EWEB Board of Commissioners — February 16, 2021

0:03 february 16 2021 um we'll get started and the first thing we have is an agenda check is there anything anybody wants to add change the agenda great then we will jump right in to our customer experience improvement and i think that julie and rachel are gonna take the lead on that we are thank you so hi everyone i'm julie mcgahy chief customer officer and one of the sponsors for the customer experience improvement project also known as cei joining me is rachel chilton our customer experience program manager so a little bit of background before we start our demo

0:48 the cei project was created with the goal of giving our customers just really an easy to use modern online self-service experience with eweb and although the project itself is centered around some upgraded technology to give us a new online customer portal more flexible payment processing and a new build design it's also an opportunity i think for us to take a fresh look at just the overall customer experience so how we interact with our customers at all touch points and kind of ask ourselves could we be doing that better so we anticipate product delivery from our vendors in march at which time we will have some employees who are also customers of ours

1:34 use the system and give us some feedback and then a product launch will follow after that so with that i'm gonna turn it over to rachel for a look at our new customer portal great uh thanks julie and good evening commissioners i'm super excited to show you this portal demo and also we'll just get it out there but this is weird this is a super weird experience to interact with the board from my home over a screen but here we go gonna jump right in and share my screen and i'm actually going to turn my video off because i'm going to share from my other screen so you're not just staring at the side of my head the whole time so i'll turn my video off and see about sharing my screen let me know when you can see

2:20 it yep we've got it right yep uh so this is the login screen for eweb's new online customer portal and i'm just going to go ahead and log right in i already did all the registration but i will show you the registration screen as well it's pretty darn simple to register just one thing to note is customers need to register for an account on the portal and then following that they will connect their eweb account or accounts to their profile but i will go back to the login page and sign in and i will just say that because this is a live demo and it's still in a test environment there's always the opportunity for demo gremlins so hopefully we don't run

3:06 into any um but we're still working on the product and we could certainly run into something so here is the account summary screen this is what any customer will see when they first log in and the first thing i want to bring your attention to is that it it's responsive design so if i shrink that down you can see that it grows and shrinks with it and we have the menu in what we call a hamburger menu at that point but i'll do the rest of the demo in desktop so you can actually see everything that hamburger menu is in desktop view just you know a menu you're used to that's across any website across the top so customers can navigate throughout and the first thing that you really see is this account balance which mini has recently paid her bill so she

3:51 has account balance of zero right now um but this is a new thing for e-web and for customers in that this is real time so if a new new charges hit and you know minnie has a bill and she goes in and only pays half of it she'll be able to see that right away so real time payments is a new improvement we're very excited about obviously make payment so a big you know blue button there um one of the the first things that customers will see besides their account balance and when that payment is due and if they click on make payment we'll hop over to the payments page which is just sort of a standard payments page they can add multiple payment accounts to their wallet select to pay

4:36 she doesn't have a bill to pay right now but we can schedule a payment later um just some basic payment functionality there i'll go back to the account summary can download a pdf of the current bill i'm not going to do that because this is actually so even though we changed the you know the specific information this is a customer account we're looking at and that will download a real bill so we're not going to do that in a live demo but we did send some bills ahead of time so if if you have any questions about the bill redesign would be happy to entertain those at the end as well you can also view billing history and payment history so click on those and you can see those down here as well but i'm not going to

5:21 get down here because down here is where i get really excited so i have to stay focused with the first thing first before i get myself excited about usage graphs you can see you know billing history and you can export to excel for customers that really like to dive in anything the same thing with payment history can export that to excel over here on customer enrollments uh so the two enrollments that we are going to have at the time of launch is auto pay and paperless bill so this is another change customers can have a portal account and choose to be paperless or not um so currently those go together in ewebs payment platform where you're paperless and and you have a profile they they go together so now those can be separated if customers prefer

6:08 and we look forward to adding some additional customer enrollments as we go forward and we're really looking at launching this product as sort of what we're calling minimum viable products so making sure we're doing all the basics really well and then you know looking at how do customers use it um where where can we add more functionality and features to help us reach operational strategic goals help our customers reach um you know the kind of customer experience that they would like to have and then we'll add more programs that we can enroll here so things like um bill assistant assistants payment arrangements you know in the future when we have additional uh pricing programs or payment programs and be able to all do that from the online portal so some quick links um so i just want to

6:53 highlight this start stop transfer service those are going to go to our existing online application at the time of launch but that'll be one of the first things that we look to add after launch um one of the first enhancements is to roll start stop transfer service into the portal experience as well so there's a lot of good reasons to roll that into an authenticated experience we can pre-populate some stuff for customers and just make it smoother for them i am going to hop over really quick to notifications because that is something that we have have something new there so a lot of the notifications themselves are not new we provide customers with these today if they want them but what we don't do today is provide text message notifications so that's new functionality again we're excited to enter into the

7:39 text message space go back to account summary so up here in this utility menu is where we have some additional features that we're excited about uh so customers if they have multiple accounts so if they you know have a rental or um you know are kind of watching after their uh you know college age kids account something like that they can switch between accounts so if i go here to switch i added another account for mini to look at and so if i come over here and look at daisy's account uh you can see that i just want to i picked this one just to show that we're also trying to roll in messaging um if customers are past due so you know that's in line with some of

8:25 the goals that we had around the build design as well um to to make sure that our customers understand um if they're past due and the consequences of that but i'm gonna go back to minnie's account for this uh so if you but if you have multiple accounts you can add you know as many as you want here and switch between them have a default account um if you know like a landlord situation when you go to pay you can pay multiple accounts at a time i'm just trying to make it as simple as possible for customers to manage their eweb accounts especially when they have multiple go back to mini um you can also share an account this is slightly different than adding an account so this is something we're excited about given that we are a college community and we have a lot of roommate situations

9:10 so if minnie were to share her account with someone that means that you know that person would have access to view all of this same stuff but they would maintain their own wallet uh so if minnie has a roommate that needs to pay half the bill that roommate would be able to see all of the details and then pay their half of the bill from their wallet and not be able to see any of minnie's um payment details so keeping our customers payment information secure is obviously a very high priority and then activity which i could click on that is just showing um you know everything that this has happened on this account and shows the user so you can see i actually did share my account with a friend tommy earlier and so if tommy were to come in and do

9:55 something on this account it would show user tommy and what tommy had done as well so they can keep track of what's going on with the account if i pop back over to the account summary all right and i'm going to scroll down some so this is where again i get start getting really excited about the future of what we can do with this portal uh so here is a charges graph um to give our customers a visual of the breakdown of their monthly bill and so i'm just going to walk through a little bit of a story for minnie here so we'll say that many you know recently got her january bill she went in and paid it but she definitely felt like it was a little higher than it it normally is and so she looks at the graph and sees sure

10:40 enough i mean it's quite a bit higher than her her typical bill and so starts thinking how she can dig in with the portal you know to to start figuring out why that might be and one of the first things she notices is how much bigger the wastewater city of eugene wastewater portion has has become for that month and she knows that's related to her water usage you know she's in winter it's based on her water usage so she can click on the legend here and actually get rid of the other charges and just really drill down and see wow that was a pretty big increase in her water payment and and her city of eugene wastewater payment so now she's thinking i'm gonna really dig into my my usage my water usage um to see how i might be able to control that

11:26 so she goes over to the usage portion usage graph and looks at her dashboard and so besides just having so now we're looking at the electric and we're going to look at water here in a minute so you can see the usage and this line here is temperature and eventually you know when we are able to connect in with smart metering data this is where we can provide interval data to customers and and really start letting customers drill into usage but even without smart metering data it still could be very useful so i'm actually going to look at the comparison graphs for many and look at water and this is where i think a story can be told so you know looking at november of this last year compared to

12:11 2019 and december some pretty big jumps and so something obviously changed in that household and behavior and so you know another big jump in january and so maybe you know some somewhere in the middle of november minnie had a bunch of family members come live with her you know her out of town son and his family are in town and have moved here looking for a house and so you know she looks at this and can really start thinking about what are the behavior changes that happened between you know january of 2019 and 2020 to this year that has made this big jump that has now really impacted her bill um and so that's kind of this exciting part of really starting to have those building blocks for customers to get them from thinking about how their behavior

12:56 drives their usage which drives their cost um and you know realistically how many customers are going to be diving in like minnie just did you know right off right out the gate i don't know i mean honestly may not be that many i think that's you know it's our job to to help teach customers to use the tool in a way that shifts the relationship and really gets them to start thinking less about bills and payments and more about behavior and choices as as they relate to how and when they use water and electricity which will really help us you know march our way towards meeting more operational and strategic goals using this tool and especially as we you know add more enhancements to it so that is really the end of the the basic

13:41 demo um so i'll just kind of you know end with my few closing statements before entertaining any of your questions should be happy to answer julie would be happy to answer is we are planning an extensive campaign at rollout that's focused on introducing the new bill to customers because that's going to affect all customers that new build design and then helping our current ebill and auto pay customers through the transition we have a really high ebill paperless bill adoption um well over a third of our customers are currently on paperless bill and we have about 17 000 customers that are on autopay so it's a pretty big chunk of our our customer base that we need to help help through the transition process and then once we get through that and our you know after the

14:27 stabilization period we'll really turn our attention to focusing on helping customers use the new tool and learning how they're using it where there are gaps so that we can you know increase functionality and add additional features because this definitely isn't a one-and-done it's an iterative design process that we will keep adding to for years to come so that is the end of what i have for you today but i'll keep sharing my screen for now so that if you have any details i can um dive in well rachel i love how excited you are about that um and i'm getting an echo are you hearing me echo oh that might that might be me i'll mute i

15:12 live in the middle of nowhere and so sometimes there's a delay okay now i'm not echoing anymore um so yes rachel i love how excited you are about that and um we can open up a queue for questions if there are anyone if there's anyone who has questions matt go ahead thanks thanks for the presentation rachel and uh all the work that i said expect went on in the background to get us to where we are um i share your excitement about this i am a data nerd too um this is really great um a couple questions is i assume it's the same whether it's a commercial customer or residential customer but if

15:57 there's any differentiation i'd be interested in knowing about that i'm also curious how far back the data goes um in you know what kind of access the customer has to their historic data so for the first question the experience is basically the same for commercial customers and residential customers right now i think there will be opportunity for enhancements going forward because that's definitely different needs there for those customers and then for historical data um this stuff that was that actually here i like how i'm explaining it theoretically when i can still show it um so everything that you see here in payment history and billing history goes back three years uh so the current

16:43 bill views um i'm not we're aiming for having one year of historic bills at launch we may have more than that and we will keep adding those historic views because we're transitioning between vendors and so continue to add the historic views of the pdfs of bills until we also get to three years so and i think we're on track um someone could correct me if i'm wrong but i think we're on track to have more than a year at the time we launch great uh john barofsky i think you had your hand raised thank you thanks for the presentation um a couple of questions

17:28 some of the bill that got sent out with our packet and one of the questions i had was on the water side i know that in my in my household when we have summer and irrigation there's different rates of water when you hit a a certain level of of usage and i didn't really see that broken down at least on the bill that was there um i'm just wondering because that's one of the things that my wife notices is like okay we're watering the the guard we're watering the garden we're watering the lawn and our summertime water rate obviously goes up because we hit a kilogallon threshold um and i just want to make sure that that's as clear as we can make it to our customers because

18:14 that's something that that we see and it jumps out at us you know normally we open the bill we look at it we pay it but come irrigation time it's like holy crap our bill went from here to here and i think we really need to be clear on that and i didn't notice it on the sample bill so can you address that and then i've got one other question sure um yeah so the sample builder provided obviously doesn't have the tiered uh water rate so this customer didn't go into an additional tier um but we did do quite a bit of work in in simplifying the um bill print labels and unfortunately even the we've done more work since this sample was provided so um even this one you know the water residential inside city

18:59 um we've done some work to clear it up no need for hyphens uh in in that kind of a situation and and have definitely done some work to to make it clear when a customer goes into an additional water tier based on their their usage and i'd be happy to um you know find some additional examples and share those with you uh thanks like i said i just i just want to make sure that that's something that is is uh usable to the to the customer you know so that they can understand that when their bill and in may was you know 27 and in june it went to 127 that they're clear as to why that is and they might be able to to remedy that the second thing i was wondering is um

19:45 has there been any thought to incentivizing uh paperless and auto pay because i know obviously that's got to be more efficient for the organization and if you can incentivize it in the front end and then it's all set up i mean i i see that on a lot of my bills it's like yeah do you want to do paperless do you want to do auto pay you know it might be convenient but if there's a little bit of a spiff to it in the beginning that might help and and the organization might see efficiencies through that we have considered that um and i think we'll continue to in the future i will say that even without incentivizing it might just be you know the wonderful community that we that we serve um

20:30 even without incentivizing we have actually i wrote it down so i could give you the so currently we have 38 of our customers on paperless billing and our um bill print vendor that we're getting ready to you know to start using they i mean are pretty shocked by that usually industry average is between you know 20 25 and uh their customers like 30 is pretty high so 38 is remarkable um and but we can certainly you know consider incentivizing for you know the customers that haven't made the jump and i also think that part of the reason that customers haven't made the jump is because we made them make the decision of um you

21:15 know if if they were paperless like having to have an account and log in and they don't have to do that anymore so you can you could you have to um make an account log in make yourself paperless but then you can keep managing your account from other different you know directions and channels and so we've made a lot more options that i think will increase adoption um after we kind of focus on that first you know bit of just transitioning the existing 38 of customers and i actually want to circle back one second because um i wanted back to the tiered rates thing so i wanted to point out something that on the bill that is another spot i get really excited so i get very excited about data-driven anything so we can now provide these messages these aren't great examples but

22:00 we're able to provide messages on a customer's bill that is specific to the customer situation based on data that we have for them and so in theory we don't have this one set up but in theory we could actually even have a message that is specific to your water has gone into a second tier and here's an explanation about it and here's where you can get some tips about you know water conservation and controlling your water usage um and we'll be able to do that kind of thing based on you know the data provided in the file that we we give to the bill print vendor so um that's something brand new and it's something that honestly other utilities aren't even doing a lot of we're a little bit cutting edge there and i'm very excited about it and and that is thank you for that

22:45 because i'm gonna put it on the list because i hadn't considered that one great sonia do you have any questions and then john yeah i had uh just a few um well one before i jump into the questions thank you so much i'm really excited this looks wonderful it's definitely a major upgrade from what we have now um so i i didn't catch when uh the launch was expected to be on it um so i guess that was my first question just missed it in the paperwork yeah so we are kind of looking at it in three steps so product delivery um looking at mid to late march and then using that

23:32 you know that final product to do some last user experience testing with some friendly ewebers who are also um customers and and frank has agreed to be a part of that group as well uh just and then we will look at rolling out after that um so approximately a month after that so we're still aiming for end of april um but you know ready to be flexible obviously bills and payments is something that you cannot mess up and so and so we want to be 100 confident that we are ready for customers to have the new bill and make payments for these new channels because we actually didn't even mention this also is upgrading um and replacing our ivr so when customers pay by phone so it's really affecting um a lot of our

24:17 payments 57 of our payments come through these channels and 100 of our bills go out through that channel so yeah so we're going to be very careful um but that's right i'd be happy to be a guinea pig if you if you need other guinea pigs sure i i will i'll take all the feedback i can get before we actually put it out to sometimes less friendly customers yeah yeah commissioners count as as friendly ewebers or or unfriendly i i don't know i've tried to figure that one out it depends on the staff person asking the question frank [Laughter] i and on the the different bill options um it seemed like from the packet that you sent us

25:02 it was the there was a number of different layouts are you going through the process and and kind of determining which layout to do or do customers have the ability to pick which layout i'm i just wasn't sure so i thought i'd ask a little bit more or is this the whole bill because it seemed like it was the same information presented in like three or four different ways yeah that's a great question so um we have a couple of different bill presentments based on programs that customers are in so this first one that you're seeing is just our standard bill this is what most residential customers will look like most commercial customers there's some a little bit of nuances to the commercial bill but it's pretty much the same and then the second one

25:48 is for customers that participate in our budget bill program so where every month they pay the same amount and our current budget bill presentment isn't great i mean it just isn't it doesn't help the customer very much they're paying that flat amount and they don't necessarily know unless they track themselves if they're on track or if they're going to you know come to their kind of renewal month and either have built up a big credit or oh um owe us more money because they actually were overusing and above their budget and so that's actually one of the things again i've said the word excited a lot i need to get my thesaurus out but i get very excited um about what we were able to do with the budget bill uh you know helping customers stay on

26:34 track so if they're tracking over based on their rolling 12 month average um or if they're on on track or under so that they can really use budget bill for what it's supposed to be used for um which is to help manage their costs and and contr you know think about their behavior and how that affects the monthly cost and then we also i don't i didn't provide an example because it's a much smaller um customer base but uh we also have a different presentment for net meter customers because again they're interested in in different data we present different data on the bill for them and the you know little circle here doesn't work as well um when that's a negative number so had to come up with that for net near customers if if they are um you know generating more than using

27:20 and then the oh no there's also a different sorry if that's scrolling i realized like make everybody dizzy i'll go slower but the um there's a a special also a special present for our master bill customers you know also a really large key account so that has a much improved presentment um and then the disconnection notice which isn't a bill it's you know a letter a notice to them but tried to make it very clear this is very different from our current one make it very clear and transparent to our customers exactly what will happen if they don't pay and including you know additional charges that they may accrue so i'm trying to to you know be be kind with honesty for our customers

28:10 excellent thank you i appreciate the different distinctions because i wasn't sure if it was they were different options but now now i completely understand one thing that i didn't see on here now customers who do like uh the green power donation monthly is that is that does that come up on the bill how does that present sure that that will just be another lie so if i scroll back up here um that would be a line item um under the details of electric so they would you know see that as a label here that they're basically paying that premium and or if they buy a block i mean so it depends on kind of how they participate with the green power program it would just show up in the details of the line and then that's again another thing that we can

28:55 um you know address in the message center we can thank them we can promote it um we can say hey you're participating green power and now we're rolling out this new you know carbon product we think you might be interested in this as well um so really you know using the bill a lot more um like tactfully excellent i have more questions but i can pause and let others ask theirs um and then if we have time i can come back if that works sure john brown you are next thank you a great presentation i can tell you're you're pretty vested in this this is great um quick question on the storm water um i know this we the terminology's changed because currently it's it's you know four

29:40 dollars and some odd cents per isu and and the the bill is based upon your impervious service unit uh a certain dollar amount and that's where it's currently reported and now uh did they reclassify these where did we come up with general or small residential and general residential and things like that or did they is that just some iteration so these are just the examples provided that information is still on bills where it applies um and we you know have have been doing some incremental improvement with the city of eugene to actually try and clear up the stormwater portion of the bill around esu's and there's definitely some confusion there um so

30:26 again i can round up some examples that show that it's still on bills where where it needs to be it's just that the examples that i happen to provide you know because it doesn't apply it's not there okay thank you and then the other one i've had some fun i'm on ebill and autopay and when the credit cards expire it seems to me that and i think staff has admitted that there's a rather cumbersome process you you ha we can re introduce new credit card information but then we have to do something else otherwise they won't auto pay and then you get thrown into delinquents is that something that you've rectified that issue or that challenge i can't tell you how excited i am you brought that up because it was fun for me too

31:12 and you're not the only one that's happened to um so that's kind of that's part of how we we built this new thing is we used real customer use cases and you were one commissioner brown so we we used that case to say how would this happen today in this new system and um obviously it's in theory it still could because if there is a way customers at some point will figure it out but it's much much clearer to a customer that if they are on autopay and they alter the payment um method that is associated with autopay that you know it could affect autopay so in to some degree so if you just update your information you're fine if you delete that account it will boot you off of autopay because now you don't have

31:57 you know a payment associated with your out of pay but the messaging is much clearer and we used you your you as a case okay well thank you very much and uh sorry i was a little pain there but we we don't we won for it but the bottom line is if the messaging's there is how you can accomplish what you need to be done i think that was the advice i could give is it's not the technical issue it's just this is what you need to do or be cautious of it because i'm not so sure you get warned right now but thank you very much so i just have a quick question um about the customer service reps so does this does this help them in any way with their job other than maybe like pointing customers that they can look go online but i'm just curious

32:43 if somehow this information is presented in a way that that helps them as well or maybe that's not needed but i'm just curious yeah so our customer service analysts are also just as excited as i am um i'll speak for them so this is a lot of improvement for them um and they were you know a lot of them very involved especially in the bill redesign process because they get a lot of questions about the bill so um just in a simple way i'll say yes it definitely improves their experience um i'm really invested in the fact that employee experience and customer experience go together very hard to separate those uh so we've been doing a lot of work on the internal side i think that's kind of what julie was mentioning that it's more than just a technology project and we've really done a lot of work internally on

33:28 on processes and you know making sure that um you know customer service in particular and billing operations are prepared to support the changes and on board with the changes great thank you i think it looks fantastic so great job um sonia you had other questions and i don't know if other people have other questions as well but i'm gonna pass it to you sonia and then we can start another queue great thank you um kind of building off of what john brown brought up on the the payment issue i've definitely had that situation where i had to cancel a card because of other fraudulent uh activity and then when i went to go re-up it it didn't catch is there a way um currently we can't pick when it pays

34:16 it just pays on the due date is that different now because it would be helpful to be able to pay before the date so you can confirm that yes indeed it actually did pay so that it doesn't hit the due date and then cause an issue of you know now you've been paid and does the new system allow you to pick a date to pay so you can actually pay before the due date um if you're on autopay no so autopay will continue to pull out on the date it is due um there are some additional reminders um that can be helpful so oh i've logged me out because of inactivity but um i'll just explain it and i'll log back in here a minute but so you can you can get reminders if you're past due and that includes text

35:01 reminders so if that's something that is of concern if you're not on autopay you can select to pay later so you can schedule payments um you know for any time you want so long as you are current so those are sort of two different options um so so if you schedule a payment let's say you had to change your card because i ran in that same problem i had to change my card and then it takes a little bit before it it like re-ups to the new card and so if you go on to auto pay you can't pay it in time i guess it sounds like you have to schedule the payment but then you don't want it to double pay on the when the date comes up it might just be something if there was any way to look in into that it would definitely improve

35:47 customer experience um just from my perspective it's it's nice to be able to you know pay to pick a date to pay and say okay you know yes i'm on autopay but if my due date is the 20th i would like to actually auto pay on the 15th so that i can confirm that yes it is all paid and then i'm not going to ever go into that like late payment time but anyway um the other question i had was on mobile services can we did if since it shrinks down and does all that does it um does it work really well on different mobile devices it does yes um so this is kind of the the like

36:34 rudimentary way to show it is by just you know growing and shrinking my screen um okay but you could actually yeah i mean it looks great we've done testing across multiple devices you know phones tablets um you know mac windows all a lot of extensive testing and so far it looks um you know just as just as good on on any device any browser any operating system perfect so does this also allow us to do some of the um i know you have the side messaging but can you also come put the the like newsletter type pieces and i know that's something that you know those who have signed up kind of get that but if you like if you're signed up for the electronic uh

37:20 payment what does what is that do we get emails from it or does it is it all just on the web portal um you'll get emails so you'll still get your bill ready email um and you know like yeah you can and then you can elect for additional emails that's where it's in this notifications here so you know if you want that your payment is on the date that your payment is due a payment reminder that comes out three days before it's due if you pass it past due and then there's some additional auto pay notifications um so and and we will look at adding more of these now actually like folding in the the newsletters the e-newsletters um would be a much bigger effort and and not something that the portal is really

38:05 you know meant to do at this point and equipped to do um but that is you know the kind of thing that you know down the line we'd love to provide a little bit more of a you know one-stop shop omni channel experience for customers um but this is just our first little step yes no i completely appreciate the minimum viable product idea that that's a great way to start it and work out all the kinks before you add all the niceties in all right well that's all i have thank you so much this looks wonderful i can't wait to see it go live i know this has been a lot of effort in the making over a number of years so it's paying off you have reason to be excited yeah thank you yeah and i just you know i wanted to put a shout out there that it's really been a big team and i'm the one that gets to do the fun of like presenting it to people um but it's it's been a a

38:52 big horizontal team across eweb that has gotten us to this point great all right i just want to point out that we're running a little over time but if there's other people that do have questions that they want to ask this is i don't want to waste the opportunity so john brofsky i see you raising your hand thanks just two quick questions one and you don't have to give me the answer to this right now it may be coming in an email uh just the cost savings to the organization of uh auto pay and paperless as opposed to sending out the bill and and doing it that way that could come into memo and then the second question is as far as payment options can you link a bank

39:38 account to it or does it have to be a credit card and i'm and then also can you just talk maybe a shortly about people who aren't set up who have to do cash payments and those types of things i i know that frank was talking about maybe we'll have some sort of a kiosk at some point but those were my questions so the first one yes customers can use a a checking or a savings account um and then as far as cash payments go that's sort of some further exploration that we're doing so um here soon we're sending out some messaging to customers that frequent in the lobby and and may have paid in cash we didn't actually separate them out and are asking for some of their feedback about some other payment options that include

40:23 you know kiosks um you know paying at some designated location like a credit union uh using like a retail partner like a fred meyer 711 kind of situation pay by text i'm just sort of seeing like what options would best fit their needs since customers came into the lobby or paid by cash for different reasons and then we'll figure out you know how to how to best meet those needs going forward but definitely something we have our eye on all right matt or john brown any last questions nope all right well thank you very much for that rachel um look forward to um seeing the roll out and if any

41:09 commissioners want to be part of your test do we just email you or how do we how do we do that um that works for me or email anne and and now she can help coordinate um but yeah i'd be happy to to have any and all of you great thank you even you commissioner brown even you come here everybody all right thank you that was actually a lot of fun all right so our next topic is a review of the strategic plan so frank that is over to you yeah it's over to me well you know thanks to julie and rachel and the team and i think they've they've uh they said it right when it

41:54 was something that you just don't want to get wrong if you really want to know what it's like to get a billing system wrong just look at seattle about three years ago with their new billing system and and all the the headaches that it caused but i'm i'm i i don't know if i'm quite as excited as rachel was when she when she did did her presentation but uh i'll i'll tell you this is this is really the the attempt tonight to kind of zero base the board a little bit in the in the most recent strategic history um it starts really with the fact that you know if you look at the the the slide there there's a few people on that that a few pictures there are people who did not participate in the process um you know some of the the ones in the upper corner obviously but then um you know john brown and and and sonia

42:40 carlson were part of the strategic the most recent strategic process but the rest were not and so this is an opportunity for the board to make make comments review it ask questions and for me to give you a little bit of my context when it was developed kind of the story behind the story if you will go ahead with the next slide i'll see if i can catch this up a little bit on the time here too really just a reminder of the profile public utility a little bit of of the size i don't i think most of you know this this information pretty well and we manage over a billion dollars worth of assets water and electricity go ahead with the next slide i mentioned that with this slide that

43:25 there's a couple different ways to look at strategy and kind of where we ended up with with what we did some theories actually say that it really matters on the market that you select you can be a poor performer but if you pick the right growing market you can be successful with it i'm not sure that that really applied to us given that the we were public utility we had to define a charter fairly consistent over the last 100 years another theory was really about your resources you pick whatever opportunities fit your resources the best resources can be you know assets they can be human talent they can be a number of different different things the alignment which is kind of

44:11 and then there's this one down in the in the lower right corner which just says it really doesn't strategy doesn't matter it's all about execution i'm not sure that that i agree with that um although there are situations that you do see that we kind of ended up with an alignment approach to it which was to understand that we we had certain conditions in our market and we had to align our resources to try to maximize uh the market that we were in um and and look at the best opportunities we could so we kind of ended up by doing that looking at the challenges we saw in front of us and saying okay how do we align our resources to to maximize our benefit for in this case our community and our customers

44:56 based on the situation and based on our resources go ahead with the next slide we also kind of coming into this we you know i'll say that i had not been the general manager very long um and i i really wanted to kind of take a look at where we were a lot of that had to do with customer feedback we were getting um felt like the organization was pretty fragmented at that point and we really needed to focus in on our core mission and our our core uh duties to the to the community this is some of the feedback that we were getting from customers you know attitude of inflexibility quasi-governmental certain things they

45:41 felt were things that we just should be doing and so uh this combined with a few other uh pieces of information felt like we really needed to focus the organization and so part of a recognition of the fact that the strategy went from previously a few years ago you know 37 page strategy down to four or five um part of that was just a recognition that we needed to focus as an organization and and to a certain extent it didn't necessarily matter on what um but we found a couple of what's to to focus on uh go ahead with the next slide one of the things that that we we found that we needed to focus on it you know if you look at the upper left-hand quadrant or corner here you

46:27 see the the 2015 customer survey the black circles are what customers think are important and then the the blue triangles are how they think we're doing at it and you can see that you know drinking water quality pretty consistently number one on the list um water reliability source protection electric service really you know really the reliability of the systems uh are you know consistently at the very top of importance and in fact we our customers at that time even felt like we did a good job with it then we came to this this efforts to control cost and and really customers uh just you geographically here said hey we this is important to us

47:12 it's it's in the top tier of what we think is important and we really don't think relative to the other things you're doing that you're doing a very good job of that um the 2019 data in the lower portion of the screen there shows again the the the same kind of top things of importance we still do a good job of those you start to see a couple other things come into play around environmental stewardship but you do see a much narrowing of the gap on the far right side there with efforts to control cost the the importance dropped a little bit and and our effectiveness went up so we we've narrowed that gap some i think it's always something that customers really care about they care

47:58 about drinking water quality they care about safety they care about affordability reliability those are really the the big things and and so we found something back in 2017 that we thought was really important to the organization because it was important to our customers and that that did initially um mean that we had to focus and we had we had to make sure that we were managing our customers money and so we really started to emphasize that this is not our money it's our customers money and we needed to treat it accordingly go ahead with the next slide um it was pretty obvious as to why they felt this way um if you look at the period of time um the the seven years leading up to uh 2016 and really if you count 2016 as

48:43 well you can see some really significant pricing increases you know they're almost 35 on the water on the electric side and and over 70 percent on the on the water side uh during a period of time and and you know right after that it's like well no wonder uh people were sensitive to rate increases at that time and so we felt like there was a an opportunity to look at this but we also felt like there's it it's hard to compare just utility costs we started to look at utility burden which was how much were our customers paying you know what percentage of their median household income was going to utility costs and and that has dropped really since the beginning and started to

49:28 take a look at some initial measurements um you know 16 so far but we've made some headway really just through prudent cost controls um as well as other investments so i don't want this to sound like the the intent here was to be cheap the intent was to manage our money well and make good investments go ahead with the next slide you know one of the things that we also recognized on the horizon and and really strategy is about moving toward a new horizon or a horizon that where you want to go is that we had some large electricity resource decisions to make starting really you know these are color coded according to different types of resources the the larger circle on the left is carmen

50:13 smith that was around re-licensing and then the the three trio of circles out there on the right are ones that we've started talking about already leeburg walterville and then stone creek is the other one those have lice those are hydro licenses in the late 2030s or 2040 and then there's a number of resources kind of a cluster in the middle of the 2020s decade which are some pretty significant decisions but go ahead and advance the slide one thing you'll see is there's this other big one um there's a huge one here called bonneville um and so if the size of the circle is proportionate to production you can see um a lot of production production related decision around that 2028 time frame when it came to and and

50:59 really how do we set ourselves up to make the best decisions we can uh even relative to bonneville and other relationships and other other resources going forward go ahead next slide please um this is the bonneville time frame i won't go into this i just wanted to note there's a number of different milestones and not any in the next really for e-web in the next year so other than to really start to prepare ourselves to look at various options including what we would like out of bonneville over the next several years to prepare for potentially a new contract in in 2028 go ahead with the next slide

51:45 thank you we we ended up after going through the process with a couple of things that we thought were our strategic priorities one was to really start to look at on the right side there the the rebuilding of our generation portfolio that is is something that i mentioned earlier especially relative to the bonneville contract and then on the left a recognition that one of our most important things that we do is we provide these vital services electricity and water and we needed to make sure we were able to do that under a number of disruptive conditions and and you know that the ones that were popular um to think about uh at that time and continue to be um is things like earthquakes but as you know if you just look at the last year

52:31 i don't think a pandemic was was high on our list and i we did we did think about wildfires especially relative to our water source but i think we need to look at this broadly and we need to make sure i think that's still an issue to be concerned with and how do we prepare for various types of disruptions you know there's cyber attacks there's chemical spills there's all kinds of things that can can keep utility people up at night but our job is to ensure a continuity of service under whatever threat and conditions that we're presented with and so that's these were the two priorities that rolled out of the strategic process i i think they're still priorities because if you look

53:16 at the at the future horizon those will still be issues that we need to work on go ahead with the next slide i'm kind of where we are and relative to the original plan which started in 2017 we figured that we couldn't do this all at once and and the strategy is really about positioning the utility um and and a journey as opposed to just the destination so we we broke this up into a few different phases we're kind of in the middle of this consumption flexibility some of that is around understanding that uh the the consumers will play a role in the in the balance of supply and demand whether that's electricity or water to get there we needed to improve our relationship with customers

54:03 and i don't think that ends these all continue to to go and then eventually we start to align the resources and that's on the water side that means a second treatment plant it means understanding mobility opportunities as well as distributed emergency sites with the with consumption and then on the electric side it it means that there's an understanding that the resource base is changing across the west um including uh for e-web and could change significantly and how do we align and synchronize the supply side with the demand side and and the theory there is especially on the electric side the better off we sort of synchronize supply and demand the better

54:48 service that we will eventually supply our customers because that will be it's the most affordable it's the most environmentally conscious uh it's the most reliable uh so we have to synchronol synchronize all those things in in the final step there go ahead with the next slide uh we also as part of the plan we we did um take a a look at our mission and and vision and the values of the organization um i'll say there's a few kind of key words here you know the vision basically says what we do and and how we do it and there's there's kind of a key term in there called we do use we use the term delivering drinking water and electric services delivery uh you know we're very highly uh integrated um on the electric side we we

55:35 do generation we're not just a uh delivery or distribution utility and that's that's up for some some discussion with the board whether that's still going to be appropriate going forward i think it needs to be a conscious decision but we do we need to do this in a way that's consistent with our community so we deliver these services we want to be consistent with the values of our community and then the values that we identified organizationally safety reliability responsibility which there's we've had some discussions with about whether that is both uh explicitly affordability and environmental stewardship and then community recognizing that this board is is you know people um

56:22 it's it's not like an organization where the board is sort of this the secret society we're a public organization we're governed by representatives of the public and so we wanted to capture and make sure we codified these as part of that process go ahead with the next slide and so um you know with that i i wanted just the board to have the opportunity to ask questions you know where things may have come from if you have comments um i know you know if if john brown or or sonia carlson wanted to add some context from their perspective as well um that would be helpful but this was

57:07 really uh as kind of a first attempt to kind of ground the board and and where we were and why we got there obviously there's a lot of things that go behind this i could have probably put a hundred a hundred slide presentation together um but i i really kind of felt like i i wanted to kind of zero base and and let the board uh comment and ask questions and and and have a round table discussion about kind of where we where we came from where we are and and why so with that i guess uh president uh schlossberg i'll turn it back to you and see if there's any comments questions discussion this is this is really a work session so it's for the board things that people are

57:52 comfortable uncomfortable with things that we want to pursue differently i'm open to all those but the intent tonight was to kind of zero base some of the thinking and so i'll turn it back to you all right well i'm gonna jump in and ask the first question um i'm getting some feedback so i don't know frank you want to there that's better sorry about that okay so my question is um actually how was it put together so was it like a process that was the board and you um was it something that you and the executive team put together and brought to the board how did it actually come about

58:42 yeah it's a great question um mindy i it i think it started um originally it just started with some dialogue and i to to a great extent um i i would say my first six months off on the job i spent quite a bit of time observing the board i'll say that trying to understand what i thought uh and and i and i do joke about this it's it's actually done in great fun but i i you know have referred to the the board as as five people with 15 personalities and i and i think that i was trying to wrestle through that a little bit um only in the context that i think eugene is that way and so i think you represent eugene well because um i think that's

59:27 that's a fair characterization of of the community from time to time and so i wanted really the first few months were a lot of observations um you know paying attention to the dialogue that the board had at board meetings was a big piece of that and then it was it was probably april or may when we had um i'll say a work session that was around here's here's some strategic things that we need to start thinking about um it was kind of a back and forth quite a bit of i'll say management and staff kind of working together with with various um kind of straw proposals of different areas i describe it as catch ball kind of back

1:00:13 and forth uh with the board primarily it's it's hard to just say oh let's dream up with some let's dream something up together and so there was quite a bit of here's some ideas and then certain things would get shot down or built up and then we'd kind of rethink that and then we'd sort of come back so it was it was mostly between myself and the board with um quite a bit of just listening and trying to understand context and just trying to do some just a you know assessment of our situation um and so um yeah i don't know if that answers your question but i i think it was a back and forth primarily with the board and management and and then of course with management there's a lot of things that kind of happen behind the scenes as far as

1:00:58 checking things out and doing surveys and and and things like that great sonia go ahead i mean i was just going to bring up i do remember at the kind of the first meeting that we had around this topic we had you know very broad discussions about some of the big picture items that were coming down the pipeline and we looked at what we had before and whether or not you know what the language that was in there really encompassed where we thought we needed to go as an organization in order to tackle those challenges and when we looked at i mean at least for me personally when i looked at what language we had prior and the kind of things that we

1:01:43 it seemed like we valued as a board at that time and the pathway we wanted to go it felt like there was a disconnect between the language that we had versus where we wanted to go and we wanted to provide really clear guidance that we could easily measure as an organization and create kpis around that that we could see that this is there was progress on each of these different um items and so you know now we are we have lots of kpis around this different strategic plan but at that time there really it didn't seem like there was good metrics around it as well and and being able to see you know these are the things we want to accomplish over the next few years and these are the steps you know obviously you know some of the steps

1:02:28 are in the in the mix but these are the things that we really value as a whole um and i i i really appreciated that conversation just more broadly about you know as a group of what we value and what the other board members what they wanted to see so i i've been excited about about this meeting particularly to find out you know we have this plan um it's it's here in place but there may be other things that you know there's mid-course corrections and things that that new board members have new perspectives and ideas and i would certainly like to hear what the new board members well and and old board members as well

1:03:14 um you know where we're at and where we want to go so um i'm i'm looking forward to that part of the conversation yeah mindy i think that sonja captured something that i think was important um there was a lot of discussion broadly about what things we thought were issues and what and and what we thought was going to be important not not just today but you know five years from now ten years from now and then this board is already starting to wrestle through some of those things that might be 20 years out but it was hard to find in the plan at that time where that was stated and and you know sometimes it's like what are we trying to say here and then you go well let's just say it

1:03:59 and so you you end up kind of coming back to something that's a little bit um i guess more direct because you know one thing i feel is really important in a strategic plan is it it gives you guidance on where to go but it also tells you where not to go and and i felt like there was no limit on where we could not go before and so i think the conversations that sonia is talking about were really helpful to me to understand where the different board members wanted to see the organization go and then trying to see if there were ways to coalesce that into something very direct and and also understand what would we have to give up to do that i think those are those are really valuable conversations

1:04:48 great thank you um we can just keep the conversation going i don't need to ask a bunch of questions in a row if there's somebody else who wants to jump in i'm happy to have someone jump in john brown yeah i'd just like to thank frank for that presentation and things just for some of the new people one of the perspectives i'll just go into the disaster preparedness and resiliency we're in the midst of a 70 million dollar potential construction project a second source and when we talked about the priorities you know it didn't matter if we had two sources of water because everything else is going to be blown up we'd have a water treatment plant in glenwood that couldn't serve anybody so to take it from all the strategic goals we had to bring it down into something that's

1:05:33 not only measurable but reasonably attainable is what we did at least on the disaster resiliency and you can see how many sites do we have already because you know you can go a few weeks without electricity try going two days without water and we're talking about potentially months without water without a system with it you know potentially broken and collapsed reservoirs and things and so we saw that sense of urgency and that's where we're going with that and i think you know that's just one example of we've had this master plan and these goals but you know how many can could we really check off in the last decade and now we're unable to check things off and i think that the two main ones we have now really encompass a lot more than just you know where we're gonna buy our electricity uh

1:06:18 and you know how are we going to prepare for disasters and so i'm i'm glad we have what we have but i'm hoping to listen to other people yeah um commissioner brown i think one of the things that that i remember that came out of this was was not that a second treatment plan was not important but there was a sequencing of things that we needed to do that was that was just as important because you can't do everything for everybody all at the same time unless you don't want to do anything very well because that's usually what happens and so we recognize that that the situation in glenwood was also one where there were a number of land use issues and we needed to do some things from a distributed perspective that would be affordable they would show

1:07:04 progress they would be part of the big puzzle but then a second treatment plant was something that we would position for later and you know now we're now we're later and i i think that there's a little bit different position than that needs to be looked at but i think what you point out to me is that the the order of which you pursue things is also important thanks um it was it was good getting familiarized with my with this uh over the last few days and i hope that it is a not a static document it's one that can be

1:07:51 amended and updated because i think that the priorities in 2017 are obviously going to be changed from the priorities in 2022 2025 2028 and so one of the questions would be is at what point do we look at this and and do another dig back into it um and and with regards to that you know i wasn't on the board in 2017 and i wasn't really listening to the community as a as an eweb commissioner back in 2017 but i know that in 2021 the community i think is much more attuned to some of the things that we do as a utility i.e in in regards to carbon

1:08:37 and our role in in our communities uh efforts to reduce our carbon footprint um and so i think that that's something that i think for me is is something in the strategic plan that we can lean into a little bit more possibly um if if it is updated you know if if and when we decide to do that i think just you know if he went up to the average person in in 2017 and said how many parts per billion of carbon do we need to reduce they would have said what are you talking about or maybe one out of 50 would know whereas now i think one out of ten would have have some sort of uh impact on that

1:09:23 so uh again i'm really happy to see a lot of the the things that are in there but i also think that we can take it and move it forward and i think especially with some of the major decisions that are coming up you know you identified them back in 2017 here are some things on the horizon and now you know the horizon is getting closer and it may be you know time to reassess if that's appropriate yeah uh commissioner barofsky i think it is appropriate i i think there is a there's a an important balance between having a plan with some stability and also recognizing that it has to be a living

1:10:08 a living approach to it because things do change they do evolve i actually think this is the year to start that evolution and and that's that's part of why there's a goal uh around that um the way i don't i i don't see the process going where we we drag out the plan and we we actually wordsmith it um what i do see is picking some certain subjects and diving into some of that content you know i know that um commissioner mccray and i have had some discussion around what does a a resource principles or policies document look like right and there's there's obviously carbon impacts to that there's there's cost impacts to that you

1:10:55 know there so what does it what does a future portfolio of e-web need to look like and and that can be a discussion that we can have and really dive into that will then um you know we'll capture that and sort of try to incorporate that into a strategic document and we may have several of those on these topics that then start to coalesce around a strategic plan that that tends to be i think more effective than just saying okay um here we go here's this four pages of words um let's let's all contribute to some editing here and see what we want to add or take away i i think the the quality of the conversation gets a

1:11:41 lot better when you pick certain things you know there's um you know certain things around what does resiliency look like on both electric and water you know how much of you know how many days do we think we need to have for backup supplies for example um i i just think that there's ways to dive into that and then capture it in a plan as opposed to um saying oh here's this plan everybody you know go on and provide your edits so i'm hoping that we can have a number of work sessions around some of these different topics and just dive in um staff and management can do a lot of research and provide various pieces of information and data that we think will inform the conversation but then also listen

1:12:26 to you and the commissioner's perspectives on where they think that needs to go um before sonia excuse me before sonia matt do you have something do you want to ask any questions or have any comments sure i'll just uh weigh in really briefly um i'm curious about the timeline for updating i frank the way you just described updating sounds fine to me i agree we're smacking the whole thing isn't necessarily the the best approach so um diving into details is good i am but it does feel like we want to have some timeline by which we've kind of made our adjustments and then leave that alone and move on to other things so i'm curious what you think about that

1:13:12 i'm also curious you said that this do you feel like a strategic plan and it may have just been the process in developing it helps you think about or understand what's off the table what's not our priority which i agree with you is equally as important as what is and um it's not articulated in the strategic plan it might be something that we want to bring in is just some statements of like we're not trying to solve this problem or that problem because they're too big or they're out of bounds and even if it's not necessarily printed as a part of the strategic plan to have it accompany the strategic plan so that we're all cognizant of that might be useful um there's a calendar you showed that had policy workshops in late 2021. um i'd love to see that calendar just to

1:13:59 review it because like there's more process stuff there that we that's a part of this um sure yeah so i'm just kind of curious to dive into that at some point um because there's so much time back there that doesn't have to be tonight but um i i do look forward to diving into that a little bit and i think the policy workshops um would be super useful to help us think about our strategies going forward and then lastly the the survey results that you showed us at the very top they all showed results from 5 to 10 like on a scale from five to ten i assume that when those were done it was

1:14:45 actually a zero to ten scale but i'm just checking is that right uh yeah that's correct and it was one to ten i don't remember if there was a maybe there was a zero but it was it was a ten point scale whatever the case it's worth noting that all of the responses of the things that people felt really strongly that we need to be doing we were above average we were both five not that average is a great standard for us to be aiming for but also to point out that overall the community seemed like it seems like the community feels like we're achieving the things that they want us to achieve i would be interested in seeing those uh the survey results there kind of more broadly just to understand you know what what things weren't prioritized what people were less concerned about i think that's just as useful to think

1:15:31 about in the context of our conversation on strategies and or strategic planning that's why i have things yeah commissioner mcrae we can get you all kinds of of the the raw data around the surveys and the the full reports that we we did too actually did a a qualitative and a quantitative the qualitative was where we we interviewed people in the community the the quantitative one was was one that was more mathematical and did rankings um now there were things that were it's all relative because nothing we do people felt was was bad so there was there was nothing that was low on the list but some of the lower things were you know how much does does eweb get involved in economic recovery for

1:16:16 example um you know that that one relative to the cleanliness of the water we drink it was low i mean it was now does that mean it's not important no um a lot of people feel like that's where rates come into play um but i think that that's just an example there were there were a number of things that were you know does he web participate in community events um you know what's what's our role there um and so and then you know you look at things that aren't on the list um you know telecom is one that it's not listed in the strategy um and yet um it's one that that is there an opportunity in the community um i would i would tell you that it's it's

1:17:01 possible that you would would be more involved in telecom i would think there's going to be some things that we have to give up and i would i would be very clear as to what i think those have to be um and and and some of it is just business model you know how do you do you start becoming a delivery business model across different different types of platforms so um my timeline i think i i definitely want to have a plan a new plan in 2021 i'm thinking that there'll be a number of different policy discussions through the the first two and a half quarters or so and then we can actually get into the the comprehensive sort of pulling everything and integrating things together probably in late summer or the fall so

1:17:47 that we have a a plan um that's the sort of captures those all those different discussions so that that would be my intended time frame certainly this year hopefully you know third quarter that sounds right to me that's great thank you frank i just have a quick question about the surveys um so the survey was that you showed us was done in 2015 and then another one in 2019 and so do we regularly schedule those kind of customer surveys yeah we we have historically done those um president schlossberg about every two years um we we did the we did the now that's the quantitative one and

1:18:32 we've tried to ask some consistent questions and then we'll throw in a few new questions here and there depending on what's relevant at the time um but the the quantitative one has been every two years and we have those going back um yeah i'm going to say 10 or 15 years worth of history not always that interval but but pretty consistent um and then we we started the qualitative one i think 2015 was the first time we did that and then we did it again in 2019 just to see because if you recall um i think it was like the years run together i'm sorry it was either last year or the year before when part of the discussion with the board at that time was you know where

1:19:17 are we at in this strategy and i think it was a valid question and so um given the part of the first phase was around customer confidence and really just performing well in in the sense of building you know community and customer confidence we needed to do one and and and so was reported as uh you know the quant quantitative and qualitative results in that context and and we have made progress um there's there's still a ways to go um there'll always i think be a ways to go when you're a monopoly i think there's a certain expectation that comes along when you're when you're there is no direct customer choice um and so there's a there's a certain critique that we expect and i

1:20:02 on the other hand i think it there's a certain obligation that we have in that so it was within the last year and a half that we just kind of did this extra assessment to see where we were at got it well i think it will be really interesting if we're doing one again this year uh because 2020 certainly threw everyone for a loop and it'll be interesting to see if people's priorities have changed a little bit um and that might inform some of our decisions too yeah sonia [Music] thank you um i definitely think this is

1:20:47 the right time to um to revisit the strategic plan um and we have over the last few years we have made some adjustments to it to commissioner borofsky's point um we actually did in the last iteration we specifically called out ghgs in the responsibility value because we thought that that needed to have more focus and i would certainly agree that if there's other things or projects that we need to do to help move that along um the utility perspective um i i would be in favor of that i also wanted to note that you know with indus in discussing the customer surveys

1:21:32 um a big part for me in uh in in helping you know ask for responsibility to be a piece of it was that that major gap between you know what people think is a value and where we're at financially and we've seen narrowing there but it still continues at least from what we saw in in 2019 and i and i also think out of that survey in 2019 what we also saw was that the reliability piece was still a gap there and i'm remembering that we had the big ice storm um and snow storm in 2019 so some of those we have to put into context of yeah yeah thank you um into context of

1:22:19 kind of what the major weather events were that were putting challenges on us and we definitely learned a great deal about communication with the utility and i know that you know with the the bill pay system there's been work there to help with communication i also think that the that there's been quite a bit of work done um in terms of communication around you know when we have the outage so when we do this my main point in bringing this all up is that when we do the next survey and i'm a big proponent of getting this kind of data from customers every time we do one of these strategic plan reviews because we are here to serve the citizens and you know getting getting a taste for where they're at and their understanding

1:23:05 in context of where we're at as an organization i think is absolutely key so i would personally advocate for seeing um how we're doing communication wise during uh during these kind of shocks to the system because i know that's that was an issue that we had wanted to tackle a little bit more so seeing if if customers feel like there's been improvements there um i'd also obviously you know the items that are on here are good ones i'd also like to see if we can bring up um the point that that frank made i've been getting some constituents reaching out to me about expanding broadband service and you know there's always trade-offs in that kind of discussion um as as frank mentioned maybe then

1:23:51 you know is that a higher priority over cost is that a higher priority over something else but i think it would be good to get you know we have a few very vocal people in the community that push on one thing or another is that a broader sentiment from the community especially during times when we can't have or it's it's much more difficult to have those kind of conversations out in the public at you know neighborhood association meetings and other things of that nature this kind of feedback would be very useful so um those are some of the things i would certainly like to see how the public thinks we're performing and i'd love to hear other commissioners responses and thoughts on areas that you think that

1:24:36 you know how are we doing how does the public feel before the commissioners responded to that sonia i would i would say that in 2019 um in in late 2016 2017 we had the ice storm and then in 2019 we had snowmageddon which which the surveys were you know after that we did capture quite a bit of communications anecdotal data near near those events so it's it's interesting because at the first ice storm we didn't even have an outage map at all um and i remember the

1:25:23 the commissioners at the time saying gosh we really need an outage map look at lane electric's outage map and you know okay um you know even though there's was great big zones and we thought okay well we need to find different different means of communications and so by 2019 when we were in snowmageddon the amount of outreach was significantly different between eweb and customers now is was it perfect no there's a lot of areas to continue to improve and and i think unfortunately with with every every kind of i'll say event um disruptive event and you know fire up rivers a good example our outreach this time with with uh proactive programs uh proactive

1:26:11 um waiving of past balances and things like that for customers that was a result of the strategy that was in that has been employed um and some of the the the issues around communications and so it would be i would you know i would like to hear too from other commissioners as to what they think you know of your question about what's what seems to be important what are you hearing um you know how are we doing and and i think those it's it's always good a lot of times you get that face to face right you get it with a you give it from a neighborhood meeting you get it from a friend you get it from you know not everything's good and not everything's bad and you can't do everything for everybody which we've learned

1:26:57 but you can figure out okay these are the things that we think are most important so given that do people want to say what they think are most important not to put everybody on the spot but frank didn't open process so most important in what context and i mean because i i represent about 25 000 people and like we all do proportionately and you know and we're in a position that's not privately contested so there's not a lot of debates and not a lot of people that know about my position so if you ask me about what my priorities are you already know the answer it's the water and etc it's what the community does but my

1:27:44 job is to represent the 20 000 people and so i'm kind of wondering in what context mindy are you asking me as i represent wards four and five or a perception of community values or what i would say both those things i mean you're responsible for your constituents and and we're also individuals who come with our own set of values so i think it's it's kind of a mixture of both i mean people elected you and it doesn't mean that you have to um do everything that your constituents say because you're a person who has your own beliefs so okay thank you no that just kind of adds a little perspective for

1:28:29 for me um so i was just gonna i was gonna say i um i know that uh climate change is gonna come up here and i'm all for that and i'm whether or not that's pushes out uh you know emergency preparedness and resiliency is a priority um you know i i gotta have to look at both of them as a sense of urgency on that uh but you know i wouldn't want to sacrifice one for the other so i kind of wait i'm going to kind of wait and sit back and see what others say thank you now's your chance um well i would just say from it's

1:29:14 it's too soon for me to answer that question um i mean i i have again like like john brown i have my personal feelings but getting the feel for my constituents is something that i'm in the process of doing actually er you know one of my neighborhood association meetings starts at seven o'clock so i'll be you know when this wraps up i'll be going into that and learning from those types of things but um yeah i i would say i need to learn more before i can really articulate exactly what my priorities are at this time because i need to hear from constituents and see how those meld with my own personal feelings yeah commissioner

1:30:01 brown the one thing that i would i would want to include in in some of those discussions is is that i don't think those are mutually exclusive i i think you can be both resilient uh and environmentally conscious in the decisions to to make i i think where we we really need to approach things is to is to do what what i think actually eweb is starting to become pretty good at and that's really defining the challenges and the problems well getting a good definition and working on a path towards solutions um now it we we tend to do things more than we talk about things and i and i think that that

1:30:47 in some ways can help us in that but i i don't think resiliency and in being environmentally conscious especially around uh atmospheric carbon those are not mutually exclusive i i think there are solutions out there that we can we can do both um now when you do that what's the impact on affordability what's the impact on reliability those are the other things that we have to balance and so i think it's it'll be part of management's job to try to provide to the board what the various conditions are around certain decisions that need to be made the good thing is our resources are in

1:31:33 pretty good position for the next you know five to eight years but we have resiliency work there's alternative fuels you know for example we've we've talked about hydrogen and fuel cells that that i'll tell you if you had a fuel cell backup instead of a diesel generator instead of going a few hours or a few days as a backup you could go weeks to months and it would be more environmental so now that technology needs some some further refinement and some further evolution they do it in other countries but i don't think that those are necessarily mutually exclusive but there are impacts across the utilities and we'll have to have those be out there in the open for all

1:32:18 of us to see we'll have to be transparent about what those trade-offs are i i just want to say i don't mean to put people on the spot also to say like what are your priorities and then that's going to be it this is your chance so um i guess frank you kind of posed the question and sonia you did too so if there are things that you can think of right now that you want to share you can but this isn't your last chance or if you're somebody that likes to think about it a little bit more and you want to send it out in an email what your priorities are that would be okay too because i know that some people just like to kind of let it percolate a little bit more and think about it so i don't want anyone to feel that they miss an opportunity if they don't speak up now but sonja mindy i just wanted to just

1:33:03 say really quickly i mean i was the one that kind of provoked the the conversation and from my perspective i came in with a platform for my campaign of items that i you know committed to the community so maybe not everybody is in that same boat so um this is an ongoing conversation that we can continue to have for me it was just really about trying to get to know what other um members wanted to do i mean why did you run for office why did you you know what things did you see as needing to be you know done with the utility and what did you want to accomplish if you don't have that dial in that's that's absolutely fine i just wanted to get a better sense of what that looked like if you had something that differed or you know was was maybe new and unique in a different

1:33:49 path i just wanted to let you all know that you know especially since you know john brown and i were there when this original plan was crafted that it is a living document and if there are other things that you feel like you know we need to do is utility and bring those ideas out that this is the open forum to do that so that was really all i was trying to do in kind of raising that and giving more context to you know how we got to the place that we're currently at so we can review as a group if there are mid-course corrections that we need to take or or not i mean if if we like this plan and this is you know where we need to go i mean again this is something that we can revisit over the longer haul it doesn't need to be no tonight we're

1:34:35 we're changing the language here and we're modifying this it's really more of a conversation starter about how we got here and and why we did what we did so that we know where to take it moving forward um go ahead and i was going to say i mean for the for the record i suppose um you know i i if anybody's interested in the values and some of the priorities that i had um my my my campaign website had all of it lined out and i don't want to take too much more time tonight but i'm happy to go and dig in or look at other people's priorities too if that's helpful i'm just trying to get a sense for you know where people are it's sort of frank's um frank's comment about

1:35:20 uh studying the board for a bit we have we have very new members and and it's nice to get to know you and find out what what you want to do and how you work best and so it was a way to you know provoke some of that conversation yeah i would say that um and i saw matt has his hand up i just wanted to jump in real quick that part of my job i i feel like par it's part of my job to take the five ingredients that i'm staring at here on the screen and sort of mix those into something that eventually tastes good and and sort of aligns the utility around something that the board as a whole is comfortable with the

1:36:05 direction it didn't and when i say observed i i observed the conversations and the details around the conversations it didn't take me very long to figure out what some of john brown's priorities were when i came onto the board you know you it it was just in the midst of conversations on specific topics that that that gets developed but then it's my job to make sure that the board at large because you are you are a board at large is somehow developed into a cohesive path that that all feel comfortable with including those who you represent and so it is it is a process it's not a one or one and done and it's you know about the editing of the words there's

1:36:50 there's it's and then there's i'll be honest there are things that i think the utility needs to get out of the strategic plan that aren't there right now and we're going to need the board to help us figure that out this is this is not just a one-way street there's some things in there that i think are some pretty significant direction that the board needs to provide the utility in order to set up some of these things in the future so it works both ways matt did you want to say something sure i'll try to be uh i'll try and be concise and and hit on a few things that uh are front of mind for me one i i rely heavily on

1:37:36 surveys of the community to get a better sense of what's important for all of our community and not just me or the people immediately around me so um that's probably why i've asked you know frank for those surveys and i think continuing to do the surveys is really important um and that they be done in a way that's um it's not biased you know that they're we're getting results that we can rely on um so yeah just i think that's important um the things that that i hear and that i'm want to see eweb uh addressing i feel like the strategic plan has all all the parts there you know there are a few things that i would um just emphasize a little bit more or yeah i

1:38:23 mean i think that's it really is just emphasis on a few things and adding some more specificity i i don't know that a strategic plan is supposed to be super specific but for example i think some targets um or some specific goals associated with some of those um strategic goals would be useful so uh one of the things frank and i would we're talking about is it from my perspective be useful if we had a carbon intensity goal for the electricity that uh is providing over the next several decades just so that as staff are going about you know renegotiating new contracts and figuring out how we're going to source power um they can see where we as a board and therefore we as a community want to be by 2030 2040 2050.

1:39:09 um i think similarly on the on the resilience front you know there's um when it comes to electricity specifically we we could look at um some goals of you know how much of that power that we use on on average a year do we want to have either local locally generated or at least local control of so i think there's some again some more specificity that we could add to some of those targets that would be useful so i think the resiliency part is important i think um uh the affordable affordability part is important too that's mentioned in there and we don't talk a lot about that but i think you know making sure that we're not um putting undue pressure on low-income households i think we could

1:39:55 set some targets about that that would add some flesh on the bones of that goal and i think it's important that we think about affordability as not just rates you know we talk about that a lot eweb is is good at talking about that but but then we frequently turn back to just well what's the rate and i think we have to give ourselves some targets that are not rate specific but are really looking at you know bills for people um you know the average household in eugene instead um that's kind of my you know initial thinking you know just reflections after this conversation some of the things that are up for me as we revisit the strategic plan

1:40:41 thanks thank you so i'm just going to add in my little piece and i'm in the weird position of i'm not really sure who my constituents are i guess they're everybody so i can maybe take my pick or not but um so i i mean i can also look at those surveys you know as a whole to inform uh my decision making but um i agree with the input that everybody's given and then i also just want a second the idea of of broadband or telecom it's not something that i thought about when i ran for this office but it's one of those things that definitely has come up this year as we all rely on as fast internet as we

1:41:29 can and i'm not sure if eweb is the one that that should be leading that but i do think that it should be a public utility and i would just like to explore it i don't know that it belongs in the strategic plan but that's just an area that i'm really interested in looking more at especially because i know springfield is doing a trial of community access to broadband i don't know if there's anything you want to say frank um you know not really i i think that tonight was really about making i

1:42:16 i guess providing a little bit of basis for the board now at large this this is now a board that i see a lot of opportunity with uh from a strategic perspective um i i think that um since i've been general manager i've been blessed with pretty good boards um compared to a lot of the the ones that i see around and so i think this is no exception i i think that um although when you think about i think um john barofsky said that the you know we're getting closer to the horizon i think on some issues are i wish the horizon would sit still it seems to be key it seems to keep moving which which means we have to be dynamic

1:43:05 i also think that this board has the the capacity and the capability to look at things broadly and strategically and from a policy perspective and that's not always the case with boards and so i really feel like and i know i've said this a couple of times there are a lot of issues for this board to wrestle through in the next year or two in particular and um we we need some basis for those to make those decisions and recommendations on and that's usually where a strategic plan and values statements and and these types of things come in and so that's why i think there's there's some sense of urgency we'll start diving into some of these topics

1:43:50 including what i think is necessary if we were to start to explore delivery other types of delivery models and telecom might be just one of them there could be other forms of energy for example you know there's just there's a lot of different things but there's it's a different business model and so if that's some that would be something that i would have to do some some research on um so that the the board could understand the impacts but i i got what i needed tonight it was really more of an opportunity to kind of talk about where some of these things came from and why [Music] and i'll share some more of the detail that was requested here tonight but it was really to kind of ground the board at least to

1:44:36 for you know one opportunity to to ground us in this at the same time um and so i know you have a retreat coming up where all kinds of ideas and things you get to know each other but i think we've got a lot of work ahead of us and we need some basis to make some of those decisions on this this is it strategic plan should be it so yeah i appreciate the questions and the feedback and comments and if you have more we're available to answer those thank you um and and i appreciate that we had a work session around this because it's much different to talk like this than it is at a meeting and i just feel that it's um

1:45:21 easier to share ideas in some ways and just hear what each of us has to think so i look forward to the next time that we revisit this and i will say that i think the next time we do this and maybe even it might not be the march board meeting but it might be the april board meeting there may be an opportunity for the board to meet in person at the rock um with a um a telework station set up for staff and the public so the board could actually be in the same room with lots of distance and lots of masks just just so you know this room has a capacity of 125 and there'd probably be six of us in there um but there's various screens and

1:46:07 microphones that we're setting up throughout the room so that that may be a possibility to have even a better conversation um although we're kind of getting used to that but we'll we'll try it out and see how it works first but that might be available as early as april all right yes john um just as a as a long time chef uh frank if when you're stirring together these ingredients of the five commissioners and you want to make it taste good if you add enough butter fat to anything you can make it taste good

1:46:53 that's why we used to serve meals at these these meetings john all right well we are 18 minutes late and john i'm sorry that you're going to be late to your uh neighborhood meeting but um i think that is everything unless there's anything that anyone wants to add that they haven't already all right i would just say uh thanks mindy i i agree that this has been useful from my perspective so and thanks for hurting the cats mindy you're welcome um and then lastly just a reminder that we are having a very short board retreat on monday i apologize because i know that this format is not what we all need more of but i really want to just offer us an opportunity

1:47:39 just to kind of chat and i sent you an email um if you could please respond because even though we can't gather together in person to eat we are still going to eat together so check your email and respond and um i guess not you frank but the rest of us will see each other on monday at five and the meeting is now adjourned thanks everybody thank you thank you