand um the two new board members perspectives on this i as long as we're not starting to redirect staff i think that's where i would draw the line yeah i'm all in favor of it i just wanted to make sure we didn't set ourselves up for a challenge if somebody doesn't like what we're coming up with thank you well i think i you know commissioner brown i think that you know the one thing about this is there will be a lot of scenarios that people want to look at and i i really think the most important thing for us to do as a utility is when we speak of electrification which is really one piece of a big decarbonizing effort

1:11:27 we need to make sure that the decisions that that this board and future boards will be faced with do not put us in a position where we cannot handle our obligation to serve in a way that's not aligned with the values that we have around you know very carbon free resources and other things so i think that this is very informative to the paths and the decisions ahead because we do have to look at a number of different futures and this happens to look at the load side of that futures of those futures so i i think that this is going to be a valuable tool because we will be asked well what about this resource or what about that resource um what if this load changes or that

1:12:15 load changes and so i think we're putting ourselves in a position to do that thanks if you get any controversial uh or you know or judgment calls it you know you can always bring it back to the board um and ask for our approval of whether or not um uh you know that uh we want to allow staff or staff to move forward with specific requests by the presumptive commissioners last question for me can you just clarify susan um did the study include uh potential um what would you call it uh heat from the uh sorry my from the commercial sector i was trying to trying to differentiate commercial and industrial does domestic sorry what i think what i'm trying to say is does domestic heat include

1:13:00 commercial it does sir and i i apologize for not making that clear it was residential and commercial space and water heat okay the study that you have the initial report does not quite capture the commercial load potential in the way that the residential sector has but we will capture that in terms of final publication in october all right well thank you very much all right we are a few minutes over uh uh so i apologize primarily to john brown we will um are there any other questions that commissioners wanted to ask and again i can only see right now um uh john brown and uh sonia so if others have questions you can speak up president mattel yeah go ahead dick

1:13:46 i just want to make a comment about the earlier discussion about uh the um new commissioners uh i would i would assume more broadly that we're moving into a phase where they're going to be subject to some orientation work by staff i'm not sure exactly how we accomplish that in these days of covid but um i i normally that includes briefings on salient matters that are likely to come before the board early in their tenure there are a number of those including issues having to do with our upriver hydro projects so i really see this this issue is really no different than other things that would be folded into that orientation and i would just encourage uh the board officers and and the senior staff to be um

1:14:32 looking at schedules and trying to figure out how to pursue that so that as those new folks come on not only in the case of this topic but others that there's as much of a seamless transition as possible and in as much as we're not presently contemplating decisions at least on this uh matter um uh i i don't think there's formally a a constitutional problem so anyway i i support that um proposal that they be brought into the discussion that way and just pointing out that there are more topics that would be of the same hilt

1:15:19 alrighty any final comments from many other commissioners or frank or susan um yes i just wanted to say uh commissioner that a megan in the planning team had been working non-stop from home on this for some time and they got a great deal of assistance from renegade gonzalez's communications team who helped put that report into a format that was made it digestible to uh non-technical people including me so i just wanted to call them out and say thank you well thanks to everybody then for the report it really is fantastic i very much appreciate it all right well we will um move on i believe to our next item of business and that's the eweb headquarters building looks like we have the slides already

1:16:04 queued up we have 20 minutes on the clock and uh frank it looks like this one's yours thank you president mattel this is actually a really uh simple presentation because the slide you see in front of you is the actual presentation the board was provided a backgrounder on the on the topic this is really a general discussion around the headquarters building and potential future ideas on disposition for the board to discuss the backgrounder highlighted a couple things uh first of all there's a decreasing presence from eweb at the particular at the headquarters building we're presently using it because we're

1:16:50 social distancing quite a bit and even some of our people who need space have leverage space that was was kind of open space but going forward it's it's not the the best use of an asset um and so our our presence is declining at headquarters uh we also received a notification from um our tenant phillips that uh of their intent to um not uh continue the lease um that's through the uh i believe it's october november of 2021 although they've indicated they will vacate um roughly at the end of this year and so it brings up the question uh relative to what do we want to do with the headquarters building

1:17:36 and so it's an opportunity for the board to have a discussion around that and what some of the options might be and and direct me to uh either look into or come back to the board with certain information that might still be needed so this is a situational update on headquarters building and really for the board to have an open discussion on all right before i open up uh queue and it if it's possible can you um pull the slide down so that we can see or that i can see those nine tiles if not you know i understand that's fine like fantastic uh that helps so much thank you anne or whoever did that

1:18:22 all right well i will open up a queue uh to ask questions or give feedback john brown you cannot go first you gotta at least wait a half a second give somebody else a chance anybody like to go first besides john brown go ahead dick oh yeah and you are muted dick i apologize um frank could you just remind us where we're at in terms of our surplus declaration kind of vis-a-vis the city's uh interests i can't remember where we left that so uh commissioner helgeson the um city manager and i continue to have just just general discussions around

1:19:07 not just the headquarters building but the mgp site to the south of the riverfront property as well as potential code changes that that we're interested in those are ongoing i haven't received interest specifically from the city uh on the building or its purchase um you know and so i would just say that it's just general dialogue there's an open dial we did declare the property surplus i believe that's coming up on two years ago it was in november of two years ago and so the clock is running on the five-year window

1:20:13 sonya if you want to go first your hand was i think raised oh sorry okay i'm not sure if you can see you it's fine you go and then i'll i see everybody now for a moment i couldn't it's a little i'm on a small screen i apologize but anyways go ahead mindy um so my question frank is aren't aren't our hands kind of tied until the either the city decides that they want it or don't want it or that we somehow change the whatever the rule or the code is like what what could we do so there's a couple of options the board could direct me to negotiate with the city further around terms that designed to lift the obligation to wait

1:20:58 that would be something that i could engage the city on specifically um that um or the board could direct and look at more of a leasing option um you know there's a number of different disposition options um in in what's probably going to be a challenging commercial space market given the fact that there's a lot more telecommuting going on um and so um we at present now there there also could be which i wouldn't necessarily recommend there could be some legal options to um potentially shorten that time frame but that's not necessarily where you don't want to jump to the to the legal options i think it

1:21:44 would be better to to work with the city on something like that related to changing the code or lifting the obligation of interest to free us up to sell the building to whoever at that point but i could do that if the board were to make that recommendation i could approach the city with a more specific uh request okay thank you commissioner carlson would you like to say something sure so i mean i i do remember that we had some other legal options um it sounds like the city is not moving

1:22:29 on uh kind of the clarification that we need around that five-year time window i mean they it's in their best interest to drag out the clock as long as possible so that they keep their options open um i mean at this point given that there there's a probably i mean i don't know i would look to john brown for some um outlook on the commercial space because it's still a really great property granted in the current economic times maybe we just you know we have to sit on it for a while anyway so i don't know if our options around leasing are really that strong or if you know it it moves us to try to move it through faster just to get it off of our

1:23:14 hands if it you know if we can sell it and um challenge the city in that way um i'm i'm just not sure if we have the any ability to lease either if there's really any interest out there so you know i mean right now it seems like it's a useful tool to be able to use to socially distance where we need to but it is a big asset that we're holding and i i would really like to be able to move it through faster but um we do have a i think there's also the other thing i wanted to note was that there's a pretty significant turnover my understanding on the city council um well so i don't know if that will

1:23:59 change anything or not but it might it might be worth um starting conversations with some of the people that could presumably you know be elected during the next term and see if they have any interest in kind of moving forward faster with the city's discussions thank you all right again i can't see everybody doesn't look like there's anybody else who wants to speak so we can i think moving forward to the break is there anybody else out oh john brown is there something you'd like to say thank you i really appreciate the comments um yeah i got a couple questions for frank i mean there's an old analogy so you don't buy anything

1:24:44 beats while you sleep that thing will lead us alive if we sit on it for another three to five years because we have to maintain it and heat it and insure it and do all that whether there's somebody in there or not right now we're getting what 45 or 50 000 a month um that we're getting from them and we're only renting less than a third of the building um we don't know if there's a market out there for it nobody's ever dealt with a covered dynamic in the market we've dealt with recessions and those you know i've been through three of them and and we've survived and things come back i have no idea how this this dynamic is going to change the concept of commercial space and things but you're not going to know until we try number one number two i have a legal question frank uh the code says that they can they give they have 30 days to tell us they want them five years to figure out how they're gonna get it but they can only take it for municipal purposes

1:25:31 if we lease that building today to the abc company for five years then they cannot acquire it from municipal purposes within that five year time frame is that a legal stance that we could take uh because they can't use it if we if we lease it to another phillips corporation or something and instead of just sitting there and having them you know we have making us bury 20 million bucks in a can and put it in the backyard we want to put that money to work because we told the rate payers when we sold any or all parts of the headquarters building we'd use that to reduce the debt that we built rock with and i think we owe that to them and so i don't want to sit there for another three years or four years and wait for them to figure out if they want to buy it or what they're going to do i think it's time to

1:26:16 you know time kills deals let's move and either rent it out to somebody and then if we have a challenge on the legality of them not being able to acquire it because they can't use it for municipal purposes because it's least oh well we get 50 or 100 000 a month so commissioner brown first of all while we are the owner so this this is really an option to negotiate on a right to negotiate on their part while we are the owner we can make any decisions we want to around leasing leasing terms etc so even if we had a five-year lease and they negotiated to they expressed an interest and they negotiated to purchase it

1:27:01 they would at that point have to agree to the terms of that lease as part of that purchase so um you know i think that their option is simply an option to negotiate for the purchase and they have up to five years to close that deal it doesn't specify the terms of that deal other than their obligation if they were to purchase it they would have to use it for municipal purposes so that's an obligation on them not on us okay well my point was is if we have let's say we've leased it beyond that five year term they can't use it for the municipal purposes so does that negate their uh right to buy it because their right to buy it is only subject to being able to use it for municipal purposes

1:27:46 we leased it to the whole thing to phillips for five years they've already burned up two they can't use it for municipal purposes so does that negate their own uh their right to buy yeah the municipal purposes in the sense it isn't very well defined in the code there have been some there is some case law around municipal purposes i would think if that came as part of the negotiation and there was a lease in place we would have to negotiate the details around whether that was you know acceptable to us or not i as far as a restriction i'm not sure that that would have to be looked into um in a lot more detail that that

1:28:32 specific scenario around a municipal purpose okay well just in my closing real quick i'll just say the one thing i don't want to do is let that building sit there vacant for another three to five years either release it and sell it and move forward but that's a ton of money sitting there and you know yes it's not as if we have that kind of dispensable disposable income just to say oh well what's 15 20 million bucks it's uh we need to we need to monetize it one way or another through a sale or at least so hopefully we can succeed in doing that yep totally under understood and in fact the even our usage right now is pretty minimal and um it's it's certainly an under utilization of an asset and that's that's not what we want so your point is well taken

1:29:19 i see your hand dick i'm going to jump in the queue and then take do a round two so i i may have missed this frank and if that's the case i apologize there was a text or two back and forth with ann just so i could try and figure out how to uh manage some of the um stuff online a little bit better did you say or if not could you um tell us how things worked out with the roundabout my recollection is that we were not going to sell that property to them and they needed it to kind of complete their planning uh until we had secured um you know a change of uh in terms of their how they viewed that the 30 days and five years issue that's still the case um president mattel the we have not sold them that's the mgp

1:30:05 site that i referred to it's like you could also call it the roundabout site we have not negotiated a deal for that sale as at this point and because their interests you feel have changed uh because of whatever the economic cl whatever the reasons i suppose it doesn't matter but they perhaps don't need it the way that they uh or they just don't need it right away or what do we what do we think is the reasoning on their side um i really can't presuppose but i i can hypothesize that the timing has changed as much as anything i still believe that the the roundabout is the best approach for access to that end of the riverfront if you recall a lot of their timing was driven around that

1:30:50 the 2021 uh world championships that along with um just the whole development plans around the riverfront has has been delayed some so i think it's really more of an issue of timing i do know that those discussions need to be resurrected and i believe that i still am under obligation by this board for certain deal points associated with the code the mgp site and potentially the headquarters building so that is still in place but it has not progressed because of timing yeah well what i'm hearing from the board by and large uh we haven't taken a

1:31:35 vote per se but is an interest in getting and moving forward and not letting it sit five years so do you do you have the authority you need to move uh you know to explore those or would we need to update the um you know agreement that you have with the board i believe i have what is necessary to move forward um i will make sure that if there's any details within question that i would bring that back to the board likely an executive session but i believe that i have full authority to pursue those deal points as specified previously around a sale and other sales um and negotiate with the city i also believe that

1:32:20 we're in a position where we can negotiate leases as well um and bring those bring those back to the board for uh approval depending on on the level and i would think this is probably at the level that the board approval would be required so um i have i have full authority to to take the advice of this board and i'll consider it advice at this point and move forward my last comment and then i'll turn it over to dick is i just want to underscore what sonia said that uh you know as a new general excuse me a new um city manager uh over there and several new com counselors who will take their oaths january first or second or third or whatever it's going to be so there might be a reason just to revisit based on the new makeup of their um leadership go

1:33:07 ahead dick well i think most of what i was going to say has been substitute uh in in your comments steve um i i don't think we're in any different position on this than we were a year ago kind of vis-a-vis our ability to exercise options other than another leasing out of portions of the building so i would say you know that i would agree that perhaps if you're hearing direction at this point it's do whatever we can at this point to seek as much clarity with the city as possible so that when and if we have alternatives other than those we can exercise on our own that we're in a position to move those forward because without that clarity we're just kind of sitting here as as commissioner brown says with an asset that we can't

1:33:52 really utilize or convert to some value for our customers i'm curious if we chose to put the building out on the market to see if we got any interest um i mean obviously the city has given us indication that currently they are no long they're not interested um there's ambiguity around the five-year time frame obviously that could cause some strife with them if we you know if they have this assumption that they can sit on it for five years and that we can do whatever but i mean it could i mean some of these deals take a while to go through anyway um i wonder if

1:34:39 there's any you know possibility there to to kind of feel out the market and see i mean it could be on the market for that long anyway i don't know but i mean i would be uh potentially interested in seeing that option if we were to put it out on the market and see you know what sticks and if we get any interest i think what we've heard so far commissioner carlson is that there is interest i i think the challenge in going from having an interest to actually developing the details around a purchase i don't think a legitimate buyer would take that step knowing that there's a city option

1:35:24 um hanging kind of hanging over the the property's head now that that doesn't mean that we shouldn't explore you know any and all options i i think that to the point of this board we don't want this to just sit there i i think it's it's gonna be a dilapidated asset if you do that and so there's a sense of urgency around plotting a course and starting to execute that course i will say also that i have a good relationship with the city manager i think city staff and e-web staff are working well together and if we need to sit down and hammer out some more details around some of the real estate issues along the river then because there's a number of them there's not just a headquarters building

1:36:11 that that we can do that um in the context of understanding where both both eweb and the city of eugene land so i think that there's an opportunity potentially to do that like i think like it's been mentioned with some of the differences in makeup of the city i mean it just seems to me that it would be if we actually had an interested buyer and took that to the city and said this is the opportunity cost you're costing the community that it might they might be more willing to to move on it and that okay well yes we are going to lose out or no that's fantastic you have this other option please take that for the benefit of our community this is this is all about the community's money and not about the city versus eweb

1:36:57 and so you know i feel like their interests should be aligned with our interests if they truly are not interested in using the building for for any city purposes and if they're not then at that point then they they would need to make a real decision about it i mean i would just bring it up with it you know with potentially the city manager and say that this is something that we're you know potentially interested in if the other board members were agreeable to at least making that indication to see where you know where they stood i mean if this was an option that they would you know if it would cause a lot of strife within the city council or the you know the staff there then you know that would also be a good indication of where they're at

1:37:43 but again this is all for the community's best interest not sitting on something that's going to cost ratepayers more and not be able to move forward with the city as well correct alrighty we are just slightly over time for this issue but i want to make sure if there are any um any final comments that people want to make that there's an opportunity to get them in all right well hearing none we were are scheduled to take a five minute break by my clock it's uh 708 we'll come back at 7 13 so i'll just set a five minute so please be back on time i have no way of chasing you down

1:43:52 alrighty looks like we're mostly back sonia and mindy if you're there if you turn your cameras on that's why not how i'll know you're here well alrighty then nice to see everybody hope you enjoyed your break my cheesecake was fantastic i hope yours was too uh frank it looks like you are up once again quarterly strategic and operational report and you have 30 minutes great thank you president mattel i just wanted to highlight a a few things relative to the performance of the utility for the first half of the year um you know first of all i i think that if you've watched this report evolve um it's really starting to become more and more

1:44:37 informative and condensed and address the goals if you're like me you like to flip through and look at the charts and the graphs and and see where we are i think that much of that is attributed to the management team and also to supervisors who really gather up the information for for assessment go ahead with the next slide some of you know this was part of a roughly a 65 page uh report that we provided the board uh relative to um our work in the first half of the year and and taking a snapshot of of the financials of the goals i have to admit that a lot of the first half was trying to adjust to a new operating

1:45:23 environment around covid we made a number of different adjustments but continue to operate we are part of an essential service we've developed and continued to refine plans uh around how we respond and how we're continuing to respond how we're helping the community financially the electric utility financials are a little i describe those as sluggish much of that is driven by um slightly lower than budget retail revenue so far our earned income numbers are a little bit low budget at about 4.4 million compared to budget seasonally

1:46:08 adjusted budget of 6.8 million the water financials are actually pretty solid they're actually ahead of budget uh being at 2.3 million of net income versus 1.6 which was the seasonal budget much of the water utility revenue does occur in the summer though and so we're we're entering the the higher consumption period for water i would say that from the capital perspective the water utility is going to finish the year projecting at a little over 90 percent of their project completion which is which is a good number water is a little electric's a little bit behind much of that is because of carmen smith and some equipment issues that we

1:46:54 equipment delays that we had with carmen which accounted for a pretty large majority of that we also budgeted some work on the canal which probably will happen next year that's the lieberg canal and so those assessments as the board knows we'll we'll get into and provide some updates next month on we have i think done some really nice work on the customer side we've provided in the first half over a million dollars of direct assistance some of that is just looking at how and when we distribute funds and also our energy assistance program and developing new terms and conditions for customers to help them through this tough period much of that is around

1:47:40 extended payment terms partial energy payments really trying to keep customers customers and we we suspended our normal collection process including disconnects this really the last resort um up until this time we will eventually in the month of august have to resume uh our normal collection process and slowly get back into that there is some exposure there for delinquency accounts as i mentioned earlier in the meeting safety metrics are strong some of that because of how we're working because of the levels of work but the the encouraging thing about safety metrics was our our good catch program used to be

1:48:25 referred to as close calls but good catches are so far in the year even after the first half over double what we would typically average in a year and so as i think it's just bringing safety to mind um the the operating environment that we're under and some of the tools that we've developed for people to provide safety suggestions really right very in a very timely way has increased the amount of of good catch reports that we're getting which is really a preventative action from a safety perspective water quality remains good as you know we we monitor cyanotoxins and how hazardous algal blooms throughout

1:49:11 this period of time we have seen some blooms in the reservoirs but none have appeared at our intake so far this year and so water quality is good reliability of delivery is good both on the electric side and the water side our metrics on the electric side are below are kind of our five-year running average uh actually below the five-year range and so both water and electric are doing well from a reliability perspective and we're making good progress on our strategic goals and not everything's perfect but we are making progress on those goals and specifically next slide please you know here's kind of where we are on

1:49:56 the various goals the the first one is really the operational we have a number of metrics and and as well as board policies around how we operate um ami is getting and and starting to resume its installation pace i think we made some a lot of progress on the communications side the radio communications side on ami as well as some of our process mapping we're a little bit behind on cei that's the customer self-service portion we are looking to do and launch that in the late fall still so it's a little bit behind but we're going to start our trial with internal eweb customer employees potentially even within the

1:50:41 next 30 days or so so that's a little bit behind but still on track to to do well this year and make good progress this year emergency management continuing to make progress the emerge the hazardous emergency assessment on the water side is progressing we developed some initial fire uh planning uh as well as continuing to make progress on our emergency water sites and so that's that's progressing well um the negotiations and working collaborative with sub on the water resiliency is a little bit behind it's it's not that we're not working with sub we're working mostly on the the glenwood uh property um

1:51:26 issues um their interest around the uh electric side our interest around the water side so we're we've made a lot of good progress on that and and as uh commissioner brown mentioned in his opening comments we've also had a discussion with the city of springfield around the future uh of a drinking water facility in glenwood and i think have a pretty good understanding as to some of their interests and so that's well that goal is behind specifically we are continuing to work with springfield utility board just on some other subjects our electrification as you saw earlier i think that's on track it's one of those issues where the the more you do the more you learn the

1:52:11 more you want to learn something else or something different it's continuing to evolve and and will continue to involve i think the the really the best thing that we're developing there is a is a system and a modeling method that we can look at all kinds of scenarios relative to the impacts of load and then also as part of that looking at the the impacts on carbon it's um because we're talking about fuel switching i think it's really important to recognize that the electric sector will look much different in 2050. we won't have carb we won't have coal in the system we will likely have other renewables we may still have natural gas in the system but also the natural gas sector will continue to evolve as well and so

1:52:58 if we're going to make assumptions we have to understand the assumptions that are being made both in the electric sector as well as the i'll refer to it as the fossilness factor associated with natural gas there's a lot of interesting technology that's developing there too so both of those will have to be analyzed as part of our studies going forward we are preparing to come back to the board on goal seven next month to talk in more detail around the lower mackenzie hydro project specifically the the lieberg canal as well as some other upriver issues and then we are on track relative to our climate change policy this is usually it's written both around policy

1:53:44 what we're doing at the state level also what we're doing relative to energy efficiency and conservation what we do with internal operations and then things related to an eventual target of of helping to have a positive contribution on co2 equivalent so the goals are progressing uh to various degrees and and paces um but i think we've continued to make good progress um under a pretty tough operating environment over the last gosh it i i hate to say it's actually been five months um that we're in this already um and so we've as really staff and

1:54:29 you know i think susan mentioned people adapting to a different work environment looking at different ways to operate remotely and and in a mobile fashion so continue to operate there i think with that the the other 85 pages or 65 pages i can't remember exactly what it was um if you have questions or comments be happy to answer those or call on staff to answer those or get back to commissioners if there's further questions or comments but it's it's been a really interesting if nothing else it's been an interesting first half of 2020 and appreciate all the board guidance that we've received along the way we interact in a lot different way than

1:55:14 we used to my breakfast expenses have have gone way down and my lunch expenses have gone way down they don't have to meet with uh with all of you for for in between things so you mean you don't get that i'll entertain any questions or comments all righty well i'll open up a queue anybody like to jump in look at that frank you really did it with those i don't know it's okay i think you know we're continuing to make progress and um it looks like you inspired a couple of them steve looks like the awkward silence got a few people to speak up go ahead dick

1:56:00 i just wondered frank um whether you um were sensing that we were going to have to make any um amendments to the budget as we move towards the end of the year or is this all being managed within the context of the flexibility you already have and that you're thinking that you can get through the year with with the same budgetary resources that we authorized in december i think you know it's a great question commissioner helgeson um we're we're only really halfway through um i i wouldn't want to say that there won't be a budget amendment but i i don't foresee you know i'm not seeing any danger signs at this point i think we're

1:56:46 managing pretty well within that i actually don't know if deborah hart is going to correct me on this if she's if she's on this um within this meeting but i don't see any indications that we would be coming back to the board um with a budget amendment request i i think we're managing pretty well with that but there are still a lot of variables as you know and half of the year left to go so um it's possible but i feel pretty good about how we're managing it so far remind me um in one area we we've um at least in the near term we've increased our outlays for low income assistance

1:57:33 is that being accomplished by simply resequencing and rescheduling the money that we'd already authorized or are you expecting that we're going to have an overall expenditure at your end that's larger than what was originally in the budget so there were a couple things some of it was rearranging the timing commissioner the other was with our our energy assistance program where customers actually uh customers contribute to the fund we had a little bit of a balance going into the year that we have drawn down um that typically contributes about 125 000 a year just directly from customers uh that entered the year with a little bit of a balance and so we have leveraged both changing the timing a little bit and then leveraging um those funds that were

1:58:19 available through the energy assistance program so i don't expect a budget amendment specifically for that okay thank you john i think you were next no thank you um just a real quick question on silt i noticed that the the silt for q1 to q2 and springfield was consistent so that's water but the significant like six hundred thousand dollar differential between the two porters on uh to the city of eugene a decline from one to two and that's six percent of a number that six hundred thousand differential is i didn't see how that totally correlated i you know i'd get lost in the weeds of all the numbers but is that uh consistent with what we're seeing is that significant of a decline in

1:59:04 revenues yeah some of that yes it is commissioner brown the there is a portion of silt that is based off of a more fixed number relative to wholesale business and then there's a variable a number of different variable numbers it's a pretty lengthy spreadsheet that is used to calculate sil based on the revenue received so there's variables between you know residential and commercial and consumption but i would say in general yes that was based on a lower than budgeted consumption and therefore revenue number okay thank you

1:59:49 i'll jump in the cube briefly um so frankly lots of organizations that and uh including eweb right have frozen travel um during covet and um i i don't have i don't pay i don't read the budget that closely to um in in recent years but i think i've looked at it in the past and you know we have a significant travel budget so that um our staff can get out to conferences and meetings happening across northwest and uh in dc and elsewhere anyways i'm just wondering if you could comment a little bit on on um you know what that impact has been like for staff and the other thing is that i think a lot of organizations are realizing like maybe we don't need to travel as much in order to do the job that we have assigned uh that that is before us maybe maybe zoom and

2:00:34 these other go-to meetings etc work reasonably well now that we've all tested it and been forced to um get comfortable with it so anyways just going forward or looking back a little bit you know um what impacts have we seen from the lack of travel and going forward do you anticipate you know savings i suppose in one way by adjust by you know by not picking it up at the pace that we had last year yeah i think uh commissioner mattel it's it's when we started to look at um next year especially given that we're forecasting some revenue decline because of economic fallouts from from the pandemic we looked at areas that were really kind of natural opportunities to make adjustments in our expenses

2:01:21 and travel was one of those and and we have seen and um are are seeing this year uh a lot lower travel budgets uh because a lot of organizations have adapted um you know if you're if you're participating in seminars and trade organizations most of those have converted to some virtual method and i have committed to doing that at least through the end of the year we have also projected that that's going to continue and so we have have um in our budgetary process that we're working on now looking at significantly lower travel budgets for 2021 and and i want to say roughly 80 cut in travel for 2021 there's some opportunities where you're talking

2:02:06 about a high degree of collaboration or partnership work or even potential looking at training associated with certifications that you might may or may not be able to get online those we have a little bit of funding for but you're absolutely right i think i've i've seen a lot of you know i've been on i don't know you know it's it's an odd environment because it seems like i never stopped working it's you know one zoom meeting to the next and then you go to teams and then you go to go to meetings and then you know you just go from one to the next and i think people have started to adapt to that um so i absolutely agree we've we've seen a significant decrease in that i think we're starting to adapt to it in some types of work it's maybe

2:02:52 even more productive than it was before you have the ability to concentrate but we are working definitely on our budgets for next year and that's one of the opportunities we're going to leverage yeah well i'll just throw out the comment that i i think that uh you know given how you know that's just one very interesting and i would say somewhat positive impact of coveted lots of organizations that took travel for granted it just it's just a fact you just you can't stop it um are you know forced to reassess and realize no things can work just fine um or reasonably as well without so i guess if that's the case then it puts the um pressure on us um to justify the increase in travel budgets in if it you know whenever it um we get

2:03:39 the all clear from who you know the powers that be the feds and the state that um and the airlines and whoever else the travel is safe again okay fine but if we proven to ourselves that we don't that we can do our jobs reasonably well or just as well without that then i guess i would i would i would put it back on you all to um to be clear with the board as to why and if two years from now travel budgets have to resume to what they were in 2019. yeah the other thing that we're seeing commissioner mattel which is a i'll say the the inverse reaction to that is that there when you look at online activities online trainings we're seeing uh subscriptions going up so i think people are

2:04:25 recognizing that virtual trainings have value you're avoiding travel costs so therefore you may be willing to pay more on the virtual side so we're we're not seeing a total savings in i'll say a training and travel we're saving in travel some of that on the online side is is not being totally offset but so there's there's some push and pull there i understand commissioner carlson great um they brought up the the budget for um supporting uh people who need assistance during this time now i know we have in the past we've had the run to stay warm i'm assuming that

2:05:11 that's canceled are we doing something that's somewhat of a community outrage fundraiser going into the fall or is that something that's also tabled yeah commissioner carlson i'd actually don't know on that i'll have to follow up with the communications team and we might need to be renamed the run to stay safe instead of the run to stay warm um but you know we stay warm yeah we had switched the uh up to the point where you have a fever you can run to stay warm but if you get a fever that's that's too much you know we we did contract out the the management of that that race i i don't know exactly where that's at but i can follow up with staff and get back

2:05:57 to you on that okay other comments questions for frank uh and mindy i don't see you right now so if you're raising your hand sorry i'm not seeing that um i don't have any other comments other than great job mostly staying on track given these very strange and challenging times and i'll just uh maybe end as my sense we're about to close out this session uh with uh you know kudos for the quality of the report not just this time but in general as you said at the outset that it has evolved um but all under your leadership we didn't have anything like this at all until uh you became the general manager so just recognizing that and so the adding it into our

2:06:44 um into our calendar four times a year and continuously improving the quality of the report itself it really is a fantastic addition to uh you know the board's view of um you know of what's going on and i and i suspect it's really useful for you and uh leadership and a range of staff up and down the organization so thanks for the effort to frank and all the folks because i know there must be many of them who contribute to the quarterly report yeah there are a lot of contributors thank you president mattel and and i think that what it does is it pulls us back to the mission at hand and the goals at hand and it's it's a nice way to keep us on track and so um thanks to thanks to you for those comments we appreciate them but there's

2:07:30 a lot of staff that really do um contribute to this and and pull it all together so thanks for that all righty we have one last uh substantive item for the evening and that's the annual strategic plan review it's another 30 minutes and frank once again you're front and center yeah it's it i guess you get a lot of dose of me this this time around and i'll see if i can work on that going forward go ahead and go to the next slide so just you know as a reminder we we entered the the strategic plan late in 2017 this board was instrumental in its development possibly with the exception of commissioner schlossberg who

2:08:18 who kind of assumed a role to that this was the strategy when she joined it's part of the reason for the recommendation going forward um to not look at any really substantive type of changes until a new board would come on and take a fresh look but i think there's a number of things that like i said it started in 2017 uh we're continuing to push through uh a number of different phases um and and really a lot of the work we're doing now is is around even things that you see around electrification and understanding the consumption side of of what we do go ahead with the next slide i think the just in general working with with the board getting your comments um

2:09:05 some of them formal some of them informal uh some of the strengths and weaknesses of the present plan and and process that we're in the two you know the two big ones and in fact the entire plan was really based off of the challenges and the issues that we saw the utilities going to be faced with over the next decade and so the fact that those are still relevant is is probably a natural outcome but i i think that's the strength of the plan it wasn't um something to just make us feel good and and about something and and have some fancy words but we thought it was relevant to the decisions at hand and it's you know breaking it up into phases there's always a little bit of grayness

2:09:51 between the phases but i think that we're we're seeing progress through the plan that way and it's biting off chunks that we think we can work on in in kind of a near-term versus long-term approach and then we feel pretty good about the definitions associated with safety reliability the affordability piece we think those are pretty easy for us to understand and to to qualify and quantify some of the weaknesses emergency preparedness is different than resiliency and we see that resiliency which which we're actually seeing now involves workforce resiliency uh and financial resilience resiliency

2:10:36 and we we think there's an opportunity to expand the resiliency piece of this a little bit and not just talk about emergency preparedness and disaster recovery but expand that to become more about across the utility resiliency which would mean your i.t systems your communication systems your your people your finances so we think that's an opportunity for us we think that as we go through these phases the intent was as we kind of work through one phase we would provide more definition to the specific actions that would come out of the next phase and we think there's um maybe phase two which is kind of where if if we're between phase one and phase two there's an opportunity to

2:11:22 describe some more specific programs or actions that we would want to include in phase two we think that that's that's just an issue of developing things that are measurable and um quantifiable as you go through this and so we probably the the more we forget if we were to just leave the the plan stagnant which was not really the intent the more we work through that the more it it becomes a little bit disconnected and so we need to bring it back to some actions and then it's always one where the the role once you get past the delivery of electricity and water we have a mission that says that we're going to do this consistent with the values of our

2:12:07 community or our customer owners and that's always a tough one to define especially in eugene where there's there's lots of values and there's there's sometimes competing values and how do we manage our way through things that aren't directly related to the delivery of electricity and water and maybe how we deliver electricity and water and to what to what method or to what result we do that so that's one where i think as we go forward and and have to figure out what does that look like we are a community owned utility and so uh the role we play in the community beyond just the affordable safe and reliable

2:12:52 delivery electricity and water what does that mean what does that look like i think there's always opportunity to to work on that piece that does impact how we do our work so some opportunities some strengths and weaknesses go ahead with the next slide please kind of brings us to um really looking for some input from this board as to if you see those same opportunities if you see other things that we might want to be looking at more specifically we thought that given that mindy wasn't involved in the first in the development of this plan we had two new board members coming on that it would be appropriate to really take a

2:13:37 little bit deeper dive into what the next sort of revision of this would look like uh next i don't mean revision maybe more of a fresh view of this sometime in 2021 but not to exclude this board from from providing direction if there's things that we think we're really missing and kind of where you see the strengths and weaknesses if you feel that same way so asking for your input your guidance if if that seems logical to the board and whatever other uh wisdom that you can provide would be helpful that's it president mattel all right well thank you i'll open up the queue um

2:14:22 i can see most everybody except for dick right now go ahead sonia i mean i'm i'm personally still committed to the current strategic plan uh i do appreciate you raising the kind of the ambiguities around those certain topics i can see where you're coming from there and i do appreciate the thought around more of the resiliency perspective maybe not necessarily emergency preparedness um in the current situation that we're in i am very thankful that we have gone through a lot of this work because i think it it set us up for a good situation for here there's a lot of overlap there but we could probably take that further and um and see other ways that how we can be

2:15:07 more flexible for the community's sake so i don't know i i don't personally feel like we need to revise it right now but i do appreciate the thought that we would do a kind of a broader review of the plan with the new board in 2021 as well yes so thank you um frank and also thank you for bringing up the possibility of just potentially revisiting this um in 2021 i think the thing to me that seems the biggest challenge is that um where the weaknesses lie the responsible and community values it's just there's

2:15:54 they're not um quantitatively defined right where the other one safety reliability and responsibility there's quantitative measures that you can look at to see if we've met them i think that maybe in 2021 when we have the new board members maybe we can look a little bit more into the responsible or environmental one because that is something that we could maybe set some tangible goals in and i just think the community value is always going to feel a little squishy because really we are the community and the thing that makes brings community to it is that we have an elected board and i think that whatever the makeup of the board is

2:16:39 is really gonna influence that i mean hopefully we're representing the customers and so those values are coming through but i just don't know that we can define that other than just by saying we have a publicly elected board that represents our customers so that is all yeah thanks commissioners i appreciate the the first two pieces of feedback i i think that the you know the the goal of a strategic plan which is really to help set up the organization to be successful um ongoing and sustain that success i in in the private industry the goal of a plan is to develop what's referred to as a sustainable competitive advantage that this one because of the structure

2:17:26 is almost a sustainable community advantage and so there's that there is that community piece uh part of it is that if people don't like what they're doing uh they have a board that that they can work with directly that's a piece of it and if they don't like what the board does they can re-elect new board members i mean that represent the community i mean that's that's a piece of it but we also can point to certain things that we do as a utility that relate directly to how we support the community that goes beyond delivering electricity and water in the way that we do you know environmentally consciously affordably there's things that this

2:18:13 board is committed to around funding educational programs for example we offer a great deal of very direct customer assistance that doesn't rely on the state or the federal government that comes through our rate base which means our community is also paying for it so we have to manage that correctly so there's some things that go beyond the governance part but you're right those seem a little squishy they they probably are and i think part of what is challenging in eugene is is there are a lot of values that people express very openly and passionately in eugene and it's up to this board to make recommendations kind of way through that so if we could at least even look at

2:19:00 some of the tools that we would use to guide those suggestions i think that would be helpful so so thanks thanks so far dick if you're interested in speaking i'm sorry i don't see you right now well um it doesn't appear that we have a um anything else uh um to add to it i'm i'm happy to largely um be quiet maybe that's what dick is thinking about as well that's sort of what we were invited to do thank you frank um but i think that makes sense to give the

2:19:46 those who are remaining on the board and those the two new folks who will join it um the opportunity to kind of lead that um when the time comes i will just say one thing that um in response to the whether or not we ought to substitute resilience for disaster um i forget the wording we have disaster recovery um i uh i guess i'll just say i'm not so sure i'm in favor of that i mean we are i i heard what you said about resilience and it's a more kind of widespread term and it can be applied to our financial metrics and and our workforce but we're already doing things to make the workforce more resilient and we already have policies in place to guarantee uh or to help us weather any number of financial storms that may

2:20:32 hit us right there's lots of things already in place there i worry that that term um we are back up we have done i feel like a pretty good job in the at least in the eight years that i have been here in in focusing um and that's been probably the the theme that has um you know most strongly resonated over the period of time that i've been here and we were not super focused um honestly um prior to that and that was the source of a lot of problems and so being really clear about what we do and what we don't do has given us a lot of focus and that's turned into a strategic plan in the head room and all the opportunity that comes with it resilience and you're talking to a guy who's a sustainability director so i'm aware of you know the things that i'm you know that i'm touching upon you know is open to a lot of interpretation and and

2:21:17 suddenly if if we open up um our terminology in that way we'll see lots of proposals um uh you know becoming our way under the banner of resilience when that isn't necessarily um when we i think we could afford to focus more tightly than just that broad term so you know for me a thing that the community really seems to a problem that we have had and deserves a lot of focus is storm response and we have gotten a lot better at it but we need to get a lot better still and i would prefer to see us tighten our focus as a as opposed to relax it with a term like resilience yeah commissioner mattel thanks for that i i do agree that what makes a plan or in fact the

2:22:03 planning that's behind the plan successful is a combination of of focus and then the alignment within the the organization that that can create so uh i i think that that's why this plan was a very condensed plan relative to the previous plans that the utility developed and it was a lot around focus not that that's the only thing we care about but i think when you look at trying to set yourself up and get results that align with some future position you have to be able to align an organization especially one the size of eweb and to do that you have to focus and then you have to communicate behind it

2:22:48 so i i do appreciate that perspective and and i think that's worth considering i i like the tight focus and if you or you know staff came to us and said hey in order to better uh you know to do storm response or disaster recovery or whatever you want to call it um better well we need you know we need a new bit of i.t infrastructure or we need to you know send train our workforce in a certain way or any number of other things that might seem tangential initially but but we're um but we're really a part of a larger response so um to make our recovery from disasters that much more nimble i think the board would accept that and enthusiastically so i don't see those terms as um as limiting us uh i see them as

2:23:35 really useful because the thing that the the community wants is and that has been expressed and we multiple times better faster um you know more 21st century style recovery from the the kinds of disasters and events that we um are gonna become unfortunately acquainted with that much more in going into the century yeah i think it's it's especially a challenge a commissioner as as you become what might be viewed as more successful as an organization you're getting more results you're you're seeing uh success um the more things people want you to do which which actually creates the challenge of lack of focus and so

2:24:22 um i do think that focus is important um i know that the the senior executive team hears that pretty regularly um and and i i agree with that i think the challenge especially when you start talking about board turnover is that people want they bring in lots of ideas they want more and so we're going to have to figure out what that looks like and and i think that's going to be an interesting challenge going forward is how do we keep our focus on the things that we really think are important and not get distracted by the things that other people might want us to do and it's a compliment to be asked those

2:25:08 things it's just it's a it's a very challenge it's a big challenge to an organization when you get fragmented in a lot of directions yeah i agree knowing when to say yes and knowing when to say no are too big uh really important all the way around well um we have some time left in the session but i sense that folks are have asked all the questions that they would like to ask unless i'm missing anything commissioner helgeson wanted to make a comment sorry dick you're the one i can't see right now go ahead just on that last point i think the challenge for the board when you engage that kind of a discussion is to agree on what the priorities are and that means you can't do everything the sum total of what everybody wants to do you have to not only focus but you have to

2:25:53 narrow that down to a handful of things that you can actually put the energy of the organization behind which means that you have to be willing as board members to kind of negotiate a set of priorities that um regrettably uh usually involves some or all having to let go of of something so um i think that's the challenge in achieving the kind of focus is in narrowing down the number of things that as an organization you're going to try to work on over a period of time because as capable as eweb is as an organization if you get spread too thin and try to take on too many things all at once

2:26:38 you're not going to be uh successful and beyond that there's nothing really that steve or i can contribute because the next time you talk about this um it'll be in that environment where you're looking at it anew well thank you commissioners and there's always public testimony dick yeah there's there's always that opportunity as a um i i think it's been one of the strengths of this board is the ability to to align and in some cases focus i have no reason to think the next board won't approach it the same way i think the the organization is poised to do that and um you know i think

2:27:23 the fact that this plan came together especially for for you two who are are moving on to better and bigger things i think that's a a real attribute that you can point to that highlights your contribution so thank you for that alrighty uh final i know i keep saying the same thing but because i can't see everybody i feel like i keep on having to offer the opportunity for folks to speak uh sonia you're good john brown i don't see you right now um i'm good i had a just a technical question but i'll ask prank later two big ones thanks okay fair enough all right well we will move on to our final

2:28:08 item and that's uh correspondence and board agendas frank it starts with you yeah there was um i believe just one piece of correspondence it was an update for the board on our fiber system there was also a little bit of an update on um the comments from the last meeting and requests from the board around a little bit of an update on what sub was doing and so that was provided as correspondence i don't know if you have any questions on that um i guess i would open it up if if you do and if you don't we can move on to agendas uh i have just a quick question so if a private you know residence business whatever outside of the downtown

2:28:53 network wants um to um but let's say but within some kind of reasonable proximity wants to try and connect is there an avenue for them to do that on as long as they're willing to pay for the extension of the fiber generally there's not a mechanism at this point commissioner mattel as you know we've we have offered um our spare fibers dark fibers first and foremost to public entities such as school districts and city county for those purposes we we have not made those available to contractors or suppliers for commercial

2:29:38 or re that we have a few commercial accounts i won't those have been a relic of history primarily but we have not made fiber available for people to then light and provide um isp type of services yeah all right other questions concerns on that issue yep mindy go ahead um i would just like to i said this earlier but just to get an update some information what the city's done around their their research into fiber and um just to kind of piggyback on this report so i don't know if that's possible to get that maybe in one of the upcoming board packets or something but that would be great

2:30:24 i think um commissioner schlossberg we've we know that the city is working on some grants and and we've actually had some discussion around those grants i don't know much more about their their project i i guess we can look into it as far as part of those discussions with the city yeah i i think i would appreciate that as well and my sense is that at some point right whether that you know we want to um folks in the city uh beyond those who are already served by our fiber you know are going to want need and expect um more and and it could be provided by us they could be led by the city there you know there are already uh private um suppliers of those kinds of things and

2:31:10 so it doesn't necessarily have to be led by us but it would but i get the sense of like some angst out there as to where is where is this initiative going to come from and how might it develop and uh you know to our community responsibility our squishy community responsibility that is i would like to have you know some kind of response uh in the works to that question right now it's like it's just it's so murky i have no sense of where that would come from that you know the move to faster um internet hookup speeds uh and better service for folks um but i yeah my my sense is that we owe that to ourselves in the community to um to start thinking about that it doesn't mean we have to act on it right away i know there's lots of risk financial and otherwise to it

2:31:57 yes commissioner schlossberg i guess one thing to add to that is that um i also think it would be interesting to open up that conversation with the school districts as well because like richie weinman commented in his um public testimony there's just a lot of kids and teachers out there that during these types of times really need internet connection and it's not there and that's one of the struggles that the school district is having and it's not just related to pandemics but it's when there's weather emergencies and things like that so it just might be of interest to bring them into the that conversation if we go that direction yeah i think commissioner thank you the the issue with the schools isn't so

2:32:43 much the schools it's the the people who aren't located in the schools given that the schools in most cases have fiber connectivity already in many cases e-web fiber not not in all cases but in many so it's those creating of hot spots or some other kind of interconnectivity and this this is one of those areas that i think if if the board wants us to really take a deep dive into it i will have to get with staff and understand what what an assessment like that would look like there's a ton of different business models around the country relative to fiber some through utilities some through cities we also know that there are private

2:33:29 entities who do this who are our competition in that case and so um this is one of those things that um and and it may be best handled as a partnership with the city a lot like we did downtown where we leveraged some infrastructure and then the city actually paid for the installation some type of partnership might be the best way to do it but if it starts to get too deep i'll have to come back to the board and say okay what do you really want to do here this is now going to take a a almost a new business model kind of approach i think carlson had a question oh sorry sonia now you're the one who i can't go ahead it's okay

2:34:14 a couple of things one so the the school districts by and large have this capability does that mean then that the fiber is run out to the school district so it's technically spread out throughout the community it's not just in the downtown corridor that's correct commissioner we we have fiber loot i guess we'll call them loops or pathways throughout the city of eugene and then we have taps into the various schools and sometimes other other entities and so yeah we have fiber it was developed back to link our substations together so if you ever saw a map of all our transmission lines and substations

2:35:00 it would be very close to that map so it does spread throughout the city and then we have used x the extra fiber strands that we didn't need for our own operation we offered those to the school districts for use and interconnecting of the schools so yes it's throughout the entire area got it okay well i'll say two things and then i'll make a comment on the report one i i mean i'm i'm personally supportive of figuring out a way as a community that we expand our capabilities around this type of technology i mean the pandemic is uh the current thing at the top of our minds with how we use it but moving forward into the future i mean getting at steve's point about how we interact as a society and how we

2:35:45 you know may not travel as much moving forward i mean that may be a part of what you know we contribute to the community and the climate plan even is that we are setting up a community that doesn't need to travel as much so in i know that that is a you know we just talked about the strategic plan and that would be a a very large pivot i think away from what we are looking at but i am personally going to foreshadow that i'm open to that potential discussion um and then two that being said i know in the report there was a note about the age of our current fiber and that it's going to need replacement soon so it's a new technology we don't know how

2:36:30 long it lasts um technically but it's rated for 20 to 25 years and with that we're going to have to make some resource decisions around that and if we do have to do replacement that may be a good time to partner with the city elk other sorts of groups to utilize that resource and that replacement process in a way that's the most strategic for our community and if if the board decides that that's something that we're interested in doing i'm more than willing to take that back to elkhog as the eweb uh representative to alcog so that's what i'll do thank you yeah thank you commissioner carlson i i will say that when we've had some funding discussions with the city because they're exploring some grant opportunities one

2:37:17 of the areas that we mentioned two different areas one of them was to help with the replacement cost of those aging assets and those those fiber rings so that was one that we've we've worked with city on on some potential funding and the other one is to run a fiber line up to blatant heights which is the sort of the epicenter of radio communications for emergencies in the area and that presently doesn't have a fiber connection to it it is through microwave which is a um has some vulnerabilities to it so um yeah i think there's opportunities given the aging assets that we we can look to replace them maybe differently than we we had them before so

2:38:02 funding is part of that too thank you i think commissioner helgason had a comment um president mattel go ahead dick well i would just say that based on my recollection of the last iteration of the board's consideration um if the interest is in having eweb play a major role and basically backing the investment in build out of a more or less universal community-owned high-speed internet system that that is something that can't be obtained incrementally or leveraged

2:38:48 necessarily out of the asset base that we currently have and so i would say that if going forward it's always been an interest that's been kicked around i think we abandoned it back then because we couldn't find a way to get the last mile without such an investment that we felt that we could never recover it but that may have changed i'm just i'm just saying that if going forward there's a board interest in the utility providing a major or playing a major role in a universal build out of some kind that that's like as frank said that that's a pretty big deal that would require putting some resources behind a strategic analysis and updating our understanding of what

2:39:35 the business opportunities might look like with today's technology and environment and certainly to the extent that there's an interest in that that has implications for what you replace some of the existing aging infrastructure with going forward because i doubt that we would have a system uh today that looks like it does if we were not intending to be in that business nor would we invest in some of the capability and redundancy that we currently have going forward so i'm just saying if there if you find in your conversations going forward that there is that interest then i think that's a whole new strategic initiative that

2:40:21 has to be uh looked at pretty broadly and we're not going to back into it good luck with that i think there's an interest out there yeah there's there are like i said there's a lot of different business models some have been quite successful and and some very similar models have been not so successful um very unsuccessful so i think it'll be an interesting thing to explore going forward it it sounds i i can imagine um i'll have some discussions with staff around what this might look like and what opportunities we see kind of both in the near term and then and then something that's more strategic

2:41:06 so i'm sensing an interest to have those discussions if nothing else frank it'll give you a very clear thing to focus your engineering skills around that community goal go ahead sonia yeah thank you uh and and i i want to put out there that well i'm supportive of looking at it that doesn't mean i'm supportive gung-ho going after it right now i mean i think information is one thing choosing a plan is a totally different thing so gathering information you know if it's low cost low risk that's that's one plan um also say that i know that we're going to be surrounded by uh satellites circling the planet and i don't know how that technology compares to the fiber

2:41:51 network and and what it affords us or not but technology is changing very rapidly and so these sorts of things always have to be put in context of where we're going not where we are so especially with technology so thanks all right let's move into ford uh wrap up um and frank i'll i'll give you the first opportunity in case there were any concluding remarks that you wanted from the last sec thing that you want to stuff into the wrap up no i was just going to say that we we have i didn't go through the agendas and so the upcoming agendas there's um quite a bit of of upriver topics for both the regular board session as well as the

2:42:36 special session specifically on upriver topics in september and so we'll be preparing for that that was the only thing i was really going to mention there i think like i said before we're making a lot of progress on a number of subjects including electrification i i think that electrification is going there's a lot of different moving pieces to that um and i've described it as ultimately we're going to have to synchronize our supply and demand and that's going to be complicated um to do not just because technology is changing because carbon content regional influences the the one public comment around the fact that we

2:43:21 have to look at this will eugene improve and the rest of the region get worse those are things we're trying to figure out we're trying to capture those by looking at regional carbon content which also varies with time and season and so i think we're getting um we're going to have a lot of of work ahead of us to answer just a whole variety of questions around it and so it's it's going to be fun but it's also going to be informational when we start talking about new products and services and resource decisions that are going to be coming up here within the next decade and so looking forward to that i don't have anything else commissioner mattel thanks for the board's guidance on all the sub subjects um we'll get that building sold by

2:44:08 friday um so that john can be happy um we'll either sell it or rent it one of the two so thanks for your advice all right well we will do our board wrap up we'll go in the reverse order that uh we normally take this thing john brown you're first i'm good thank you it's a good meeting i have a real quick question on the agenda uh frank about the 22nd the uproar meeting i assume that's going to be another virtual meeting yes that's going to be a virtual meeting and so we're the the table tops that we you know we'll have to adjust the agenda a little bit but the plan is at this point to go virtual on that one i just hope what we can um address because the the internet upriver is abysmal at best i mean

2:44:53 some people still have dial up up there we want participation i hope that we can do something to help accommodate people because what it takes to uh to participate in a meeting such as this when you have very limited capacity may be a challenge for that group and i think it would be a wasted effort for us to try and put too much on and where they can't participate so um just hope we're ahead of that so thank you very much yup thank you um i think i guess i'm next i don't think i have anything to add um sonya you're next uh the only thing i had to add was on to john brown's comment a lot of that up river meeting is there for us to answer questions to that group and and are we going to be

2:45:40 able to have that format i mean we haven't had it in these meetings but it's been more of a town town hall style format seems like it's going to be just due to the very nature of the electronics that we're having to use that we won't be able to do that um it might be helpful to be able to gather questions at least from people ahead of time or you know something that effect i don't i don't know we'll have to look into a number of options but there are there are also a number of options relative to the technology including teams we use it in a certain mode that's

2:46:25 that's kind of a broadcast mode but there's also more of a of a meeting collaboration mode um and so we'll have to look into some other options that might facilitate some q a a little bit more right uh take your turn i just say as far as that up river meeting goes um maybe reach out to some of the folks that typically give us input on how to be effective up there they may have some ideas about what would be useful and not let's not assume that we necessarily know how best to do that

2:47:12 um and commissioner schlossberg your last but not least um we have received some some questions um from some upriver folks and so i know frank that you said that some of those you would try to get those answers incorporated into the presentation um just to support what sonia said that there's not really going to be a huge opportunity for people to ask questions since the format will be so different and the topics that we're looking at are pretty impactful for the people up there so i just want to make sure that we have an opportunity to answer their questions so if for some reason there are problems with connectivity then um we'll go from there but

2:47:59 i think that that is something that we should look at ahead of time and one last thing it's a bummer that we don't get to go up there physically for the meeting because it's so beautiful and i really enjoyed that last year but hopefully next year yeah i think it's unfortunate they that we are not looking to do it physically i i will um um understand you know i do understand the the board's comments around q a i think that's that's an important part of it we're going to have to look at what we do in the early september meeting versus the mid-september meeting to try to create a flow of information and a discussion we're going to have a kind of a strategic level discussion early

2:48:44 in the month so that that we can kind of coalesce around the upriver territory's value itself and and philosophies there's there's lots of ways to to answer questions i've talked with staff even about doing an faq kind of approach to some of these issues and so we're exploring a lot of different ways to communicate also the meeting up river is not one where the board takes action and so it really is around discussion and so i don't think if if someone felt like they for some reason couldn't make that meeting for some reason that there's not going to be some action taken by the board some of these issues are longer term and are going to take a little while to to coalesce around and make decisions on so

2:49:30 but there are some meaty topics and we do want to make sure we provide lots of opportunities for people to contribute well and i'll just say by way of closing that uh we did raise the cosa issue and signaled an interest in following through on that so there's um there is plenty of incentive uh for folks from the upriver community to um come on out and let us know what they think and i would be surprised at commissioner if they don't let us know what they think uh yeah i expect it in full all right um i think we're we are there i am uh i i'm how do i do this i'm gaveling us out meetings thank you commissioners see y'all everybody have a nice week

2:50:15 thanks and holly you