EWEB Board of Commissioners — May 18, 2021

0:02 2021 and we're going to start with an agenda check is there anything that anybody wants to say about the agenda nope okay great so we're going to move on to our first item of business which is wildfire mitigation planning rod and there you go tyler you um good evening virtual people and commissioners and everybody um i'm here with tyler nice and the electric division manager i'm also invited larry longworth who is the electric dispatch uh supervisor and

0:48 shane tennyson who is our uh barbarous supervisor for the the tree program uh both shane and larry will be with us at the end of the presentation to answer questions and tyler will talk about a few things and i will so one of the things i'll do is a little preamble from my lawyer friends they are reminding us that we are talking about present programs and programs that might be worked on in the future as far as fire mitigation and we're not talking about the past this month um next slide please i'll do a couple of basics around uh wildfire uh help get us grounded tyler's going to

1:34 talk about the programs that are in place now then i'll talk a little bit about you know creating a work wildfire mitigation plan and what that might mean and then give a few examples of some potential medications just for illustration purposes we'll wrap up with a lot of time left for for q a like i said shane and larry will also be available to to give us more detailed answers that perhaps tyler and i want next slide please so by definition really the wildfire is an uncontrollable fire in general what we're talking about from the last general accepted ways to talk about wildfires is there's three components there's an ignition

2:20 source which could be anything it could be lightning you know it could be a muffler or it could be a power line so uh from a couple years ago i was reading some statistics from california approximately 10 percent of wildfires are started by power lines of those ten percent by far in a way most of the fires are started from vegetation contacting the wires or from hardware type failures connectors cross arms that kind of thing another key ingredient to to a wildfire fuel lots of dry vegetation has been the big concern that's the most common fuel source right now disease drought

3:07 insects climate change all these kind of things have contributed especially in the western united states to to a large amount of fuel the third thing that typically happens in a in a wildfire situation is it occurs during so-called red flag warning conditions that's where we have high winds very low humidity and typically high temperatures one of the things that's noted is that the red flag warnings have been increasing and again you know climate change or you know whatever the reasons are um i was reading things this weekend wind speeds there's fires are occurring in southern california now where the wind speeds are relatively low [Music]

3:52 vegetation and any sort of ignition source so the the question is what what does eweb do about wildfires and you know you can click on a link to our our home page and there's some information about it there really uh what i'd like to stress is the the work we do right now even is addressing wildfire mitigations and i told you the two biggest uh instigators of ignition sources with utilities typically is vegetation and hardware failure so i was going to talk about the vegetation program but we also have a 10-year puc program that's very difficult as well

4:38 to really address the a lot of our sources of ignition one of the things that we want to talk a little bit more about tonight is developing a wildfire mitigation plan which is really just to evolve our current program into some more distinct components that that will enhance the our resiliency to suppliers and to reduce ignitions and a key part of this is really keeping the board involved there's a we had unlimited resources we could we could make a magic system perhaps it would never start a farm but there's all these tug of wars that are in place that

5:26 financial and all kinds of things that play into what our plan might look like and how big it might be one of the things the other i'd like to also mention too is that um this is sort of an evolving thing um wildfires have been around forever but obviously we're hearing more and more about them and i kind of wanted to use the the analogy of driving maybe some of us rode our electric bikes here i'm not sure but you know when we get in our car we're driving somewhere with some pretty fair assurances we're going to get there without even thinking about it there's a whole host of things that have gone into building cars laws cultural habits all these things that keep us safe and getting there

6:11 so we need to do a little bit of that kind of thing with our wildfire mitigation dampers so it takes everybody involved state everybody in utility really and outside so next slide please i'm going to turn over to tyler right now and he's going to give us a lot more detail about some of the things i mentioned that we're doing right now thank you commissioners for the topic tonight again tyler nice for electric division manager for the record uh so i'm going to share three slides with you that are really what what we've operationalized and programs we have right now that we do to reduce risk of fire that are maintenance oriented then i'll share a slide a little deeper on what we do in red flag events raw defined what a red flag event is but we

6:57 do some actions when those come and then also talk about things we have planned for this year as part of that distinct wildfarm management plan that we have efforts underway so vegetation by far is you know one of our biggest uh arguably one of our biggest impacts for both reliability and fire risk like rod talked about and we have a vegetation plan that on a cyclic manner we go through the system and trim by a feeder basis and that's mainly trees you know clearance to the lines what we also do is we yearly go through what we classify as high fire risk circuits which is basically some some lines in the south engine area and then also everything up river we'll go through those and do what we call

7:42 spot checks trim them back in the spring annually we do about 280 miles in our regular program of this maintenance and then in this hot spotting this year we just got done with it last week that program for the year and it was around 125 extra miles on top of the program that the crews go through the next piece like rod mentioned is is hardware failure or contact of equipment due to failure that that one's mitigated through puc and m maintenance plans so we have uh like rod said on a 10-year basis we come through the whole system and inspect and these are puc required programs and that's things like you know the polls we have a third party inspector inspect those we have look at the cross arms you know

8:28 the components the insulators again more clearance and and all those inspections really get forms filled out and the inspection materials and they turn into job packets and get repaired and so there's one workflow that basically just goes through with the line crews and other groups that that fix these issues uh the regular line patrols bullet what that's about is our our single resource people mainly the troubleshooters they also in addition to that those puc required inspections they go through and they comb through the whole system and they end up going through the whole the whole system on a yearly basis that's more of a high level look and they'll as kind of filler work in between appointments and things they'll be able to inspect again those spit out another set of work that that we keep up on those maintenance

9:14 then the the other two bullets here are more project based a little more strategic upriver is a project that we're completing this year that the pull top transformers up there we are converting those with new ones that will basically go from two phase in a neutral to single phase and neutral the loading allows that that has some advantages for other work we're doing up there but in context of this it basically takes you know two wires in the neutral and you can imagine that's kind of that could be like a cradle to a tree and that makes it just one wire so that the the tree or the debris or whatever it is more doesn't have a place to land so to speak so that is a we call it rolling taps something we do whenever we can we do that in town as well the fema uh

10:01 we've had several fema pro projects uh specifically a couple that have been linked to the 2016-2019 reimbursements from fema in those storms and those are underground uh conversions from overhead and those fundamentally reduce risk of fire they have lots of other reliability benefits as well but because they're not above ground and can't contact that vegetation or other components so those are kind of our our programs we have right now i'll move into if you can go to the next slide this slide is more centered around what we do in red flag and so we do have some specific operational changes and system changes we make when a red flag comes so this diagram here is really a simplistic view of the system

10:46 on the left we have the large transmission lattice towers you might see driving up and down i-5 around the system those are on the hundreds of thousands of volts level those come into town in our substations around the city step that down around the 12 000 volt level and it gets fed out on these feeder lines that are made on your main thoroughfares and things and the tap lines split off of that branch out to neighborhoods and service lines to the homes each each portion of these are are protected a little different and you can draw parallel with this system with the panel in your house which is what i'll do to kind of explain how this works so the panel in your house uh main feed comes in as a main breaker and then you have all your circuit breakers and it branches off and you can think of that that main line

11:32 coming in like your transmission line for us and the substation and then the feeder lines each one of those circuits now the tap lines might be off of individual breakers in your panel that that might trip off and then your service lines a lot of times you'll have more than one outlet on one of those circuits that may blow we've all been in the situation where you have a heater on and a hair dryer a toaster oven and a vacuum or whatever it is the combination blows the circuit breaker and that's really due to a thermally oriented kind of overload that accumulates over time what we're talking about here is a little different than that and if you've heard of a gfci gfci ground fault current interrupter what that's doing in your kitchen or outdoors is looking for really instantaneous

12:17 situations that might go to ground that could hurt you or burn something up water or you know a faulty piece of equipment or something like that and that's kind of what i'm focusing on here is the type of protection that's happening it's more of those instantaneous events we call them faults so you when we talk about faults faults can be damaged equipment animals on the line target poles vegetation is kind of the main main one here and these faults when they're protected is a lot different than the circuit breakers in your house in the substations we have devices called relays and reclosers and they're 24 7 high-speed monitoring that are sensing current and voltage and if they see a spike in volt a spike in current or a dip in voltage

13:02 they activate and they may take action and so the the type of actions they'll take is one it might if it's a high enough fault bad enough fault it'll trip it off right away no questions asked a lot of times it's under that level and it might have a time delay where it takes a little bit to trip it off and that might give the fault a chance to what we call clear it could be something that burns off or an animal that hits and leaves and not leaves but falls the other thing we have is reclosing re-closing is what happens when when this fault is sensed on the transmission and these feeder lines it will attempt to it'll clear off the power and then reconnect it three times on the third time it'll lock out and that requires human intervention to go out and reset

13:47 everything and that also requires us to look at it before we re-energize it now in a red flag all that background goes to say that in a red flag the point of all those chances and all those different levels is to try to keep your power on even if something touches the line basically as much as possible for reliability in the red flag operations to reduce the risk of fire we disable those reclosers so it's more of a one and done and we turn off those time delays so it's anything that happens it trips off that equates really to more outages likely in a red during those red flag conditions and more time to restore them because the other thing we do operationally is when we go to restore them we always patrol the lines in normal operation but

14:32 in a red flag we'll also stop and call before we issue a crew out we'll call the supervisory 911 number to make sure there's no active fires or landslides or restricted access or anything then we also won't patrol after nine pm for safety in the in the night how long that goes along that is the third bullet is communicating all this out so we have a communication team has developed a communication plan around all this and they have some evergreen messages that they stage up periodically for education or ahead of a red flag we also talk about these modifications answer questions and proactively communicate them and really let folks know that they might experience some some impact and reliability

15:18 the other thing we do internally is really ramp up and and enact more of an ics type protocol to make sure the awareness is there go to the next slide so this slide is more around what we have planned this year going forward so some of the things we're doing are through legislation there's a couple peer utility groups and also puc there's a lot of reoccurring webinars right now that that we're participating in uh lots of various staff are calling into these and keeping prizes the changes and rules and also the best practices we're learning from others we're also creating you know this this defined wildfire management plan we're getting a

16:04 consult on board to help lift that that formal document bench market with peers and uh and that qa piece in addition to assigning some internal pm help to to shepherd that um because it'll reach beyond just electric as well we're also starting to participate with the local emerging management city county and others to to be able to to get our processes for response down and that kind of goes into the situational awareness we have a high situational awareness and treat these as ics events going into a red flag and that that turns off a waterfall of communication and these you know changes in operation and communication we talked about um through the years we worked through the wildfire management plan we will be

16:49 hitting all these different factors and documenting these plans that we already have formally but also defining and benchmarking the criteria we have and developing some new ones such as psps the public power safety offs are listed and those will be something we'll be working through together with with the consultant and other stakeholders and i think with that uh you can go next slide i'll turn it back over to rod let's talk a little bit more about that that mitigation plan in general so uh i thought i'd just kind of go over a few things that will be in a mitigation plan and i think it's likely that the state will require something um again this is uh we've got

17:36 a lot of uh experience that's happened in california that that we're really tuned into they've got a template laid out that's that's pretty good they've got all kinds of things figured out and experience and so that's really going to be helpful to have the consultant in some of this reference stuff too as to how we define mitigation projects and some of those projects uh i just give you some maybe i should call it majors they're not exactly all projects because there's a number of things we could do that are not just project related but typically the these mitigation measures are divided

18:21 into three categories electric grid hardening a lot of non-grid hardening and then you have kind of operation and organizational kind of things typical typical grid hardening overhead to underground i'm going to talk a little bit more about that but converting wood poles to steel poles for instance or putting up insulated wire to keep the trees from making a spark that kind of thing some non grid hardening things firewatch cameras weather monitoring some of the utilities in california have the best weather systems in the planet weather monitoring stations those kind of things public and employee communications we have to get better with that

19:06 updating our data and our risk maps that tell us where our high risk areas are for buyers and losses and those kind of standards within the organization leaving emergency management position things like that because one of the things that's so important for wildfire is the interagency and internet work other utilities all these kind of things it's communicating with with everybody around you because we even if it's only in our service territory there is so many agencies involved with the emergency management process of that

19:52 next slide please talk about a couple examples of these mitigation projects the this one is very commonly referred to and 22 to help reduce ignition sources and so um what i would say is that um these kind of projects right now would fall if we talk about our capital planning effort they would fall into the risk-based category or the strategic projects or maybe a strategic program kind of thing but in general they reduce greatly reduce the chance of ignition because most devices hardware and vegetation contact and so if you reduce the source of ignition that's that's the key goal for it um

20:39 [Music] some of the advantages also are and disadvantages there's a positive and negative effect on reliability so in a storm snowstorm and all that typically underground is more reliable for the same reasons the vegetation stays out of the way and the animals that kind of thing it does take longer to repair underground outages though like in your neighborhood john reduce costs higher aesthetic value typically the community likes that i think one of the big things to to address is the cost it's uh typically we use estimates of around four times the overhead cost and so

21:24 putting circuits underground i just took a stab at a couple you know plumb bobbed a couple potential costs for 25 miles in town and come up with roughly and this was using the same fema kind of pricing and everything that tyler just talked about but that comes out to be about 37 million dollars a really targeted upriver program under underground targeted program would be on the order of something like 16 million that's just to give you some budgetary kind of estimates of what that might look like one of the things that's kind of ironic is of course it's less resilience to seismic events because as the stuff moves and

22:10 shifts and all comes apart next slide please the other one that gets a lot of press is the public safety power shut-offs tyler referred to a little bit so the great thing that um obviously shed the power off does is it completely eliminates the the ignition source right one of the things though that it does mean is we have to be very carefully coordinated with city and other emergency management people and we have to have some pretty careful criteria about actually turning people's power off and some of the lessons learned from folks in california and other areas

22:56 washington uh montana you know if you if you do too many of these then and especially if the uh the event is somewhere else and and your lights are out for two days and there's no storm that gets to be fatiguing and one of the examples that it's kind of similar to the whole coven response right there's um we use some certain measures to do some protections yet there's economic costs to that and there's there's confusion and all kinds of things so um all kinds of things that little things big things technical difficulties within the utility to execute these kind of things communications to quotes

23:42 i think one of the things that i hear a lot about from fellow utility folks is around uh fire's cause for other other emergencies you know if you shut the power off the the lights are off the uh people's wells the way to pump uh water uh communications can go down if you're trying to communicate with people and you turn the power off the internet goes off you know some of these kind of things so so we do have to be very careful and coordinated about the public's uh our public safety power shutoffs so i guess just to kind of wrap it up we're going to continue with our present work we're going to work with that board

24:27 to develop a plan and have we'll bring a plan for probably towards the end of the year for review and then as we go along we'll talk through the normal budget and capital planning process to talk about spending and priorities in some of those companies with that i guess i'll just open it up to the questions [Music] excuse me so i can't see anybody so um my screen everybody's camera is turned off is that what's going on no i've

25:13 we've got pictures of everybody click on somebody's picture on the bottom i know okay i think my very very slow is the problem so um i might just yeah i can see everybody right now i can see sonia and everybody so if you want me to keep a cue i everybody hear me okay popped up for me so i'll give it go ahead okay okay see everyone right now so i'll give it a try as long as everyone can hear me so um i guess we'll just go around if people have questions

25:58 and um i think that i will randomly call in people if that's okay and we it was it was john barofsky but if i'm breaking up if my sound is breaking up then john brown you go ahead and take over okay right here so john brown you take over the meeting okay yeah your sound is freezing so uh john browsky and then anybody else in the queue i'll keep it cute okay thank you um i have just a couple of questions that maybe after other people ask i'll have the

26:43 others first one was is who issues the red flag warnings that national weather service and so they've got they've got specific guidelines that says that winds are 18 miles an hour and whatever so that's okay um then the second question i had was um on the o m the 10-year plan thing so once every 10 years you do a total inspection bringing outside consultants or is that a kind of rolling thing because our thing is so long it takes 10 years to do the whole system is that we're basically doing 10 a year on the trees it's it's a quicker turnaround but yeah we're basically doing every year we're doing we're doing it continuously and it's over the

27:28 course of time we cycle through the whole system that's that's kind of what i figured kind of like painting the golden gate bridge to start at one end right the other end and started all over again um good so that's good to know i guess you know one of the things that i think that we're going to struggle with is is one that you know when you shut it off and like i said the trade-offs you know is it every time the wind blows we shut it off because we're we're worried which is a legit in my view as a legitimate concern but yet on the other hand that has consequences like you said you know the traffic lights go out the things go out and and uh you know if they're short duration

28:14 ones you know if it's from seven at night until six in the morning that's that's one in my view that's one scenario when rod mentioned a couple of days you know then that's you know i'm thinking about me i'm thinking well my cooler goes out for two days i have significant losses and other you know so those are going to be some interesting discussions on where that balance is the other question that i had and this is just kind of i know that we have service that goes up to vita but then we have the main transmission that goes from carbon down so is it easier for us to depower carbon down you know like i said if

29:01 there's a if there's a high wind thing if we take that one offline and leave the service up to light is that an option that we have and you don't have to answer that right now there's a couple of comments that i might just just jump in here a little bit on commissioner so um on your issue of psps um being initiated it's likely that there would be a or will be dependent how you look at this a series of triggers so a red flag warning is simply a warning so that might be your first stage um then you have to go through are you actually witnessing the events on which the warning was issued for

29:46 right so then you have to say yes the winds are indeed blowing in the places we thought they were blowing it hasn't rained there's other conditions maybe maybe there's there's even um certain disruptions that are starting to occur so it's it's not going to be oh we get a red flag warning we're going to shut people off there's going to be different criteria and there could potentially be different criteria for different places in our service territory depending on the risk that those that those would possess a transmission line up by carmen might be viewed differently than something in the south hills for example um because of the impact um but uh and then to answer your so a series of of triggers on the series

30:31 on the question around carmen um the transmission line goes up to blue river it then and that's it feeds the town of blue river through lane electric and then it continues on up and it goes both to carmen and then splits off and it goes up to cougar or actually goes to cougar and splits off to carmen so there's potential that you could sectionalize and disconnect part of that without disconnecting the rest of it yeah and thank you on that that was just kind of a quick question um yeah and i think you know the same thing with the with the turning power on and off you know if it's you know if it's in the

31:18 city of eugene and you've got more fire stations there that's going to change your risk level as opposed to something where the nearest bumper truck is 20 miles away so those will be interesting i'm looking forward to trying to figure out those metrics and good luck with that thank you mindy would you like to go yes and i think i fixed my internet problem so i should be a little smoother now i'm not sure though um so maybe i missed this because the presentation was a little bit spotty on my end because of my internet but um what is the timeline for the wildfire mitigation plan

32:04 well it's going to be a continuously evolving thing i think but our goal is to get a draft by the end of the year i believe the state of oregon has kind of heard that they're looking for something by the end of 2022. ious or um you know the pacific goers and those kind of folks are under a different timeline than than the community-owned utilities like like us so our goal is to get something in front of the board by by the end of the year and then um i just have one more question about communication so um i know like all of this is going to be like a continuous ongoing process um but do we have do we have any communication coming out for people in anticipation of summer the dry months

32:52 um do we have a new plan for that or um yeah what what is our communication thing nope that's a great question um in fact i think has it migrated to the webpage yet i'm not sure um we're so joe harwood right now is is running a little project and program to to evolve that we've been meeting i don't know every couple every other week and that kind of thing to put together an evolving message to stand out in case of a red flag event or just general knowledge there's um as questions come up that kind of thing there are quite a few references um the commissioner on our website

33:37 and and links to other resources there's there's a number of different groups that deal with fire mitigation in general whether it's the forest service or the the county there's there's a number of different ones we we are in process of doing some of our own communications as well but i think that those there's a number of good good resources many of those go around this time of year to neighborhood associations especially in the south hills and others and talk about how to make your own residents more immune to things so there's some some personal communications as well there um when we did the pledge to prepare a couple years ago i think it was right for disaster preparedness i thought that we

34:22 did a really great job with that and i'm just wondering if it'd be possible for us to do something like that um around wildfire mitigation because many people like especially if you live in town but you happen to live in a forested area they might not know so anyway just one suggestion i don't mean to get in the weeds here because you're all very smart and know what you're doing but um that is just one little suggestion from me thank you i i think that uh we're in the sort of the infancy of that sort of a program very parallel to the pledge prepared same same communication group great that is all from me uh mindy you want to take over the queue you want me to continue

35:14 she froze up again okay sonia would you like i hit it and then it hit it again okay can you hear me okay great thanks uh i had a couple of quick questions one um so when we're in a red flag um kind of setting who who makes the call on kind of who you know is that a group is that like you rod and frank or is it staff that are on the ground ground witnessing it do we send extra staff to that area to kind of view the conditions so right now the

36:02 when we know red flag is coming like we had this spring earlier we had some pre-situational meetings and discussions but essentially when when the red flag takes place the operations folks have uh standing orders that they work through and so they they take the position of some of the things that that tyler explained in the operations and go through we don't really um at this point have not planned on sending extra people to the area or anything like that at this point okay i think in the commission carlson the there would be a a defined process by which if it went to the extreme especially

36:47 where you had a psps condition there would be a defined process that would would not rely on me for example you you would want the the operational awareness to be part of that and so there would be a defined process it's similar to what we do now only probably extrapolated a little bit part of that is because of the importance of community outreach and communications and dealing and coordinating with other agencies this last one was a little bit unique um in the sense that we got the red flag warning um less than 24 hours ahead of when the condition were experienced

37:33 and so it wasn't like we had a lot you know 48 hours notice or something that we could put out advanced communication so this one was actually experienced relatively quickly but it'd be highly orchestrated and i would suspect right i guess one thing just to make sure we're clear we we do not have a setup in place to to proactively shut off power we if there is a car hit pole if there was a fire burning all these kind of things we would shut off power in a sort of reactive mode but right now one of the things we would really need is a way to broadcast pretty widely communication that we're

38:18 going to shut people's power off ahead of time and so you know we need to work with emergency managers in the 911 systems and whatever the emergency broadcast systems are and some of those things too amongst other things to get ready to do now outside of it just a reactive mode but if we were in that position i think if we if the wind was coming up we would start sending out and staging crews and doing stuff like that okay okay um yeah we were talking about having a like a red flag warning over multiple days it seems like typically with winds and i'm i'm not a weather pattern expert here but this is why i'm

39:04 kind of asking if if you have some knowledge of when it kind of ebbs and flows but it doesn't seem like it would be typical that we would have like sustained winds through multiple days it seems like they would kind of come at one point during the day you know the heat rises and it comes down and so it doesn't seem like there would be a time when we would have like we might be out for a number of hours if we decided that you know the wind was blowing too much you know we could be out during that time but then like at night or you know at other times the winds wouldn't be picking up as much it seems like it ebbs and flows but would it i mean are other areas experiencing it where they're seeing like multiple days of just sustained winds is that like what has happened down in

39:49 california and such that definitely is what happens in california and uh to the north as well okay and what i would say that uh be careful about saying what what hasn't happened in the past because there would have been a fire so yeah climate change is changing everything right our models are probably not as good as they used to be and our weather uh prediction um means uh you know that's it's it's amazing the amount of horsepower that goes into predicting weather anymore so anyway we would get a red flag and they would typically it comes out says it's going to be over an eight-hour period or whatever it is and so we would just follow during that period

40:38 okay and then two other quick um one i read in the packet that you know i mean we obviously set up the generator program to help uh with resiliency uh during winter outages caused by snowstorms how dangerous are those and are they restricted in red flag warnings from being turned on um typically yeah and that is part of the uh discussions that have come from uh washington montana and california in some cases about people you you know that's another ignition source you fire up a generator on the side of the house so again this is part of what we need to do is work with emergency management and communications

41:23 and what do we really need to work with fire departments you know what do you guys uh how do you see this and how do you want to work with that yeah it seems like if we do the communication plan um or so you know something along the lines in the future um i fully support what mindy brought up i think that's a great idea if we did something along those lines maybe that idea around the generators could be a part of that since it's also something we've promoted um and then final question are there other types of mitigation i don't know um like sprinklers if the transformer explodes is there something that like comes out of the transformer and like foams up and covers the fire and is there any of that kind of technology that it seems like it would make sense to have something like especially around those transformers

42:08 because if a tree hits those those things just they pop right um is there technology in place to prevent that the the closest thing right now anyway is the uh what the fire retardant or the ifr we call the ester oil oil yeah there's there's lower flammable oils that we could purchase and put in again it's more expensive but but typically there's that has not been a mitigation effort that i've seen the the lower oils if they're more expensive are they i know we switched to a more environmentally clean sounds like those two are potentially

42:54 incompatible the same they have a higher flash point the the new oils we've been using the ester oils the the trade terms fr3 they have a higher flash point so mitigates that okay all right thank you those are my questions turn over yeah i'll give this a shot can you hear me okay yes great thanks um uh just briefly uh thanks for the presentation materials and the media materials they're both really helpful uh this is a super important conversation in my view and reducing risk of eweb lines igniting fires it's extremely important um

43:40 and that's i mean that's why we're here um we did just have a 10 acre fire in lane county last week and so as you all know the risk this year is very high and and we're likely to see the trend of increasing fire risk over time so i'm grateful for having this conversation um i i don't know it doesn't feel like we've maybe allotted enough time for the conversation tonight um but uh maybe maybe you could correct me perhaps staff get what they need from the board this evening um i do have a handful question people that i think are impossible um one is the difference

44:33 just get a little closer to your mic yeah your phone it's i'm using my headphones so um alright you're okay you're good now i can try this is that any better yeah okay uh is there a difference in the circuit disconnect mechanism between transmission lines and distribution lines and if so is there a way to address the lines with the higher risk well there's a transmission and distribution there's there's circuit breakers which are um you know the mechanical devices you see the big ones and then in distribution there's the fusing and so um fuses type that is a mitigation effort that

45:19 a number of utilities have employed is changing out the fuses to a less explosive one there's ways to automate um protection devices and upgrade them that's another mitigation that a lot of utilities have used is putting more protection devices electronic versions of the the substation transmission breakers out there so they can control them remotely very quickly but at some point it does come down to the fusing there's more fuses by far out there than anything okay thank you um i mean i i guess i'll just state i think my bigger biggest concern um i

46:04 mean i think we need to pay attention to mitigation everywhere where we have lines but uh from my perspective the south hills is especially concerning just because there's a very high wildfire risk the ability for people to get out of that neighborhood is um not great and of course there's a high density people living in that area and their distribution lines not transportation lines which as i understand it are just a little um they're not as quick to disconnect but maybe i i'm not sure if i understand that right anyway i'll just voice that i have um i do have a concern about the south hills and making sure that we're paying attention to that particular area because right of anywhere in eugene it's definitely the highest risk my other question is and sonia mentioned

46:49 generators certainly there are other ways to provide power during outages as we run into increased uh likelihood of red flag warnings are there measures that we can take perhaps um help assisting people who have medical equipment for example that requires electricity to keep people alive are there ways that we can support people in in getting battery sets or other things that would help reduce the risk for those individuals as we look at the potential for more red flag yeah that's a really good point and uh vulnerable there's a lot of vulnerable uh folks in the community even to the point you could say a hospital in general

47:36 is a vulnerable and so many of the utilities do provide some kind of backup power uh again this is a you know i don't want to it's something we could do um and so it's just very a lot of conversation there's a medical device for example many of those are are actually geared for short outages they do have batteries in them part of the importance of the communications is so that if you do have a medical device and there's an expected outage that you have time to charge everything and so the communications becomes really

48:21 important for people in those types of scenarios as well so i think the communications piece of this becomes more and more important yeah agreed thanks that's all many questions and i'll go less even though we're out of time um thank you everybody's asked some great questions i just have a couple quick ones um on south hills i agree with matt that's that's a priority not to marginalize or minimize any other area of their importance but there's nursing homes there's all sorts of things it's about the the liability because i look at the claims for power food you know every time we have a power outage we buy new computers and freezers and all those other things that everybody can do so is there any legislation pending or

49:06 is there any legislation existing and if we are proactive trying to save lives and then property and that particular priority where we may not be held totally liable for that because um you know if we start turning the power off more often especially in areas like south eugene where there's thousands of residents and lots of options people get stuck with garage door openers is there a legislation pending or should we pursue legislation to cover us on that or should we just say that you know we may have to pay 50 or 100 000 bucks every time we shut it down but it's a lot better than than not shutting it down and having a loss a lot there's a lot of areas where legislation will be part of this and again it just used to go back to the automobile speed limits all these kind of things

49:51 right and so they're they're basically in their infancy at least in oregon what i would say is that jason is very very tuned into those things we're looking into them there's a lot of opportunities there even from uh all kinds of legislation there just beyond the liability and the last question is about the capacity of the south hills reservoir because i know what like we had the civic fire that attached our system we almost ran out of water just by putting that one fire and if we shut the electricity off and we have a fire what is there a plan for backup

50:37 generations or make sure that we still have the capacity to fill our reservoir very finding capacity or is that something that's in the plant so the yes water system has backup generators and so we can continue to serve our reservoirs and get water there to put the fire out in south hills that's the plan you know that's part of their risk analysis okay good all right well thank you very much that's uh that's great and mindy do you want to take back the queue or do you want me to continue absolutely um you you continue because my internet yeah okay thank you you continue john i don't know if you can hear me no i didn't think i was just going to

51:22 add that as an oregon utility we're fairly immune to unintentional disruptions where legislation going forward will be important to us as if we screamed shut people down and that's that's where proper notice and other things will be part of that uh legislative discussion because if you you just shut people off with no warning that's going to be handled differently than you could provide people so fairly immune to just natural disruptions but it's but much more immune to the impacts of that than in california where we have the

52:07 reverse condemnation type of laws so but more to come on that i think that some work ahead of them when it comes to a lot of our mitigation all right well thank you very much great presentation and you guys did great we're looking forward to some more great work out of you so good the next item uh agenda item number three the strategic plan and discussion it'll be uh with yes uh good evening commissioners let me pull out the presentation here give me just a second

52:52 so um thanks for your time this evening i know it's great to have these discussions especially helpful for us i have you got prior to the meeting some information on the strategic plan there were actually two different versions in there one was the one that's presently in effect and the other one was some i'll say a proposed draft of something that we could potentially modify going forward just a little insight was written originally in 2017 modified in 2018 that's that's what the stars there are for but i wanted to give you a little bit of perspective on this and so one of them is that not everything is strategic

53:37 we we do consider our operational effectiveness for example to be a prerequisite to strategic pursuits you know we don't operate well it's almost like we need the right to then position the utility going forward so just because operational excellence might not be in there uh it's not that it's not important and just because something's not important doesn't mean it's strategic you know the strategic and importance aren't always aligned and large isn't always that way too you know i'll give you an example i think you might relate to which is the lieber canal that could be incredibly expensive and yet when i think about the canal as future it's very important

54:23 also it's not necessarily strategic in the sense that it's part of the path to position the utility favorably going forward so large important don't always match to be strategic the also the other part of this is that the strategy is about the path it's not necessarily about the outcome although you need to have a vision and a mission this really describes the the path moving forward and with the intention of aligning the utility and the board and the public behind it we did some assessments we've kind of done an ongoing view of our plan there are some things that we like about it it's it's pretty concise

55:10 it's easy to align the utility behind what it contains there's also some things that seem to be still relevant emergency preparedness disaster recovery resiliency major resource decisions on the electric side but a challenge for us at the moment and it's fairly i mean it's the dynamics of this is it has increased a lot is that as a utility we tend to do a lot of long-term planning we the things that we do tend to be decades in length and we're doing this under an environment that is incredibly turbulent right now market conditions the political landscape

55:55 the environment local views legislative regulatory everything seems to be to be changing and yet we're being asked to look at things from a decade or two or three in length and that's that's a significant challenge it's definitely something that we can environment we can work within but it's important to recognize that's a challenge for us we also think that there's opportunities you know we think about resiliency emergency preparedness we don't always think about financial we don't always think about uh workforce or our information systems we tend to think about transformers and pipes and pumps and

56:40 infrastructure resiliency is more than that and i don't know that we have fully captured that when we think about preparing for and mitigating or insinuating circumstances also really feel like the water utility and the electric utility have really different and strategic processes and conditions that they're working within the positions of the two utilities are much different and if you just want to think about the pricing relative to comparators the electric utilities kind of middle of the pack the water utility is by far the lowest in its pricing so they're they're coming at this a little bit differently and

57:26 they have different strategic needs the other thing that kind of how we've approached strategic planning is the role of the values becomes really important in how we do things so the strategy is okay here's what we're going to do the values are how we are going to go about achieving those and we feel like both of those are important the recommend is kind of a summary of the recommended changes we do feel like it's it's good to keep this simple still it does translate well and aligns the utility quite well you think and you'll notice in the draft that water and electric are highlighted differently and that's because of the

58:11 different positions that the abilities are in we also wanted to put a little more definition behind the strategic phases and look at that slightly differently a little bit more specifically i think the previous plan just was was descriptive but it didn't have the milestones in it that were as definitive as the as the new one so we wanted to be a little more definitive around that i would i would describe that as kind of the phase that we're in if we were playing chess um we we've done our opening this is now the middle game we're we're positioning the pieces

58:56 to accomplish the two really largest strategic challenges around um resiliency and then resource decisions on the electric side we also there's some enhanced values in there we added secure as well this is important we have safe but we added secure and that's both for physical assets as well as cyber assets i think when you when you think about the integrity and the security of the data that we hold for customers that's important to us and it should be part of the va something that we value and state so in the values we also split out responsible into both affordable and environmental

59:41 and added and left a placeholder for some uh for a workforce value that will probably talk a lot about teamwork alignment motivation and those types of things as far as our workforce that's that's in development and so the values are slightly enhanced from what they were before um and we also wanted to make sure that that those values that recognize the kind of the right side of this this shows that there's tension sometimes between those and we're willing to discuss those and i think those are important debates when you look at the trade-offs between reliable and affordable for example we've talked about that one in the past and some of the others

1:00:29 so this is um if i were to describe the the middle game that we're we're in and you can see there's an important horizon for us and in fact the board is part of that important horizon um there's significant and can be significant turnover in a board so i think it's important that we look at kind of two to four year windows uh what are the really important milestones the electric ones are on the top and the water ones are on the bottom from a strategic perspective on the electric side what jumped out to me and and talking with a number of other people about how we set up for this billions of dollars worth of resource decisions is the integrated resource plan that's

1:01:16 probably one of the most important strategic pieces of work that we will do in the next five years and positioning understanding what are the requirements what are the principles of the resources we need to pursue to meet our load to meet the needs of our customers we also have a second one on the electric side which has to do with the ballooning i think it described it this balloon of aging assets that's a condition of how you have evolved the 60s and 70s was a tremendous growth period around eugene a lot of infrastructure investment and all that infrastructure is aging at the same time and so we're going to have to attenuate and mitigate and make really good

1:02:01 choices around our asset management on the electric side while doing it in a way that's more resilient so there's a big bubble of aging assets that we're going to have to mitigate in a way that makes us more resilient and prepared going forward some of these others i don't want to read this for you some of these others really set up that we can have some flexibility within the the customer side of the equation to balance supply and demand on the electric side and then the water side because of the fact that we've invested so much in the hayden bridge and it's really looking at this source to tap approach that we've invested significantly in hayden bridge we've invested significantly

1:02:46 in the pump stations and now we're looking at the base level reservoirs and the interconnecting transmission work um to make that um improve operations improvement resiliency within within the city limits primarily also the recovery of the watershed is important in that that source to tap an approach there and we do have a a drinking water master plan excuse me just for citing we do have a drinking water master plan that is is statutorily required every 10 years and then really the important part is that we eventually and likely within this window of time need to design and commission a second treatment plan

1:03:32 on the willamette i think the the wildfire was eye-opening for us and for our community hopefully we'll have some access to different forms of funding that may help with the design and commissioning and construction of that strategic planning is is part of what sets the stage for a number of different control mechanisms for the board um long-term financial plans capital plans all come out of there's a there's a pretty large strategic section in all those it also drives some other plans the water master plan i mentioned earlier

1:04:17 the integrated electric resource plan ultimately coming back to here's the revenue requirement here's the rates here's the operating budget for the utility and the board plays a role in in all of those through your various approvals and then there's a number of different policies that this drives and i'm not going to go read the last slide because it's a it's a an eye exam but the strategic directives uh from the board there's a whole series of those so the strategic plan actually has mechanisms to drive those decisions drive that framework into the organization and so it is really um one of the most important things that we

1:05:02 look at when it when it comes to how do we implement this across the utility how do where do we where do we want to take the utility how do we want to position it what's a priority and also what therefore is not a priority this is the eye test i'm not going to give it to you this was just put in for reference since i knew you had the presentation ahead of time just a number of different types of of implementation policies that's that's why sometimes things are not directly stated in a strategic plan there's you might say that we want to be sustainable or we might want to be environmental and then that actually rolls into various policies and various budgets and various capital and other other decisions from there

1:05:50 what i'm what we're asking for tonight really is um getting your perspectives you were given a a draft change to the plan i'd say more of an enhancement a revision had some things that were more specific in it it was actually shorter also which is probably hard to do but i wanted to get your impressions of it and open it up for discussion and questions okay well thank you very much um i'm the entertaining cue we got 31 minutes left there's five of us so do the math i want to respect everybody's time and so uh i'll open the queue and see if anybody has a burning desire to go and if not

1:06:36 i'll uh i'll call on people so i'll look for a show of hands if anybody wants to jump in the queue that's fine and if not i'll do it alphabetically john b uh do it reverse alphabetically i went first last time i like to hear what the other commissioners say first oh man uh tell me if audio is no good and i'll take off my headphones is it okay right now yeah okay um first uh frank i really appreciate the strategic plan the way you put it together brevity is fantastic and i feel like you have uh you and your team have boiled down so much of what the web is aiming for into a

1:07:22 couple of pages uh that it's really remarkable and well done so thank you and i appreciate also the broad brush that a strategic plan needs to be and i feel like you hit the mark with this there are only a couple of things that i would bring up well one i guess the same thing as uh as the last topic i feel like there may not be enough time for our conversation here um so just you know as we're thinking about strategic plan conversations it might be worth uh allocating work time next time um two things there there's a reference to um eweb's uh need to address greenhouse gas emissions and i appreciate that that's in here i would say that i think we should be

1:08:09 clear that from my perspective that eweb has an opportunity to and perhaps obligation to address community-wide obligate greenhouse gas emissions that it's not just the emissions from our electricity but it's the emissions across the community that we're looking at and we have an opportunity to address for example uh has already taken some bold steps to help increase the rate at which people adopt electric vehicles and that's outside of our you know general services of just providing electricity of water to people that want them we're trying to expand and help people get off of fossil fuels and i think we can do that in other places too and so i think addressing community-wide greenhouse gas emissions would be an important caveat to help us broaden that direction

1:08:55 and the other thing that i think could well should be added here is some measure of addressing the importance of equity especially as we look at the price of just if we want to just put it in affordability we could talk about the importance of protecting low-income customers and we already do this this isn't introducing something new but i think it's a value that we hold that should be reflected here is the importance of protecting populations who are lower income or other vulnerable populations as we make our policy decisions that's all i have thank you thank you

1:09:48 it's really having a hard time muting it's taking forever and then i click it again and then it removes sorry about that uh so i i really uh like the uh the organizational values and how that was split out a little bit differently the safe and secure and splitting that out to call out more of those cyber assets too um i like the splitting out of environmental from the uh start with an r um anyway responsible i think the responsible um line that it was in before i think that makes it a little bit cleaner is before it was like well we're responsible for financial but then also responsible for

1:10:33 you know the environment it makes it real clear that there's two sections there that we are you know trying to call out um the the workforce i'm curious where that will go but i'm interested in how that might play with you know equity diversity inclusion that kind of framework i'm very interested in how that might uh bubble to the surface there and then um i do echo some of what matt is saying around climate change although i think for me i'd like to see it in as we develop more of the plan around how we want to address the community projects i'd like to see the climate change really pulled out i think in the values section it's just fine how it's pulled out i

1:11:18 don't think we need to add any more there but i would like to see more in the projects because that's really where the rubber meets the road in in what we do as an organization and i don't see that as much in the the you know big long-term strategic projects so maybe if there's a way to pull that out more i would be interested in that but otherwise i think it's a really great plane i do note that we're starting to get longer on the values and i know when we when i first started on the board there were like six eight it's starting to creep longer and longer so it's an interesting progression i think it's the right progression but it's also interesting that's what i have thank you thank you mindy

1:12:07 all right hopefully my audio will work um so uh a couple things one i really like that you added workforce in there because i feel like that's something that um we keep hearing about periodically frank when you um kind of give us updates about the utility it's not just like workforce wellness or how people are feeling but also workforce development and how sometimes we can't recruit enough people for some of these critical jobs that we need so i think that that was really important and appreciate that you added that um in the affordability piece i know that we that is long time been a [Music] part of our strategic plan and i just want to make sure this kind of wraps it into the climate piece but part of that affordability for

1:12:53 um lower income folks who rent isn't so much that the their rates need to be affordable but also that um they have the whole um conservation piece too so right those those all go together which kind of ties into the climate piece that matt was saying and sonia touched upon two i agree with that as well as somehow bring that a little bit more to the forefront because so much of what we do um is affected by climate change or climate challenges that we have and so um instead of just mentioning it as eweb lowering our own greenhouse gas emissions i do think that somehow it needs to be a little bit more outward facing or community community

1:13:39 based i'm not using the right terminology but i think i'm getting my point across those are my only comments right now thank you john b thank you um yeah i i think it's a well-crafted plan one of my concerns is um similar to matt i think it it a little bit deeper dive is going to be required on my part to go into this because what i've seen on in other jurisdictions and other things is you give you give the organization a strategic plan and say go this direction and it sounds good on the 10 000 foot

1:14:24 level but as it comes down you know so you guys have your marching orders this is where i want you to go and we're looking at it from 10 000 feet and by the time we get to look at it again we're at a thousand feet we're like is that really where we're gonna go and then when it gets to a hundred feet it's too late for us to turn that bones and so i think it's really important that we make sure that you know these things that are in phase two if we're if we're saying yes this is our strategic plan am i really on board with phase two and am i in touch at this point enough with what the customers that i'm representing and two the the knowledge of the

1:15:09 utility to know that that's where i want to go so for me i need a little bit more input on this because i i can see this you guys taking this ball and said you guys in 2021 said take that ball and run and in 2023 when you're at the 20-yard line trying to score and the community values may have changed or whatever it's too late for us to stop so i want to make sure that we flush through this i'm i'm on board i think especially with a lot of the things that you said but i still need to get ramped up a little bit more before i could could say yes this is the these are all the goals that i want to see put forward and and that type of thing so that's where

1:15:54 i'm at thank you thank you uh great ideas i'm generally in agreement with everything that's been said to minor topics is the uh the workforce that we talked about i know that getting into the weeds but that's what i like to do is that you know that when we get into that the diversification that i saw in the last month's presentation where we had some positions been open for over a year some of the technology meter technicians and ami we had to sub it out and knowing that lcc is going to spend 35 million bucks on a high-tech facility to train local people i would hope we would coordinate too you know on a regional thing and we could we could probably help train people in our local workforce because it's skilled trades and

1:16:39 professions such as that so just a side thought there and then i'd like to know what other people think about regional water supplies because we talk about affordable housing in these areas and you look at the bedroom communities where the only developmental land exists anymore they don't they have very very constrained water supplies and we've already been through this we supply water to veneta and you think about where cottage grove and creswell gets their water and we're we're cobra and junction city and everybody else they don't have the resources nor the supply that we have and if this region wants to have an affordable building supply of housing that people can afford anybody get electricity but nobody can get a water and if we don't think about or being that regional supply we had a

1:17:24 big uphill fight for some of those that you didn't remember that before on growth issues uh when we got sued when we supplied venita with water and things but i'm just thinking throw that out there and see if other people have that thought because that's gonna take we have the capacity and but if uh if we're gonna be a supplier of water to other communities that we could serve very easily we've had to think about that because that's a huge move on our park so i don't know if other people share that sentiment but i think it's the only way we can get affordable back into the housing conversation is by by giving them that opportunity so that's what i have thank you so with that we're way ahead of schedule thank you very much everybody by other

1:18:10 comments maybe i have a question uh kind of directed at john borowski but also maybe a little bit to everybody is that um i feel like we're starting to kind of run into some resistance here and i think frank it's because you have this vision and this strategic plan that only two of the commissioners have been involved in crafting and then i've i've been with it for a little while and i i appreciate that you are having these work sessions to bring the rest of us along i think that's a really good idea but i'm concerned or my my worry is that we're not doing it in a meaningful enough way to keep us moving on because

1:18:55 i don't want us to keep getting stuck with people saying uh people needing more information so i'm just curious like i don't want to put you on the spot necessarily john borowski but i am just curious like what would it take for you to have a deep enough dive or or matt or any of us so that we can um figure out like what the plan is instead of talking about what the plan should be um well you know that's a that's a good question um like i said i'm fairly new and i think frank brought this up in the fact that that you know the commission turns up can turn over every two years

1:19:41 and so doing it in a timely manner is something that i'm very willing willing and able to do but i also want to do it in a conscientious way so that one if there's values or or things that i feel need to be added or or subtracted then i i can give a good qualitative uh view on that and and see if the other board members are in there i'm not thinking that this needs to be a year-long type of an issue but but you know these are things that could maybe be brought up in the one-on-ones and and those types of things is is what i'm thinking again i want to be as conscientious as i can being a new board member i can i can

1:20:28 only pull the new board member card for probably another month or two and so i got to use it while i can so i i might add a little bit something that that might help from from my perspective uh commissioner so part of brevity is that you you start using terms or phrases that mean something to those who know what they are but you know i'll use the statement i made earlier i think the integrated resource plan is probably one of the most important strategic things we have to do in the next couple years i i happen to have a knowledge of what i think goes into that commissioner borofsky might go oh

1:21:13 an integrated resource plan what what is that um you know how does that fit in fit in here and it's incredibly important in the sense that if i start to look at some of the comments i've heard earlier which is around the principles of renewable energy or carbon intensity and some of those an integrated resource plan sets out what your principles are in your acquisition of in this case electric generating resources so that's a that's a debate point for the board to come together and say what is the trade-off between renewables carbon intensity reliability

1:21:58 affordability of the resources we need to go pursue what's the order of those things now that's not spelled out in the plan and that's probably something that spending time with with the the commissioners on what where some of this content falls would would be helpful the thing that i struggle with a bit and i know it's it is probably when uh commissioner mcrae brought it up and i think some of you brought it up there's times when i question as a utility what is our role in the community and and there's some there is there is real tension between some of these values and i think commissioner carlson phrased it right we used to actually limit the number of values you have if you start to pull out

1:22:44 something strategically out of the values it instantly makes it more important than those and and the thing that we that i think is really important if the board doesn't feel this way that's that's okay uh we need to make sure we all understand it i believe that all of the those it's an and situation we need to be safe and reliable and affordable and environmental you know all those things are important to our customers if we start pulling out one and saying oh our rule we need to be more into this and it's a community thing does that change the balance and if it's if it doesn't it's conscious great we then then we will recognize

1:23:30 that that and let's say we just said reliability is the the top notch we're gonna we're gonna put in this strategy that we're gonna have the best reliability ever anywhere we would know that there's a price to that and so if that's a conscious decision that's great that's where i've struggled a little bit with pulling out certain things and highlighting certain things it doesn't mean that there aren't avenues and mechanisms to do that you know one of the things that our climate change policy actually states is that we will help the community decarbonize that's actually one of the five tenets of that policy so that policy is

1:24:15 is really an enforcement or an execution mechanism for the plan and maybe some of this becomes part are we comfortable with the climate change policy we have we sort of brushed over it so quickly i don't remember when it was two years two years ago it really maybe that's a key debate point for us and and so i i absolutely understand that and on the ev front as well we've we've had some internal debates what is our role in educating the public on the value of eb should should we be doing that or should we you know as a utility should we make sure that that the electricity is as clean as possible

1:25:01 it's affordable so that people want want to electrify that that we can facilitate the installation of charging stations and things like that so we we do debate quite a bit what our role is in trying to balance those things it's um and maybe it needs a little bit more work in some of in some of that area because i know it's it every single commissioner that comes comes to the plate with their own interesting ideas and priorities and and passions which is which is great but we we get we're in the business of and kind of live in the land of hand when it comes to all the things we want to do i i would say the same thing about regional water

1:25:47 it's not necessarily easy to do regional water and i think we actually have some other priorities before regional water regionalization it can be very expensive too and so when i would look at this commissioner brown i would say our first job is to make sure that we have redundancy and resiliency in our system here before we start to go out and and look and actively look for regional partners now if someone came to us then there's there could be an opportunity there that that we would want to facilitate and work with them on but i'm not i'm not hearing that from staff at the moment thank you sonny you wanted the coupe

1:26:36 okay there we go uh yeah i wanted to talk a little bit about the the diagram on slide 17. i'm curious because i think that this may be an indication for how you prioritize the different values you know you're saying and um you know we're uh yeah yeah this this over here um i'm curious how you know how it comes these different decisions and how the strategic plan ends up with staff allocation i think that's what this means is that this is a a percentage of like the time that staff are allocated to that is that what this means now this this was actually a just a representation

1:27:22 commissioner when what we would do in this is to look if if the board came back and said we want to elevate something here what we would do is we would figure out how how we're going to measure each of these five points so reliability on the electric side might be related to sadie or safety or some combination of a metric affordability might be where are we compared in our comparator group environmental might might be measured as to our metric tons of of uh impact on the community so there's this was just to represent that there

1:28:08 could be a difference between where we think we are today where the board wants to go this this was not based on real data this this was just done but we would we would figure out what those measurements or what representations those measurements could be okay i see so i mean what it what it kind of outlined to me is is how you prioritize when there are trade-offs among those issues which ones win that i mean you know roughly you know for me it was interesting that the goal on here was actually lower than where we're at for affordable i mean i i would think that that would be the the goal would be to have affordability you know higher though there is a trade-off with affordability and having

1:28:54 something a system that's safe and reliable so obviously you know we have we have safe and reliable i think that those are a higher priority because that's our that's our bread and butter i mean we have to be safe we have to be reliable because there's other implications on affordability environment and the community if we don't prioritize those two items same same on the on the environmental side i mean the more that we don't focus on that as a community as a whole to deal with climate change now obviously this is everybody in the same boat we're not going to be able to move the needle there but we we have a responsibility there to move it

1:29:39 but how does that play against you know affordability um so it was just it was interesting to me to see how there might be some some differences here i i do appreciate that the safe and the reliable are are definitely in that higher metric um i do like that maybe the goal on here would be a little bit would be further out and kind of push a little bit more on the environmental side but i do want to make sure that we still have that attention to affordability because if we price ourselves out like you were saying earlier frank with um the evs if our electricity is so expensive nobody's going to switch to it even if it's the cleanest thing you know out there they're not going to switch to it because they can't afford to

1:30:26 yeah so i think what what you've pulled out commissioner carlson is is the purpose of this kind of exercise and looking at the values associated with whatever strategy you're implementing and that's that's why to me the value is really high like how we're going to get there and i don't know that you do this organizational balance um spider chart um for as sort of a generalized statement although i i know that we we think all of these things are important but i think if you got into an integrated resource plan and you're making decisions around the resources that you would like to procure

1:31:11 going forward you might make a very conscious choice to give up affordability or environmental attributes and that that could be just a very fair choice or you could say we're going to risk a little bit on the reliability front or the capacity front or what however you would characterize that so i don't see this i'll call it the spider chart just to i don't see a spider chart being a generalized here's a spider chart for the whole organization i see this as something that when we get into an issue we might want to look at these five elements and say okay where are we now and where do we think we can you know see the tension and and make some real conscious choices

1:31:58 i think you know that's that's a it's a very fair approach to look at these things i think the plan probably calls out we recognize that all all five of these are important they're of value to us we recognize there's tension between those that in some cases one thing might become more important than the other you know even we talked about earlier we talked about risk mitigation now that's that's a safety issue but it can it also there's some diminishing return on the investments you make and so you can say we want to be the safest utility ever and your reliability might go down because your psp has seen every three weeks

1:32:43 and so you know i think i think this these are really almost topic specific but i think having the values identified is important to then build build these from so but i think you hit a great point on that it's interesting that the workforce piece i mean i can see why you left that that layer out of here but you know it does play into it and how does it play into it is is another interesting you know i know that you're kind of toying with how that how that plays with this system but it's about resource allocations about you know how you have

1:33:29 uh you know what capacity staff have um what abilities do staff have to even you know play in this spider chart and make these things a reality as well so it's interesting to have that as another called out section and how it kind of impacts the decisions that are made yeah there's some opportunity costs there as well you can't do everything for everybody at the same time um i i will just make one comment about something matt mentioned and it was there were some notes in the in the editing that and had to do with equity and i i do agree that that's missing

1:34:14 something in the affordability piece related to equity is something that we'll we'll figure out how to incorporate it it's just it is missing and i want to to acknowledge that okay thank you we're almost out of time but does anybody have a burning desire to make some closing comments or any anything else i know that we've had kind of a second round for uh both mindy and uh sonia does anybody else have anything they want to say to staff or to each other before we adjourn i'll just say one more thing it goes back to i know that commissioner

1:35:00 i know you commissioner brown i know commissioner carlson remember this when we did the first plan there was a lot of back and forth like this where you know i i would take what i thought i heard and i would go back and i would craft and have one-on-ones and other discussions and bring something back and it would be okay it would be well what there's there might be a missing issue or there might be something that we need to be more clear or elaborate on and so i will take what i've heard and try to incorporate this into the next the next draft or if there's a particular subject that comes out of this that that we can dive take a deeper dive

1:35:46 into that than we will but this this is useful for me thank you thank you and you know if we're going to close i'd just like to say something thank you very much mindy for allowing me to have the gavel i i'm sorry that you had some technical issues but i really want to say that i really appreciate it when mindy had the dialogue with john about finding out what's it take to get you into this understanding i wish we had more of that dialogue and i encourage everybody to to interact amongst the board members and things such as that because that's really good for me and i like to see us go in that direction rather than us and them it's you know us and us and them and them and us of them so we kind of mix it up a bit but i really appreciated that uh by maybe bringing that out and uh thank you very much so

1:36:31 if there's not anything else john yeah i just wanted to mention uh last week i had an opportunity to meet with staff to go over some power training and hedging conversation and it was it was really informative staff said they'd be happy to do it again with anybody else you know we went down through into the weeds on some things and it was really a very eye-opening thing and first off i want to thank the staff for for going with me and letting me geek out with them and i found that they like to geek out almost as much as i do so i would recommend that any of you guys that want to do that presentation because it was very enlightening so i wanted to thank staff

1:37:16 and and get you guys to maybe do it as well thank you any other closing comments before we head our way if not we'll look forward to everybody on a dry friday thank you very much mother nature um looking forward to that and we're going to that's a it's a great group of people you put together thank you very much that's going to be really really a good uh thing up there so looking forward to everybody at 8 30 uh he web boat landing just past the uh libra game um be there have fun be safe thank you thank you man for all the feedback appreciate it okay everybody have a good evening thank you see you friday