EWEB Board of Commissioners — May 4, 2021

0:03 so i'm going to call the uh may 4th 2021 regular eweb board meeting i'm going to call it to session and we're going to start off with an agenda check is there anybody that would like to say anything about the agenda no and i can't see everybody's screen and i don't have those three dots so i don't know if there everyone else is seeing everybody's screen but i just see the big thing that says e-web board meeting and some people at the bottom president schlossberg if you click on

0:48 the um small images on the bottom it should bring up the board got it yes okay you would think by now that i would have figured that out okay so nobody had anything with the agenda check great okay and we will go along to item number two items from board members and general manager so um i'm just going to call on people randomly because i don't even have everybody on my screen so i'm going to start with matt mcrae nothing for me thanks mindy great john barofsky uh same i have nothing to avoid at this time

1:36 john brown uh yeah thank you i have a couple items um we had the quarterly opeb uh meeting a week ago i was intended able to attend portions of it but it's good news to report that's the this is this supplemental insurance for retirees there's i think 536 retirees in the program and it's one of the best uh reports that they've had um you know in 2018 we contributed two million dollars to it to back it up um this year we're going to have to contribute about 214 000 based on what i wrote down and according to staff this is the lowest contribution they've ever seen before the plan assets grew by about 850 000 over the year they had real good investment results so bottom line is good good report uh

2:22 the liability is 21.1 million the assets are 20.1 million and so we have one one million unfunded liability which uh given the current state of things that's really good so a good report there um the other item is i've been getting a lot of phone calls about can't eweb do anything about water and leeburg canal because you know the salmon that went out four years ago are coming back and they can't get back into the fish ladder because there's no water coming down the canal through the fish ladder and no there's nothing we can do about it but i do want to let people know there is a if anybody is so inclined to volunteer opportunity i'm going to do it in the month of june or may um help odfw the department of fish and game they have a salmon sorting facility on the side of lieber dam where they're going

3:08 to try and keep the hatchery fish and the wild fish separate so they don't get mixed up because that's part of the rule is they don't want certain species to go over the dam and without the water going through leeburg it's really complicating the issues and so um volunteer opportunity for people if they want uh it's not a fun job but it's it's kind of different but just thought i'd bring that up thank you thanks john uh sonia so john let me just get this clear you you stand there and you sort fish you pick up live fish and you put them in different okay all right interesting they're big fish too they're a big salmon and uh actually they'll have sorters there but you help them and you can do certain ships you can

3:53 sign up at the fish and game commission and uh it's uh it'd be kind of fun it's it's educational to see uh see how that works well i try it out all right outside sword and fish i love it uh i don't have anything else thank you very much um i just have one very very small thing and it's just a little left over from our work session that we had a couple weeks ago and um i was remiss in not thanking the people who put that on because i thought it worked really really well i have to say i was pretty hesitant about how it was going to work having some people in person and some people remote so here is a belated thank you to everybody that made that happen

4:43 and frank you're up thank you president schlossberg good evening commissioners um commissioner brown one time told me that that was the sordid fish was the easiest fishing he'd ever done just just so you know i actually have two things this evening uh one is i would like to start off uh with an announcement from the northwest public power association on april 27th the nwppa awards committee announced that former e-web commissioner dick helgeson as a recipient of its life membership award for 2021. this is presented to policymakers who have made notable contributions to the association and public power and we're honored that dick has been

5:28 presented with this award for his many years of work with eweb and within the industry just so you know dick helgeson started in 1978 as an employee of eweb um and during his tenure he held multiple management and leadership roles before retiring in 2009 and then he returned to public service in 2012 as a commissioner until his second retirement in december of last year and so congratulations to dick helgeson who i know is listening in this evening the award will actually be presented at the annual meeting of the northwest public power association in september and so a big

6:13 congratulations and a thank you to dick helveson and i'm sure he he may have a few things to say since he called in we'll we'll see so thank you uh commissioner helgeson um the second note that i have i would also like to thank u.s representative peter defazio and his district manager dan whalen for the time they spent with a number of us up the mckinsey valley today almost seemed like all day along with i'd also like to thank carl morgenstern jason huser joe mole of the mckenzie river trust and jared waybright of the mckenzie watershed council it was a day well spent seeing first hand

6:58 the post fire recovery efforts and discussing future plans for our critical watershed it came together rather quickly but it was great to spend time with uh representative defazio and dan whalen so thank you to them for that and those who participated those are my two items president schlossberg back to you all right um dick i don't know if you're here if you wanted to say a few words or not i don't want to put you on the spot well that's okay i will just be very brief uh and say that it's nice to hear all your voices and quite an honor to have you take the time to announce this award i did ask uh

7:45 scott coren their manager how i might continue to attend some of their meetings and apparently this was the only way that they could accomplish that so um it is quite an honor and i look forward to being able to receive that award at the annual meeting thanks for taking time to um for the acknowledgement uh frank and and board members that's it thank you dave thank you dick it's nice to hear your voice um okay but we are moving right along and we are on agenda item number three public input so we have i think we just have one caller and then um one

8:31 uh public input reading but uh when your name is called remember to unmute your call press star six if calling from a landline or simply use the unmute button if calling from your cell phone please state your name and optionally your address or ward and speak clearly into the telephone each speaker will be offered three minutes to present their testimony please keep track of time i'll try to give you a little warning too um and after all testimony is heard each commissioner will have an opportunity to speak if they choose although by policy we do not engage in a back and forth dialogue please note that failure of a commissioner to speak shall not be construed as support of or opposition to any speaker's testimony if a question is

9:18 presented by a speaker and the board does not provide an answer an eweb staff member will contact the speaker so that the question can be addressed at a later time the public testimony period for this meeting is now open and we have stephen anderson via telephone and after that joe hardwood joe harwood will read on behalf of tony dawer so stephen you are up yes stephen anderson ward 2 on behalf of myself and many others we want the ewef board to know what it feels like to us and many citizens that we have been lied to and railroaded on the east 40th water project last year we were invited to an adjacent

10:03 property owners meeting concerning the water tank project just before the coveted shutdown we were told eweb was in a hurry to build one tank immediately as the tank on college hill is a life-threatening hazard if we have an earthquake and we're long overdue for catastrophic quake as we all know and eweb is supposed to decommission it by 2023. at the meeting we were shown two tank sites we immediately identified a problem with tank site one which is not only right on top of our neighbor on a property of more than 10 acres but also requires the removal of some of the biggest trees in south eugene an irreplaceable habitat for hundreds of birds and animals we registered our dismay asking the tank sequence be reversed

10:48 and we're given platitudes about how it's all very fluid etc as if there was hope you would change direction and build the first tank on site too the most obvious location if you're truly in a hurry later we were told noticing would be made until a geologic study was completed and we watched the course come out of the test holes which confirmed exactly that tank site 2 is the easiest and fastest to excavate yet excuses to not change the tank sequence began to pile up some of this has worked in construction and forestry and can refute every single justification we were given for clearing all of the trees for both sites now and building on tank site one first then most shocking of all the

11:34 general managers stated again after we protested well maybe we'll just build both tanks now are you kidding us your entire tank sequencing plan is out the window because of our protesting you're going to subject south eugene to almost two years of additional heavy construction and leave college hills dangerous tanks hanging over that neighborhood according to ewebs phone engineers is expected to fail in an earthquake and what will your liability be then college hills residents should be outraged at all of this because it's apparent that we caused this trying to save our neighborhood habitat as long as possible freeze older than eugene for god's sake and one last question

12:20 do the citizens of south eugene have any idea what is in store now an extra year and a half with hundreds of extra gravel trucks cement trucks and equip construction equipment rolling down hilliard street around two very dangerous curves past tuckman park which is always full of kids clogging our already overburdened streets two years of construction and one tank makes sense what you approved is insanity this is not an engineering decision this is a political decision you need to rescind your endorsement build one tank on site two that is the best thing for e-web in the neighborhoods this is a legacy project you say thank you mr anderson

13:05 your legacy will be infamous and we will never forgive or forget all right thank you very much mr anderson um next we have public input reading by joe harwood on behalf of tony daher i don't know if i'm pronouncing that right thank you president sloshberg um please bear with me as i work my way through this text it's um a bit muddled um subject line is extra electricity storage uh the customer did not give a ward or neighborhood as an electric company you can use this for extra electricity storage in the form of ammonia

13:50 that can be used to make electricity or can be used as fertilizer there is a company in ontario canada that has a patent to produce ammonia from air and water and electricity it is called green nh3 it can replace oil for sea shipping airlines trucks even cars and energy storage or extra electricity storage the website is green nh3.com it was acquired by an american company known as fuel positive corporation the website

14:35 is www dot e-e-s-t-o-r-c-o-r-p dot this may be a good plan for your green new deal ammonia does not release carbon and does not pollute and it can replace hydrogen in fuel cell cars it's a good way to store hydrogen thank you all right um the public testimony period for this meeting is now closed and now we have a chance um if any of the commissioners would like to comment so um

15:22 you can raise your hand i can see you all if you would like to comment all right i don't see anybody wishing to comment tonight okay thank you um we are now moving on to board action items um agenda item number four which is approval of consent calendar a move to adopt consent calendar right great um all those in favor say i

16:08 all right consent calendar a is unanimously approved uh agenda item number five approval of consent move to adopt consent calendar item b second all right all those in favor raise your hand and say aye aye aye okay that was unanimously approved as well um great bruising along here moving on to general business items agenda item number seven reserve fund status and transfer use of reserves over you deborah i believe

16:54 right thank you um good evening commissioners uh we're here this evening with our annual discussion on reserve transfers normally aaron ballmer the general accounting supervisor who actually did write the accompanying backgrounder would be here with me however he was unable to be here tonight and matthew miller has graciously offered to fill in uh slide thank you our agenda this evening is short matthew was going to give a brief overview and then provide some recommendations for reserve transfers and the remainder of the time is for board discussion and direction

17:39 so with that i'm going to pass it over to matthew all right good evening commissioners again i'll give you a little bit of an information about myself so you know something about me um i've been working at eweb for about a year and a half prior to e-web i was working in public accounting and i work primarily on the water utility side and i also manage cash and investments for the combined utility and i'm excited to be here to give you an overview of uf's cash reserves so eweb's reserved targets and the way reserves are used are guided by uof's financial policies there are several different categories of policies and associated reserves the race efficiency policy consists of

18:24 working cash working cash targets are based on the amount of cash needed to pay for ongoing operational expenditures and provide an amount of working capital to support the day's cash ratio sufficient to maintain a higher than average credit rating e-web uses a threshold of greater than 150 days to calculate the target based on guidance and input from rating agencies the rate stability policy consists of several different reserves the operating reserve exists to smooth out the effects of revenue shortfalls or unforeseen expenses for example restoration costs resulting from extreme weather events such as winter storms or wildfires the self-insert self-insurance reserve is used to fund out-of-pocket liability costs of

19:10 third-party claims the rate stabilization fund exists to smooth the impact on the increases to customers and to reduce future borrowing requirements the capital improvement policy consists of the capital improvement reserve which exists to maintain uf's assets such that uf can provide reliable high quality service to customers and generally equals about one year of depreciation expense the pension reserve is based on policy that requires that if annual pension expense is below budget then the difference shall be moved to the reserve policy also guides how reserves will be replenished should they fall below target including the order of precedence and length of time allowed to replenish my reserve i'm pleased to say that at 12

19:55 31 all reserves were at or above target next slide please although working cash is above target for both utilities there are several items to consider that will likely bring working cash closer to target in 2021 the holiday farm and riverside fires there are ongoing repairs to eweb infrastructure and fema reimbursement is not expected until later in the year at the earliest in the kinsey watershed recovery the board approved a budget of 3.95 million dollars to be funded through the watershed recovery fee due to timing of implementation however only about a million dollars is expected to be collected from the fee in 2021 leaving a three million dollar shortfall

20:41 that will be funded from working cash we'd like to point out that this is expected to be a timing issue only and to be fully recruited through the recovered fee over the life of the fee there's emergent capital work with both utilities beyond what was budgeted and transferred to the capital improvement reserve for 2021 and one other item that's routine but is coming up as the august august debt service payment this is one of the larger payments for the utility and will total about 15 million dollars for 2021 and it's primarily funded by working cash next slide please so for the water utility we are recommending a 9 million transfer to the race stabilization fund

21:26 along with the required pension reserve transfer the rate stabilization transfer amount is limited by the death service coverage ratio of the water utility this transfer will maintain it could maintain a cushion and working cash for the previously mentioned cash outflows while also setting aside funds to smooth smooth future rate impacts and reduce future borrowings next slide please on the electric side we're not recommending any transfers beyond the required pension reserve transfer and with that i'll hand it back to deborah to wrap things up thank you matthew so uh again tonight we're here uh for board

22:12 direction and to answer questions uh and then we'll bring back a resolution requesting board approval of reserve transfers at the june 1st meeting unless they hear otherwise we'd anticipate that that would come to you all on uh consent calendar great so i think you're opening it up for questions now right deborah okay um great um sonia we'll start with you i just want to say thank you for answering the question about the the rate stabilization fund in regard to the reserve transfers that all made sense to me so

22:57 i'm in support of moving the money over and uh look forward to having a resolution next month thanks thank you thank you um you mentioned that in august there's a big debt service of about 15 million dollars uh and you said that comes out of working cash do you know the breakdown between uh of the electric side and the water side as to because i see electric side working cash we have 10 million but uh our electric side we have 41 million and water we have 10 million do you know how

23:43 much of the debt is coming out from each one of those funds the electric payment is about 15 million correct matthew and annually yes um i don't have the exact august numbers because we make an interest payment in february and then we make an interest in principal payment in august but it's roughly 5 million for water 15 million for electric for the year okay thank you

24:31 i don't have any questions um i'll just say thanks for the presentation and the materials uh for making this clear and understandable and thank you to the whole team for keeping this organization financially healthy it's a remarkable place to be to walk in onto a board and see a situation like this so thank you all um i i have nothing thank you i just i too have experienced when this wasn't the situation and uh we're wondering how we're going to get things going and i'm very very pleased with staff both current and past that have gotten us into the situation so thank you i have one more quick question uh president can you tell me what our bond rating is you said we have a good bond rating do

25:17 you know if is it one double a where are we at uh each utility has a separate bond rating and they're a little bit different with each ratings agency but generally double a it's double a across the board thank you great um i don't have anything other than a big thank you for um helping us this is a maybe a corny pun but whether this storm kovid could have been really uh devastating in many ways and um i am just really glad that we are in this strong financial position so

26:03 thank you president schlossberg given that there there were not substantial recommendations we will bring that back on the consent calendar next month as opposed to a a separate action if that's permissible uh by you yeah that sounds great thank you okay well that was very easy um okay so i have a question because if we are done with that we are really cruising ahead at this meeting and um we are at a point where we're supposed to take a break but the break is not supposed to be till 705. so are people okay just powering through

26:50 yeah great okay great then we'll go on to agenda item number nine which is the quarterly strategic and operational report for the first quarter of 2021. well president schlossberg thank you good evening again commissioners um paulie go ahead and advance the slide please um we appreciate the opportunity to present the quarterly report um assistant general manager rod price and i'll go through a high level representation of the quarterly report of which you got in advance it's approximately 60 pages and so we're not going to go through 60 pages worth as you can see from the the topics

27:36 listed um you'll also note on this particular presentation that on the right hand side that's our new customer bill presentment that the board got a preview of in the first quarter specifically in february and so we we are excited about that coming here in the second quarter at some time and that'll be be talked about a little bit later go ahead with the next slide please just a few items of significance just at a high level you know first of all we indoctrinated two new commissioners uh who were willing to invest a significant amount of time both after they took office and before orienting themselves to the utility and our operations and we think that's

28:22 and hopefully they will agree it's been a smooth transition for us and so uh thank you to uh the two new commissioners barofsky and mcrae we do continue to operate under covet protocols there's optimism around immunizations of course but there are also some new county restrictions and sort of the ever-changing advice from health authorities as we go forward and it's been uh it's it's been interesting to look at some of our results in in that context we made significant progress in the initial watershed recovery efforts that we started last fall based on this board's passing of an emergency funding source to get that

29:09 going we also uh the board uh passed a landmark resolution really establishing the ongoing funding uh for watershed recovery um separate from our traditional watershed protection and so that was that was really very significant we also made some progress in our understanding of the leeburg canal repair costs and and as well as did a significant amount of public outreach and communications with the the water storage projects go ahead with the next slide please besides being an eye test this was i we knew you got the slides ahead of time and so this is just a reminder of the goals that were approved by the board in january

29:54 and so go ahead with the next slide and um before i hand the presentation baton off to rod price who will discuss in detail uh goal number one and goal number two it is worth noting that we made progress in the first quarter uh mind you that it's early in the pursuit of these annual milestones and quite a number of these uh have specifically scheduled updates planned for the board over the next few months we are in the midst of a number of planning related items goal number four is is a very significant amount of effort involving the board and anything from wildfire mitigation plans

30:39 to multi-year coasters and pricing and so we're we're setting up those conversations um i will note uh also on goal number three we had a a a work session last month my plan is to come back to the board we have another work session in may with some specific plan and policy proposals for your consideration uh and your debate and discussion um that's based on your feedback from both a planning session in february as well as the some of the discussions that we had around energy and carbon uh last month usually this is a an iterative process and so

31:25 um i don't expect this to be here's a proposal uh asking for your approval this will be a proposal asking for your debate and counsel and discussion and we'll look forward to that session on may 18th and so that's my plan is to bring something forward to the board for that discussion at this point you can kind of see that we are making progress lots of things coming up over the next couple months to interact with the board on these specific items i will turn it over for some operational updates uh specifically related to goal number one and goal number two to the assistant general manager rod price who will take it from the next slide rod

32:10 thank you frank good evening commissioners and as a long time star wars fan i i just have to get it off my chest may the fourth be with you um but you're probably not interested in star wars so let's move to uh safety i wanted to highlight a few things from our operational report and a couple things on the safety and wellness front i wanted to really particularly highlight is from the uh health and wellness team um in the first quarter developed some really good tools that align with the state and county metrics to to help uh eweb and its pandemic response and um the cool thing about that is the number of outside agencies have asked us to share their work and tools with them and so a handful of folks have actually been adopting it outside

32:56 the agency outside of you excuse me so along with those tools uh the safety program manager lance hughes is also able to line up vaccines for purview of employees starting in mid-april which was also very nice and very convenient for uf folks so hats off to that program the other thing i'd like to highlight about our safety program is we've been doing a good catch program which is a pro uh sort of a proactive thing where uh employees can turn in ideas and submit um near misses and things like that that might help scope out trouble before it starts and we've not had that great of success to this point uh that changed

33:41 this year and the numbers are are going up we're having a lot of uh input come in now so so that's really encouraging i think for our safety and wellness program um one of the things i wanted to talk about a little bit is finance uh we had a lot of uncertainty in 2020 um economy um and uh you know based in covid climate concerns all these things and so we ended up budgeting fairly conservatively in 2021 um deb i think would say i can't remember how she exactly phrased it but there's cautious optimism we are right now seeing that favorable incomes in both the water and electric so i think that's a good sign for for the area's economy uh

34:27 another thing that that was buried down in the uh the quarterly report that may not have been as obvious was i wanted to just kind of do a quick shout out to the communications and marketing team the they reorganized a bit um jen connors was appointed the supervisor for the group but um and they've added some staff but what i really wanted to talk about is they're making a great big difference in our projects especially the ones that are public safety like public facing like the the mckinsey river restoration project and the 40th street that's of course they've just done a a great amount of work for us and that takes a lot of burden off of the engineering and operations side when when they can really step in and help so hats off to them thank you

35:14 um i also wanted to mention um i'm not sure was in the report yet but uh there was a um a year-long process to to go through the sale of the wanted uh generating station and that was completed near the end of the quarter uh that resulted in a three million bucks for for eweb and our partners so and we received about half of that and uh also a little shout out to is department here uh some fun facts that were not uh shown in the quarterly report um they've also been reorganizing and really working on prioritizing their their work um but in the background a lot of folks have been uh really coming along and doing some things uh like making sure we get 20 000 emails

36:01 and making sure we get three million minutes on our teams uh like even for this virtual meeting so um patching matching is critical uh we had 500 cyber vulnerabilities addressed through 896 patches in one religion so um all good work going on next slide please tell me so in the past uh we've reported um mostly on on our quarterly successes and so this year i'm also going to take some time to note areas of concern so one of the areas of concern um is that it's a trend that you'll see

36:46 highlighted on these four bullet points in one way or another which is uh we're having some challenges with our metrics based on um obtaining and holding skilled ftd so one of the examples on the first line there's the uh electric um uh the struggle that the electric design staff is having uh getting customer uh work out and we've had basically the turnaround time we've got a metric of trying to turn around work in three three weeks or so right now our metrics around seven to eight weeks so um to mitigate that what we've done is uh focus all of our tech work right now on customer work so some of the tax that

37:31 we're working on you have internal capital those have been shifted over to work on on customer work so we make sure we can we can serve the customers first for currently licensing uh as another example though both technical uh staff and operation staff shortages are slowing down our ability to reviews i review designs and keep up with some of the commitments now we're doing pretty good overall in both of these areas but we do see some concerns um i think noted too in the in the quarterly pretty uh detailed was um we're a little behind in our tree trimming about six months and so we have a five-year program so it's not a great cause for panic or anything but and we are still maintaining all our fire

38:16 protection circuits um but there's just a high demand for tree crews in the west coast for all the other wildfire mitigation that's going on so it's going to be a bit before we get back up to speed on that and then the other area that that's being hit a little bit is the water department so ami metering installations is interfering a little bit with some of our routine maintenance tasks and so uh we need to do a better job in the ami project in resourcing that the meter installs one of the things i'll note real quick is i'm going to go into some more detail on goal 2 in the capital report so

39:01 uh at this point i'll just stop and see if there's uh any questions go ahead we'll start with john barofsky yeah um the the staffing was the thing that jumped out to me in this report uh you know when i went and looked at the electricity metrics a lot of the a lot of the ones where that were clicked yellow were because of staffing um i know that that's a that is something that i'm dealing with in my industry but i i wasn't so uh keyed in that it would be affecting uh all different industries especially ones that that are technical like ewebs

39:48 can you just talk to what what type of strategies we're doing to try and recruit and retain qualified employees yeah i mean there's there's a couple things going on here one is that um in the there's just not a lot of people going into some of the technical areas like metering and in engineering and so the pool's low to draw from to begin with another struggle we're finding is that the uh eugene's not quite the draw that uh some other areas are because um i think lena calls it trailing spouses uh it's difficult to get a job and then also it's difficult to find housing right now

40:33 for for uh young families coming in so um so there's some things that we're trying to address a little bit but we're working with uh um hr and lean on her team to see if we can't get a little bit more creative um about um how to attract staff um how to bring bring them in uh what levels to bring people in um we're also trying to prioritize work and do with what we can and align with the strategic plan and to meet some of the challenges but but it's tough we've we've been looking for meter shop folks for for several years engineers for several years um and it's just the

41:19 buyer's market i just wouldn't call it yeah commissioner barofsky i would add just elaborate a little bit on what rod said there's this is not coded related certainly um it's the fact that you also start with an industry that typically does not have a lot of voluntary turnover people when they get to a utility they tend to like like the utility generally and so you you see some turnover through retirements and and other things but um you know recruiting to eugene from other utilities is is a challenge especially right now when try and find a house even if you can afford it try and find one it's incredibly difficult to to bring people in and and i would say that it's it's it's also

42:05 concentrated with several very kind of unique positions metering is one some of the engineering fields so we're trying to get more creative and and trying to build some of those even sort of homegrown you know organically as well through various programs all right john brown did you have a question for rod i i did rod i haven't gone through this before when we were getting robbed by all rit people from the big tech companies and uh they were just buying their way and robbing everybody at eweb uh i understand your dilemma i i read the same thing john uh read about some of these positions being open for over a year um that said i think

42:51 you know you'll do the best you can to get there but i'm just wondering what's not getting done if these positions are open and they're there um i know we're behind we've tripled the turn time for you know design engineering and because my ears ring daily on that but what else is not getting done uh that should be getting done i mean how far if we've had these positions open for a year are we going to continue to get a backlog because you know the growth is continuing and the demand is continuing when when is a breaking point we're going to get worse and worse aren't we without uh filling these positions well one of the things we're doing too that i didn't mention is we've um we're starting to work uh closer with consultants and so uh working with consultants is a good strategy regardless of

43:37 the staffing levels so we can hopefully maintain and dig into those those backlogs but basically the work is not getting done there's as i mentioned the internal e-web capital uh replacement program um is starting to be a little behind in the electorate um and you'll see that we'll talk about that a little bit more probably in june in the capital plan and we'll talk about aegis system and similar things but brown i would also say that there's there's two trade-offs that we kind of constantly have to

44:23 two dials i guess we have to constantly turn one is the the trade-offs between o m and capital um there are risks associated with both some are more near-term some are longer term and so we we have to adjust between those two types of project uh work and then rod will talk a little bit about it when it gets to the capital uh update here in a few minutes and that's remember we have categories we have compulsory we have strategic and then we have risk based uh the risk based are the ones that maybe are of a time frame that we can determine um it's it's really that's the part of the dial that we can turn more than sort of the have to projects and those are the ones that tend to get turned up or down to catch up or

45:10 adjust on the o m side so um when it gets to that part of the capital plan that'll be the part that where you you'll you'll look at different projects that you know we might replace transformers at a certain rate and we slow that rate down or we speed that rate up um it's all an issue of risk and so um that's where we tend to make our adjustments okay thank you and on ami deployment i thought we passed a contract a while ago for 12 million dollars to basically sub it out the installation and uh i'm wondering how that's going if we're still getting behind that ami deployment yeah so um that's uh that contracts for electric deployment uh not the water so uh and i will talk about that a little bit more i've got a slide on that coming up in the capitol

45:57 thank you thank you that's all i have thank you all right matt or sonia do you have other questions before rod moves on okay go ahead ron we want to go to the capitol report oh that was sorry i thought i didn't realize that was the wrap-up of the that was it but i'll still answer questions yeah i would i would just like before we get to rod's capital i would just you know it's it's the way that we describe that first goal sometimes internally when we talk about it it's you know we want to make sure that the train you know it's great to do all these strategic

46:42 things but we want to make sure the train is still on the tracks and you know we're the train is not off the tracks but we're feeling some vibration in the wheels and so those are the kinds of things that um that it's why you have kpis why you have indicators uh why you look at um and our we're going to change our report around a little bit to be more of a series of dashboards so we can we can actually get get readings of this but i would describe it that we're feeling a little vibration in the wheels the the train is still on the tracks but we've uh we've gotta make some adjustments and and grease some skids and and make some adjustments as we go forward and that's how i would describe our kind of first quarter read from an

47:28 operational perspective yeah i would agree to that i think that um in highlighting a few things here that that we're paying attention to uh because of metrics it's really important uh we've got hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of things going really well so i'm not ready to push any panic buttons or anything i just want to highlight some things that we are trying to focus on and get better at i would say given the year that we've had it would be remarkable and even a little weird if there weren't some areas that we needed to work on sonia go ahead i'm curious if any if any of the delays or anything if you've had any

48:13 supply chain issues no not too much uh definitely seeing the signals that pricing is going up you know big jumps 10 15 kind of things um i don't know if the uh dang i should have talked to sarah before this that would have been a good deal but i'll i'll get you some more information on that we'll uh um i'll check in with sarah as we start going into budgeting and such just starting to see those swings so all right our contract i would say our contract escalation has been pretty well under control i know we've had a few issues with materials related to the carmen smith project uh some of that is is sort of specialized equipment coming out of the far east um which has been a little bit of a

48:58 concern but sarah can maybe elaborate just on general lead times um a little further this be the time to do it yeah so um your timing is good we um actually this week we've gotten several notices from some of our suppliers indicating that we will be expecting longer lead times um and that will of course also impact price um we we've worked with our key project managers to try to get ahead of the materials for especially our construction uh season coming up for this summer to get those materials ordered early and if we need to look for alternative sources or alternatives approach alternative approaches to doing the work so we are um working with our

49:44 contractors to really get the materials that we need early and um have it available but at this point we haven't had any direct impacts where we haven't had materials required that we require for projects okay all right great yeah i appreciate that you're all staying ahead of that and looking out in the future what the it's hard in an organization that big too to foresee which is going to be the linchpin that's going to be pulled out but thank you for that update all right any more comments on the quarterly strategic update before we move on to the capital project update nope all right we are really speeding

50:29 along this meeting i don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing but i guess we're going to get out of here early so we're moving on to agenda item number 10 capital project update well i can slow it down a little bit if you want me because i could talk all night about some of this stuff so um i just wanted to uh real quick the um part of the purpose for this presentation is to help set some background um on where we're at with our capital plan right now uh we'll be coming back to the board as part of the long-term financial plan you know there's a 10-year cip conversation some of those kind of things so um really the purpose here is to sort of set some of the the stage and baseline support for that though

51:15 i do have um wally um mcauliffe and the water engineering supervisor he's the one that masterminds the water capital plan um and then tyler nice the electric division manager who uh was the brainchild behind the electric capital plan or at least the ring leader maybe not the brainchild but they'll join me at the end of the the presentation to answer uh questions so next slide please so uh i think this will be refresher for some frank related to it but it might be new uh to the uh two new commissioners so several years ago uh wally came

52:00 up with this way to categorize our capital work into three main areas now you know these three main areas are not um accepted accounting practices or anything like that but there are some engineering judgments around um categories that help us line up to have conversations and make priorities and and figure out spending months that kind of thing so um what you will see is uh that these categories are represented by name and color in most of the conversations you'll see going ahead about capital and even on m to some extent we're starting to use the same terms just kind of lit it through but the three main categories really are compulsory um which is kind of what it sounds like

52:46 these are the things you have to do they're fixed timelines they're they're driven by our obligation to serve uh you know think federal requirements etc things like that so it's sort of our baseline loading if you will uh the strategic category is is more of the executive strategic plan board level kind of of projects and so um carmen smith re licensing decision you know back at some point we we decided we'd be licensed uh carmen smith because it made sense for this that or the other reason ami perhaps uh second water treatment plant source can can be a strategic uh example as well uh risk based uh and frank was talking

53:31 about this a little bit so here's some links to o m but risk based is more staff driven so we have a big slew of projects kind of sitting there um with with things to do to um address age of system it's more flexible um when it's more in the preventative nature but you know substation rebuilds pump stationary builds that kind of thing i put the enterprise i.t systems upgrades into that too as well um one of the things that just happened was most of the servers are in the process or have been uh replaced and that's a big chunk of mine so next slide please so here's just uh to give you a flavor of what that means in our capital plan

54:17 um i kind of like to talk about the capital plan in two ways there's the size of the pie which is if you look at water the size is 21 and then there's the you know how big is the slices of buying so um in both pies if you will uh ami for instance is 15 of the strategic uh uh or actually it's 15 of the total uh pi and that comprises most of the the strategic category in water um and some of it in electric so that's just to kind of give you an idea of right now how we budgeted for this year risk-based and strategic and compulsory so as as you move projects in and out um

55:02 and delays and whatever hopefully the risk base there is able to come in and be the more more or less a shock absorber if you will between extra and um taking away money too as well in order to to try and meet our budgets for the year so uh next slide please so this is straight out of the quarterly report uh shouldn't be too surprising for you hopefully you've seen this but these are really typical quarter one graphs on spending um they're usually in the quarter first quarter it's pretty light and spending so you'll see the curve starts out fairly slow and usually by the end of the year it works its way up in more of a curved

55:48 sort of fashion not not following a linear straight line um but um one of the things that that happens with the capital planning is that not like o m which is fairly steady um there's big projects that extend across multiple years budget years and so the disclaimer on water right there is hey we're gonna spend 100 of our money but it could depend on the timing of how our 40th street reservoir construction uh ends um we're still in the process of doing some planning and all that and so we don't know exactly how that's going to end there's a first i'm not a certainty or wally wouldn't have put 100 percent but um i think you get that idea and another good example in electric

56:33 uh frank alluded to a supply problem from the carmen smith re license and we had to defer the unit two we wanted to replacement um that was scheduled for this year because the the manufacturer couldn't meet specs and and we had to go around and round and round with them and it caused a year to weigh so five million dollars went from this year to next year so that's represented there in that understand one of the things i'll note about that um is that we have a guru open again wally and tyler are the ones that have these groups that they meet periodically sometimes once a month sometimes once a quarter uh with all the supervisors and we'll talk about where

57:18 we're at with spending and how we can manage those projects around so you know our goal really is to spend on what we say they're going to spend because i like to keep my friend that part very high next slide please so i just want to kind of touch bases with this uh concept a little bit here so water um basically has a 10-year plan um we are regulated um to to have a master plan and basically the master plan helps shape their their capital upon moving ahead but they also have a uh a strategy that links to our our overall strategic plan of building resiliency and so uh

58:06 you can just kind of see you know we've started down the checklist there of uh of our projects it's like this so an overview of what's happening this year in the water department there's a picture of on the far right some transmission line work that's being done down on the riverfront to take advantage of all the construction that's going on down there in the development of any front part and that kind of thing if you remember we came to you last month with a second contact to to basically double the work here on this pipeline and that was due to some proficiencies in having this contractor keep moving on

58:52 down the line to do some more work which is really good so uh we doubled the work in that area and so we're gonna have to take away a little bit of work in some of the areas other areas and put that uh work in the next year's budget set um some other work obviously you're familiar with the 48th street reservoir um upgrade one of the other things that we've been doing is main upgrades um if you notice the metric from the portable report for links per mile this is higher than the national average so one of the things we're doing is increasing the focus on that risk based uh category to produce some more main replacements and so that means that the percentage is not getting bigger so much but the slice of a part of the size

59:38 of the time might be coming up so an electric uh transmission distribution uh right now this year is kind of fetch up and life extension kind of work a lot of type one substation kind of work downtown this picture of the in the middle there the network detector being lowered into the ball for some of the new construction going on down town um some telecom work fiber expansions mount egg and rebuild the if you remember mount higgins was one of the facilities that was destroyed in the holiday farm fire so we're working on that next slide please

1:00:29 in electric generation the uh main themes are carbon licensing and stone creek um rebuild and dam safety uh again it wasn't all a farm fire but the stone creek facility is served by a transmission line that was uh burnt and um up out of portland area and so part owners with that transmission line with with blocker mount bonneville built in general so this summer we're going to go back in and rebuild it up to to go and snow and the uh carmen some carbon work there two pictures the one on the left is a transmission line you can kind of see three pulls on the left hand side they're moving the transmission line over to the right

1:01:14 you'll see a single monopole that's a new design so basically those i mean this has been a project since i was supervisor 15 years ago or whatever it was that's been on the books so the the idea is to move the transmission lines out of the the watershed the creek area and the middle picture is just a picture of the spawning beds that are being reestablished there there's a spawning channel right below trail bridge it's a lot of work in that one of the things that i threw a couple pictures in here some damn safety work that's probably one of right now more on am but a lot of times those damn safety projects identify capital work and they also um tend to take up some of the same resources

1:01:59 that that are done used for capital so there's a big intertwine between capital and o m in in most of our departments that's pretty similar next slide please um a couple uh major areas in the shared service area so these are our uh groups that share both uh electric accounting and water accounting so so we call them the shared services there's an 80 20 split i think 80 and 20 i think is what it is right now um but uh is has been very active in some very big projects cei and ami i'll talk about in a couple of minutes uh you know mobile workforce um all the

1:02:44 stuff that that allows us again to have these virtual meetings where dogs are barking in the background and um there's still a number of smaller projects planned for this year you can see what they are there this is one of the supply chain things that we did have identified already uh to commissioner carlson's point uh fleet so we normally spend one to two million dollars a year refurbishing our fleet on a sort of periodic way sounds like a lot of money but every truck's worth 400 000 or 500 000 so it doesn't take much um but what uh what i'm being told is there's the lead times are 22 24 months some of these kind of things and then pricing is going up 10 15 percent

1:03:30 as well so uh it's likely we'll be bringing you some some consent items in the fall around the fleet big news in the buildings and land era uh category is the roosevelt burson property we're still in due diligence on being able to purchase that i hope that will wrap up in late august or so late summer let's die please and uh here's the the emi program uh overview john you asked about um john brown uh commissioner brown the water deployment um so we uh if you remember we separated the water deployment from the electric deployment

1:04:15 and water is on a five-year track and electric is on a three-year track and so to catch us up or to get the electric meters installed in three years we've fired a contractor the contractor gpa started in april they're doing great they're getting their targets we should be installed with most of our meters by q1 um 2022 water though so we are struggling to to staff the uh the meter shop and not to anybody's fault or anything but one of the priorities for the upcoming month or so here is to to

1:05:00 boost some fte support in that area lots of other things going on it's a big project a lot of cross provisional support is uh meter to cash so billing customer service a lot of folks uh involved in this i think one of the big things uh probably the biggest thing we'll work on on and uh moving ahead in the next couple months to six months is you know we have a new uh asset in place now with all these uh electronic meters and how we're going to deal with that from a standpoint of maintenance and repair and warehousing and there's all kinds of things that you need to figure out how to operationalize

1:05:46 the new equipment you're all dealing with so there's the big effort going on there and again under my fun fact kind of um uh things here i just kind of threw it up so right now we've had as a probably a week ago when this was posted over 700 000 billions um with the 98.99 accuracy so uh frank volunteered this morning when we hit a million he's gonna throw a pizza party so we'll all be down at uh uh committed he's having pizza uh when we hit 1 million so i will hold him to that it's now on public record next slide please

1:06:32 um last project i want to talk about it's a little less obvious as a maybe as a capital project but um and frank talked about this at the very beginning the um customer experience improvement project and so this is starting to wrap up this is really exciting i think um one of the things that we just got done doing uh or we're still in the process of this was uh we did a soft launch and so it's a controlled test and the 22 you have employees including myself and a couple of customers um to test the system um and it is really cool in fact it's so cool it's kind of boring um sorry rachel but it works you know it just kind of does the things you're all expecting systems to do now so uh it's got a lot of good stuff but again to quote rachel we have to get

1:07:18 this right we cannot uh release it until it's ready um and so there's uh a process right now we're going through to finalize and make sure it was ready to do as we can and i promised i wouldn't sit and do a live game on on air so i will not so next slide please so this is the the part of the um at the end here when we can talk a little bit so uh i keep alluding to this idea that we you know we can add spending and change spending and digest projects that kind of thing um when we come to talk to you and in june

1:08:03 i believe about the uh propose the capital plan for the next 10 years we'll probably bring some of these ideas in uh we're going to continue to to do the investments that we've already made in compulsory and strategic programs but we're going to probably talk about turning the dial a little bit and so what does that mean um uh the water uh treatment second source for instance you know we'll take we'll have a look at that and talk about scope a little bit what it might mean um electric reliability is in terms of uh how it relates to the age of system you know we can we can spend a lot of money become really reliable or you can spend no money and lose reliability and so these are

1:08:49 just some choices that that you make and and hopefully we do it with some knowledge so um travis will canada will be coming to talk to you some more about some enterprise systems and some is spending um as well some of the risks i see right now and this is not a limited list of risks to the capital plan but uh leeward canal uh obviously it's out of service and ferc is expecting us to do something so we're just throwing out a figure right now of 25 to 50 million um and that those are big swings though um to to get the canal back to the point where it it's meeting the license this is a little different than the the conversation around you know do we re-license in 20 years or do we use this

1:09:35 as a a water canal or only or uh or do we use it for power um this is really more of a conversation about uh actually getting the the meeting the first requirements for safety at the moment um in the electric system uh wildfire mitigation um is a piece electrification aging infrastructure there's a lot of power prices don't really have much to do with this but it's all intertwined um i keep hearing about all these opportunities 2.3 trillion dollars in infrastructure money sounds pretty exciting we are starting to see if we can tap into some of that and look into it uh and i mentioned inflation i think that's going to be a serious problem for

1:10:21 for a lot of folks not just our capital plan next slide please so with that i'm just going to ask tyler and wally to join us and um hopefully they can answer any questions that you come up with no questions excellent i've covered it i guess i have just a question i mean you briefly touched on the um potential infrastructure money right that would be a lot of money

1:11:06 if that goes through and um how would we how would we prioritize or um i don't know decide what to do because it would i mean it could be a windfall yeah frank yeah president schlossberg i'm not i'm not going to get into the the decisions that would be made around priorities that that maybe tyler and wally want to weigh into i will say some of that money is going to come in into categories so for example they might tie funding to resiliency for example and which would be a great opportunity to help fund a second drinking water source

1:11:51 for example so some of them might be predicated based on the kinds of of money that's available undergrounding electric wires for wildfire mitigation is another example where they could tie it to certain kinds of restricted projects i have a feeling that we have more projects than we could ever fund probably i mean we we have almost 1.125 billion dollars worth of assets of which those are on various cycles um i see this as an infu kind of an opportunistic infusion um but then we also have to match that with resources and processes and systems to be able to execute so

1:12:37 it's i think we are going to have to be selective even though there's going to be this really wonderful looking christmas present out there that we go let's you know let's just go nuts with it i think we are going to have to be selective in in how we do that and and look for certain priorities that that maybe we wouldn't do otherwise um i don't know if rod if you or tyler or wally want to elaborate on that but that's how i see it yeah i pretty much agree and i think that and that's why i wanna uh to emphasize the risk category and the strategic and some of these things because we um you know we talked about even the second uh treatment plan having the ability to do some funding uh

1:13:22 i talked to the city about um uh i think the co-owners are they saying nicobacca bridge where we have a uh one of our main transmission water lines goes across it's not seismically stable so there's some opportunities for some joint projects as well so we'll be looking um to try and watch out for opportunities as much as anything if president schlossberg i actually think our strategic plan aligns really well with the areas that are are potentially um target funding areas uh you know the other one is anything that might facilitate grid modernization that can facilitate the integration of

1:14:07 more renewables for example so demand response distributed generation and those kinds of things that anything we can do to our system that facilitates that and that's one of our two big ones along with resiliency and so i think both of the sort of the big issues that i think we deal with will align pretty well with i what i'm hearing are some of the target areas for uh the infrastructure parts of the 2.3 trillion there's there's all kinds of other things as well going going on in that um that sort of proposed bill but those are the ones that i think align quite well with our strategy

1:14:56 thanks mindy um thank you rod for the presentation and for the the materials to help us get up to speed um it's really uh it's again great to walk onto a board and see the the work that has been done you know in the recent past to improve the hayden um water treatment facility for example that we're you know proactively strengthening that that we're taking proactive steps well there's an opportunity to work on water transmission downtown to save money ultimately by doing things well you know while the opportunities there so um i just want to say thank you both to the the board as it existed before i arrived and to the

1:15:41 staff for for leaning in and being proactive it's um it's really remarkable and um yeah just thank you so much um the one question i have is about the um the compulsory spending in the cip and specifically looking at the water side because that's where the compulsory wedge is largest [Music] and my question kind of goes back to where sonya was asking about supply chains i'm sure you're all aware of the price of pember just jetting up it's like crazy uh and i understand that many materials will follow suit as people substitute timber for metal

1:16:27 um and likewise and i just wonder um if if that is likely to affect the medium-term you know couple year prices of any of the compulsory projects that we have and if so how we might be hedging for that i don't know how much flexibility there is within the strategic and based categories um so that's i guess that's another question is how much flexibility do we have there in those other two categories and what's our contingency plan if we need one uh if the price of materials continues to jet up over the next six months as it has been for the past two yeah that's a great i'll i'll start off with an answer then i'll turn it

1:17:12 over to wally so he could be more specific about the projects but uh there there's a lot of flexibility within so the out of 21 million dollars a third of it's or 20 25 is compulsory um and so those when push comes to shove that's what we prioritize very first for for materials or um and effort and labor and that's exactly what we're doing in the uh example i gave with distribution engineering work we're taking away from our risk-based and strategic work and and putting everything into our obligations make sure the customers get get the money but i don't know why do you have any uh comment on your thoughts on the next couple years and how materials might affect it and how you're prepared

1:18:13 it's all right sorry about that um matt but um i'll touch on that but i wanted to touch on first what matt mentioned about the water compulsory um pie was so big in 2021 compared to electric and the reason for that is is we're considering our first base level reservoir reservoir compulsory and so normally ours is similar to electric on a compulsory side about 20 percent 18 something like that so this year it's big and next year it'll be big with that that one first reservoir but after that it's more risk-based and then um there's flexibility on the on the prices a lot of our compulsory work is based on um materials where we have like five-year

1:18:58 contracts with suppliers and that through the pipelines and services and materials and so we have a little bit of stability there and you know one thing i want to note people keep saying is um you know higher higher prices everything is high and um our last three to four bids we got were really low i mean way below our estimate is really been surprising on the water side on the work that we've been contracting out so maybe maybe we're just getting lucky but but there is some stability and some flexibility to move things around in the future so commissioner mcrae i would um

1:19:44 you know that's part of the reason we started to classify capital projects the way we did was we it was always this oh we have to do this we have to do that and when we really dug into it the compulsories are the ones that i mean those are the have to do's if you don't do those you're you're going to not be able to deliver your products answer in the immediate i mean or you're going to go to jail or you're going to create some safety issue i mean there's there's a really compelling reason the strategic ones are the ones that if there was ever that kind of issue we would have to come back to the board and say this this strategic effort that you want to pursue we can't afford to do it do you still want to do it i mean that's

1:20:29 that's at the level that that we talk about with this with a strategic project the the risk based are truly flexible from one year to another um and so those are where we turn the dials um we also with some of them you know we try we try to coordinate with city streets for example on the water side that you know that can kind of fall into compulsory somewhere between risk-based and compulsory and so we really do that's that's a big reason your question was really a good insight into why we tried to classify projects the way we did um there has to be some flexibility whether it's price whether it's resources whether it's you know whatever

1:21:15 to be able to have and know if you can't do something what are you not going to do and also the other if you get more money what are you going to do those are that's the reason we classified those the way we did yeah no it's it's helpful categorization i appreciate having it laid out that way and thank you all three for the responses so i have thanks yeah there's there is some lumps in the oatmeal as we would describe you know you get large projects to sort of skew this it's it's probably more appropriate to look at this this across a five-year window as opposed to year by year because you're going to see some shifts kind of between those categories if you look at one snapshot

1:22:12 john brosky thank you um so three things kind of jumped out at me in your presentation uh that i'd like to just highlight um so one of them was the realization about ami and ami is coming home to roost now and and how are we going to deal with it on a capital side you know where are we going to put all these meters what are we going to do when they break where you know those types of things i'm glad that you're you're looking at that and hopefully figuring out all of the idiosyncrasies once you start putting a new technology online and and everything that that entails so good luck with that i i'm glad that you're looking at it and keeping a sharp

1:22:57 pulse on that um the second uh kind of goes to what matt was talking about and i guess it it goes to the risk side um you know i know for example that let's take a city street you know a city street can be at three different levels of of needing repairs you know it can they need a repair where it just needs its cracks filled and that costs this much money and then there's another one where it's a resurface and that costs a little bit more and then it goes to the total reconstruct which is like five times more than than saving it so i would assume that that eweb has that

1:23:42 same type of thing you know this water main is a hundred years old we can keep patching it or we can fix it or we can fix it before it explodes so are you looking at those types of things and are there things that can get moved up because we are in a position a financial position where if we move it up a year or two it won't fall into the failure category question mark and that's on both sides electric and water and then i have one more thing after that i can touch on our water mains a little bit um we do have a you know kind of a complex strategy where we look at uh you know prioritizing which mains

1:24:29 we're going to do and which ones lead to failure and frankly oftentimes we let we let mains leak time and time again because that's the cheapest alternative and it has the lowest risk um oftentimes if there's a 16-inch main that has one leak and worried and it's right downtown in a commercial area that would just create havoc i will go ahead and prioritize that main replacement over a small main in a dirt road with five leaks and that um we can still maintain reliability but we'll just it's cheap to fix and so there's a lot of strategy and then coordination with this city on that so

1:25:19 great and then and then lastly kind of going back to what mindy was talking about with the opportunities for the infrastructure money you know i know that back in 2008 when the stimulus program came out it was like whoever had shovel ready projects that were ready to go were first in line and i think that we have a lot of things in our strategic plan that we'll dovetail into what like frank said will uh will be in there but i i just want us to be poised and ready so that we can take advantage of what we can uh in these projects to the best of our abilities so you know having you know being there

1:26:05 early in the morning when the when the grants go open type of a deal that's what i did yesterday morning the restaurant revitalization fund opened at nine o'clock and at 901 i was submitting my application so hopefully eweb is is as quick on the trigger as as a lot of other people because i know there's a lot of communities out there who will be looking for that thanks princeton borowski that's a great point um there's there's a couple of things that i think help us as we we do and have already a crafted strategy that probably aligns with the criteria of which this money gets allocated which is good the project piece is then a second part and it also helps us that i i believe

1:26:51 this is a 10 year spending plan and it's not a one or done all up front spending plan so there's some some opportunities to to look at some near term medium term and longer term kinds of of project ready kinds of of uh opportunities so it it appears like we will be well positioned where it makes sense for us and um and yet not rushed you know not not like you're doing it for um a reason that it that isn't good and doesn't align with your with your strategy um oh i'll say there's a similar what wally described on the water side is is similar on the electric side but you know we look we look for the characteristics of

1:27:36 different assets you know if if if wally knows that there's a certain kind of material that tends to leak or a certain age or vintage of pipe that goes into the analysis the cost is for example with roads it makes a difference if the city is putting in an 18 inch cement concrete road where we might not have another opportunity to do it you know that's a 50-year street um that's going to be different than than a you know just a scrape and patch kind of opportunity so we have some more similar things on the electric side um then there's so there's the sort of asset groups that we look at material groups and one example that that tyler could

1:28:21 mention is we're we're looking at underground cables there's a certain vintage of underground cable that we know is at the end of life the ideal would be that you replace it about a week before it fails that would be ideal we we aren't quite that scientific um and good at that yet but uh tyler and wally are working on it i think just to add to that like frank's talking about we can look at the uh the probability of a failure you know that kind of we can understand that through condition testing inspection age and then the impact is also big um how many customers what types of customers what's the impact on the community so

1:29:08 kind of like wally's talking about with staging up that planning we look at the substation level go down to the feeder level much like we're restoring a storm you know the the biggest customer impact first so we definitely have a a pretty good gauge i'd call it like like frank said it's not 100 scientific in every asset class but we definitely know our highest risk points and have that stack of projects that that we can definitely pull on to start designing if needed and and i think we are getting more cognizant and and better as we go along looking at our our reliability and failures from a customer end and not necessarily our own end we we do know that the cost of an outage for example is different whether you're

1:29:53 talking about the oakway substation versus a substation in the south hills just based on the activities that it supports and so trying to look at the risk from a customer perspective is goes into that analysis not just every outage is not created equal for example no don't see any hands raised all right thank you for that thank you

1:30:39 great so we are moving on to agenda item number 11 correspondence and board agendas frank yes commissioners there were two items of correspondence uh one was related to the walterville um canal flow regime that we implement this every year in april we do an assessment of the snowpack and forecast the flows for the summer if those flows are below the median flow for uh forecasts for the summer we go through a regime where we keep at least 10 percent more flow in the main stem or the bypass reach than we do going through the

1:31:24 project this is for fish attraction uh fish tend to swim toward more flow and so even though this is not a requirement of ferc um we do this voluntarily um based on our uh forecast for flow in the summer this this one did look like it was going to be below medium flow median flows and so we're implementing our 10 um 10 percent rule this summer at walterville the other one um was related to um jason's latest report from state legislative activity i know jason is on the call if anybody had any questions about

1:32:10 what's going on in salem this would be the time to shout that out and jason can respond all right questions not hearing any um the the board agenda piece of this uh president schlossberg there's um just a number of upcoming events we have the may work session in a couple of weeks and that'll be a combination of of looking at our wildfire mitigation planning and kind of where we are and also some strategic topics that i will tee up for the board around

1:32:55 potential amendments to the plan and or policy for your consideration that's sort of the most immediate thing then we're still on track to do an upriver meeting in june uh we also just have a number of board activities including a tour of the seneca uh facility and and a it's it um i have to big shout out to to ann caw and and holly uh for trying to get the float trip arranged this is this is a logistical challenge and that's coming up as well so the board and other some other public officials that we've invited to float and see the watershed and and fire mitigation

1:33:41 fire recovery from the water and so just a number of looks like interesting and valuable activities coming up i'd be happy to answer any questions yes commissioner mccray there can you hear me there we go i can hear you uh thanks sorry at the find the mute button um on the may 18th agenda for our work session for wildfire mitigation we have 30 minutes and i'm just wondering if we might want more time for that um i mean i gotta think it's 15 minutes of presentation and

1:34:28 it just doesn't leave us much time for q a i don't know how much flexibility there is there to either move things around or make that a two hour meeting instead an hour and a half but i'd just like to propose that we have put more time on that agenda item and then the other question i have is for the june 15th meeting up river it starts at six do we have a proposed end time for that meeting i'm just curious how much time we have for the content that's there i will look at that a commissioner usually it's a pretty set time frame um we we try to and in this case in particular because of the the av equipment we'll have some more formal

1:35:13 handouts we will minimize any presentations those will just almost be the i'll say a an elevator speech to let people know kind of what material is available and what we're doing and then most of it is to respond to um local customer comments or questions and and have a discussion i don't know what that is set for we had usually i think planned on about an hour and a half in in past years but uh we'll confirm that and um said at least a target end date it's um i think it's been tough for a commission if there's additional conversations uh commissioners don't necessarily like to walk away from that but it's also there are some times when

1:35:58 there's a lot more questions than others so we'll we'll make sure that's understood um but we're trying to minimize any presentation so that most of it is really for our upriver customers great that's good to hear thanks frank and on the other work session i i think the way i i the way that's ordered is that i think the wildfire mitigation is priority in that discussion i will work with tyler and rod price to determine actually how much of this is presentation versus background and we'll see it we're really trying to gather as much from the board as we can around sort of philosophy and direction that we can use to guide further implementation we do

1:36:44 have implementation that we are presently that is present we we do already so this is going to be really a direction finding work session and so but it does take priority if we have to look and shift around and maybe even do strategy later then i think that's probably a reasonable sacrifice okay yeah great thank you and i'll work with president schlossberg and vice president brown specifically on kind of the agenda planning front there thanks i think that's it um presidential oh there was another just when i said that sorry

1:37:33 um is there a check-in like if if we're still an extreme risk at some point that we cut it or yes we um we proposed some sort of transition back to sort of meeting transitions um one of them was we're we're planning on the work session like we did the last one uh i think we're planning on a couple more virtual meetings and then maybe transitioning to some some hybrid meetings that that is all predicated you know our our policies across eweb are based on the classifications for the county and so and and we really don't want to violate those so this is all pending um those

1:38:18 kinds of situations um i uh so there needed to be an asterisk by this if if we're still in extreme then it'll probably be virtual frank if i could they just about an hour ago i think that all the counties were moved back to high from extreme by the governor oh okay all right and and wait an hour it might change again uh yeah i would just my response to you commissioner carlson is we we want to make sure that we're adhering to the guidelines that are enforced and um we have our own guidelines that are based off of that criteria and so everything is caveated kind of right now with that okay keep this poster thanks

1:39:10 i just want to make sure that people are okay with the the hybrid with the commissioners going in person um we don't all need to say if we are now but i just want to make sure that people aren't feeling pressured to do something that they're not ready to do or not feeling like i want to make sure if they are remaining virtual but other people are in person that they feel like they're fully integrated into the meeting so i don't know how we decide that but i just want to make sure we're all on the same page yeah i would just say uh you know i participated remotely last time and as you mentioned mindy the technology was uh really seamless and so kudos to the team

1:39:56 for making that work so effectively uh so for me i don't feel pressured to come in unless it's comfortable and and really because the team made that so effective yes yeah completely agree um do we need to let staff know by a certain date i mean i i mean i can just say i plan to do the virtual portion until we get to september and hopefully once we get into that mode it will be more work through the system by then but um yeah i don't i don't think there's a lot of advanced notice that we need

1:40:41 uh commissioner carlson um the even the last time there was a little bit of uncertainty around whether commissioner mcrae was going to be in person or virtual and that was fine it it really we we set it up to be as flexible as possible if we go all virtual versus hybrid then it's nice to know you know a day or two ahead of time just so we can do some planning but it it really the technology is very flexible and i tell you what our is staff and and then the administrative staff that helps with this has is done really a phenomenal job of being [Music] resilient in in those kinds of decisions so there's you don't have to map out the rest of

1:41:26 your year for us if you unless you're so inclined thank you president schlossberg all right well this is going to be a record meeting we are on agenda item number 12 board wrap-up [Music] for anybody who would like to wrap up john brown two things number one uh thanks to staff and everybody for once again having a great meeting and mindy for you hurting us along uh the two things i

1:42:11 forgot to bring up uh earlier today i in reading the uh the correspondence i'm really pleased that eweb was able to make that home donation especially to that particular family that home we bought late last year and then and donate that that's really a good thing and i hope we can get some pr about that because that's a win-win for us and then the other thing i i failed to mention historically eweb has cooperated with the people trying to remove the navigation hazards on the upper river uh because of the flow and things and there's there's a situation up there now that i was notified of today that the water's too high but when when the water the time is right i hope the web continues to cooperate to reduce the flow so the marine board the forest service another people can get in there and remove the trees because uh they could be a real navigation hazard

1:42:56 to primarily rafters on the upper river and make sure that we can help them get rid of that so somebody doesn't die because of it so thank you very much anyone else john brosten yeah thank you for the very smooth meeting and getting us out early my wife will be happy to hear that um and yeah i just wanted to uh reiterate what john brown said the governor did uh put back 15 counties to high risk from extreme uh so that means indoor dining will be back available starting friday for anybody who likes to eat at local

1:43:42 restaurants that's a good thing for me i think it's also to be honest i think it's a good thing for eweb as every time we move down in categories uh the i think the the covid dip that we saw in revenues hopefully will be dissipated so get your shots and encourage anybody that you know that hasn't had their shots to get their shots because that's what the real way that we're going to get to back to normal thanks president schlossberg i would i would just comment i don't know if people noticed this in the report we did go into this year forecasting about a five percent decline in consumption based on our general

1:44:29 covet economy oops you muted there sorry i was right in the middle um we we haven't seen quite the decline in consumption that we had forecasted which is which is good news um there's a number of variables though just besides economy that do affect us such as weather weather has a huge impact on on both the electric side and the water side especially in the summer for water so but it's it's you know it's encouraging that the at least the consumption sort of general consumption non-weather or so i'll say weather um independent is um a little bit you know it's better than we had forecasted

1:45:15 so i'm hoping that that continues great anyone else have anything to add for wrap up nope all right well i don't have anything either so wow over an hour early this meeting is adjourned and thank you thank you commissioners have a great evening thanks mindy 18.