EWEB Board of Commissioners — June 15, 2021

0:01 i don't know if i have to officially open this meeting if not okay it's officially open we'll go ahead and do it that way this is a little bit of an unusual meeting for eweb our normal board meetings are full of actions and votes and things like that the one that we do up in mckinsey valley is a little bit more about the interaction and the questions and and talking with people within this part of our service territory and so it's a little bit different in format what we will do and i guess i'll start with an introduction of the commissioners that we do have here now vice president john brown is here commissioner john barofsky and commissioner matt mcrae the two that may wander in

0:46 at some point is our board president mindy schlossberg and also commissioner sonja carlson so they may come in at any moment if you see two people scurrying in at the last minute and sitting over here those are the two we're going to do a presentation series the the whole hope of this is to give you some ideas on some of the things that we're working on there i'll call them topical trailers or teasers they're really three minutes each uh covering everything from wildfire mitigation to customer programs watershed recovery and what's going on with some of our licenses for the the generating sites and a few other things we have five of them they're about three minutes long

1:32 the purpose of those is just to give you some ideas about things that we're working on and also to inspire some conversation and some questions and then we really we will open up the floor to customer and and stakeholder input and questions the board is here to interact and and listen and that's really our primary purpose to share information and have a discussion and so with that i will turn it over to our first presenter who is right behind me lisa i assume that's your mic frank so i'll take it i'll steal it can everyone hear me okay this work all right good evening it's nice to see so many people here we're gonna hold this

2:17 because it's probably easier it's nice to see so many people here tonight um my name is lisa krantz i'm ewebs electric generation manager and here with me tonight is mark zineker he's our generation engineering supervisor i'll be providing a brief update on the lieberg canal and our decision-making process going forward so as i'm sure all of you know the libra canal has been out of service so effectively dewatered since late 2018 following areas of increased seepage in the urban embankment over the last several years we've completed additional studies and we found areas of low strike soils that could potentially become unstable in the event of an earthquake throughout last year we completed additional risk assessment workshops to

3:03 get a better handle on the issue and identify what investments would be needed to safely return the canal to service for the purposes of power generation those results were presented to the e-web board in february of this year now based on those cost estimates all right if you are asleep you're not anymore um based on those cost estimates it's it's abundantly clear that the the investments required in terms of canal improvements will likely substantially exceed what we would expect to get back in power generation so we're currently exploring other options for the future of the canal we understand that the decision to either return the canal to service or to continue to operate it as a

3:49 stormwater conveyance which is essentially how we've been operating it since 2018 impacts more than just economics the libra canal has been a feature in the mackenzie valley for 90 years during which time a portion of the mackenzie river has been diverted through it and residences and businesses have grown up around it recognizing that we're taking a triple bottom line approach so that our eweb board can better understand the consequences of their decision what that means is we'll be looking at environmental and social issues in addition to the economic drivers we've already started that work by identifying a list of the potential environmental social and economic components of each decision so either returning the canal to service

4:34 for power generation or continuing to operate it as a stormwater conveyance that list includes a host of issues from regulatory requirements to irrigation and water rights issues fish and water quality impacts and replacement power among others so for example what is eweb able to do under our operating license from the federal energy regulatory commission along with other regulatory requirements that we're subject to now most of the things on this list will require more research to understand the impact so we intend to use the list as a roadmap of sorts to get to the place where the e-web board can make an informed decision we've already begun extensive research on regulatory requirements and water rights and we'll

5:20 present both the larger issue list and our preliminary findings on those two topics to the e-web board at our august meeting so just a couple of months from now the other thing we're doing aside from a decision-making process for the future of the canal is we're going to be doing some canal improvements likely over the next few years to ensure that the canal is able to convey stormwater in the short term so this work would be highlighted in areas where the canal might experience high flows from tributary creeks during storm events so with that mark and i are happy to take questions during the question and answer session and i also wanted to let you know that we have a couple of other information tables for you inside so after we're done with

6:05 this portion of the meeting one for our carmen smith project hydroelectric project and another for dam safety and emergency accent action plans so with that i will say thank you very much it's nice again nice to see so many people here and i will pass it on to our next speaker which is frank thank you lisa you didn't notice but they did walk in behind the scenes so commissioner uh sonia carlson and president schlossberg didn't make it through the accident so and you didn't miss a whole lot i have the pleasure this evening of talking to you about rates in particular and one of the things that we've been considering and give you a quick update on the

6:52 potential for a mckinsey valley electricity rate so as a little bit of background public utilities develop rates out of really doing two processes one is through budgets and financial measurements and forecasts they develop what's called a revenue requirement and this is really just the total amount of money that a utility needs to operate and then they use what's called a cost of service analysis to determine how those costs get divided between different customer classes like residential and commercial for example or for example between what's a basic charge and what's an energy charge and so we're in process of both

7:39 a few years ago one of the commissioners with concurrence of the rest of the board asked us to do a cost of service analysis on comparing the cost between the eugene metro area and the mckinsey valley so we over the last couple of years we did that cost of service analysis we also worked with a consultant who deals with utilities on these types of matters and it showed that the people of the mckinsey valley our customers were not covering the costs specific to this area the difference was about 14 just so you know so based on that board request but really driven by a lot of the events over the last year the board has not chosen to pursue or

8:27 look into that type of issue at this at this time although one of the things that we're doing this fall is we are doing and looking at the cost of service analysis across the entire utility for multiple years and so while the board has not chosen at this time to establish a rate for the mckenzie valley separate from a rate from eugene that will be part of the discussions that occur this fall typically what we do is really between october and december there will be at least two public hearings on the topic as well as probably an initial proposal meeting so at this time we have done an analysis it does show some cost differences but

9:12 further discussion this fall with the board on what that really means and whether there will whether they will choose to establish a mckinsey valley electricity rate that would be separate from our urban rate for the citizens of eugene and so more to come a lot more activity this fall we'll be happy to answer questions on that later if need be but i'll just pass it off at this point so talk about something that's a little more pleasant than rates which is our work in the mackenzie watershed and i'll pass that off to carl morgenstern you frank uh welcome everybody it's a pleasure to be here with you tonight and what i'd like to do is just uh talk to you about what we're doing in

9:57 the mckenzie to help uh with the watershed recovery and restoration um obviously the holiday farm fire has impacted thousands of lives up here turned people's lives upside down and i think as a as a community we've responded to uh to help build back and and support each other that's kind of the work we're doing up here uh eweb is working with our partners in the pure water uh partner program um who is the watershed council in the saltwater conservation district mckenzie river trust and others to really embark on a partnership with landowners that have been impacted by the fire to help rebuild smarter and and better and so as we've done this work

10:42 we really are are focused on trying to help those that that ask for help and want help so that maybe there's one part of your lives if they've been impacted that maybe you don't need to pay as much attention to because we're helping you collectively with that and so eweb and the pure water partners agencies and organizations that we work with the watershed council like i said in the solar conservation district respond to the fire as soon as we were able to get access to the watershed and responded with the initial million dollars that the board approved to help us with uh stabilizing ash and debris and keeping that out of the river and erosion control and then re-vegetation and so um basically what what we're able

11:28 to do as a pure water partners program is as we're working before the fire to help landowners uh restore and protect riparian forests and so we'd do riparian assessments on landowner properties and then work with them to develop a management plan so what we're able to do is just pivot and then start doing burn assessments and then help with the erosion control and designing and planting and so forth so the emergency phase emergency response phase of our watershed recovery efforts is now done we finished that in may and that included uh basically like i said stabilizing ash and debris uh doing erosion control and re-vegetation on over 300 properties and so that work and and re-vegetating about 90 acres on across 89 properties so that effort has kind of wound down

12:13 and now in may basically what happened was we received 200 000 from odf oregon department of forestry to do fuels work and so but that money has to be spent by this month so really we had to pivot and and try to use that money quickly to do uh fuels work uh to help landowners on uh 25 different properties that work is continuing and now we're kind of shifting gears now that work is winding down that we're basically in a transition phase to look at doing reassessments on landowners properties to look at a host of things that we can help with one is invasive weeds that are starting to grow and then pop up obviously everywhere we have early detection rapid response

12:58 program partnership where we can identify them we can then respond and help also continuing the fuels work um and then uh planning for re-vegetation this coming winter and then also looking at erosion issues that might hit us this coming winter that we can help with and so what we're going to be doing uh in the next couple weeks is doing outreach to the over 350 landowners that are in the pure water partners program and this includes those uh pre-fire to basically do these assessments that really look at the whole property and identify areas that we might be able to help and then write a recommendations back to the land owner and then they can figure out and work with us on what they want to work with us on moving forward and so that's kind of where we are with

13:44 that and the other piece when we we're also doing work in the flood plain on large scale and small scale um uh working mckinsey river trust in the fin rock reach to restore the fur at least the first phase of henrock reaches summer and so it's a large-scale restoration to connect the river back to the floodplain and these floodplain restoration projects basically help to get spread out the flow slow down that though the flow of the water and drops out the sediment attenuates water uh and and metals and nutrients so there it's kind of this area that you know we're looking at doing these in a number of different areas around the watershed another one is quartz creek um and so those efforts are are ongoing as far as planning and

14:29 getting ready for implementing those in the future years and the other piece is on a smaller scale is working with landowners who live in the floodplain or floodway and whose homes were destroyed who are looking to maybe not rebuild and want other options of what to do and so recognizing that we'd like to offer an option for those landowners that are thinking about that to work with us and mckenzie river trust to basically sell the property towards to conservation then we'd restore it into a floodplain uh property and so working with mckinsey river trust they've secured three uh acquisitions and in the floodway and are are currently in conversations with seven others so mckenzie and eweb because you ever trust me whoever partnering on that and basically both

15:15 are are sharing the cost of that 50 50. and so um so that that is ongoing and will continue um and then the other uh i guess piece to kind of bring it to a close is the funding side and so eweb's board uh last march i guess it was approved a surcharge on our water customers of on well on average actually the majority of them will be about three dollars a month um for the for the water average water customer and so that's going to be a surcharge that will last for five years or sunset after that and that's essentially generated about 12 million dollars that will be used in watershed restoration up here and so um that's in addition to the million that was approved for the emergency response efforts

16:00 and so that money is then uh going to be used to uh for the next five years to do some of the things we're talking about um especially flood plain efforts restoration efforts uh helping to incentivize rebuilding and help with rebuilding and nancy will talk about those those programs next and then finally you know eweb is working with our pre-water partners and uh the lane county to really seek out other state federal funding that that can leverage uh this investment that he was making and so we're working uh you know not only with fema and others but also with our with our elected representatives to identify basically we we've i have about 20 million that is in process of either promised to us or we've applied for or received

16:45 and so there's quite a bit of money that we're trying to get to help us in this effort up in the up in the watershed um so i think that's about it and i'll just obviously we'll be next door like everybody else and we have a table so if you want to have questions to stop by and talk about your situation happy to do that i'll hand it over to nancy to talk about landowner incentive programs that we've developed good evening everyone and thanks for being here tonight i wanted to briefly outline some of our incentive programs that we've set up for landowners who have been affected by the holiday farm fire the first one i wanted to talk about is our home site relocation program so in this program eweb will provide up to seven thousand dollars in grant

17:31 funding to eligible homeowners in the fire perimeter who move their building footprints away from the river both in an effort to rebuild smarter and be protective of water quality specifically property owners who move their building footprints outside of the riparian setback which is typically 50 feet for residences or out of the floodplain area will be eligible for two thousand dollars in advance of construction once the land use and building permits have been issued by lane county and additionally eweb will offer grant funding for landowners who incur out-of-pocket expenses to relocate their home site and this will be done on a 50 percent reimbursement basis for these expenses not to exceed five

18:16 thousand dollars and this type of expense could include things like moving septic drain field lines or altering your well infrastructure in order to accommodate for the new location of the building footprint and landowners who are not able to move their building footprint or it's already outside of the riparian setback are still eligible for grant funding to install advanced septic systems that are more protective of water quality another program we have is the septic system zero interest loan program so we offer these zero interest loans up to twenty thousand dollars for homeowners who need to replace or make major repairs to their septic systems and we do still have our 250 dollar

19:02 rebate program that's designed for regular septic system maintenance every uh three years or so and then finally we have our undergrounding of electric service lines so eweb has been willing to invest in underground service lines wherever it's practical for customers rebuilding within the fire perimeter who require substantial repair or full replacement of their service lines so those are the three eweb incentive programs and more information can be found on our website at eweb.org hff-resources or you can always email us at watershedrecovery eweb.org i wanted to talk about two other things briefly carl mentioned our pure water

19:47 partners program earlier and we still have our nature scaping pathway and this encourages and provides recommendations for the use of native plants in riparian areas particularly between homes and the river to protect water quality and reduce erosion concerns and also provide things like wildlife habitat and right now over the summer we're working with the u of o landscape architecture department to develop a guide that incorporates these nature scaping practices with firewise landscaping practices and that will be available likely in the fall so that will be a resource that we can hand out to landowners and we'll likely have a nature scaping firewise type workshop in the fall as well to give folks suggestions as you're rebuilding

20:34 properties and then finally i wanted to talk about a newer initiative for mackenzie firewise communities so the pure water partners program oregon department of forestry mckenzie fire and upper mckenzie fire are working to develop firewise communities in the watershed and so this program is a voluntary program developed by the national fire prevention association to essentially encourage communities to work together to become more fire resilient and we're currently looking for landowners to either serve on the board or to just participate in the program and it doesn't require a huge commitment it actually only requires one hour of time per year to do some type of firewise

21:20 related work on your property so that could be clearing out your gutters or removing invasive vegetation or cleaning up fuels or things like that and usually with these firewise communities there will be like an educational event or a workshop or something like that once per year so it's not a huge commitment but you can learn a lot and get to know your community and also look for vulnerabilities in your community and the oregon department of forestry serves as kind of an advisor to this group so if you're interested again we would love to have you get involved and we have information about all these programs at our table in the other building that you can visit after these presentations so thanks for your time i appreciate it and i will now

22:05 turn it over to tyler nice to talk about wildfire mitigation measures hello my name is tyler nice i'm the electric division manager at eweb and uh really just tonight i want to talk to you about the the uh what what e-web's doing in regards to wildfire mitigation as it relates to the power system wildfire seasons here so i know some some noises here uh wildfire season is is here and upon us and wildfires are top of mind i know for everyone here in the community and in this room but also e-web staff this year uh what i want to talk to you tonight a little bit about is is the things we're doing uh right now as part of our normal procedures that limit the risk of

22:50 wildfire also want to discuss with you the things that we've already put in place that are very specific to wildfire mitigation and then what we're planning through this year and beyond on our full wildfire mitigation plan so starting back on the right now you know the main risk of wildfire associated with power lines is contacted trees we have a very robust tree management vegetation management program and we do have some folks here from the our foresters that can answer all your questions and they have some materials and how to reach them and everything we trim about 300 miles a year nine miles a year in our system and that's a ongoing basis that we wrap around the system kind of like cleaning the or painting the golden gate bridge that

23:35 we chop up over the course of time and that that that basically pulls the trees away from the lines the second thing we do and there are compliance requirements associated with that other thing we do is inspections and maintenance on the equipment itself so that could be looking at rotten poles rotten cross arms or or equipment because that's the other big risk of of fire in power lines is equipment failure so we inspect those and that's an annual piece of work as well the other thing that that's worth mentioning in our normal processes is how we respond to events so when there's an emergency situation associated with one any of our equipment a lot of times we'll get a report when you might not hear about is like a car hit a pole and and we'll de-energize that through

24:21 dispatch when alerted by partner agency or an outage report and and that's the same with wildfire right now and and part of our normal procedure if if there's a risk out there that we know about and that we're told for like i said reports would that that's another method to limit it now looking at what we've done this year and what we've done recently and going forward that are wildfire specific one is what we do in a red flag event so when red flag events come that triggers us to make changes in our our system such that it trips off quicker more sensitive and and it also requires us to do some additional patrol before we turn it on one of the things as a step is calling our 911 supervisory number to to ensure there's no active events or

25:07 access issues in the area when we when we do that we'll then patrol the line and our techs will get a visual uh safety check basically and then we'll only re-energize when it's safe to do so it's worth noting in that that when we have those red flag events that means that the lines since they're more sensitive might trip off more often than we're used to in a in a wind event or or when those triggers happen and then it may take us a little bit longer to patrol incrementally so i hope you'd understand that uh the other part is back to the tree management the the tree trimming we we do additional focused uh trimming on what we call our high fire risk circuits and that's about 250 additional miles per year we do that on an annual basis that

25:52 includes all of upriver the transmission distribution also some circuits in south eugene mainly that we've identified and that that we completed that plan uh last month a little bit ago and uh and we'll do that annually as well now on to the things that that we'll be doing you know throughout this year is we we are going to be we are in the process of creating a distinct wildfire management plan and that's a requirement with the state as well that will get adopted by the board and submitted and that that encompasses some more aspects of looking at things like construction standards that are a little more long-term more possibly more monitoring will be one of the things we evaluate that could be weather stations or other other methods in risk areas the other

26:38 one is what we do during red flags that might trigger some other tools in our tool bag as far as how we treat the system how we respond and also some of the vegetation pieces as well will be evaluated so that'll be ongoing through the year and as we improve things and enhance the system we will you know be communicating that out because that is a big component of this is our communication plan that our communication folks have put together and so as we're going through this year you may see you know educational things on on any of our communication avenues also uh directing you to the right resources for weather events and also for uh resources in there and so as we go through the year look out for that we'll also be you know as as we get done with that

27:23 plan communicating out the changes so really appreciate the time tonight and the interest but with that i'll hand it over to frank for the next portion thank you tyler i would like to take a moment to thank mackenzie fire and rescue and specifically chief darren thanks for your your flexibility we didn't know what the covid situation was going to be or the weather situation and so we had some contingency plans thanks to you i guess you're into planning yeah thank you i would like to also offer the board an opportunity to make a few comments before we get to questions and answers and so if you'd like to offer any color commentary

28:08 i will hi everybody um first of all i just want to apologize for being late there was an accident on the freeway um so that's why we're here a little bit late um i just want to thank the staff for all your presentations and also for everybody for coming out tonight i know that some of you are our customers and some of you are probably you just live in the area and you're impacted by ewebs reach that we have out here so i appreciate everybody showing up and i look forward to hearing the question and answers and i'm going to offer if any of the other commissioners want to say anything

28:58 well thank you um my name's john brown and i've been around for a little while and i really want to thank everybody for coming out this evening i know that you don't get to vote for us and maybe that's good for us it may be good for you i don't know but i do want to remind you that every one of us can take a phone call or an email and mindy is our she we all have two awards in eugene there's eight wards but for city council awards but she's kind of the area rep for everything and i was in that position before so all of us are open for questions comments or criticism or whatever if you have something you want to communicate to us please do because even though you don't get to vote for us we listen and that's why we're here and so if you have issues or if you have questions comments compliments or anything else don't hesitate don't be shy tell us what you think

29:43 because we can only do what we hear and so we have to be able to communicate with you so thank you very much for attending and please if you have something you need to say or you want to say do it because we're open to listening thank you thank you i'm john i'm john borowski i'm one of the newer commissioners uh thanks for coming out tonight we really do value all of our customers whether we you can vote for us or not like john said and i think all of us have a really strong feeling for the mackenzie valley and everything that that you guys offer up here and the things that we offer to you as well so we hope to continue on with the partnership that's been going on for over 90 years

30:31 hello my name is matt mcrae i'm new to the board this year as of january and just likewise want to say thanks for carving out the time to be here and thanks to chief busage and your team for hosting us hi and i'm this is really awkward um sorry i'm a big proponent of vaccines but i have a family member who can't get vaccinated so i wear this in solidarity with him so sonia carlson i'm eweb commissioner i've been on the board for four years in my second term thank you very very much for having us out here tonight and i can't i have to pause and recognize that the people up here the mackenzie fire group helped save so many lives and and protect so many homes up here

31:18 over this last fall i just can't help but but think about that and recognize and say thank you very much for everything that you do every day to protect us and opening up your doors to helping you know helping us come up here and and work with you to help restore the area here everything that you do every day just thank you very much for everything that you've done so thank you so if you really have a passionate complaint the address is commissioners at eweb.org just so you know we would like to open up the floor now for public comments and questions we did have somebody in the queue who had a young child and they needed to go and

32:03 i think that's anna so is the process joe to have them step up to the microphone and while she's coming up you can direct i mean the commissioners are here to listen and comment as necessary please feel free to comment or or question us on any subject we gave you a little bit of an overview from wildfires to canals to pricing um but feel free to comment on anything of your choosing thank you anna i think you've got the floor my name is anna and we are the recipients of the eweb house that has to be moved um that's my beloved husband and my

32:48 super glorious child about to be seven we lost our home in the fire and both our businesses my husband is an artist and and all his paintings burned everything was lost and my i make women's clothing and my studio was in blue river and that is also lost all the patterns all fabric everything so uh the ability to get this home and move it to our property is an incredible boom for us um because we thought that we would gonna have to live in a bus for three years while we slowly cobbled together something so that's pretty much all i have to say thank you for allowing us to move forward so much

33:33 quicker and have a normal life so much faster thank you just just to give you a little background and go ahead and come on up just um eweb bought some property um that was subject to some some threats because of of its its nearity to one of the canals that we were having some issues with and so we actually bought the property we didn't necessarily need the house so we donated the house and through a number of different organizations it looks like it went to a good cause so we were happy to do that go ahead yeah go ahead and come on up okay so the the national weather sorry tyler i'm taking

34:42 so there were two questions that she she asked there the first one is what is a red flag event and the other one is why didn't we turn off power given the that there was warning of winds the the first answer is a red flag event is issued or red flag warning is issued by the national weather service and it usually occurs when a forecast says that there's very low humidity very hot temperatures and very dry or very high winds and so that combination will drive the national weather service to issue red flag warnings and they're usually very specific to certain areas so they're locational as well as far as turning off power some utilities do have programs for what

35:28 are called preventative shut-offs others do not in the case that you're referring to i believe at blue river we did have our lines that they were de-energized at the time that the fire broke out that was actually a result of our safety equipment and they operated like they should have at the time and so um that occurred at i think about 5 30 in the evening and reports from from reports that we heard the fire uh was allegedly started about eight o'clock in the evening so in that particular area and then there were a few other areas around the mackenzie valley and in the south hills of eugene where we did have lines de-energized because of how we have the safety

36:14 equipment set up so in that particular location at that time the e-web lines were de-energized there were yes so her question i'm just repeating so everybody can hear there was another power up company up in that area there's actually three different utilities that have equipment in this area bonneville power administration is one they have transmission lines eweb is another and lane electric cooperative is the third and there are different territories and different equipment in in that area at the time so i'm assuming you're asking because you're curious about the fire and the investigation associated with the fire

37:04 so um i will tell you that when it comes to the fire investigation we are still cooperating the the investigation is being done by the federal government so it's the department of forestry in combination with the um us attorney's office and the department of justice we are cooperating they have not issued a cause report yet and so um until we get that cause report we won't have uh further details on the specific cause as determined by the report so until that comes out we continue to cooperate it's we're getting regular requests for certain information and certain data which we've continued to cooperate as as i'm assuming the other utilities are as well

37:53 no an earthquake isn't it's not a red flag event we'd be open to other comments or questions as well how far up does eweb provide power understanding the holiday inn fire is under control of lane electorate am i wrong yeah the we supplied distribution power you know home homes and residences

38:39 up to just before ben and kay doris park their thompson lane and that's where our service territory ends we have transmission lines that go all the way up to the carmen power plant but as far as past that that point we don't supply power to residences up there then why is zebra being sued what was the question why is eweb getting sued then so so what what happens in a lot of these cases and it happened in california with pacific gas electric it happened with pacific corps it's happening with eweb is almost immediately after the fire we were notified by the federal government that

39:24 they were going to investigate the cause which is understandable immediately after that we probably got 70 or more different tort claims notices that we were going to be sued these were by attorneys everywhere from san diego to chicago and so um i think because of the situation and the fact that uh wildfires and utilities are vulnerable to suits um you get you get lawsuits and so um presently we know of of at least one that is a suit of both eweb and lane electric and so that's that's an active suit that has been filed okay second thing how come e-web so involved with lane or with the

40:09 mackenzie trust you're supposed to be a power provider it sounds to me like you do a lot of side projects involved with this mckenzie trust so eweb has a long history in the mckinsey valley and only part of that is electric we have generation facilities and our main interest in working with mckinsey river trust which i'm assuming that the group that you referenced is because of our interest in the mckenzie river from a water quality perspective the mckenzie river is the and our only drinking water source for the citizens of eugene and so we

40:54 continue to think it's important to invest in water quality and the watershed so we partner with people like pure water partners mckenzie river trust a number of other groups that care about water quality in the mckenzie valley and so it's a combination of one we have a presence here because of our generation sites and our electric supply but also we're very interested in maintaining water quality for the the people of eugene that we serve as we all are there's no question it just seems to me you're uh you're involved in a lot more than just generation instead of focusing on the generation my personal opinion okay and finally how many

41:40 commissioners are from this area thank you so god okay i'm just gonna stand back here uh yeah the way that it works for city voting for the eweb races we actually have to be in one of the wards the city of eugene wards so like i represent ward six and seven um mindy is the at-large commissioner which represents the entire area but we don't we can't live up here because you actually have to live in one of the wards and that was how the the charter was set up initially so if we want to run for office we have to live in one of those wards i did want to note too that a lot of the commissioners

42:26 we actually ask for the staff to partner with a number of other organizations so that we can get more bang for our buck right we want to make sure that we're spending the dollars wisely and you can go a lot further if you don't go alone so working with the other organizations like the mckinsey river trust and others that were listed this evening they can actually do a lot more and benefit the community more if they work with these other organizations so we actually look for that when they come and ask us for funding hey did you try to get this done with others so that's part of the reason that you know they do work with others my name is richard tracy i live about three blocks up the river here i got a couple questions when the water was drained from the

43:12 canal or shortly before about that time there was something built down here about a mile what is that it's ewebs something i don't know what it is holden creek substation on the on the north side of the highway yeah yeah so that was the substation tyler could talk a little bit more about the intent of that substation if you're in operation yes it's currently in operation uh it it basically is an intersection point on the line from thurston substation down in springfield up to the carmen facility and so right there is where we tapped into the bpa line so it doesn't have anything to do with this power plant the the power from the power plant if it should generate again

43:58 will go into that yes and then the feeders that that supply the power uh for this upriver feeder comes out of that as well so if you don't use this power plant anymore you still use that still use that yeah and it's doing its job per se right now my other question is about water rights um since the canal is drained i don't have irrigation for my crops whatever and i haven't since it's been drained prior to it being drained i and others used to get our water from the water rights off the bottom of the canal four or five years ago e-web decided they wanted to give us our water off the top of the canal now the canal is down there's still about six seven feet of water in it

44:44 but i don't have any water anymore is is it being considered to give us water off the bottom of the canal even if it's just a storm drainage i'm talking about johnson crate drainage i don't know about the others yeah so um there are uh a total of i think about 25 um different properties that were relying on the libra canal for water prior to our outage and very few of them are set up to be able to continue to draw water with a low canal level whether it's because of the elevation of the inlet as as you're

45:30 describing that the change that was made about 10 years ago lowering the inlet to your water supply that's a situation that i would say about 90 percent of the water users along the canal are challenged by currently and when uh lisa was talking about the you know triple bottom line evaluation that's underway those are the types of considerations that are you know elevating where the the impact to property owners who have historically relied on the canal as the source of their water is one of the significant impacts um that have

46:16 occurred and so whether eweb returns to generation or not those irrigation considerations could factor into future canal modifications because you're actually correct uh mr tracy that the um stormwater conveyance that the canal would continue to provide may still allow provide a source for irrigators like yourself but there would be some investments that need to be made as you have uh acknowledged in order to make that feasible so that's some of the factors that we're um taking into consideration as we're looking at these future

47:01 paths forward whether it's a return to service or stormwater conveyance well all i know is if i stand on the canal and i look where the water feeds to my property there's still six to eight feet of water in the bottom and that drain was right in the bottom it's still there it's plugged up right so there was always been water over the top of that drain i understood that eweb changed it around because it kept plugging up with debris and and that's a lot of manpower man hours to get out there and unplug it and there was some concern about erosion too yeah there was a combination of factors it's interesting that we made that change um for maintenance and for dam safety reasons um to to make it a safer water

47:48 withdrawal and and you're correct in this uh drawn down water state it is now impossible to gravity flow water out of the canal any longer not where i am because i could i can see there's six feet of water and i'm way lower than where the bottom of the canal is right without a canal modification you're correct yep that's it is a frustrating situation yeah i was wondering where does this canal end doesn't it end at a partridge and then it continues on i heard something about the canal still

48:33 ran through cartridges yeah there's there's two canals up here there's the libra canal that's the one that's currently out of service um the one that you're referring to at partridge lane that's the intake or near the intake to the walterville canal so there's two separate canals that run parallel to the mackenzie river and two powerhouses the one that's out of service right now is leeburg oh yeah libra canal terminates right down here at the power plant libra canal the one that's out of service uh terminates right down here at the at the liebert power plant just down the highway from us and then there's i don't know five six miles in between until the waterville canal intake starts

49:28 the other thing that might be confusing for you right now is the walterville canal is currently drawn down for annual maintenance outage that occurs every june for two to three weeks and so those of you who might have been driving up river you would see two canals without water in them one of them usually has water that's the walterville canal that's the one i guess for lisa on the canal here um you know does the web consider the fish hatchery or do they consider the power source down here and also the water the irrigation for the farmers i mean this is filtering the

50:13 water right into a clean river that's what keeps your river clean and you know i grew up here i went to leeburg they used to have tours up here the salmon coming up that and everything else that's an endangered species you know we've we need to fix that canal and get it going again and use it for overflow whatever because just like when you got storms that rivers erode in the banks and you got nowhere to deal with it right there so i just wonder if you guys realize that what's going on when i get through here i'm going to go help sort salmon at the at the dam this

50:59 evening but if i were king yeah it takes 70 cfs in the canal just to run because the salmon hatchery for the ladder there's no water coming down the ladder the fish are coming back and they don't know where to go so they're going up to the dam it's a mess but the big federal government tells us we can't do anything in that canal we can't even put enough water for the salmon hatchery and the fish that are coming into the salmon hatchery are not native they're hatchery fish and so the passion isn't there for that i get it i get the everything else but we they can't let us put any water in that canal until we address the integrity of the canal walls and the federal government controls us on this ferc yeah army corps of engineers are supposed to run it and

51:48 they're they're supposed to provide it i mean the same thing i get that and uh at least is really good at this she knows that so lisa go ahead yeah i'll give you just a little bit of background on the um the mckenzie river hatchery so the salmon hatchery that has historically pulled water off of the lieber canal we understand the situation that they've been in for the last many years and it has been obviously very problematic i did want to note that we have worked very closely with the hatchery to see what if any feasible options we might have to to get them any additional water unfortunately given uh what we've been ordered to do by the federal energy regulatory commission and the the elevation that we're required to keep the canal we're there's next to nothing that we can do for the hatchery to

52:33 pull water from the intake that they currently have off of the lieber canal one of the things that i do want to note is that the mc the mckenzie hatchery does they do have a water right and it's for the mckenzie river and we have through a cooperative agreement allowed them to take water their mackenzie river water right out of the leeburg canal as we've done for for lots of folks the slight difference with the hatchery and i hope this is okay to say is but we we've been we have recognized um that the hatcheries reliance on the canal as their primary and only source of water was a big risk and so we've been um i think the most the longest the history was maybe in 1992 we started talking with them about

53:19 the risk to their hatchery for that and unfortunately unfortunately it's uh it's problematic for um and very expensive for them to get an alternate water source so they never did go through that the hatchery is operated it's funded by the corps of engineers and operated by the state um so point being we understand the situation that they're in and i understand that it's it's very frustrating but we have been i mean we talk with them near constantly around what their situation is and if there's any feasible options that we can do to provide them with water

54:24 hey i i can uh i can only i can speak for what we've done at a staff level i i can tell you most of our work with the federal government um is not related to specifically lobbying for a a fish facility most of it has been working with the federal energy regulatory commission to try to find ways to have some flexibility to get the canal back in service and understanding what those conditions are and and staff has been working with them regularly it we we have to ask for permission to do anything on on the canal and it goes through a pretty arduous process but we are not lobbying presently

55:10 for funds for that purpose we are lobbying in general i'll say for funds having to do with infrastructure there's been a lot of talk lately about infrastructure funds those have to do with resiliency they have to do with electricity and water systems and we have been lobbying both at the state level and the federal level for funds for those types of purposes also recognizing that infrastructure takes lots of forms that would also potentially include things like hatcheries and other things so it's been a little bit generic but we have lobbied for infrastructure funds in general but not specific for that purpose

56:25 yeah absolutely i'm good i would just say we we agree absolutely that infrastructure is incredibly important to us the the water side when i say water side so when you refer to waterside we we think about water from a drinking water perspective a mckinsey perspective and also from a water management perspective for generations so and and to be to be honest what ties this whole community together and eweb's presence here is water i mean that's that's where it begins it goes back to 1911 i think it when we first and i think we built one of the plants up here in 1912 or 13 i don't remember that myself but um it's been it's been part of our presence so we do consider water and infrastructure incredibly important to what we're doing

57:24 yeah yeah the the canal was constructed in 1928 yeah the the board has a couple of things to contemplate uh relative to that relative to the canal some of those are near term and some of them are longer term uh the license we have to operate both walterville and lieberg expires in 2040 so we're about halfway through that license that we got in the early 2000s in the near term there's a number of investment decisions that staff has to bring to the board around the degree to which we return that that canal to full production or whether

58:11 it's just for water management there's a little bit different of difference in cost between those two as well as what kind of return on investment we would get for the power that it produces and so if you're going to invest an extra amount of money you have to make sure that the that the power can can return that that part of the investment what complicates that is there are certain requirements under our federal license that we are evaluating presently and we're going to bring this information to the board in august both related to water rights and also related to our our ferc license there's a number of legal obligations we have under that and we don't know if we can actually say oh we're not interested in producing power going forward so these are things we have to investigate

58:57 and then we'll bring some some some requests to the board and and seek the board's feedback on some of these issues like you're you're bringing up and others are bringing up and then in the longer term it probably won't be this bored but probably in the late 2020s then a board will have to decide whether they're going to pursue a re-licensing of the two sites that of course occurs in 2040 but the last license took us 16 years to get three days two months six hours um so in about 2030 uh an e-web board will have to decide do we re-license the facility or potentially do we decommission it and return it to its natural state

59:43 and that's another option potentially so are you talking about the end of the license so well right now the we're working with ferc there will be requirements to make it safe for water management so this is to manage side streams that's at a minimum and they they may require other things relative to power production in the long term typically it takes it takes a decade or longer to decommission a a site uh generation site like we'd be talking about in 2040 or beyond it takes a long time

1:00:29 there they don't tend to be in a hurry so you asked specifically as a board or what are we considering i can't speak for the board but i can speak for myself and say that i feel very strongly about this issue and and trying to make sure that the this canal can keep doing what it's been doing for the last 100 years whether that will be possible or not i don't know at this point because we have to get more information but i can just speak for myself that i know the impact that the water the power the fish all of it has not only on this community but the whole regional community as a

1:01:15 whole so just know for myself personally i do take it very seriously and i will consider all options and and try and do it as best i my name's eric clark and i'm a new resident on greenwood avenue as of last year with my wife and children we love it here and i just wanted to make two comments on the lieber canal one on the social aspect and another on the economic on the social side i'm hoping that the

1:02:01 staff will consider the use of the canal path as a running recreational park-like space and continue to provide sort of end-to-end traversal from the power plant to the dam my children in particular run that path regularly we see many other residents making good use of the canal side path and so it's i would suggest ask request that that be considered in evaluation of plans for the canal and then the second economically and we you mentioned the possibility of having to decommission one of the things i would uh again suggest to ask recommend is considering and estimating those decommissioning costs when making the

1:02:47 economic decision about the future of the canal it would be very unfortunate to make a decision without those costs being estimated or modeled to turn the canal into a storm water runoff and then find out the dam has to be removed because you have to restore it to a natural state and suddenly the costs of that make the cost of restoring the dam restoring the canal service look reasonable and so i you know it's obviously up to you to make those estimates but i'd ask that you keep in mind that decommissioning the canal will likely lead to follow-on costs to decommission the dam and that those costs may be substantially higher than the cost of restoring the canal service thank you

1:03:42 the city pays like 14 more than we pay up here right did i understand that what i can't hear you either it costs well no it cost us more to service the people up here than it does the people in youtube yeah but we give you all the water the power anyway it's coming from up here yes and then also um about the canal and seeing all that i went and looked at it i got killed no but you know you it's stagnant water that causes insects and everything you know it's kind of

1:04:28 disgusting i don't know what do you do with your stagnant water i mean some people do live right next to one you know i don't know doesn't that cause mosquitoes um make a comment and i don't know mark if you had anything you wanted to add um we recognize that's an issue i mean there's been flowing water in that canal for nearly 90 years up until the last few years right so it is a big change um and we recognize that there have been significant impacts to the local community who live up here unfortunately given uh what we're required to do under um our our license from the federal energy regulatory commission we we don't have options for say flushing the canal or doing that sort of thing to kind of try to

1:05:13 to scour it out we can't raise the water elevation in there at this point because of the concerns over the canal embankment and the safety um issues related to that so recognize that it that it is um it's different up here the last few years than it has been and there are there is stagnant water in the canal and um i do have a lot of compassion for all of you who live on the canal and have experienced that and unfortunately we're we're pretty limited in our options in the short term on how to address that anything you want to add yeah i was just gonna um add that in response to those observations that we've had from neighbors um our water quality staff are um starting to monitor the canal

1:06:01 for the presence of any any water quality hazards and so that's something we want to understand better so that we can take that into account in terms of how we ultimately end up managing the canal whether it's in the storm water conveyance for a long period of time we need to understand those impacts so definitely appreciate the information and then just one comment to your comments around decommissioning you're right decommissioning scenarios can range um i mean all across the board and we we recognize that there's a there's a pretty extensive process to go through for decommissioning and it involves partnering with other regulatory agencies and stakeholders so um we can make some guesses as to

1:06:47 what decommissioning might look like but until you actually go through the that negotiation process if you will um we don't have certainty over that so but you but you're right they can they can range far and wide and that can change the the economics of the equation hi i'm dana burwan i'm a lifelong resident of mckenzie valley here i have a commercial blueberry farm that the canal intersex goes right through the middle of i first want to thank um a lot of people here for coming out especially the board for bringing the meetings out here and frank um i really appreciate that it makes a big difference um i also want to give kudos to mark he worked with the local commercial farmers here and made sure we got water we got water

1:07:34 about two weeks before the plants all died so we made it just in time so he did mark did above and beyond getting the ferc license amended for us also i work with the fire department and carl and has done a wonderful job on doing the cleanup and working with the watershed councils and the mackenzie river trust to make that happen so i want to thank you for that and the questions i have um are about number one the canal obviously back in i think it was january the staff gave a board report a report to the board about the cost of

1:08:20 decommissioning versus keeping it or rebuilding it and making it whole again and at the time we didn't get a lot of information about what all those numbers were we just got the numbers but in the cost analysis uh i know there had to be analysis of the price per megawatt in there and i'd like to ask the staff at what price per megawatt does it become feasible to open that canal back up and run it we know that we're not producing a lot more power plants and electric cars are going to eat up a lot more so i think in the future we're going to see the cost analysis swing more towards

1:09:05 opening it back up hopefully but without knowing the actual numbers and how you're getting those numbers we can't really make that decision so we'd like to see that if we could if there's a place on a website that we could look at those and how the staff made those recommendations that would be great the other second part of that is the 14 increase for the local residents we'd really like to see how that the numbers got figured into that and are is the local residents being charged for the maintenance of the canals and the maintenance of the people up here or is that spread among the whole department as a whole the city of eugene

1:09:50 does it cost that eweb pays the city of eugene i know several million dollars a year is that only for the eugene residents that benefit from that or is that spread to us also can any of the staff answer that when you made the analysis frank would have to take the question on the cost of i'll just test okay good um so you asked a couple of questions the first one i thought had to do with the economic analysis of the canal did you want any feedback on that one or did you yeah if you know there's got to be a breakover point where it because it becomes economically feasible to to

1:10:36 restart the canal and fix it right that's probably tied to a cost of megawatt price power obviously if it goes up to two or three hundred dollars a megawatt i'm sure you'd probably open that back up again sure sure absolutely so where does that break over start so there were um the analysis that we did was in in two different levels the first level was to just do the minimum required that we had to do to make the canal safe for water management that's storm runoff managing side streams and that which means we didn't have to do the entire canal only those locations that were appropriate for water management and and some of our initial estimates were ranging from 20 million to 35 million

1:11:21 dollars to do that just for water management if we wanted to actually generate electricity we would have to extend those repairs further along the canal we would basically have to rebuild the entire canal that's probably another 20 to 35 million so it's probably doubling doubling that from our initial estimates so we're looking at i'll just round that to a 30 million dollar cost and then you have to go how long does it take you to recover that in megawatt hours sold or kilowatt hours sold even using some some pretty aggressive favorable forecasts the return on that was somewhere in the 12 million dollar range and so we would have to see

1:12:08 prices that would quadruple probably in order to recover the investment just on the power piece of that right now um our melded cost is around four cents a kilowatt so it would have to be you'd have to see market prices in the probably 16 or 20 per megawatt so you can imagine if if we're seeing those kinds of prices in the market you can also imagine what is going to do to the rest of the pressure on our pricing so um the the return on that um is going to be a challenge for us honestly you know we'll have to work with the board uh when we get more information specifically on where those costs land

1:12:54 and can there's a number of things changing in the power markets carbon pricing this is a carbon free resource which should have more value to it it is run of the river and not dispatchable it just runs all the time which doesn't make it quite as valuable as if we could turn it on and off frequently so all those will be considered but we'd probably at least need to see a three to four times increase in the in the cost on the market okay and the second part of the question was a 14 increase what's included in that what is being charged for the residents up here that is not being charged to the residents in town and vice versa sure so um in general things like uh generation so when we talk about

1:13:39 canal costs and we talk about water management those kinds of things anything that that has to do with producing electricity is spread across the entire customer base there's there's no division and that typically comes out in an energy charge and that's the same whether you're in town up river or or anywhere else or we started to see some of the differences in cost it's it's probably understandable one of those was the makeup of the environment out here is more woodsy more tree-like so you saw a higher allocation for tree trimming costs for example and then transportation and inventory costs every time we make a service call up into this area it adds 30 to 60 miles round trip

1:14:24 and so there were or you could store inventory out here which drives that cost so those were probably the major differences all of the the administrative costs all of the sort of standard costs for power production were were spread across the entire customer base so um and and that to the point earlier what it led to was um those costs that we could contribute and there's there's hundreds of accounts that we capture these costs in so it's pretty complicated but um when you go through that the cost recovery for this was was 14 under under what it should so um that that was the end result and how we address that or if we address

1:15:09 that as coming later the money you pay the city of eugene for police and fire and right away is that spread throughout the whole thing or is that just to the eugene residents so the we we pay what's called a contribution in lieu of taxes that's that's a flat charge it's a charge it's not a flat chart it's a charge that we pay the city of eugene it is based on consumption and it is spread across our entire customer base that's the way that they allocate their cost and so we have to allocate that the same way the only exception to that is there's a a fixed charge that we we pay the city of eugene for our wholesale business that we sell outside of of the territory to other utilities but that cost is

1:15:56 peanut buttered across our entire customer base because that's how the cost is presented to us the city of eugene does not distinguish is what i'm saying okay well mr larson thank you for coming out and bringing your your board out i really want to thank carl and nancy for the fine work they've been doing up here and also mark for really working with the commercial farmers up here to make us stay whole so and thanks to john brown arrested board for really working with the river thank you thank you i did want to make sure that we clarified that the the cosa is an analysis it's a cost of service analysis so it is a look at how much it costs to

1:16:43 provide the services but only the services that you receive up here not not other services that you don't receive so when you mention that you know we don't provide water up here we don't that's not part of the cost of service analysis because it's not a service we provide to you up here so i just wanted to make sure that that was clear also it's not something that we've actually voted to support yet last year the the board looked at the cost of service analysis analysis analysis it was brought before the board and we decided to vote against implementing it against implementing a price increase at that point so it's something that we're looking at how much it costs to service and not just in this area but in other areas too there's there's higher costs to to service other areas within the eugene

1:17:30 area and we've talked about what it looks like in eugene upriver in other areas there's a different rate that for the water that we provide to veneta and the water that we provide to the river road area and the services that we provide to those areas so it part of the process is to look at across the board the different regions that we service as a utility to make sure that every region is get is is paying their fair share now again last year the board looked at that um it was the first time that we looked at this region and we said you know we're not we're not going to do that right now we're not going to change the rates so it's something that we're continuing to look at it's not something that we have implemented already so i just wanted to make sure that that was clear to you all thank you

1:18:21 good evening my name is tom hoyt i have the privilege of serving as the president of the mckinsey river discovery center tonight we have two of our board members here ken engelman and steve maylie we are partners on the mckinsey river and i want to share with you one of the uh facts that came out of this fire we all we possess for the next 99 years 46 acres and four six historical buildings at the old mackenzie fish hatchery site and our plans are to build a world-class interpretive center there to date we've raised over two million dollars for that purpose when the fire came through

1:19:07 it severely burned most of our forest including the water pipes that brought water from hatchery creek down into the old pond that is behind the buildings now that hatchery was decommissioned in 1957 it was built in the 1920s at that time over a hundred years ago electricity was generated by a water wheel that we have a replica of it there now you can see it we just got a grant from the oregon department of fish and wildlife to restore the water supply

1:19:53 from hatchery creek down to the pond and to clean out the pond and put in fishing platforms so within a year we will have families fly fishing and fishing in our pond catching hatchery trout but that pond will be watered by a new water line that will be paid by this grant and we have elected to put in a third water line is right down the middle which we hope in the future will be the water supply for the water wheel demonstrating how we used to generate electricity here a hundred years ago so we want you to know that we're partners and we really look forward to working with you thank you

1:20:47 well good evening i'm will rutherford and uh i live up up the river here just a ways i attend most of the commissioner's meetings in fact john brown's the only surviving commissioner or general manager or many of the staff that i've been working are watching and working with and we started with our mackenzie clearwater coalition back in 2010 it was a matter of trust community trust and what eweb was doing and i got to say eweb has reclaimed a lot of that trust and i thank you for bringing the meeting here tonight i thank you for putting the brochure

1:21:33 together to let us know what all is going on in our valley that you are concerned with and uh and i thank you for um the presentations that you've made uh as you know because several of you have heard me voice it i have a problem with the cost of service analysis i'm relieved to know if i understand correctly that that probably will not materialize in any rate structure change for 2022 is that correct so will uh i think just make sure everybody understood the question you

1:22:18 were asking about whether the cost of service analysis material lies for 2022 we we have a number of different pricing issues to talk to the board about this fall that'll be one of them it is when we look at cost of service there's a number of issues relative to recouping fixed charges versus variable charges and we do plan on presenting some information to the board this fall um you know when we presented it before and and commissioner carlson was correct they they chose uh not to pursue or implement a change um there were probably a number of reasons for that um as a by the way when you say surviving general manager it makes me a little

1:23:03 nervous um but just so um the the way that we have to look at presentations to the board is to look at the integrity of the process of which we use to present something um nobody likes to go to a board and say something's out of whack and we'd we'd like to raise a rate i have to look at that and go would i have made a recommendation to the board if it would have showed just the opposite if it would have showed a 10 percent reduction and you were overpaying i don't think anybody here would have a problem with the cosa it would be hey why aren't we getting a 10 reduction so we have to look at the integrity of that the board has to decide then looking forward and and it's going to be a little different this year we're

1:23:49 going to present a three-year forecast for rates not just for all rates on the electric side we're going to we're going to take a look and say what's not just 2022 but 2023 and 2024 and i think part of that that conversation needs to be um is there further further delineation between an upriver territory and an in-town territory and how do we divide the cost fixed cost variable costs and other things so it will be on the table okay i misunderstood what you said earlier in terms of uh so it is possible that the rate the rates for our area could change as a result of the budget that the 2022 budget yeah there's there's two things that that are driving that so the first one

1:24:34 is that as i mentioned earlier one of the things we look at is just the budget itself and even if the rates were the same as in the city of eugene there is likely going to be a rate increase coming this next year some of that is just inflationary pressures we're feeling construction costs cost of power there's a number of things that that are driving that even if even if the the actual rate does not differentiate we are seeing some pressures that will drive up rates for the next several years probably okay okay thank you um i personally have a problem with the cosa study and i would urge the commissioners to understand what's in that box

1:25:19 because i don't like our small area being compared to eugene there's a south eugene that's very aerial intensive as far as your service goes your ariel out the river road i think you need to compare us to like facilities in the city of eugene not pit us against the average of that whole city i believe that's what it's doing now but i don't i have not been able to find and i really haven't asked for what give me a list of the classes of service that go into the coastal study i am going to be pushing for that because i need to understand that i also need to understand

1:26:04 if my electric bill is helping to pay for building infrastructure in eugene because the cost as you said in your last meeting wildfire mitigation cost to build underground structure in eugene is three times what it is to build out here so i need to know if eweb is borrowing money bonded money and charging me to build facilities because the city of eugene wants or you all want to or whoever wants to improve the infrastructure which ought to be done but i don't think i ought to have to pay for some of that i and we don't really have to debate this here i just want to make it known at this point that i'm going to be

1:26:51 challenging some of your information between now and the end of the year yeah well i think that's fair i think what we really want to do as a utility and i think what the what the board would require of of staff is that there's clarity and transparency around what those differences are and what the comparators are it's in in some ways it gets a little bit challenging we're we're talking about for example out here we have um twice the area that we're covering with one tenth of the customers and so it's it also works the other way around there are some major differences in how the costs get divided i think what you're asking for though is a reasonable

1:27:36 request and that's that when we look at cost of service analysis and especially if we're going to look at different classes of customers that what charges go and are allocated to those different classes are clear and i think that's a very fair request and and we'll will shoot to satisfy you and your desire to to know that um and so and you know there's i think it's important to recognize and i know the board feels this way we we feel a connection to the mckinsey valley we've been here a long time whenever we make an investment for example in our licensing we make a lot of investments up here that have nothing to do with power we build campgrounds and we build boat ramps and we there's a number of things that we invest into the valley that are then spread the other way those are spread across our

1:28:21 customers the other way so over the long term we hope that balance is out but i think inherently we do feel like it's more expensive to service a very spread out remote territory versus a dense ins in a very dense territory whether that results in a different class and and the cost of service and how those are allocated we'll try to be very clear and and then we'll work on the board and work with the board to see if if that results in a separate rate or not okay thank you for that one other comment we've had some discussions between folks relative to not being represented and i understand why we can't be formally represented but i also believe that some of the onus

1:29:08 is on us here as a community we we're not incorporated we have no central government we've got a community center up here that's burned down uh we don't have any organizational structure okay and that's just one of the challenges that we have and it's a good thing in some cases but i believe that if we if we want to be represented it's it's the balls in our court to assemble ourselves and then ask commissioner schlossberger whoever to come up and meet with us i i don't think that we can expect that you folks are going to just drive up here once a month

1:29:56 for an unorganized purpose so i'm just appealing to all of us to say that you know if we want to be represented let's get together and and then invite the commissioner up here and and talk thank you um i just want to reply to you well i believe when i first took when i first got in office a couple years ago you did have me up here and i came to one of your meetings and i would be happy to come to another meeting and also just know that you can you can email any of the commissioners you can email me you can call we're here to answer questions or find out answers to questions that you may have so just because you don't you're not

1:30:43 able to elect us doesn't mean that you can't reach out to us and that we won't respond can the board comment on the cost of service study the classes the various classes it's within the charter to parse out a different residential class or is that do we need to look at board meetings where you're talking about charter issues or other bylaw type issues i'm not sure is it you i i heard someone comment that you know you're selling water to veneta other resident that's a residential use out there maybe but that doesn't seem the same as our standing within eweb's

1:31:28 utility to parse us to consider us as a separate residential class and i kind of agree with will that you could look at us certainly our density is probably the biggest reason it wasn't mentioned as to why our cost of service is higher but there are probably areas in eugene where cost of service is pretty darn high that we would rather be compared to but i mean i'm just wondering does the board think it's possible to divide us out and is it a administrative issue do you guys do cost of service in-house or do you can use consulting engineering firms uh-huh this last cost of service is

1:32:23 right and and that's available for us to look at any of the nuts and bolts of the study actually if we wanted to try to analyze it yeah if i may too one of the things i hope that you do look at is lane electric we had a meeting up here 10 years ago will and we talked about transferring our service and and boy nobody wanted any part of that because lane electric's charges are a lot higher than ours you look at their base rate charge i wear 22 dollars a month and they're 35 just to have a meter before you even turn before you use an ounce of electricity and if you when you're doing that make sure that you look at not just eugene because we do have different areas like in eugene and south eugene where we have to pay a lot more money to pump water up the hill we charge those people there's a delivery charge it's different than it is for the flatland and things such as

1:33:08 that so we this isn't something that we haven't looked at before and it goes both ways yeah i understand that so we consider ourselves part of eweb from the beginning of time right and so yeah so just want to make sure that you knew that uh uh at one time we did consider if people said you don't want eweb find lane electric's already up here and uh in their rural utility we're in urban utility 50 of our service area is up here and only 2 300 customers yeah i understand you get the math on what it costs i mean when we have an outage and things such as that so our cards are going to be up but when we do this we're going to make sure we're open and transparent and look at it and be fair and equitable and if if it's going up that's fine and if it's going down that's fine but it's got to be fair and it's got to be open and

1:33:54 transparent and we want to make sure that we hear everybody everybody's side of it so we'll make sure that we do that who is there is there's no regulation since you're a public utility that applies like like it would the cost of service studies for private utilities are regulated by the puc i believe right yeah so it's just up to the ratepayers to just make sure that there's nothing that's you know advantages some special interest yeah you're i'll answer your question directly there's there's nothing in the charter that that um prohibits looking at different classes basically our puc is right here yeah this is the the governing body who

1:34:40 determines and we have to get approval for rates for we do have a number of situations where we have different classes and rates for example on our in our water utility we have rates inside of eugene versus outside of eugene and that's within the city limits we have pumping charges because the costs are higher to get water to a different elevation so there's there's other standards that we've there and within the residential class there's varying rates pardon me within the residential class yes that's that's correct so if there's nothing that prohibits prohibits it the the process that i think we're we're really trying to to look at here is to develop and understand the costs and the basis for those costs and like i said earlier we have to bring

1:35:25 things to our governing body our board not whether we like the outcome or not but do we trust the process that we that we've evaluated and then they can look at it further and say yes this makes sense to us or no it does not but there's there's nothing from a charter perspective or regulatory perspective that prohibits it and this group here is the one who will decide whether they want to implement something or not and historically has the cost of service for up here ever been studied before or is it assumed that it's always been greater than service in town i i would say if you look at historically uh it probably has been about the generation when we were generating up here so the the generation costs are actually

1:36:11 peanut buttered across the entire customer base so so those costs are separated out those go into what we call production costs and all customers pay for even the production up here or whether that production is up on the clackamas where we have a facility or whether we buy it from bonneville those are all lumped into production costs right yeah well no thank you for being up here and for myself you know i enjoy being part of ewing thank you hi so first of all i wanted to thank you as well for coming up to lieberg and just giving the community the opportunity to one meet everybody in person and just have an opportunity to listen and

1:36:56 ask questions so my name is brandi crawford ferguson i'm a third generation mackenzie i actually grew up in springfield i live in hayden bridge i'm downstream my grandparents came to blue river in 1946 my grandfather learned how to be a lager and started a small logging company i actually work for mckenzie river trust local land conservation group i've been with the trust for 12 years and i just really wanted to thank eweb for investing in the mckenzie river i know growing up i would inner tube on this river and you know fish and go home and fill a glass of water and never even thought about the fact that the river i was just playing on was the same water that i was

1:37:41 drinking from at home you know we i didn't make that connection honestly probably really didn't seriously think about it until i started working for the trust that's really when i started saying okay these things are connected right this community asset is key to a health a healthy place a healthy livelihood so holiday farm fire excuse me holiday farm fire happened right in in the fall and i'm just wanting to thank again the pure water partners program which the trust is a part of but how quickly um that program was able to pivot under you know eweb's investment that was huge i've had the opportunity to be a part of various statewide communities representing the holiday farm fire

1:38:26 and listening to other wildfire communities across the state who do not have a utility investing in their river that's been impacted significantly so that's been huge and just really want to call that out in addition to eweb's investment in the mackenzie river trust and our local you know conservation lands and carl my question um [Music] do you mind digging a little bit into this science why e-web invests in the health of this river by investing in the lands that cradle it so is that right yes sorry um and actually it's kind of chagrined that i actually left out a whole paragraph that i wrote and i was talking to you guys and it's all about water

1:39:12 quality and the mckinsey being the sole source of drinking water which is actually the most important thing and so focused on trying to make sure that we articulated how we do like and want to work with landowners up here to protect this precious watershed because it is a social drinking a sole source of drinking water for 200 000 people but it's more than that as you all know it's it's it's kind of the heart and soul of eweb and of city gene and of the communities are up here that's what links us but the reason we invest in and lands up here is that we've been up in the mckenzie in one way or another for as you've heard over 100 years and we are here for long-term connection

1:39:57 and to help grow basically uh conservation or stewardship uh with the landowners are living up here so that you know we can together essentially create something that has longevity and is resilient to future disasters and so we have an inherent interest and uh and value chain that that kind of links us to the mackenzie not only do we obviously generate electricity up here we have power customers up here we drink the water that comes down so when you think about it the water goes through multiple turbines and then we pull it out and drink it and so it's it's just a strong connection i think eweb has always been interested in investing in the mckenzie and

1:40:42 and basically did the initial investment that started mckinsey river trust back in 2000 so um so the land is is key and how we manage the land impacts you know the water quality and impacts habitat it impacts uh what happens when it floods so um yeah that's the short longish answer hopefully i answered your question i'm not seeing other hands go up so um i guess i'll give the the board another opportunity to comment but i would also um after this we do have uh some experts

1:41:29 and some tables uh next door it that that is an indoor type facility so we are asking people to to mask up if they go in there but there's an update on carmen smith and some damn safety not d-a-m-b but damn as in dam safety energy efficiency holiday farm fire up there's a number of updates on some of our programs over there but i would also like to give the board an opportunity to to comment to everybody while they're here and i think after that we'll adjourn to next door or be open for individual questions if people want to talk to us about anything in more detail

1:42:14 i just want to thank everybody again for coming tonight um and to the staff for the presentations and again just encourage you if you have other questions or comments or concerns to please reach out to us because that's the only way we know what you're thinking and what you're concerned about so thank you i too would like to thank everybody for coming out this evening and uh will and others i'm sure we're gonna have a great conversation and thank you for bringing it up and i'm looking forward to the dialogue thank you yeah i would ditto everything that's already been said and just know that i will be an advocate for you guys on the board uh as someone new to the board i am trying to understand all the issues to the best of my ability and so part of that is learning from you all

1:42:59 about what you care about and how you see things so i too am interested in the conversation happy to come up and join you for a conversation uh if that feels useful to you um and i'm committed to understanding the all the inputs the best of my ability to the decisions we're making so i think all of us are in that spot we're trying to really weigh um all the information and make the best decision we can on behalf of all of the eweb customers as well as stakeholders who aren't direct customers so um we're still learning more and and thanks for helping me yeah i like the other commissioners i mean thank you so much for having us up here um we always look forward to coming up

1:43:46 and meeting with all of you appreciate that you're taking your time out this is you know this isn't something that everybody comes and does and so to will's point you know the more that you come out and are involved the more we're motivated to come out and be involved with you and it we really appreciate that every time we do come out here there are people even in times of crisis and in times when there isn't crisis to come out and find out more about what we're doing so we can learn more from you and we can help support what you're doing and you can let us know what the issues are up here that we've missed so please do feel free to reach out to any of us we're very open and thank you again for having us up here i'll just conclude by thanking everybody as well i um i would say that this is normally this is way more fun than a normal board

1:44:32 meeting sorry no offense uh we we do appreciate it and you know i [Music] i do um have the fortunate opportunity or or unfortunate opportunity to work with a lot of other utilities and what differentiates e-web and lane electric and some of the other public utilities are forums like this try this with pacific core and see how far you get it's it's part of why a lot of us work for a public utility is the connection with the public and the to recognize it's it's your money it's your investments and you're the people that we serve and so thank you for coming out and we'll be around for a little while to answer any further questions but

1:45:17 thanks for your questions and opportunity to interact have a good