EWEB Board of Commissioners — November 2, 2020

0:02 good evening everybody uh and welcome to the eugene water and electric board's november 2020 meeting we are um having the meeting one day earlier than we normally do in honor of the uh once every four-year presidential election which everybody knows is tomorrow i want to thank staff in particular for uh kind of answering questions that commissioners had prior to the meeting in a hurry just a day or so before um and i also want to recognize that this is the penalty meeting as i was recently informed for commissioner helgeson and myself with that we will open it up to our agenda the first item on the agenda um is the agenda check itself does anybody the five commissioners or frank um lawson our general manager have any concerns about the

0:47 agenda as published all right well hearing none before we move on to the next item i just want to mention for the 20-plus folks who are on the line right now that i'm having some connectivity issues this evening hopefully it doesn't disrupt things um too much if it does i've asked our vice president mindy schlossberg to take over and if that also fails um commissioner helgeson will take over until uh the two of us can return hopefully we won't have too many disruptions all right we'll move on to the second item and that is item from board member items from board members and the general manager um commissioner schlossberg we'll start with you all right the only thing i have to

1:32 report this month is that um uh president mattel um frank and i met with the city of eugene for our quarterly meeting um there were no action items or anything that came of that it was again still in that relationship building phase i believe and just sharing what was going on with the city and what's going on with eweb so that is it commissioner crossing your next um i wanted to mention that i had a chance to go up river and see some of the really painful destruction that happened up there and i'm very very thankful for what we voted on last month to

2:19 help clean up um just seeing seeing it firsthand and seeing how close some of those properties are directly to the river and the amount of you know material that's remaining there i think it was the right thing to do so i just wanted to say thank you everyone for supporting that and for staff for putting that together i think that was really a good move on our part thank you uh commissioner hudson uh just three quick things uh one is that um i agree with commissioner carlson on her just made point although i was one that had expressed some reservations last time voted in favor and um uh on reflection find it to be the right thing to do as well

3:05 i also appreciated the opportunity i had over the weekend to walk the elliott site uh once again with a couple of the neighbors up there that we'll be hearing from in public uh input tonight so i look forward to hearing from them and appreciated that opportunity uh and maybe we'll have a chance to comment uh once we hear from them uh and then lastly there's a teleconference board meeting of the nwppa board on the 18th to discuss budgetary issues they're on a calendar year budget and things are obviously kind of sideways with covid continuing and that certainly affects their business model in terms of their training program and revenues although they've

3:50 seen a pretty robust um registration and teleconference type trainings um it's not going to be a good year for them uh next year um i suspect that could have some implications for dues but would remind us all that there hasn't been a change in their due structure or their assessments um in all the time that i've been on their board which is six or seven are going on eight years now so and they actually gave us a little bit of a rebate last year so i'll try to report out on that or send out an email to frank on what the upshot is there once that meeting takes place on the 18th but um don't be surprised if there's some upward tick in their assessment for next

4:36 year and i would hope that if that's the case that you could support that given the history and the circumstances we're in uh they've been using reserves to basically cover that to this point and that's all i have thank you well i'll jump in real quick and john uh you get to go last and we'll head over to frank after that so uh like commissioner carlson and um commissioner hudson i also want to express my thanks to staff carl morgenstern in particular i don't know if he's on the call tonight but uh to an extent i suppose i owe a little bit of an apology i i came out pretty hard um you know and scrutinizing the budget requests last month and the work that he was planning to do with his team and mobilizing them really quickly um but i've not had a chance to go up there personally yet but i have seen some of the media reports in the guard

5:22 and elsewhere and uh the you know just from the pictures i've seen and the comments i've heard from folks it's absolutely the right thing to do so i'm i'm glad we were uh overcame whatever reservations i expressed and it feels very much like the right thing to do so good work to everybody um involved also wanted to just say briefly that i had a call with my counterpart over on the sub board john de winter is their current president and we had a discussion about the possibility of eweb and sub exploring some joint um up river uh source water protection work as we begin to move potentially over into the um the willamette watershed and as they begin to move over

6:08 more heavily into the mackenzie there's some interest uh between the at least on on my part and his in having our staff look at ways in which they could uh work um together and also be clear about what intentions they have um for source water protection and the respect of watershed so he's in the process of um putting a um a draft mo um mou together that would uh kind of describes not not excuse me not mou but just a board resolution that both boards could sign perhaps in december um we will you'll all have the chance to see that prior to the december meeting but their hope is that we could sign something in december and give the staffs a few months time to work together to see what they could um come up with similar to the um the board resolutions that were signed

6:56 looking at source uh water treatment on them on the two rivers as well so more to come on that uh just a brief heads up at this point in time based on the conversation that i had with john dewinter about a week ago um john brown oh thank you a couple items um number one i i left the meeting abruptly last time it wasn't about anything anybody said or did is because mr wizard here doesn't understand what the little drinking lead right light is and that means your battery's gone and i couldn't get it going and i had a panic attack but nothing happened so i apologize for the way i left the meeting last time but not beginning to wrap up the other thing is that the the governor's appointed what's called the oregon wildfire economic recovery council and i've heard input from a lot of people upriver that

7:42 they're very appreciative of the the quality of the people they appointed but they haven't appointed anybody that lives in the area that was affected even though there's people there that are qualified willing and i don't know if eweb has any input or pull on that or anything but it would i think it would make sense to have somebody that lives up there uh on that uh economic recovery council to help direct and guide how that goes because um there's been a lot of lives uh impacted as we all know and so uh just wanted to bring that to the forefront thank you frank you have anything you'd like to add and i think uh if not uh we will move or in addition to i should say we can just move directly into uh sorry i was thinking about the last couple of meetings i'm sorry where we had moved

8:27 into a coveted update but i can see that that's not part of the regular agenda today sorry about that go ahead yeah president mattel commissioners good evening i'll i'll i will reserve most of my comments for the quarterly report later in this meeting i will respond to commissioner brown's comment about the wildfire economic recovery council i do have a call later this week with the governor's office and i will explore um how that council was formed and what opportunities there might be so um that's a pre-scheduled call i believe it's wednesday or thursday of this week other than that i'll pass it back to you president mattel all righty um well we will move into public input um

9:14 let me read a uh a required preamble and then we'll introduce our speakers so first off let me open up public testimony and uh read the following statement when your name is called remember to unmute your phone um if you're on the if you're on the line press star six if calling from a landline or simply use the unmute button if calling from your cell phone please then state your name and optionally your address or ward and speak clearly into your telephone each speaker will be offered three minutes to present his or her testimony please keep track of time if needed the board president will notify you when your time has elapsed after a testimony is heard each commissioner has the opportunity to speak if he or she chooses although by policy we do not engage in a

10:00 back and forth dialogue please note that failure of a commissioner to speak shall not be construed as support or of excuse me 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 okay with that i believe we have potentially as many as six people uh in the queue today and would you let me know is scott roder there no scott roeder nor stephen anderson have joined the meeting yet so first up would be sandra bishop followed by james porter okay wonderful sandra why don't you go ahead and unmute your phone and

10:46 uh we'll be glad to hear your testimony okay thank you very much good evening this is sandra bishop my address is 4096 hillyard street thank you for allowing me to address the board this evening i'm here to draw your attention to the water tank project on hilliard hill here in south eugene i'm here to ask the board members take a more direct role in the citing decisions that are now being made at this legacy as this legacy project moves forward please look carefully at what's happening with the project it has come to my attention that staff is recommending clearing almost all of the mature fur pine habitat on the northeastern

11:32 most end of the site which is a large 10 to 12 acre site this is the area slated to be cleared for sighting the first and second water tanks with an acreage of this size it's imperative that the board be clear that there are alternatives to where the first tank is situated on the property please don't be lulled into thinking the site is vacant as stated on the eweb website it's true there's no housing or commercial building on the site but it's alive and vibrant as a refuge and habitat and is used regularly by many people who bring their families pets up here to experience some sense of nature in the city it's home to an untold number of birds

12:19 and different species and other species and it contains legacy trees that were growing on this site very likely when the city was founded in the mid-1800s when you're looking at this what the staff's recommending for citing the first tank at the extreme east end of the property what you're looking at is destroying this mature fur pine habitat versus a concept of what might be created or enhanced for potential habitat elsewhere on the property please get the facts look at the details look at the age of the trees varieties species they're common to this habitat look at the actuality of what now exists

13:06 and weigh that with the conjecture of what might be developed in the future as landscaping enhancements so please look at the finality and totality of what you're doing here what's being proposed is clear cutting the mature habitat in the guise of site preparation there's no question that we need the water tank but the question is please look at how unnecessary it is to completely clear this habitat there are nuances that need to be considered for a less damaging sighting the where to site the first water tank is not a mundane everyday decision that should be left to engineers and staff it's a highly

13:53 charged political matter that affects a large thing in the population as well as the development of the tank will but a decision like this needs to be made by you as elected officials so please see look at the data presented but please do the least harm on this site that's why e-web for 50 years now has maintained a site with this much acreage they knew they didn't need this much acreage so now you've got the opportunity to adopt an attitude of being a steward a caretaker almost like a doctor please pledge all right well thank you sandra your time is uh just one more sentence because specifically please ask staff

14:39 to come back to the board with a clear option of what it would take to site the first tank to the west of the heart of the mature habitat area on the easternmost edge thank you so much all right well thank you for your time james porter if you will unmute your phone um sandra remember to re-mute your own james go ahead okay uh can you hear me yes i can go ahead okay uh yeah this is james porter and i uh also uh live at 40 96 hillyard uh sandra bishop's my wife anyway our property is as close to the tank as any property in the surrounding area i'm

15:26 fine with the tanks i understand their need and even one quite close to our house my concern is is with the trees and the the proposed second tank which is in the middle of the property is my preferred location it is the least impact on the forest so update you may have to clear the big uh 250 year old trees that are in the east end of the property which is

16:11 the target area for the first tank if i understand what the staff is up to so anyway i i would appreciate if the board would prevail upon the engineering department to shift their attention to the center of the property and uh and we'll deal with the uh large trees in 10 years or or more but in the meantime we've got the benefit of of some very uh beautiful large trees that were living there by themselves back when it was a a oak savannah

16:56 anyway that's um that's it thank you very much you're welcome thank you for your testimony james uh and i believe that we um have uh joe harwood on the line who's gonna read two statements before he does uh is anybody else there live to speak for himself herself no no additional callers have joined okay joe why don't you unmute your uh phone and read two statements i believe one from the first is from will rutherford and the second from chris jones that's correct uh the first is will rutherford of vita i'm certain that you've heard lots of appreciation for eweb's responses to the holiday farm wildfire with this short note i'd like to personally add my thanks to eweb

17:42 for all of the positive efforts you have made to accommodate uweb customers those outside the e-web service area and the river ecology the rebuilding of infrastructure along highway 126 and good pasture road was extensive in my mind your crews did an exceptional job of restoring power efficiently and safely i appreciate that you deferred building and adjusted the delivery charge to reflect the time that electricity was not available other e-web accommodations include deferring discussion on rate adjustments the waving of temporary meter fees site assessment for hazard trees and assistance with hazardous waste cleanup and mitigation it was impressive to see how eweb

18:27 quickly responded to the water source protection issue i'm certain that previous work developing the source protection plan enabled immediate action the efforts of carl morgenstern and nancy tow combined with pure water partners are helping many folks mitigate both runoff and riparian impact i was personally involved with stable stabilization efforts on a complex property and lawed the work done by nancy toath lily leaderman of the upper willamette soil and water conservation district and the contractor anderson's erosion control to accommodate landowner schedules and assess constraints i also note that you have increased the current budget for water source protection

19:12 by over one million dollars to enable quick and substantive wildfire response unfortunately many river citizens beyond your service boundary may not appreciate how extensively eweb has supported the cleanup stabilization and restoration efforts this is because communications with the entire 40-mile upriver community is challenging the e-web website and e-web news room are excellent although available to the public your website is probably not frequently accessed by non-e-web customers there are many ongoing local efforts to expand community communication this might be a topic for the next upriver meeting in conclusion again i say thank you to eweb for your efforts to support the mckinsey river

19:58 community as it recovers from the destruction of a holiday farm fire okay uh the second letter is from christopher jones of kincaid street this is a comment for the board and the general manager about the revised phase one electrification study included in the november 2020 board meeting materials in its climate action plan the city of eugene has adopted a goal of a 50 reduction in fossil fuel consumption by 2030. given the current slow growth in electric vehicle adoption in the united states reaching that goal will require ceasing the installation of new fossil gas heating equipment replacing nearly

20:43 100 percent of fossil gas heating equipment by 2030 and providing significant incentives for the purchase of electric vehicles including heavy vehicles that are not but should be out of scope of this phase one study the scenarios evaluated in this study demonstrate an unwillingness to confront the state straightforward math behind a 50 reduction in fossil fuel use in our community over the next 10 years the scenarios are simply not aggressive enough the baseline scenario should include 100 replacement of fossil gas heating equipment along with an exponential path to 100 electric vehicles in our community by 2050. the latter path is implied by

21:29 california's recent proclamation that all new vehicles must be zero emission by 2035. given normal vehicle replacement rates and california's effect on the u.s vehicle market that restriction means that nearly all vehicles will be zero emission in 2050 i hope that phase two of this study will include a baseline scenario that conforms with eugene's climate action plan and with the best available scientific recommendations the baseline scenario should include 100 replacement of fossil gas heating equipment by 2030 electric vehicle adoption rates that are well above phase one's high scenario and aggressive replacement of electric resistance heating equipment with modern heat pumps in order to

22:14 mitigate the increases in peak and average loads that would otherwise result from this rapid electrification i have every confidence that eweb in partnership with the city of eugene the city of springfield lane county and neighboring utilities has the expertise and will to implement the aggressive electrification that is needed to meet this important challenge that's it all right well thank you joe uh i'll just ask one last time and since i can't see uh has anybody else joined the call requesting to give testimony no there's not all right well i'm going to close the public testimony and open up an opportunity for commissioners to respond john brown i'm going to start

22:59 with you today all right thank you and thank you for everybody that testified and sandra and james i i can understand your concerns and things and i also um know that you've asked that we get involved in sighting of a reservoir and that's you know personally i'm i'm not going to get into the weeds i understand the concerns i know that eweb goes to great lengths to address neighbors concerns and protect the environment and i'm sure that they're going to do what's right here i would think on the counter that if we have trees that are 150 years old next to a reservoir they would pose a hazard because trees die from what's called root rot and other things like that and you get 150 year old tree that falls on a reservoir i know what it's going to do to it

23:44 so um i'm sure that whatever the decision is that it's going to be the right decision we've all toured the site we i think we respect um your concerns and i think we'll do that at the end we'll do what's right for the community and and have the least amount of impact we can and still do what's uh the right thing um regarding joe's comment with will i hope that maybe somehow either steve and mindy or frank or somebody could do an op-ed or a letter uh talking to the community about what the effects have gone on upriver what we're doing and what we anticipate to do in the future because it's not just a one and done with us i think it's gonna be could be a decade-long restoration and recovery for there and maybe we want to do a

24:29 outreach to the community and let them know what we're doing because i think he's right not everybody knows just exactly how involved we are and i think it would be a good thing to do so that's what i have thank you very much uh commissioner hudson would you like to go next okay thank you um i want to appreciate all of the testimonies tonight um it's particularly difficult during these virtual meetings uh as compared to our normal protocols uh when we're able to meet in person and so i just appreciate those of you that took the various uh options that were available to be with us tonight i particularly want to thank sandra and mr porter for their testimony

25:14 and the invitation that they made to have me tour the site with them over the weekend uh i also appreciate uh eweb staff laura farthing that was uh with us as well and in reflecting on what i saw there and what i heard tonight i just guess i wanted to make a few points one is that we recognize this is a large and complex project that has a lot of impacts and those are impacts that we're concerned with and that are going to be uh challenging quite frankly to balance as we move forward i appreciate your acknowledgement of the importance and the critical nature of these new facilities uh as it is really important that we replace all of our lower level reservoirs over a

26:00 period of time here um i i wanted to tell you that i have a lot of confidence in our project team we've got some of our best people on this team we've got a project manager who not only is an experienced and capable engineer but has a background in uh in environmental uh studies and and ecology uh which serves us well in in this uh case um i want to point out that um uh their work is in progress that they're uh nearing the end of some assessment that's been ongoing for a considerable period of time now and um i i don't think it'd be a bad idea at all for um for them to uh come and report out to

26:47 the board when they reach the conclusion of that phase of their work and kind of lay out for us and communicate more broadly through our communication plan um the results of their work and the the siting and sequencing of construction but i have confidence in the folks that are doing this work and i would be reticent you know at this point to jump in and try to second guess or um substitute my judgment for um for theirs uh i i feel like they've got the expertise and the consulting support uh to do the right uh work here under quite challenging and and um frankly um uh difficult circumstances in as much as

27:33 we're not going to be able to mitigate all of the impacts that we know are going to be associated with this construction i think the main focus of our discussion over the weekend had to do with the sequencing of the two tanks that we've been um looking to cite i want to make a couple of quick comments about that and then i'll probably be out of time first of all i just want to clarify that we need both tanks the reason they're sequenced is that we can't take all of our facilities out of service and construct uh the new ones all at once and that requires a sequence over time but um the second tank will be needed uh in the time frame envisioned uh not to meet future growth but to simply replace

28:19 the existing capacity that we have i suspect that both of those tanks will need to be nearly identical in size shape and configuration in order to work properly in the system principally that means the top and bottom elevations of the tanks need to be the same and we're going to need both tanks i'm going to give you one example of why i think it would make sense at least from a technical standpoint to proceed with the tank number one or the more challenging of the tanks this may be a little counterintuitive but um since both tanks need to be virtually the same with the same top and bottom elevations

29:08 there's a lot of earthwork associated with that first tank which may be counter-intuitive but i recall when we did the tank at hayden bridge which was a large tank requiring a lot of excavation that we were not able during the design phase to fully anticipate all of the conditions geotechnical conditions that we would encounter as we did the excavation for that and we in fact had to make some changes in our design and the configuration of that reservoir in order to accommodate what we found uh and despite the fact that we'll do a lot of geotechnical work there there are some risks and unknowns associated with um with what lies below the surface uh uh on on these rock uh

29:59 promontories um the problem with building the the second tank first is that um if we encounter things during the excavation for what would then be um the east tank the the more difficult of the two that require a change in design or or um elevation or location um you know we we could run the risk that we'd be locked in at that point and we'd have some problems with the sighting of the second tank so i think there are some reasons why it makes sense to proceed as staff as proposed but i i i think we're all still open to how that resolves as they complete their work and looking forward to hearing back from staff as that work concludes

30:44 so it's something i know we're all paying attention to and i appreciate the testimony tonight all right well we'll move forward uh with commissioner carlson okay thank you uh for all that gave their testimony this evening or submitted it in various forms really appreciate that it's i know it's difficult um i did also have the pleasure of going out there and viewing the site um directly and wanted to take a minute to appreciate the attention that staff were giving to the concerns of the community and the citizens that have raised them i really did feel like they were very much listening to those concerns and had developed a strategy of

31:30 communication and also a way to process the site based on all of the different constraints that are out there um you know it has to be at a certain height it has to you know meet all these different parameters and i did appreciate that they were doing um a sort of environmental study that incorporated uh information from the public on what kinds of animals and um inhabited the trees and looked at that so it wasn't a requirement it wasn't anything that we had to do necessarily but i appreciated that it was something that staff were going um through with and and kind of gathering that feedback from the community on the types of animals that live there now

32:15 there will be impacts no matter where uh where it's cited but i do believe wholeheartedly that the staff that are there and involved in this project are trying their best to make the the impact there as low as possible while still getting us the two uh the two uh tanks that we need to fulfill um resiliency in the area and to you know replace the old tank that is falling apart and so we're under very strict time constraints to get that replaced and so again i just i really appreciate you know your concern and involvement and look forward to hearing more you know from staff and also from citizens as this project progresses

33:00 and then as far as you know the upriver work i i really do uh appreciate will's um insights and incentives uh insights into the you know the various work that uweb has done up there i i think the one of the things that struck me was the you know just the clear impact um from from our board packet that staff had directly inter interacting with people had been impacted by the fire i mean i i can't just seeing the level of devastation up there that 20 minute drive was absolutely horrific i mean i i can't even imagine and so i'm again i'm just so thankful for all of the all of the work that we've done up there and the ways that we're we are going to need

33:46 to be up there and helping and i actually do wonder um if we are going to need more um a lot more work around the trees that are dead and up there that are going to pose a risk to all of the lines that we've now newly put up so anyway um thank you again for all of the uh support and and uh testimony during these challenging times um i think my fellow commissioners have captured my thoughts well but um again just another thank you to everybody who provided public input i know that we try to be as welcoming to the public as possible and this

34:31 format can be kind of intimidating and clunky so thank you for persevering and either calling in or sending in testimony all right well and i'll round things out i won't repeat some of the comments that other commissioners shared regarding the um uh uh the soft eugene kind of uh the water towers there um i generally am in support other than to say that as i expressed last month after visiting i am fully supportive of the staff approach which i think has been quite measured to try and accommodate both uh the city's needs but also the nearby neighbors and i think even though that in the short term it's going to be a little messy up there no question about it uh that's what

35:16 construction is that uh in the long term you'll find that um you have a really good neighbor ultimately in eweb so um uh i know that probably doesn't um feel too good to hear that right here and now but i do believe that staff is doing the best they can to accommodate that need and has been very clear in communications regarding that will i just wanted to say that uh you attend every one of our meetings and uh so you know how infrequently um somebody steps up to say thanks and so we certainly appreciate when that happens and somebody takes the time to recognize the good stuff that eweb staff do so we'll certainly be sure to make sure that staff who are involved but not necessarily on the call tonight are aware of uh what you took the time to wrote thank you very much and uh chris jones

36:01 we will i'll withhold any uh comments that i have about your particular statement until we get to that portion of the meeting hopefully we'll have an interesting conversation about that um at that time um before we move on i just want to say that um i our board secretary ann khan let me know that stephen anderson um was also hoping to call in and give some testimony this evening but had some difficulty with the technology and if you would let me know if steven had any luck um getting through we will reopen public testimony on his behalf thank you president maitel i just spoke to mr anderson on the phone and he said he was on hold but i have not seen his call come into the meeting i'm not sure what's happening but

36:47 i do not see him as of yet okay well um we are going to have to move on stephen if you're out there in the uh ether and can hear me i'll just let you know i'm sorry if it doesn't work out for you to provide testimony you can also submit a letter just via our web form and all five commissioners plus the general manager and any other senior staff who might need to read that um we'll get a copy of it we'll read it and we'll be certain to respond so again i'm sorry if you're not able to make the call um this evening but uh whatever comments and feedback you have we'll certainly take it to heart all right we will move on then um with our next uh agenda item and hold on just a moment here and move windows around on my computer all right next up is um our consent

37:32 calendar so we have two consent calendars the consent calendar eight is comprised of the minutes a couple of contracts um and an intergovernmental agreement do i have a motion to approve uh sorry i'm moving windows around here uh sorry about that i i can see john's hand i can't see others john i believe you're making a motion to approve yes uh so if somebody else did that i apologize i'm moving a bunch of stuff around on a small window on a small screen here sonya would you did you make a second on your second okay thank you very much um any discussion before we vote all right well all those in favor of consent calendar i please raise your hand and uh say aye

38:18 aye we are definitely getting better at that folks all right looks like that passes unanimously all right now we have consent calendar b several contracts uh an intergovernmental agreement and two resolutions do we have um uh thank you sonya which ones would you like to pull i'd like to pull the intergovernmental agreement number nine please all right we're gonna pull number nine does anybody want to pull any other items uh john brown number right uh funny that's the one i was gonna pull all right any other ones all right well for the balance then of the consent calendar i will just list off what i believe that comprises so we're all on the same page that would be items 5 6 7 10

39:06 11 and 12. do we have a motion to approve thank you sonia all those in favor of uh um consent calendar b less items eight and nine please raise your hand and signify by saying aye all right well um now we will i'm suddenly realizing that maybe didn't take that quite in the order that it needed to be but nonetheless we did what we did um why don't we uh pull item number eight john brown go ahead um thank you and i'm sorry i didn't uh permit submit a question earlier but i just thought of this and uh if we're going to spend 2.6 million additional for meter installation is there a provision

39:52 that this money is i just so i can understand uh it's spent locally on local contractors and things such as that and we're not bringing in people from the outside because i would certainly like to spend as much money with local help as we can as long as it's qualified so uh commissioner brown this is rod um real really this is not additional money we would have to pay for the installation whether we did it or the contractors are doing it um but i'll have to get back to you on i believe they've uh i'll check and see i don't i'll check and see where the the resources are coming from i'll get back thank you it's just that um you know i just have a real strong propensity to to

40:38 buy local and to hire local all else considered equal as long as we can get the best bang for the buck because there are a lot of people that are financially challenged right now and a significant amount of money and hopefully we could help this to you know help our community so thank you it's not in their favor to bring somebody from new york for instance though uh local people it's cheaper so thank you i see uh frank and sarah both uh rare to go frank you can decide who goes first oh well i was just going to chime in this is this is a relatively unique um application and so i i don't know that there would be um local contractors that would be available for that there might be northwest contractors

41:23 or someone on the west coast i'm i'm sure rud's correct they aren't going to be flying people across the country um but meter installations are are uh fairly unique um compared to a number of the other things that we procure sarah did you want to add to that yes um so they will be bringing in experts to be able to provide training and um management of the program but they will be hiring local technicians to do the work the majority of the work that's that's very comforting to know at least we're going to keep some of the money here thank you i had a question as well i saw that there were some questions over the weekend about this um from commissioner schlossberg if there were responses uh

42:08 you know that's again don't blame anybody for this it's just a compressed schedule this week um i haven't had a chance to read them yet but there was a request uh you know to just get a little bit more clear about what our long-term implementation plan is regarding um smart meters i just want to want to find out mindy did you get your questions answered regarding in that well did you get your questions answered on that yes i did okay i i have a a question so you know this is um you know another three million dollars close to that we're adding on to the total budget and i haven't seen any updated um explanation about the business case you know and and how is that uh you know to the

42:53 extent to which we expect that to pay off through labor savings or other kinds of savings that might arise from this project so my question is do we need to are we in a rush to sign this contract this month or could we delay the um the signing of it not vote for it right now and get a little bit more information about our about um about the business case now that we're spending an additional three million dollars to implement um well of course you can always delay signing right um the and the risk i guess is uh relatively small but the uh once you sign this there's a two month ramp up window um to for the the contractor to start so the

43:41 the business case is you know if you look at the uh the labor and install costs it's slightly more expensive to have the contractor but e-web simply isn't staffed to get this done in the time that that we need to or that we've actually talked to the community and into the board about which is roughly the end of next year q2 q1 of 2022. so the faster we get these installed the better the business case looks in the long run because the the information is used for uh all kinds of things but the power um [Music] power resourcing and those kind of things in the long term contracting with our bonneville contract that's coming up um so the sooner we get data in um more

44:27 successful and the the bigger the return on investment is going to be from a dollar standpoint so just to be clear too this is uh this is on the electric meters we're still continuing on the same five-year path with the water meters but it is an overall increase of three million dollars uh no it it'll net out to be a small increase so one of the things i will say is that we should have some of the final cost data we're still working on that i was just talking with samurai this morning or yesterday or sometime this week about that that by probably the end of this year we'll have and present in the q1 report some some pretty solid updated financials

45:12 dick go ahead well um i i don't necessarily endorse the notion that we'd hold off on this i i think we're committed to the project at this point but i do agree that it's been quite a while since we've gotten an updated view of where we're at with things and um kind of how this is aligning with our sense of timing on other strategic objectives that would rely on this technology so i would certainly endorse um as soon as possible obviously not at this penultimate meeting but um certainly maybe when the the new board is installed to do a refresher uh on the road that we've traveled to this point i also would question whether or not this is in

45:58 fact an increase or not because well it is a trade out largely for internal labor we're not going to lay those people off they're going to go and do something else so we're going to have an external expenditure i would think that you know would be in the amount that we're discussing here um which would be not in addition to the project budget but um would have some encumbrance on the budget overall but that notwithstanding um i've been trusting staff to move the project forward and you know i i too am curious as to how things are aligning relative to our sense of strategic leverage and payback on the investment because some of the things that we're anticipating doing with this system in terms of demand

46:44 management and other things are still kind of a long way off in terms of both payoff and traction so i share some of the concerns that have been expressed here and the need for an update and nonetheless would be willing to vote in support of moving forward with the staff request so uh thanks dick i think uh just one quick comment on this that the the staff we had intended to do the installs um are still working in doing installs and so over the next year and a half they'll be phased into the the meter shop the electric meter shop three-phase program so we're it's all kind of flowing with the

47:30 plan go ahead frank i'm yeah president metal commissioners i would um there there's no issue at all if we want to take a look at this strategically and where it fits i think that's that's an appropriate step to take as far as um just a review of the strategy as as well the timing is starting to become critical for the organization and that's part of the reason that we looked at accelerating the installation of the electric side um we originally had target at the end of 2021. through this contracting effort we can we can get that done in early 2022. when you start to then look at being able to introduce

48:16 new products time of use demand side management the kinds of products that will allow us to develop flexibility in the consumption side those will then have to be launched now and start probably early to mid 2023 based on some not just meters but some other upgrades then you start to look at how that weighs into the upcoming negotiations with the bonneville contract and other contracts on the resource side really being hot and heavy by no later than 2025 we're starting to push up against the strategic window that's why we really think it's important to get the meter piece of this done by early 2022. as far as

49:02 overall return on investment impact if you look at the original contract being five years ago and he at 20 million that's the census piece and you just escalate that based on a 2.3 percent um cost of inflation that's over two and a half million so the impact on the return on investment even though two and a half even if the full two and a half million was incremental and it's and it's not it's just a replacement of opportunity cost um the impact on the overall roi on a 35 million dollar program is is less and less significant and so i think we should review it we should

49:48 review it as part of our strategic review when we go through the goals and things for next year but the timing is starting to become more and more critical on the electric side because of getting demand response and some of these new products in play um by 2023 any other questions go ahead join you i was just going to move to approve all right john you have a second second all right all those in favor of uh approving contract item number eight please uh raise your hand signify by saying aye all right hi looks like that passes unanimously so now we'll bring up um item number nine that's the iga with the city for collection of

50:34 stormwater and sewer fees sonya go ahead hi thanks dude so um i i want to ask a couple of questions about the about how the rate is determined and when we have this intergovernmental agreement what uh what encumbrances there are in that essentially if we if we're if we have a rate of a dollar 62 and there's other things that come up i mean right now we have we contract with another group to actually perform that billing is my understanding if they raise their rates are we able to pass that back on or revisit that with the city because it has this cpi adjustment in it so somebody can kind of

51:21 speak to the the dynamics of that and how it works i'd like to hear a little bit more so i'll start off um commissioner carlson there's there's a couple things in this contract that we put in there specifically because we know there's a few things that are changing part of this is the escalation from cpi which which is covered we actually think our processing cost is going to go down based on our cei and our billing projects that that we're working on now we put a mid-period renegotiation or our um kind of a midterm adjustment at about two and a half years out specifically to address any potential changes uh that

52:06 may come about through technology so we think we've covered natural inflationary escalation but i think it's it's a great question um we have put a midterm um adjustment period in there that we can we can renegotiate the price if we need to i don't know if someone else or sarah or julie or deborah or somebody else wanted to correct all the things i just said that would that would be great this is julie and i think i'm trying to get my my video camera to come on there we go um no i think everything you said is correct and um the way we calculate calculated is based on actual cost so we looked at you know share um of customer service meter reading the

52:52 vendors that we do use for billing and we did calculate in the new vendors that we're using as part of the cei project so that's already been calculated in um and then we did put in that midpoint checkpoint and that's what we're anticipating is that our cost would go down great thank you for that i appreciate it i have a couple follow-up questions uh julie or frank so um i believe in my understanding of when i read through it is that um the new agreement would allow um some piece of the low-income funds that we dispersed to be counted towards um uh stormwater fees that the the the city would want to collect so if somebody somebody was in arrears relative to the

53:38 city that some of those funds that um that we disburse could be made available um to cover those fees is that true right so part of the calculation and the cost is the city's participation in um the ecc program so when we um when we award somebody ecc it goes to their entire bill so it would cover the stormwater wastewater part of their bill so the city does participate in that part of what we're gonna collect from them goes toward ecc jump in and correct me if i'm wrong on that one that's my understanding well before she does the um so is that that is our current arrangement and we're planning to just continue it or that is a new provision in the contract

54:26 no my understanding is that's what we currently do we did go back in and in our um in our billing in our cost methodology we just went in and double checked to make sure that they were contributing an appropriate amount based on then what we were distributing back out that was spread across all of the charges on the bill in other words julie the city is paying for their portion of ecc funding i guess to get to steve's point we're we're not applying things to them but paying for it through ecc the city is paying their portion of whatever is attributed to to storm water and wastewater right that is that is my question so lie money that we have that is made

55:11 available and any other form of funding that we have uh available to eweb to support our low-income customers especially when they're burdened in the winter months by our heating bills not no piece of that is somehow being carved off to help pay for their storm water and sewer funds so so just to be clear president mattel lie heap is very specific to the electrical side it doesn't apply to water either so light heat funding is is a very allocated funding just for electric and water it or just electric the only thing we're talking about is an ecc funding of which the city would pay their fair share of that is what can go towards stormwater and

55:56 wastewater all the other funding is can be very specific and we have to handle that specifically and separately all right well thank you for that one other question the and that that answers exactly the concern that i had but it sounds like you all accommodated that ahead of time so thank you for that the other question is how have we uh you know priced in the i don't you call it but the burden of being the collector for an unpopular um you know fee right so the city when when and if they decide they need to raise that fee it appears as if to most people because they just you know don't have the time to really think through all of these things it appears that their eweb bill went up and this is something of a you know of a bitter point for us at times have we priced that in to this contract

56:44 uh we have not priced in uh you know emotional um damages um to to our uh to our staff and board um for that so you know answering that directly we we we take that burden um the emotional burden on for that well and why would why should we why wouldn't we tell them yet don't do it themselves well part of it is that we are mandated to do this we are mandated to do it at actual cost um and i'm not sure how we would um justify the actual emotional cost of of doing that but um we are mandated by uh city charter to do this and and do it at cost

57:29 well that answers that question dick do you still want to follow up yes um i almost hate to raise this um but i will ask um are there any provisions i didn't have a chance to look at the details um are there any provisions in this agreement that would allow for other city billings to appear on our bill and has there been any recent i know the city in the past has entertained various things um revenue enhancing things that they've contemplated that they posit might appear on the eweb bill has that come up recently uh i know it's always been a concern to the board and i haven't heard anything lately that that's been the case but

58:16 have you heard anything lately yeah commissioner helgason they occasionally ask for some method of other collections you're right um we have historically said no we we continue to say no i think the last opportunity there was something that i reviewed with the board and the board again said no the the city charter is very specific and in that it says i believe it refers refers to it as liquid wastes um which you know so it's very specific in what we're obligated to do and anything beyond that uh throughout the history of e-web we've said no and maybe that's because of the emotional toll that i knew that was coming back president

59:02 mattel talked about but there hasn't been any requests um in the past year i'll just say it that way the last request was about a year and a half ago thank you sorry julie go ahead just in case you want to respond directly to what um dick said then we'll pick up someone in this question yeah i was just gonna say that um with our new bill that we're gonna be seeing next year it is being redesigned in a way that does make it much more clear what is any web charge and what is the city charge and that part of the cost of that bill redesign is being passed along to the city so it's a little bit of good news in there appreciate that julie go ahead sonia thank you i appreciate you letting me have another question while my uh

59:48 foster kitty was in here distracting me earlier um so i was curious about the mailing charge do we pay for the we pay for the mailing charge correct and that's a part of that that cost that we pass on is that a part of that calculation yes postage is calculated so we look at all bills that are generated how many of them are emails delivered how many of them get mailed and that that portion is spread across in the city is paying for their portion of that okay the only reason i bring it up is that in light of recent uh challenges with our postal system if we were to have another upheaval and

1:00:34 some distress there it might mean that that rate might need to be adjusted sooner rather than later if for some reason uh those rates change drastically to deal with the current situation so anyway i just wanted to bring that up i i'm assuming we have some wiggle room there to handle that kind of variance but just wanted to raise the issue thank you all right any other questions about item item number nine move to approve and uh i think that was john brown um offering a second all those in favor please raise your hand and signify by saying aye aye aye

1:01:20 okay it looks like that one um also passes unanimously our normal next item of business would be moving to general business items but i just got a text from uh and cod board secretary so one of the folks who was trying to get on and speak earlier during public testimony stephen anderson has finally managed to um come through on the line uh normally we would uh you know ask him to give testimony at a subsequent meeting but given the difficulties of technology i think we can make an exception and hear his testimony so steven anderson if you are there um please unmute your phone and uh and put three minutes on the clock please

1:02:14 hi president mattel i um mr anderson did disconnect the call but i just spoke with him on his cell phone and asked him to call in again right now so i'm hoping he'll join us any second okay we'll hold on for a moment or two and uh keep your fingers crossed on his behalf thank you foster kitty yeah she's very sweet and it's feeding time

1:03:00 so i'm in here and i'm usually the one that feeds them so they open the door they just open the door to come in and get something and of course the cats we call them cat sharks because they just circle around me until i feed them well that sound i think means somebody's just joining the call hopefully it's stephen anderson it is yes it is uh all right mr engine i apologize uh on behalf of uh eweb for the technical difficulties that you had but it's but you're here now and uh we're happy to have your testimony why don't you go ahead well thank you yes uh i'm at a disadvantage my euro url link did not work i think it was for a different month but

1:03:46 this is the age of kobud so we have to learn to roll with these things but i want to thank you for the opportunity and the board for allowing me to to testify and i also want to really thank laura and dick helderson for walking the woods with us the other day that was very very useful and i think they have a better idea why we are concerned and my main concern is i think the board should be involved in this project this is a legacy project we can't i don't think we should get wrong and it involves so much wild life habitat and there's been nothing shown to me and i've been a timber

1:04:33 faller i've been in construction i don't see a real impediment changing reversing the tank order which will do the following it will impact much less habitat for however many years until we need tank two and i realize it's down the road five or seven or however many years but in the interim we keep some old growth trees that are older than eugene that are major habitat i mean i can rattle off for you right now i'm very involved in the birding community i can rattle off 40 birds that we have here all the time many of them nesting including a couple of years we've had pileated woodpeckers

1:05:18 nests so this is no small thing and those trees are no small thing and we've had we've heard words like uh oak savannah and i understand that we want to preserve the extreme west end of the meadow and the oaks there the big oaks and i totally understand but also oak savannah includes old-growth fur and we've got some trees up here that are 40 inches through i mean they're monsters they've been here since before eugene and they're called wolf trees and they're part of the oak savannah and they're called that because they have limbs from the bottom all the way to the top until they get to a certain size and then the limbs start to fall off but you can

1:06:03 see it you can come up and see it yourself so it takes an engineering reset i understand that but they do that all the time and i see a couple of things that are really bothersome on the website for example it shows an open meadow and and then below it an idea of where the tanks will be well neither of the tanks are going to be in the open meadow tank number two which we would prefer to be tank number one will be about 30 feet into the meadow won't impact the metal at all so if we change that sequence we get that first tank in the saddle

1:06:50 exactly where it belongs and 10 years down the road you will already have all the infrastructure in to tank number two up and we understand we're going to lose our old growth but the longer we keep it there the better and one of the other problems is as soon as all those big trees are gone it's gonna it's gonna bring winds across the ridge that are presently not hitting us and there is an awful lot of woods to the east and all of us are going to be impacted all of us neighbors by justice i'm going to ask you to wrap up your your significantly over your three minutes i want to appreciate what you have to say but also ask you to respect our time as well you bet all right all i want to say is um

1:07:37 please consider this i think the board needs to be involved and i don't think you've been shown everything that's happening thank you all right well thank you before we open it up for our commissioners to respond if they so choose and can i just uh ask you to work with the minutes takers to make sure that even though this came in after public testimony was open and closed it'd be included in our minutes next month in the public testimonies section of those minutes absolutely right all right well thank you stephen uh before i opened up to commissioners to respond i just want to know uh whether you were able to hear commissioner responses to some of the other folks who testified on the subject earlier so that the folks know whether uh you know not

1:08:22 to repeat themselves if you've already had a chance to hear um board members i was i was given the wrong url and uh was never able to hear any of the meetings all right well fair enough opening up commissioner uh i will open up to some commissioner feedback i'm gonna ask dick helgeson to go first um well steve i'm glad you finally made it on i'm sorry about the difficulties you encountered um i'm not gonna repeat what i said earlier um but um we hear the concerns that you've expressed um i uh i know that laura and i um appreciated the opportunity that we had over the weekend to meet with you and i'm looking forward to hearing from

1:09:07 staff as their work uh progresses uh with respect to the matters that you've raised so thanks again for your testimony and the time that you took to meet with us over the weekend and uh it's helpful all right thank you uh uh mr anderson i just wanted to remind you that uh sometime tomorrow the entire recording of this meeting will be available on our website so um you uh i encourage you to listen to what senator bishop and james porter had to say in terms of testimony i know that your neighbors and several commissioners responded uh in depth so um as not to repeat that uh please take a listen to that i do want to open it up to any other commissioner responses that may be out there

1:09:55 all right well i will uh just say that you know again thank you for the um for the testimony and uh i certainly you know could put myself in your position and and be sympathetic and and at the same time there is this uh you know important city need my understanding of the sequencing by the way is uh there's a handful of things at in play there but um that the staff has determined that the um by that the meta is very useful in terms of helping to stage for what we are calling um tank one and if they were to resequence they would actually end up by being likely more trees cut down in order to make room for um uh for construction vehicles and temporary roadways and that kind of thing so i understand that that's at least

1:10:41 part of the concern but i guess we'll have to end there thank you again for your testimony and i hope you'll continue to work with um staff and pay attention to the uh information that they put out as the reports become due all right well we will move on to our general business items i see deborah hart is in the hot seat as they as we like to say all right uh next up is um the 2021 proposed budgets and prices uh we have deborah and frank and if you put 15 minutes on the clock please and thank you president mattel good evening commissioners and uh we are here again to talk about

1:11:29 uh budgets and price proposals i know this did make up a big chunk of that 286 page board packet and i just want to thank you all with me is adam ru he's the fiscal services supervisor and then so alicia voorhees and ben sachdeva our senior financial analysts are available to answer questions next slide please so this evening we are reviewing the proposed budgets and price proposals for both the water and the electric utilities we do have a short presentation to go over after which we'll be holding a public hearing and then return to the board for

1:12:14 direction and with that i'm going to pass it off to adam great thanks uh deborah so this is the pie chart we showed last month with the kind of high level overview of the budget um there haven't been any changes uh since we presented this last month to the budget but we did provide the more detailed budget document as promised so we'll be happy to go through the questions related to either of those documents at the end uh just for a side note the um 2021 budget is relatively consistent with 2021 2020 overall there was a little bit of an increase in capital for both water and electric

1:13:00 utility and the electric o m decrease largely due to lower purchase power costs uh so that will go to the price proposal review um so this uh slide has uh quite a few there are quite a few items uh to discuss so we'll just kind of walk them through each one individually um the overall we had no change in prices this is the fifth year in a row for the electric utility uh six of the last seven years with no overall price change as well as the fourth consecutive year for the water utility for that we prepared the cost of service report and the classes were generally

1:13:45 within five percent there was a couple that were outside of that in the five point something uh range uh we didn't recommend adjusting those as those were uh purely a result of the lower sales forecast um that we projected for 2021 so taking that out of play they would have been within the five percent so we're not recommending any cost of service adjustment at this time the next uh item was uh there's a several annual market-based adjustments that we bring every year and we put these all into the same proposal the first one is the customer generation rate which typically applies to rooftop solar but it's not technology specific we base

1:14:31 it on wholesale markets for power and for rex and we pass that through to customers that have those generating resources relative to 2020 there was a higher market price so the uh price of this is roughly 3.6 cents per kilowatt hour and it was a bit under 3 cents last year um the next yeah the next item is the business growth and retention rate or credit that's the rate that was developed several years ago in recognition that we had surplus power and it provides

1:15:16 and selling that power is beneficial to all customers since the retail rate's higher than the wholesale rate so it's developed based on the splitting the difference between retail and wholesale for those customers for a short period of time as mentioned earlier the wholesale prices are higher so this credit was reduced a bit relative to last year uh the next one is the last market-based uh price it's the partial requirements similar to the customer generation rate it's for customers with generation um but these are general it's geared towards larger generators that typically have dispatchable generation so there's a time of use component to that one we currently have no customers on this rate but we do

1:16:01 have a couple of customers with generators that could be applicable if they weren't served under retail contracts we'd like to update this every year so they can see what the current pricing would be if they weren't served under contract in addition to the annual update to the customer generation rates we're also proposing to split out the wrecks from the power um we had a customer that wants to retain their wrecks and since we don't need those for compliance uh we're proposing to have an energy-only value so they can maintain their their wrecks and just saves us the administrative burden of acquiring them and selling them into the market

1:16:50 um the next item is uh really uh led by our customer customer service group and customer experience program as they adjust their bill uh presentment they've been at they've asked if we would be able to reduce the rounding from five to four decimal points to ease that communication on the rates and finance we did an assessment of the financial impact and felt to be and found it to be relatively minor some of the rounding was up and some was down and so it ended up being in the tens of thousand dollars relative to that uh 300 million dollar budget we also reviewed uh what our comparators used where we took where we uh typically show the bill comparison there were a couple that used six decimal points in their in their rates um there were also several that had the

1:17:35 five where we are currently but the majority of them had four decimal points or two decimal points out of our comparators so they're kind of at range but the trend among our competitors at least seems to be lower numbers um also we've historically had a bonneville pass-through of our reactive power charge bonneville has since eliminated that charge as the lineup item on their bill and recovers those costs in their general rates so we're proposing to do a similar elimination of the reactive power charge and making up the revenue difference in the base rates

1:18:21 the next item is based on some earlier board discussions we're proposing adding a new customer class for the mckenzie valley service part of our service territory this is to align kind of with what we've been doing for the water utility with intel in the within the city and outside of city rates as well as the elevation charges to segment those customers to target products and services and programs as well as potentially pricing differential between those different customer segments street lighting is an item that when the city engaged in its led retrofitting we weren't sure which technology they used so we developed a rate that had very specific range of wattages so we have that zero

1:19:08 to 10 10 to 20 20 to 30 30 to 40. since then they've really centered on specific volt types so we just eliminate we're just proposing to eliminate to clean up the procedures some of the classes that don't have any um bulbs in them um for our contract customers that we prepare our cost of service every year and typically pass through per those contracts rate adjustments for the electric contract customers they just point directly to the cost of service and those don't require board action but the water district district contracts state that will prepare the cost of service to to um annually for their rates and the

1:19:54 board will approve those so those do require board action to make those adjustments and then finally we included in the background or a proposal for a three-year cycle of preparing the cost of service we've noticed in the last few years it hasn't been a dramatic shift among the classes but felt it might be prudent to get on a schedule where we're making those changes um every so every few years as well as if there is an adjustment that's required having a multi-year cycle might facilitate transitioning and employing the principle of gradualism uh to phase those and also since many of the strategic plan initiatives are multi-year it seemed um

1:20:40 like a potential opportunity to align strategic initiatives with uh pricing changes and so we there's a lot of items on that list we'll pull uh up a list at the very end of the presentation uh during the discussion section so you can reference those um but slide uh this slide is one that we bring um related to where we stand compared to our other comparators obviously we haven't changed we're not proposing to change our rates so there's just the one bar where where we currently are and we're proposed to be um we haven't moved positions since you've seen this the last time that some of the other utilities have had um adjustments uh this we're in the sixth lowest among

1:21:26 the comparators which is based on being the second lowest for water and the eighth lowest for the electric utility for a single typical single family residence so with that i'll turn it back over to deborah thank you adam so this evening management is recommending that the board direct staff to prepare budgets and price proposals as presented in the board materials and if we could go to the next slide you can see here we're now in the final steps of a process that began in june and includes capital planning long-term financial plan updates as well as our organizational budgets

1:22:13 based on feedback this evening staff will be returning with budgets and price proposals at the december week meeting and then after the final public hearing we'll be requesting approval with that i'd like to open it up to questions there were several different pricing updates and if it would be helpful we can put a list of those up for which we're requesting feedback after the conclusion of public testimony all right well thank you debra um ann would you let me know whether there's anybody in line uh interested to give public testimony i won't open up a cue um it unless there is somebody there interested in speaking no president may tell no one signed up

1:22:58 to give testimony during the hearing all right well in that case i don't see any reason to um uh to to address item number nine uh to address item oh boy where were we here um uh sir i'm not sorry i remember a public uh hearing we'll just move right into um item number nine and that's really direction from the board so and if you put 15 minutes back on the clock i will open up a queue for president mcdowell um yeah could i just say one thing i believe that by statute you need to open and close public testimony for this particular item okay fair enough um i will go ahead and open up a queue

1:23:43 uh for public testimony on the 2021 proposed budget um and once again would you let me know if there's anybody interested in speaking no president my child no one signed up all right well in that case i will close that public testimony thank you very satisfied does that satisfy uh whatever statutory needs yeah it makes me feel better thank you all right well i wouldn't want you to suffer any emotional burden on duly here all right well uh we will move right into item number nine and that's some direction from the board there's uh 15 minutes and if you wouldn't mind putting on the clock and i'll open up a queue um hold on just a moment here let me get your faces all there in front of me

1:24:29 if anybody like to speak sonia why don't you go ahead and then we'll follow that with dick okay thank you uh first off i appreciated the questions being answered we post over the weekend so thank you so much on those that really helps um i didn't have any follow-up questions to those but after the presentation i had a couple uh the multi i'm really intrigued by this multi-year uh rating rate proposal and i'm curious would that mean that as a board we would vote for a plan for three years can we do that and it seems like there might be some inner uh uh uh from from different boards i mean we

1:25:14 have two members of the board um that are leaving and can we vote in rate increases that would come in in in later years with a different board um that's one thought i had and then two uh what what what would that mean would that mean for this year that we would be actually looking at if that is the case would we be looking at voting on something potentially you know three years out can you just elaborate a little bit more on that concept i would i would go ahead so first of all sonia the there is an annual requirement that the board um approved budgets and prices on an

1:25:59 annual basis so you you we would not be asking the board to make commitments for future boards um what the this really is specific to developing an in-depth cost of service analysis that would um provide the board and staff with a direction over the next several years so that if it looks like there's uh something that um is three years out the board could take action in the present year in a form of gradualism so if the cost of service analysis showed an adjustment you know a major shift needed to take place three years from now uh it is possible that the first two steps could be taken with that in mind

1:26:44 um and so this is kind of a a way of and then in the in the interim times you do cost of service assessments but you don't go through the the full um exercise and and burden and cost and effort to do a full cost of service analysis other than the the three years unless there's some economic justification to do that did i explain that right deborah yes you did thank you and yes you were correct that each year uh any year in which there was a raid action the board would take action in that year to approve great thank you that yeah that's that's what i thought was happening but i just wanted to clarify on that one um other than that i i mean i'm

1:27:30 astounded that for a six out of seven years been able to hold rates down again and you know i think we've done all the right things i appreciate all of your hard work to make sure that we're there um always have to balance that with making sure that we are doing the right kinds of investment that we need to do and we're not kicking the can down the road i think we always have to to be cognizant of that but um i don't think we're doing that i mean i i do believe that we're making the right investments that we need to and you know i and i recognize that that's also challenging at that this time you know we're looking at places where we're under spending in part because we just because of covet and other you know situational factors we're dealing with you know we're having to

1:28:16 move projects out so i appreciate all that and i appreciate the hard work that went into making this budget i know that those 286 pages don't pop out of thin air i mean that's a lot of work to to put that all together and we have we go through reading it but you all have to go through writing it so um thank you for that work that's what i have commissioner i think you're next then john brown okay um well i do appreciate all of staff's good work on on yet another um seemingly successful but yet to conclude budget season um i i took the um the three-year kind of review cycle to be sort of like the way we approve the first year of the capital

1:29:01 plan but we project out and we plan for the trajectory and and kind of that feeds into our financial planning and modeling and this would be a similar way that we'd be managing our rate trajectory as we begin to see that we're going to move into a time frame when rate increases are needed so that's kind of the way i took that i i will resist the temptation to comment on the mackenzie customer class i think i've done that already uh in sufficient form but i have a sort of a detailed question that i will apologize in advance to my colleagues for and that has to do with the elimination of the reactive power charge maybe this is a question for adam um so believe it or not i used to be one of the people that got the answer to our customers when they had power

1:29:47 factor adjustments on their bills at that time we were measuring vars and converting that to a percentage power factor adjustment and essentially penalizing people or charging them for the additional cost that we incurred not just with bonneville but in transformation capacity and and other things in our system that uh like capacitance that we used uh and invested in in order to offset lower power factors so there was um an element of that that related to the bonneville bills and the way they charge us but there was also um a consideration of the additional cost that um particularly in circumstances where people had very low power factors were essentially being

1:30:34 born by the system and um otherwise by uh our other customers who had good power factors so without going into a discussion of real and apparent power and foam on the beer and all of that can you explain to me why it's equitable for us to eliminate this when some of our customers will still have low power factors and i'm assuming that we will continue to incur some costs in our own system in order to serve that well that was kind of one of the internal steps in the process was reaching out to kind of that distribution engineering and trying to see to what extent they are planning or making incremental investments based on power factor and and just the order of magnitude felt

1:31:20 relatively minor compared to um the administrative impact and when we kind of reviewed the customers that are currently seeing a reactive power charge um being on their bills and kind of which if it was that justified to have those if those customers had any ability to control their um their reactive power for you know if it's um you know like a large department store or something that might have their um be currently seeing a reactive power charge that it's something that isn't really generating motors and so it felt like the majority of the majority of the customers that had the charge probably didn't have a lot operationally they could do um to impact that line item on their

1:32:05 bill and there was relatively little amount of different investment decisions we might be making based on that um and so it felt kind of prudent to follow suit with with bonneville and eliminated just because it ended up being such a small relative portion of the bill and um and something that maybe either side of the customers or us wasn't really um uh planning planning or making any investment decisions around um so i think in this truest sense of perfect rates i mean there's probably a lot of detail that we would want to you know that it could be i think there's a reason reasonable justification for it but i think it's just the trade-off between doing it right and keeping it maintained and i might have a little rambling

1:32:51 because i see frank graves in his hands so i'm comfortable with that response and i thank you for it um i i assume that that we're doing something that's similar in trend to what other utilities are doing there uh and um and i appreciate that maybe at this point it's kind of a de minimis issue i guess the only other thing i'd want to know is you know sometimes that can have implications for the system that are important beyond just what the investments are that we're making in terms of transformer loading and that kind of stuff so are we still going to measure it and pay attention to it and if there's a problem somewhere be able to flag that and follow up with customers or is it going to be completely off the radar screen no i think that that would still be information that would be collected and presumably reviewed for

1:33:36 because i think all that customers under those accounts would be kind of in the key account or customer um customers uh would be monitored and have relationships with customer uh service groups so i think that that kind of okay thank you adam i'm sure i'm out of time frank did you uh you're muted frank or at least it seems that way thanks president mattel i was just going to add that it is pretty immaterial at the moment um to answer your question uh commissioner helgeson right and we will continue to measure this we there is not a capacity issue on the system um based on a low power factor at the moment um or a significant

1:34:22 financial impact so it's we'll we'll continue to do the things i think you're probably used to but it's a fairly minimal impact at the moment just just want to comment that that makes me feel a little sheepish in as much as i'm not an engineer and i always struggle to explain this to customers so maybe that's the good thing here but it makes me feel a little sheepish that maybe i was just kind of inventing all of that back then so it sounds like it feels like i owe somebody an apology but thank you commissioner go ahead i think maybe commissioner brown was in queue oh from me thanks for that so you're right go ahead john

1:35:07 thank you mindy um i want to commend staff and uh everybody else for doing again a great job of presenting this i'm totally in line with what you're proposing i do have a more of a global question about um watershed restoration and it's my understanding frank that we cannot do that through rates that it has to be kind of a surcharge or something else because i highly suspect we're going to need more money uh in the long run to help preserve our watershed and is that going to be something that we're going to do in this three-year projection i mean how are we going to deal with the economic reality of what it's going to take to preserve the integrity of mackenzie so um it's a great question commissioner brown

1:35:52 our plan is that there is a difference between watershed restoration and watershed uh preservation which is typically what we've done um in the first quarter of next year as in response to the board's comments last month which was to for staff to develop a more detailed plan as to what restoration priorities are and what those are going to cost in the first quarter next year we'll bring a watershed restoration plan back to the board and it will include the proposed impacts on the budget for 2021 and also a projection for future years 2022

1:36:37 through probably 2024 or 2025 at least the the funding mechanisms for that we could do in rates the challenge with the restoration piece is if we truly view restoration as a discrete period of time where there's a beginning and an end it is very difficult to do that in rates when you go to back off the rate when you're done with that um in five years it's easier to do that as some kind of a watershed restoration charge or fund or surcharge whatever you would call it that could be backed off later once you're through the restoration process so from a budgetary standpoint we'll bring something back to the board

1:37:23 in early 2021 with what the plan and the funding requirements are and then we'll present as well how we would actually implement those funding requirements but it would likely be some kind of a fund or a surcharge associated with the restoration piece not the ongoing watershed protection piece does that help yeah i just want to make sure that uh because of the timing and the necessity of a quick response that we don't um face this without um without dealing with economic uh requirements to address it so i just want to make sure we're we're covered in that because we're covering the future with no rate increases and i'm certainly that budget can't absorb what

1:38:08 it's going to cost right we we think that if the board wants if we go to the we come back to the board not not if when we come back to the board next year with increased watershed restoration needs and funding we will need to back that up with this is what it looks like this is what you're getting for that investment and so um that'll be probably in february of 2021 that will bring the plan and the funding request back to the board thank you all right mindy go ahead so my question is about the mckenzie valley customer class and um i'm just curious why what would happen if we didn't do it

1:38:55 this year i i know i've asked questions about this before but just that we haven't had a chance to have our upriver meeting there's something about it that um just doesn't feel right to me and so i know that we're not planning on raising rates or changing their rates this year but in the future we could conceivably and um it just feels like they're not getting adequate um kind of explanation or outreach so why why now and why not wait a year for that to answer your question there is there is not a lot of impact to waiting um on the other hand we've been talking about this for over 18 months and so including some discussion at

1:39:42 previous upriver meetings there is no financial impact to the upriver customers we wouldn't we wouldn't feel comfortable doing that without more outreach but this creates a class that we can start measuring that we can start looking at for programs um a lot and is significant enough and we felt like that it was appropriate to do it if the board said no we don't want that then we don't do it there's there's no budgetary impact to it given that it's initially aligned with the urban rates um so if the board isn't comfortable as a board then

1:40:27 then that's that's fine um we feel it's appropriate to move that direction we're doing it in a very slow way you know sort of painfully slow in some ways for someone who's impatient like myself but we understand the the outreach piece of it so if the board said no there's no financial there's no material impact from a financial perspective in the near term um yes i would just add then i would i would support waiting a year on that um but i don't know if my fellow commissioners feel the same way or not

1:41:15 i'll just jump in real quick uh before we take a round two um sonja we'll start with you in round two if we need to so just to you know answer mindy's question for me it's sort of at this point sort of a housekeeping item and you know i'd rather just sort of finish up those housekeeping details when our attention is still sort of clearly on the issue and we haven't sort of forgotten why we initiated that process in the first place um so that that's me whether commissioners may think differently about it i just wanted to also appreciate the separation of the restoration you know projects and costs i just think that's a much more sort of clear and transparent way to go about things and i i won't be here in any case when those issues come back in front of the board in february but i really applaud um you frank and staff for for setting it up that way so that it's

1:42:01 very clear for commissioners but also for our customer base as to what it costs what we're doing and what we'll likely get in response and then i also wanted to just say very quickly that deborah i think this is true right this is the first time you've been responsible for the budget soup to nuts um as cfo yes well congratulations thank you all right we'll take round two sonia go ahead i i was curious on uh commissioner schlossberg's point about the upriver rate if you if we set up this extra this other rate structure or this other you know class you all go through the cosa then for that each year correct so if you go through the

1:42:48 cosa for that and the cosa came up and it was outside of that five percent wouldn't there be some kind of a precedent set that if we're outside of that five percent for other rate classes that i mean typically then the expectation is that you would bring that back and bring a rate increase proposal or is that not so so um so by convention when there is a rate class that is outside the five percent we will typically bring that back to the board and and recommend a correction there are some cases where we don't do that like the case that we've talked about today where

1:43:33 there was a particular customer class that was impacted by what we think is a short-term covet economy impact for example and we felt like it wasn't wasn't necessary but typically if we had a rate class and in fact we've already done this with the upper customers where it was 14 um we we would typically bring back that we felt that would need to be adjusted um so yes okay i i'm just kind of putting my mindset in in in next year when we're looking at this and rates get brought back now again i mean i look at the into the future and

1:44:18 think we're it's still going to be more expensive it's going to be even more expensive now that we're you know doing this other restoration work um for me it seems like we're probably going to be in an even larger stretch or larger difference next year if we wait to set it up it's it helps spread some of that burden to uh an area that's been really devastated at the same time it's an area where now we're spreading all of that that burden in eugene now we've already decided i think you know this year based on not setting up a rate class and not doing a uh a rate change for this year that we're okay with that given the circumstances i mean i think that that's

1:45:04 sort of implicit in in in saying you know if we chose to not do a rate increase this year given the circumstances but for me personally when i think out next year these people are not going to be in a in a much bigger recovery sort of situation so i think when i maybe what what you know others are struggling with too is just that will we feel like we're in a better place next year um or in future years to kind of look at this with without having that lens of the fire um for me i don't personally think we do i mean we can i could i guess i could support potentially making the class but at the same time it's just going to set us up for this same conversation next year where i feel

1:45:51 like we'd probably push out doing any sort of rate adjustment and i'm not really sure it's worth that to put staff through all that rigmarole without having an outcome that really changes the mixture at all that's my two cents all right i just want to take a quick temperature check in terms of time we are i don't know five or ten minutes over the time we allotted for this discussion it's important discussion um so i don't want to cut it short but uh i think at this point if we want to continue then we ought to have a motion for an additional whatever it might be five or ten minutes move extending five minutes ten minutes excuse me second all right all those in favor of extending ten minutes

1:46:40 all right fair enough um and if you put those ten minutes on the clock um all right uh we will then continue on with round two does anybody else want to jump in go ahead dick um to me this is a kind of a distinction without a difference we have other ways of collecting data on this class by zip code or other means uh within our billing system so i don't i don't consider that a big issue i think that really does what sonia was suggesting which is really set this up to be revisited next year and i i without asking i suspect that's part of frank's uh strategy here i also will take a dig at my friend president mattal and say that um maybe since we aren't able to take action on this year this is a way of giving one of the prime champions of of this whole great

1:47:27 strategy uh uh something to um take home as we come to our last meeting next month as short of a an actual uh rate change so um those would be the only reasons that i could see to um move this forward i i think um uh it will be perceived generally once some our upriver customers become aware of it as a setup um for an action that um apparently we otherwise would have taken this year and for that reason i i think we ought to hold off and and and make sure that it gets revisited with the new board and i certainly would uh defer to that new board to uh have whatever conversation you need to have and come to whatever determination makes

1:48:12 sense um as will no longer be part of it but um i do think as mindy said it does feel like we're jumping the gun a little bit and signaling something that i don't think we've yet really taken a vote on so i would certainly support holding off on that all right well thank you dick uh john brown go ahead just a question and a concern number one mindy i've been in your position my first four years was at the at large position so i understand about representation um but i also have a question that there's this perception that our upriver customers were negatively affected through their electric service through this but frank our 2300 customers that we have in the upriver class how many were lost power because of the fire

1:48:57 that were adversely impacted of our customers so um if if you look um commissioner brown there were 430 homes that were lost not all of those were eweb i don't know the exact number is it's just an estimate that would be half of those uh because some of those were in um lane electrics territory um there's about little over 3 000 residential customers in the in the mackenzie valley area in total so um i'll just say a few hundred out of three thousand okay thank you because i'm kind of on the fence going either way with this uh you know i understand that we could uh we could just set up the class we're

1:49:42 not going to do anything we set it up again next year but i don't want to uh give the impression that we're going to create an economic hardship for those people because they're not going to be you know out of the 200 homes that were adversely affected because next year they're not going to be out of it it's just going to be a long long process and uh i don't think by raising their rates you know right now is the right thing to do and i'm glad we're not doing that so i'm going to wait to hear what others have to say on this all right thanks john anybody else like to speak to that or any other issue all right well we have just a minute or so remaining um we are not um we are here tonight to provide direction right to um to staff at the the actual

1:50:27 uh vote on the 2021 budget and all the associated issues um that go along with it is scheduled for next month but of course it'd be nice if we could give some clear direction to steph now uh dick maybe you're going to help clarify that i'd like to make a motion that we defer uh the implementation of a separate rate class um for the reasons that have been discussed here at least for the sake of giving clear direction to the staff for what they bring back in december thank you we have a motion we have a second any discussion before we take a vote okay well in that case all those in favor of dick helgeson's motion to um i think essentially eliminate

1:51:12 the um creation of the upriver rate class um for the 2021 um budget please raise your hand and say aye hi hi all right we okay and those opposed say nay nay it carries four to one so that's pretty clear direction for deborah and steph all right um too by the way thank you yeah uh just making sure that before we close this one out is there any other issues that you feel like you need direction on in order to finish off the budget for next month uh no i feel like you all were uh very clear and all of these things are

1:51:59 for approval next month so uh this was not approval on any of that but we will remove the mckenzie valley customer class from our proposal next month all right well thank you um i believe our next item is a break anne's already put uh five minutes of which 30 seconds is gone so we'll be back in uh that's all right uh what the heck okay ann gave it back to us right we have five minutes see y'all in five minutes you might remind yourselves to turn your cameras and audio off during your break

1:57:39 oh it's the three of us hey frank it's susan can i do a quick sound check again it was fine when we we checked in but i didn't know something had changed in between yeah i can hear you fine okay all righty let's see um we'll wait another moment or so other sonia all right well uh welcome back everybody hopefully your breaks were useful um our next item of business is uh sorry i have one small screen to work with tonight and i have to toggle around with a lot of different things just a moment here my apologies all right here we are on item number 11 and um it's uh susan ackerman and megan capper talking to us about the results

1:58:24 from phase one of the electrification impact analysis report and if you put 30 minutes on the clock please susan go ahead uh thank you uh good evening commissioners and you can go ahead and go to the next slide um this is just a reminder that in in august we were in front of you with our preliminary results from the electrification impact analysis study that we undertook in march at your direction what we were trying to look at are the possible outcomes and impacts on e-web if there is electrification in our area you are getting a lot of questions from

1:59:10 the community about the impact of electrification policies on e-web and so the purpose of this study was to set us up to understand what those impacts would be in our loads on our generation portfolio on reliability costs and a number of other things so it's a forecast but it's not necessarily a plan for electrification it's just to understand the impacts on the utility of electrification we focused our efforts today on passenger and light duty vehicles and also residential and commercial space and water heating and we did that because these were the areas of electrification that we thought would have the most likely impact if there if we were to

1:59:58 have high levels of electrification so you'll see that we you've seen our draft white paper which is i think on you saw it in your packet and it will be published on our in final form on our website um later on so next slide so when we were here in august what we described for you were our preliminary results as i indicated and it's just um i guess the important thing to say tonight is that the preliminary findings remain true what we did though is we built on these the analysis that we presented to you in

2:00:44 august um on an annual average basis we discovered that um even high levels of electrification appear to be manageable to the utility and by manageable i mean that we will have opportunities and time to adapt our portfolio and our infrastructure as as required to meet loads that might be presented to us through electrification it's a 30-year analysis and so there's a lot of uncertainty in that primarily due to adoption rates um so a lot of the future building and electrification uh is very dependent on technology

2:01:29 um in buildings we talked about a wide impact on our load from the use of different electric technologies like heat pump efficiencies and other technologies and finally we we mentioned in august that electrification in our service territory is really one pillar of many that can achieve decarbonization um and so next slide so what's new um is uh we in the eight weeks that we have had since we talked to you in august we really continue to refine our assumptions in our data we did that primarily by engaging with some key stakeholders in the community that includes the city of eugene and northwest natural gas

2:02:14 on this study and this is an important caveat with that um there are still differences uh between and among our respective organizations about what the impact of electrification would be on our community but we believe that the conversation were helpful to us because it helped us understand their perspective and maybe allowed us to adjust some of our studies but we feel that the results of this phase one study are solidly presented and they are independent and they are reasonable um but they represent eweb's opinions only not necessarily the cities or northwest natural gases we we also completed our analysis of

2:03:00 commercial building electrification last time we were here we were just talking about residential and uh electric space and water heating but not commercial we added commercial the impacts are smaller than we would expect in the residential market but they're still still important so they are in there now as promised last time we have studied the impact of electrification on our extreme peak when we were here in august what we showed you was the um impact potential impact of electrification on peak under average weather conditions the one and two typical winter that we could expect and in this case what we did is we looked at

2:03:45 a more extreme winter presentation a one in ten year impact on on our peak strategies so uh we've added that as frank says you can't fly through the mountains at average altitude and we can't either there is in this paper um additional discussion if you have time for it on regional policies how they could be an accelerant of electrification or service territory more discussion about what the portfolio impacts are now that we have added peak under extreme conditions to this study and lastly we will be looking at some mitigation strategies uh what we mean by that

2:04:30 are strategies that eweb could use to mitigate or reduce potential peak load impacts from electrification next slide please so this shows you um the cumulative load impacts from high electrification in our service territory under typical weather or average weather scenarios the gray bar is our typical system load under average weather conditions and you can see it does not change much uh up into 2030 or 2050 and that's because we continue to assume that we will meet most low growth with conservation um and so that is offset quite a bit um but one thing that has

2:05:16 changed most mace based primarily on our discussion with northwest natural gas is that we have refined some of our estimates of how our load would be impacted by electrification uh last time we showed you an impact of 55 average megabytes by 2050 under high electrification scenarios and now what we're showing is 64 average megawatts by 2050 again based on refining our assumptions with northwest natural next slide this is where you'll start to see the impact of unmanaged electrification lows on our

2:06:02 peak this is unmanaged because this just assumes that electrification that comes from evs or electrifications of homes and residences would be not necessarily optimal the black line shows unmanaged peak impacts that could occur by that i would mean if electric vehicles all came home at night and charged at the end of the day that would tend to push our peak load impacts up same would be true if people were installing sub-optimal heat pump technologies that really has an impact on the peak load and what we discovered is that

2:06:49 with unmanaged electrification it adds about 275 megawatts or a 50 increase to our extreme peak scenario next one so this shows you how we could manage peak load impacts with with the right programs if electrification would occur the orange shaded area shows you the additional load that would happen in high electrification of building scenario where gas and space and water heating are replaced with today's technologies that are better suited for cold temperatures and the blue wedge

2:07:38 shows you ev load that would be added to the system under an extreme winter 1 in 10 peak only this time we have attempted to manage charging in other words we would have programs that would incentivize consumers not to charge at the worst possible times but rather shift the charging to a time period that is more optimal from our system and what this showed us is that we are capable of reducing um that extreme one in ten winter peak load impact by as much as 100 megawatts by doing some of these management programs next slide these are sankey diagrams sankey diagrams are

2:08:23 great ways to understand the total fuel cycle and what that means for purposes of carbon reductions from electrification you start reading these from the left hand side and the left hand side shows you all the fuel inputs going through the various processes and what happens to that fuel as it goes through the process into the right hand side which is to achieve the end result that you want to achieve and if you can look at that at the top the power to wheels figure that that ribbon that's up there that's what we're trying to do with an internal combustion engine car right we put in gasoline and we're

2:09:08 trying to create power to the wheels to move the vehicle forward and what you can see from this slide is that there's an awful lot of waste that comes from the uh use of petroleum fuels in an internal combustion engine this analysis includes waste from upstream production but between that and waste heat from combustion that does not result in moving the vehicle forward means that there's a fair amount of carbon emissions from this approach to to vehicles and you'll see that we think that there would be 3.6 metric tons of carbon equivalent

2:09:55 associated with a standard uh gasoline engine and by the way this is um assuming uh a typical car that you would buy today it would get about on the average 35 miles per gallon and it would drive over 12 000 miles per year next slide this is a comparable document only it shows you a sankey diagram for an electric vehicle again moving from left to right this shows the emissions that you would get from a single electric vehicle traveling about 12 000 miles per year

2:10:40 because uweb's power source is from a very um clean portfolio generally we we wouldn't see the same effect as if we are using a regional combination of fuels there is still some fuel in the region uh from natural gas and coal that goes into generating electricity and what this shows you is that with all of the effects in the electric generation the heat loss from electric generation line losses moving on to the right and electric vehicle efficiency losses what it results in is a total carbon emissions from an electric

2:11:25 vehicle right now 0.84 metric tons of carbon equivalent um so that's quite a change from the gasoline vehicle that's about a 75 percent reduction in carbon emissions by converting from gasoline and tusk internal combustion engines to um the electric vehicle format so every um every switch from a gas vehicle to an electric vehicle would reduce carbon emissions by 2.75 metric tons for the switch next slide

2:12:10 this is our cumulative carbon reductions that could be expected from an electrification uh event in our service territory we showed you this last time and what we showed you last time was only the orange wedge the orange wedge represents the carbon reductions that could be achieved by assuming of high electrification scenarios high in this case means an 80 percent conversion of residential and commercial space and water heat by 2050 and that electric vehicles would reach 45 percent of total vehicles on the road would be electrified we just showed you that orange wedge which is where that comes from but we also mentioned last time that um

2:12:57 really electrification is only one of many strategies to reduce carbon and so we tried to layer in here our alternative um additional not alternative additional carbon reduction strategies that occur from other sorts of decarbonization strategies the the gray wedge uh represents the um improvement and reduction in carbon that you could get from the fact that gasoline vehicles will improve in their efficiency over time using cafe standards and miles per gallon will probably increase over time and so you can see that that would contribute to reduced carbon reductions in our service territory

2:13:42 the blue um is just assuming that we gradually green up the grid and then ultimately we're we have an electric grid that is has zero carbon uh in it so you can see that what this does is it it takes us to the point where it would help meet um 34 percent of the city's carbon reduction goals by 2030 and continuing on this path that could help the city reach its uh climate action plan 2.0 uh by 50 percent by 2050.

2:14:32 so this is kind of a summary slide of where we are right now um we there were so many questions about electrification and eweb's role as a utility in electrification part of electric supply planning is understanding what may happen to our loads and how that would impact our portfolio over time so we is this is work we needed to do anyway because electrification could have an impact on our loads for purposes of our planning our portfolio into the future we would have needed to have done this work anyway um but i appreciate the fact that the board gave us this opportunity to study this on a stand-alone matter because it gave us the opportunity to develop the planning tool that we think

2:15:17 we are going to need it's a very solid data-driven planning tool and we're there so the bottom line is from all of us that we are well situated and it probably shows also that we are strategically moving in the right direction as a utility we have an obligation to serve all load as it presents itself but now we know that we have enough runway and time to adapt our portfolio and our infrastructure as necessary to meet this challenge if it presents itself so in phase two which will begin next year um shortly in 2021 we intend to do a few other things to add to our phase one study

2:16:02 one introduced introduced economics what customers would pay in order to make these choices to electrify would have quite a bit of an impact on how much electrification actually happens and we're trying to we need to understand that there was a very wide jaw of of potential impacts in the phase one study and if we introduce a layer of economics and customer choice on this we can probably narrow the jaws from low to high into something that's more clear to us we will also have the opportunity in phase two to explore the role of e-webs programs on electrification like our energy efficiency programs and

2:16:48 the sorts of programs that could help time the use of energy into more appropriate times and we'll start modeling alternative futures including taking a look at how the regional energy grid changes over time and how that gets green another important thing that we'll be looking into in phase two this is for rod is uh doing a deeper dive into our distribution infrastructure electrification doesn't impact just our portfolio and our planning from that standpoint it's also about poles and wires and substations and so we'll be taking a look at how electrification could potentially impact our our distribution

2:17:35 system next slide so i guess the questions for you are whether you have any questions on the phase one study on the assumptions and conclusions you can open it up commissioner mata all right well thank you thank you for that looks like someone is eager to jump in the queue go ahead so can you go back to the slide with the climate goal and the reduction of i think it had 18 and 25 there we go that one thank you so this blue line uh down below the red dotted line

2:18:22 represents the oregon adopted goal and the green line that's well down here is what the city of eugene climate ordinances when i look at this i think of the the amount of carbon that comes out of these three areas is being kind of our biggest buckets to really impact you know change and i still see a huge gap in between the green line and where we're at now i know that we don't have full responsibility over the entire you know city of eugene climate ordinance and there's a portion of that that we can affect but my initial kind of i don't know shock here is that it's not

2:19:07 enough um this is really i mean this is really helpful for me to be able to see and i appreciate you putting the report together but we're not even close as a community to hitting these reduction goals um you know we're starting out here and we're starting a divide and it's we're making an impact but it's it's not close um i don't know if there's other if if you know if there are other partners involved i'd if if at some point staff could help me kind of see if there are particular segments that the city views is like this is in ewebs camp and this is in you know whatever this is an ltd's camp or whatever different

2:19:52 agency or government groups that are involved business community involvement i'd love to see where those kind of sectors are because if they're just relying on us to hit everything we're not there and i and i don't think we're you know that that that entire burden should not be on us but this is is not there so anyway i thank you for all of the work this was really enlightening especially this graph for me right uh oh sorry susan did you want to respond no i was just going to ask frank if he wanted to respond um i think it's important if you wanted me to okay thank you megan yeah no um

2:20:38 if you recall we went back and we talked about the four pillars of decarbonization and we're really um we've added some examples in here of what might be some others uh but we're we're the the city is looking at much a much broader set of ways that they're trying to meet their goal a couple of them that i can think of off the top of my head is trying to get people out of cars completely and into bicycles they also um we're talking about um electrification of the heavy duty freight uh transportation that's not included in a man uses that we studied right now also um the reduction there was reducing the waste and fugitive emissions that was about 15 of local emissions uh so that just gives you a flavor

2:21:23 of what the some of the other ways that the city is looking at to reach their reach their goal um to piggyback on that train of thought um i don't know how to get the city to come to us but i know that frank has offered many times to share these reports and to to give a presentation to city council but i'm just wondering if it would be possible for somebody from the city to come and talk to the board about what their strategy is i know that i know they work closely with eweb staff that you probably have a lot of contact with them but we're being asked to weigh in

2:22:11 on these kind of board level things without kind of understanding like the whole landscape of what's going on so i don't know if that's appropriate for us to ask them to come to us or if that would be possible that's one question and then i just have two other quick things is um if there is a change in government from the upcoming election and um if if there's new policies that come from federal and then maybe state level two um will that impact kind of our forecasting um that was a question and then the third one is um i'm just kind of curious maybe this is in the weeds a little bit but how do we account for new technology that might be

2:22:57 around in 2050 so like ev charging might look very different or maybe not those are my questions good well thank you sorry susan thank you commissioner i'm going to let frank ask answer the question about having the city come to us i wanted to talk a little bit about the potential for new federal policies and new technology with regard to new federal policies obviously for most of us they would be welcome if there is a change but the point of this study was not to actually forecast what those might be but to make uh to create a tool for us to study what the impact might be if there is a change and there's a great

2:23:43 deal of additional incentive money or programs that are out there at the federal government at the federal level that would enable some of this electrification we have the tool now that we can use to understand what would be the impact on our portfolio and our infrastructure from that we didn't have that before and so the purpose of this tool is not necessarily to drive programs uh per se but just to understand how programs that are out there like the city's programs or federal programs would affect our portfolio we have an obligation to serve all load that presents itself and of course we strive to do that at the least cost that we can given all the other constraints that face the utility

2:24:30 but we're just trying to really with this tool just understand what might some of these policies do so if there is a new federal impetus we have the tool now to be able to study that and understand it and now i'm going to be quiet and see whether frank wants to add anything i'll add a few things um thanks susan there there's there's a couple of things and just that we really started out with the purpose of this to be to assess electrification's impact on us it wasn't to promote a particular position or whether to say that or to align for that matter with other assumptions that have been made by the city or northwest natural for that matter and so the fact that there's differences

2:25:16 in assumptions are probably understandable we looked at the ones that we thought were most impactful to us which is both infrastructure as well as time of use and and impacts on resources we do expect that at the state level this next year some type of 100 percent clean legislation will be introduced um driving further uh decarbonization of the electric sector and and potentially the gas sector as well we also expect if there's a uh change at the national level at the at the presidency or in congress that federal programs and federal standards will also be

2:26:02 in play over the next one to two years which could potentially impact further decarbonization and then technology it is fair and we haven't we haven't run all of the scenarios that you would say that the the electricity sector is going to clean itself significantly over the over the next 30 years and that's that's a fair assumption we know that many of the coal plants are being closed we know that clean energy standards are being continuing to evolve that affect the electricity sector when we say that we also think that the fuels sector so fossil fuels so for example natural gas

2:26:47 will have a less fossilness to it um over the next 20 to 30 years as well there is the potential that it could be synthetic by 2050 as opposed to a fossil fuel and so the nice thing is that we can model those different scenarios and we can take a look and say what's the impact on electrification that's our system but then what kind of carbon benefit do we think we're getting for that for that impact so i think it's fair to say there's lots of assumptions we made some different assumptions than northwest natural on one hand we made some different assumptions than the city of eugene on the other and so but we felt like we we made the assumptions that

2:27:32 helped best us answer the question is what is the impact on e-web for various degrees of electrification and i would also add it's only in those two sectors it's only in the the light transportation and it's only in the residential and commercial water and space heating we didn't look at industrial which is a significant one a very application specific we didn't look at buses for example which may start to use fuel cells and hydrogen and other other technologies so those are all on the table as well and those are all gaps between kind of where we are and and where some of these carbon objectives had so there's a lot of moving pieces and i think we have the some tools to be able

2:28:17 to run more scenarios uh going forward i'll jump into the queue and then i'll call on dick sorry dick um yeah thanks for the presentation and my you know look at the thing when i see where our um efforts might get us under the various scenarios of you know low medium and high adoption of evs and heat tech heat uh pump technology uh you know that's all based based on um more mostly on voluntary um adoption rates which are hard to predict and so what i see when i look at those are really gaps in policy and policies that are beyond our our own power to enact we don't as far as i know you correct me if i'm wrong we don't have the ability to uh you know follow suit with what let's say the city of berkeley

2:29:03 did and um you know uh uh put a moratorium on new gas in the city or um to eliminate to require houses to rip out existing gas lines and replace it with electricity that's a pretty um you know bold and aggressive measure and maybe folks want to take that up but that's not something we have the power to do the city of eugene would have to do that and then we would have a duty to serve so it's just uh and i'm not advocating at this point one way or the other i'm just getting really clear that what you're showing us is what we can accommodate under more or less a voluntary standard if um if the community at large says that that's just not enough the answer is uh essentially that there's policy shortcomings that need to be addressed at the state or federal level or perhaps a local

2:29:48 level to some extent um and then our job is to figure out how to um how to meet those um that's how i see it have i misunderstood that susan no uh president mittal that was the way i understood it um one other quick question that i had just uh um because people are interested so um we're not taking on the electrification of buses in the study right now but doesn't that largely happen over on subs network on on their distribution network isn't that where ltd buses go to recharge each night that is presently where they go to recharge president mattel if there were another technology

2:30:33 such as clean hydrogen where you had a fuel cell vehicle which is becoming more and more feasible for large vehicles and trucks and buses then that could be wherever they decide to make it wherever the infrastructure can support it but presently you're right they re they recharge for the most part unless it's in route charging but that's minor it's in springfield okay well thank you dick go ahead so this is all good work and quite meaty um probably worthy for a you know a candidate for work sessions but i'll try in my three minutes to give you my thoughts um susan when you sort of summarized you

2:31:19 said that um something along the lines that your your conclusion was then that we you know looking at all of this that we're well situated and strategically aligned um to um to address um you know the the implications associated with electrification in the areas that we've studied um i would just caution that um for those that advocate for an aggressive role on eweb's part and even more aggressive strategies to raise the adoption rates that they're going to read that is eweb's saying as a result of their phase one that there's really no problem here that that they've got the capability to take this on and ready to do whatever it takes to make it happen um i think that would go a little beyond

2:32:06 you know what we're really able to conclude here and probably a little premature and so that's just one thought um i i worry a little bit about the projections in in kind of a load resource balance context i appreciate that we are surplus now and that we have some capability to meet load growth with with conservation uh at least on an average energy basis but i also know that our resources decline over time and that i just haven't had a chance to look at our load resource balance 30 years out to really see what that looks like and kind of wondering if at some point we're going to have to replace something but i'm most concerned about the peak implications of what what you're showing

2:32:52 there and this is very um good work in terms of exposing um something that could be uh problematic for us particularly in the unmanaged cases that you've talked about you've counseled us um all of the staff over the last several years about the looming peaking problem on the system and kind of when that becomes a strategic concern that motivates things like time of use rates and all of that um i think you know a several hundred megawatt increase in our peak loads potentially in an environment um that you kind of um presaged on the peaking front

2:33:39 could be really problematic and costly um and i just remember a time that the industry engaged load building and we ended up thinking that we needed five nuclear plants and the rates went up and so i'm i'm really looking forward to and will kind of sit on the sidelines and look toward the work that you're going to do in phase 2 because i think that'll begin to expose you know what it means in terms of cost for customers for conversions and or incentives that we might have to pay to move things along this trajectory and or implications for our portfolio relative to particularly peaking

2:34:25 um but this is all good work and i i just um for me it's a little premature without the results of phase two to conclude that this is all great and we had a gung-ho go for it um and i just kind of worry about what the long run implications are of all this load particularly on peak that potentially could manifest looks pretty good in the short term when you're surplus but good work commissioner helga said i just wanted to respond really briefly i certainly didn't mean to leave the impression that there's no issue here and that e-web should be all in i was actually trying to say the exact opposite so that says something about the way i address you all but what i was trying to say is that we're looking at

2:35:10 how would the utility respond and how could it respond if this electrification presented itself and all we're saying is that it appears as though we can manage it from a resource standpoint and a time standpoint we'd have the ability to adjust we were making no recommendations about policies that e-web should pursue to encourage electrification that's that's not our role and that wasn't what i was intending and i would guess i would also say that the questions you're raising about peak and what does that do for our portfolio are very good ones and those are the kinds of questions we answer in an integrated resource plan now that we've got this information and

2:35:55 we know how loads could be affected by electrification especially peak loads will have the ability to examine a portfolio a long-term portfolio for the future and what that might look like well i appreciate that response and i certainly understand from our perspective and knowing what i know about the planning work that staff is doing how that all fits together i think there is a danger as i read sort of um at a high level the report that others from the outside might conclude that we're saying that there's no no concern here but i do appreciate that that's not your view or staff's view and there are unanswered questions um

2:36:40 in a portfolio context i think until some of those questions start being answered it's going to be hard to fully embrace this um and really know what it means for us and its customers particularly if we're expected to incent this uh the way we have in the past conservation or other other things but thanks for this work it's good work i just want to remind all of us um that we are a good oh i don't know 40 minutes uh behind schedule um just as a reminder but if there are additional questions we will continue to take them on this topic john brown go ahead thank you i'll be brief maybe i missed something but i recall that frank said a

2:37:25 while ago that in the next four to five years we had a high probability of brownouts because of the decommissioning of the fossil generators in the region and is that a true statement and if it is how does that play into this scenario um i mean i want a line of dicks questioning about adequacy especially during periods of time john to answer that question i would not say there's a high probability of brownouts in five years what we have are the reliability metrics and the safety metrics that we apply towards reliability in the region are deteriorating because of the shutdown it's both the shutdown of the coal plants and the prospect that

2:38:11 our hydro based system could be further eroded through environmental uh challenges to it so there are reasons why we need to be cautious about this but it doesn't mean that we're at a high probability of brownouts it means that we are getting into a risky planning um environment i wouldn't call it a risk of a brown out though okay i i don't i was at 40 was the number i recall maybe i'm wrong i i would say i i would still say that based on some of the numbers we've seen i would just i would disagree a little bit i would classify it that there's some risk that we would have to take action as a region on the load side either shedding load voluntarily or other

2:38:57 things but that's the resource adequacy program which is going on separately that susan's part of and megan's part of to look at the metrics look at how energy flows under different conditions uh and look at the impacts on hydro and and curtailment or elimination of coal and other things so i i there is still a danger in my view that some type of load action or pricing action will have to take place if we don't um come up with a different type of approach to it you know this is making questions just added oh i uh when looking at um i think susan mentioned

2:39:43 earlier that we have this we have this tool and we have these capabilities and so if we were to see uh any kind of policy change that was being introduced as as frank even mentioned earlier we would be willing we would be able to look at that and take our tools and then we would adjust accordingly and that's what's pretty nice about this is just knowing that we have uh that ability uh when something is proposed and we can uh look at the results alrighty um i think we're gonna move on to our next topic unless anybody's got a burning question right thanks to megan and susan both for the work and whatever other staff assisted you we really appreciate it

2:40:28 all right next item for business is the quarterly strategic and operational report it's not quite our penultimate um topic but we are getting close frank we can put 30 minutes on the clock and i suppose if there's any chance we can get it done faster than that everybody will be appreciative go ahead i will do my best to accelerate uh the presentation portion of this um thank you president mattel for the record this is frank lawson general manager um pleased to be able to report the third quarter results for the commissioners you'll notice on this slide the very left side of the the picture shows the up the roosevelt operations center october marked the 10-year anniversary of when we moved into the rock

2:41:14 and so um just wanted to note that i remember it well i had just joined the utility and and packed up my things and moved to the rock so 10-year anniversary of the rock go ahead with the next slide as part of the update uh commissioners you did receive roughly a 70-page um report on uh the utility and its operations for the fiscal year as well as the the third quarter the third quarter was really marked by two significant events the ongoing pandemic and also the holiday farm fire up the mackenzie valley from a pandemic standpoint we did see our first reported covet cases at eweb we had at one time eight people who tested

2:42:01 positive and 18 who were quarantined as you can see on the very right side at the bottom we are down to now zero active cases and zero uh people being quarantined and so that's um good news and and um reflective of a lot of the procedures and policies that we've put in place we're still seeing some economic impact on the electric side about a four percent uh decline in electric consumption that can be traced to the covet economy i'll call it that delinquencies or disconnect service orders it's actually that number of 590 is now lower that's actually down into the 517

2:42:47 account range that's as of today so we're continuing to work on providing services to customers options to pay that's about not quite double what we historically see so it's still elevated but we're offering a number of programs we've given out over a million and a quarter dollars of customer assistance to almost 5 000 people this year which is roughly um double what we would do in a typical year go ahead with the next slide please the holiday farm fire um impacted 430 plus homes um and um at present we

2:43:32 as of a few weeks ago actually we restored all of the electric service to structures that were we were able to restore to that existed we have also worked with lane county and others our communications technical staff restored communications to mount hagen which is the shared system with the state police and lane county sheriff and also as our part of our link to carmen smith have to give a lot of credit to bpa they have restored the carmen the transmission line to carmen smith and also to cougar and we started our watershed recovery efforts almost immediately after the fire

2:44:19 had had been contained you can see the on the the picture there the northwest youth corps youth corps assembling some waddles that's for erosion control also there's a dashboard in the upper right hand corner with a lot of different layers to it that we've created with elcog and some other partners that show hazardous homes which burn assessments we've done and which residences are premises that we have restored and stabilized the erosion with we're we're shifting from stabilizing to now we're working with the epa on the removal of the hazardous waste from the area go ahead with the next slide

2:45:09 besides really looking at the covid and the holiday farm fire we continue to have a good safety performance good reliability performance you can see that the safety numbers on the electric side the the stadium the frequency and the duration of outages is is continuing to run lower than what would be typical on a five-year average the safety record on the upper right shows that total injuries are still about half of our three-year average so far this year and also our preventative work or what we call our good catch reports or the close call reports those are significantly up so employees are reporting opportunities to proactively address safety issues

2:45:56 we've come up with some tools that allow people to text in information and others and that's that's all helping the financial situation it's been kind of unfavorable for the electric utility there's a number of reasons for that some of it is mostly driven by retail consumption uh the closing of willamette industries was part of that the covet economy was part of that the 900 million unfavorable that's based on uh the difference between making a deposit to reserves worth versus taking a a withdrawal from reserves by the end of the year um in in net um that's a forecast for the end of the year we're about two and a half million unfavorable at the moment

2:46:43 relative to reserves the water utility is quite favorable consumption has increased you can see in the lower right corner that where the red dots are is whereas where production levels for treated water we're at so far throughout the summer and those are those are high uh compared to even a typical summer so next slide please relative to strategic progress um goal number one really keeping uh everything flowing from the lights to water to information for customers to to keeping the financial flowing we really had to prioritize uh goal number one in general this year and so that's that's continuing to be on

2:47:29 track you can see quite a few of our strategic goals are still on track we've made progress on a lot of the goals um you know in the midst of the two major events um we've continued to make progress uh on on a majority of those goals including ami the cei project those are both progressing we did we had a goal from 2017 on goal number four to do five emergency sites in five years we're now reaching the end of year three and we have five and maybe a sixth ready for completion the covid environment has [Music]

2:48:15 put a little bit of a damper on our sort of celebration and and socialization of those sites but we did implement those sites as part of the holiday farm fire response there was a time during that fire that um the evacuation zone was with within about a thousand feet of our water treatment facility and so we were looking at emergency response uh as part of that and so that was that was turned up the other goals electrification laura mckenzie some of those are behind simply because the outreach has become a bit difficult under the cobit environment but we continue to make progress on those

2:49:04 so other than that this next slide please one final comment before opening up for questions and comments again there was a pretty lengthy report um i would you know like to thank president mattel and and commissioner helgeson we didn't do anything like this at i think the beginning of your tenure on the board and uh have appreciated a lot of the feedback that we've gotten on this through the last few years and so this is really turned into a what i think is a good way to present where we're at with things but you know this is this is the last time you'll have to sit through a quarterly or read through a 70-page quarterly report if you don't want to and so i'd be happy to answer any

2:49:50 questions that commissioners may have about this the status or staff is in the wings as well if you have a detailed question that you wanted to ask about what things are going on at the utility steve i think you're muted sorry about that thanks for pointing that out uh first up in thecube john brown dude real quick frank um looking at your community investment q3 we had about a quarter of a million dollars go to the schools for the education programs but it has no events or anything we gave them the money in july and there's some other things what is that for if they're not having school and not having these classes and

2:50:35 things where's that money going it's a good that's a good question commissioner i'll have to follow up on that one and get back to you i um knowing what schools are doing now i would anticipate that they're doing more online outreach um and and virtual work with that but i don't know how a field trip can be virtual necessarily so i'll i'll follow up we'll get back to you on that one thank you so frank thanks for pointing out the progress that's been made on these reports i'm always reminded about how much work actually goes on in the organization even in a covid constrained environment i worry a little bit about that i know when i was having to prepare

2:51:21 these kinds of reports there was a lot of sort of administrative overhead and time taken in staff preparation and reporting out of of all of these results because they're they're kind of a roll up of a much more detailed look that i know that you guys maintain as part of your management process how are you feeling about um this working on the staff side relative to you know administrative burden you're asking me and not staff so there might be a different answer but um there's there's a couple of things first of all it's it is a pretty significant amount of work um but one of the you know part of our refinement is to try to align the work with what we think has strategic value

2:52:08 so the responses are really geared toward the goals that we have of which we should be doing this work anyway so i'm trying to align more and more between what's reported so that it's not an unvalue added burden but it's part of managing projects it's part of managing the objectives and so we'll continue to refine that sometimes we measure too many things sometimes we don't measure enough things and so we're continuing to balance those but the refinement we've made most recently has to do with trying to align uh what's reported with the really the status of the goals that we're trying to achieve so and we'll continue to refine that

2:52:54 well you make a good point and that's where the value added is it's not just a matter of doing the work you got to evaluate how you did with the results and this is a big piece of it thanks for your report yeah thank you mindy or sonia either of you have uh questions comments okay i don't either actually i'll just open it up to dick or john in case you want to go for a second round not trying to do anything just making sure that everybody has their questions answered and said thanks for the report um as always frank uh i i will just say also yeah it is a it is a really nice

2:53:39 uh process not just the report itself but the the process the frequency um and uh and ultimately sort of the view that it gives senior management and uh and the board into what's going on is just incredibly valuable so uh you know much appreciated that um you know hats off to you that that's uh that's evidence of your leadership well hats off to staff who does all the work there's they do a great job um commissioners um to compile and understand and make it relevant and and so there's there's a lot of things that go in behind it that make it worthwhile for those who participate in it yeah alrighty we will move on here we're almost done i think now we have the penultimate agenda item for the evening and that's

2:54:25 the correspondence and board agenda so frank you're still on for that yeah the correspondence item this month commissioners mixed in amongst all of the other uh 296 pages was an update on the carmen smith project and so i am sure that mike mccann or or someone else's is in the queue for updates but it was pretty thorough i don't know if you have any questions on that uh comments questions about uh any of the board the packet items that didn't get addressed directly during the meeting tonight it's like it's that time of the night then there frank sorry and then seeing none you know um the only other thing was the

2:55:10 the future calendar um coming up we did uh push off you'll you'll make note that we we have sort of pre-scheduled the mckenzie river valley meeting for late april so that's um that's on the list and then we have a number of other things coming up at the beginning of next year including the um the work on the watershed restoration as well as some other things related to to property and other such such items and ami and goal setting and a number of things all righty fair enough uh final item board wrap up uh we'll just take it

2:55:56 right down the lines go ahead sonia good question january's meeting is typically where they do this swearing-in ceremony as well is that something that we can we can do virtually at this point or is that something that people have to actually come and be in person for i don't know what the rules are around that there's any statutory requirements on it i'm not sure commissioner carlson i'll have to take a look i uh i'm not sure good thanks question we'll have a i mean someone is making a good point there's three commissioners that will need to be sworn in in january sonya is up for re-election tomorrow night i think it'll go pretty well um and i

2:56:42 don't think she's facing anybody and neither are the other two candidates but um all three uh have to be sworn in so we should probably get clear about that procedure given uh in january city recorder will know yep all righty um i think uh it's items from uh our board wrap up sonya why don't we start with you if there are additional items beyond that one i don't have too much dad good meeting tonight i know there's a lot of work that staff put into this and i i do have to say that i'm i'm getting quite nostalgic because you know this is the group that we've been with for a better part of my time here and seeing

2:57:27 that there's only one more board meeting and we can't even really celebrate is is a little bit heartbreaking to me so i'm i'm really gonna miss serving with you guys okay i'm gonna go off video so i don't get all terried thank you sonia it's very kind of you go ahead mindy um i don't really have much to say good meeting um it's probably our longest one in the covid era and um thanks to the staff for all of your hard work because i know that there were a lot of very needy reports tonight well i'll just say that i'll i'll come down and give public testimony once a while next year if there's a blueberry

2:58:13 cheesecake as a reward uh so um so just you know there you go go ahead dick yeah knowing how much we've all appreciated that when the others have shown up i'm not sure that i'll do that or not but uh blueberry cheesecake is an enticement um i just had a point of clarification frank you said earlier that um we we needed by statutory requirement to open and close the public hearing i'm actually not aware of any statutory requirements that bear on the board's process for rate hearings i think those are self-adopted and self-governed but you are correct that we have a procedure in place for conducting our rate hearings it does require uh hearings and that that was the

2:58:59 mechanism that would allow that to be shown in the record as a matter of adherence to our own policies so i i think you were basically correct but not as a matter of law but as a matter of board policy and with that i think i'm done for the evening john brown go ahead well thank you great meeting and thanks everybody i just two real quick things i agree with mindy's request to have emi on the agenda when you guys are setting the agenda in the next meeting you may want to get that on the calendar because we're going to have a pretty full load at the first quarter of next year with the new commissioners and everything else we've got the other thing is i know historically in years past we've done a kind of a little tour of the mackenzie in different areas it may be

2:59:44 timely to schedule one now uh for like next spring or early summer to get everybody on the schedule if people want to uh go down in the river on a little float like we've done in the past to see um see what uh it really looks like because i think the perspective from the water is totally different than it is from the highway and we can see um what's going on and what advances we've made from now until then so if others want to do that that would be something that we should be thinking about then thank you all righty well um with that i think it's probably time to close out uh the meeting i wish you all a uh peaceful and uh happy election night or week or month or however long it takes see you in december good night everybody

3:00:32 good night hey steve no