EWEB Board of Commissioners — August 3, 2021

0:03 web uh board meeting of august 3rd 2021 um welcome to in person this is a little bit exciting to have everybody back in person so thank you for everybody who's come and thank you for everybody for following the mask mandate as well i'm going to do my best to speak up i have a very quiet voice and wearing a mask doesn't help so please let me know if you can't hear me um i'm just going to start off really briefly with a facility awareness and safety briefing so if you're here for public testimony please make sure that you've signed up outside in the lobby um we are only able to access the first floor of this building there are restrooms that are located out these doors and down the right

0:48 the hallway and there are some emergency exits in case of an emergency there are these exits back here and there's exits in the back of the room there and um if for some reason there is an emergency the assembly point is at the flagpole near the parking lot if an evacuation is one so with that we will go on to item number one which is an agenda chat anybody have anything about the agenda for tonight nope okay and moving right along to item number two items from board members and general manager so um i think that i'm just going to go down the line this way and enter the general manager

1:39 i just have one really small thing and i don't even know if it warrants um coming to the board level but um one of the school board members reached out to me because they are interested in figuring out what it would mean to electrify their buildings what the feasibility of all that is and they don't really have the capacity to figure that out themselves so she reached out to me saying is this something eweb could help us even understand what the issue is so i told her that um i just bring it up with the rest of the commissioners and if it's okay we can direct staff to reach out to the school board and help them figure out the answers to some of their questions so just head nods if that sounds okay yeah i just kind of clarified that i

2:24 read the board but also in the facilities uh ryan spain tucker i think the two people that do that they're in charge of building multiple medicine and cattle ridge right now [Music] yeah anyway somebody from the school board reached out to us and asked for information to help them figure out what it means to electrify their buildings and to answer some of their questions so

3:10 we're just got some head nods from the board that we're going to direct the staff to reach out to the school board and help them figure that out you will do that great thank you that's all that i have nothing for me at this point i just want to say thanks to the staff team who continues to adjust to different new locations different types of versions it's really not a general manager's item i did want to point out that commissioner carlson is absent tonight this is an excused absence that she hadn't planned for quite a while her first absence in four and a half years

3:55 so um just wanted to point that out for people great thank you okay we're going to move on to public inputs so again if you're here for public input and you haven't signed up at the lobby please do so because we're collecting um all the little flips all right um for public input please state your name and optionally your address and speak firmly towards the microphone

4:41 each speaker will be offered three minutes to present their testimony our board secretary and paw will keep time please see the timer at the board table which will indicate your time remaining a series of beeps will sound when your time has elapsed after all testimony is heard each commissioner will have an opportunity to see if they choose although by policy we do not engage in a back and forth dialogue please note that failure of a commissioner to speak shall not be construed as support of or opposition to any speaker's testimony if a question is presented by a speaker and the board does not provide an answer an e-west staff member will contact the speaker so that the question can be addressed at a later time the public

5:26 testimony for this meeting is now open all right so i'm going to call what's the first person and who it's he's going to be followed by and i apologize if i mispronounce anybody's name so first up we have richard lauren followed by ralph mcdonald what do i do yes green hill in west eugene i have a bunch of apartment houses spread all over eugene and some springfield um but

6:15 the word if you can look up the word ludicrous like is exactly the word that matches keeping the lobby over your clothes to pay my bill it's anyway i look i just looked it up ludicrous and it just fits it's just foolishly hilarious you know keep that lobby closed you have the best i've been doing business over in that mommy for like 35 years and and we've had you have wonderful customer service representatives over there and they're still even on the phone they're trying to be after you spend 45 minutes or an hour waiting for them to get to the phone and then trying to do the number one option to pay a bill which doesn't even work and then go to some kind of a portal business everybody's doing portals portals do not

7:02 work and they're not anyway i'm not i'm not a public speaker but really you know mr lawson please keep that lobby open for people there is no other public place for me to go and see you and people have no idea where they're closing that there's it's just it's it's really inconsiderate to your clients i think it's interesting to me i feel i feel really put back talk to them and pay my bill and give my credit card they give me back my

7:48 stuff it's wonderful it works thanks thank you very much you can go back and sit down and then at the end if each uh commissioners are given an opportunity to speak if they want to at the end after all yeah okay so next up we have ralph mcdonald followed by mark rubinowitz

8:34 ditto i agree with the previous gentleman having spent over three hours in the last two or three weeks on the phone trying to get through to you which i've never successfully done especially amazing tricks not successfully my name is ralph mcdonald and i'm the co-chair of the southwest hills neighborhood association i'm speaking on behalf of the southwest hills neighborhood association i live at matt keating's ward 2. i had the pleasure of meeting some of you on previous occasions in previous forums but tonight i'm talking about what i believe is a travesty of the [Music] butchering of the site at 40th and patterson board of the southwest hilton

9:20 neighborhood association voted on july 6 7 to 0 to oppose elim's proposed project there until and only if you have better demonstrate the need need to build two massive reservoirs rather than one need to clear cut more than two acres of mature eugene berg trees the globe of large conifer trees equation in the center of the site is about 60 water by weight the sequester's carbon encounters climate change climate change is on the agenda in our city here the grove helps cool off all of eugene on hot days helps clean the air pollutants coming from the whitaker neighborhood helps spread of fast spreading wild power contributes other civic values including

10:07 aesthetic value in wildlife habitat monarch butterflies affiliated woodpeckers i think the uh ego is trying to play hardball with the neighbors and the concerned uh population of eugene i've been told that it's private property and signs are up say private property or they apply it i've been told by its staff that doesn't need a city permit where you need four state departments to the city the city says you need so many problems you haven't applied for because you did a midnight massacre between friday getting your permit in the late afternoon and cutting down 250 trees between 7 45 and mid morning on monday

10:54 yesterday camp repair can't retrofit college hill heck i've been your uh 15 million gallon tank there neighbors are reasonable we're talking about one one tank that you've promised up until april 6 until april 6 you get some outreach but afterwards you doubled the project to double the cost without doing outreach last minute midnight thing outreach oak savannah versus uh fur trees what a red herring that is the fir trees are largely 60 to 75.60 to 65 percent of water anyway thank you

11:43 thank gentlemen very much next up we have mark rubinowicz followed by stephen barnhart the distance from 40th and patterson to your new compound in the western two wetlands is roughly the breathable thickness of the atmosphere we all do and that thin film affects everybody i brought here a donation from utility oregon ash and a black oat to help with your reforestation friends and trees planted a dozen oaks on the south side and maybe in the 22nd century they will provide shade and habitat you had a big pines cut you had oaks that are probably 100 years old

12:29 there's a small wetland on the site that has been trampled to death yesterday after the logging i didn't see any monarch butterflies there's a lot of them there but i hope all of you have had the opportunity to see it and smell it for yourselves i hope the children's lawsuit plaintiffs have been up there to see it be both before and after um senator john kennedy before he became president wrote a book called profiles encouraged and he joked it's a small book which included applied many examples of courage and politics for thousands of years that clear cuts create deserts

13:15 we have it going on here in the northwest it's not only fossil fuels that's part of the problem and he will know he was seeking to ram the approval through when people were distracted traumatized and shut out of buildings air clear cuts never crime scene leave the security guard on site with the workshop for now and of course the real purpose of this project is not just because you've neglected seismic concerns for the last couple decades it's also to facilitate the expansion of eugene to benita and junction city euphemistically called urban reserves uh one last thing totally different electrification

14:01 most of the increase in electricity generation in state oregon last decade has been from natural gas brac naturopaths we have three gigawatts of both wind and of natural gas installed in oregon but the wind makes a third of the power because it's variable the gas is on normal time so electrification is a euphemism for burning more gas and climate falls and sending the electrons over the um i've used solar since 1990. first thing i learned use less i realize utilities want to sell more electricity but with the limits to grow you know this extremely well more than you're ever going to say in public the limits are going

14:46 through human climate collapse is here it would be nice if you start next behaving have susan barnhart followed by david camp awesome hi i'm susan barnhart i live at 1439 west sports avenue i live down the whittaker so i'm not an envy but i love trees i think we all love trees i saw that destruction the execution of all those trees and i hope that all of you went up there to see that i have been in this building so many

15:31 times i appreciate that even has always offered this building for community events to be here again and just see how you you all weren't following your mission statement it's really incredible so sad to see the destruction of all those trees 200 year old trees maybe in the 1950s that was a good plan but it's not a good plan during this catastrophe going on now in the climate to last february to destroy trees a few trees are still up there so please don't

16:16 take any more of them down it's just heartbreaking and you have no public hearings about it and to not explore other things this is the time we should be all conserving water water is very important it is not a time to destroy an urban forest thank you thank you next up is david fossum followed by bill o'brien hello my name is david hausen um i live on glen outdrive between donald 35th and 37th been there since 1996 and

17:03 prior to that i've heard her upcoming closest question uh since 1989. um i'm a member of the glen oak park association but i mean you want to emphasize i'm not here to speak in there yet but the glen oak park is a small park that that our backyard and several backyards joined onto and we formed an association back in 1996 to interact with the city who owns that park and and just to have communication with them over the years um my kids grew up went to spend some good and edgewood elementaries and so and they had friends that lived at the end of the billiard you know and houses that back onto the property where these

17:48 tanks will go and what i would like to say is um i i've been up there with my kids you know back in the 90s when they were you know growing up and you know riding bikes and making ramps in that woods under those dead birds and so i'm familiar with the site my wife's an ecologist and she's highly knowledgeable about oak savannah and we found that that hilltop was a remnant oak savannah for decades and it's been overtopped by doug furs in the last 150 years or so so i'm here to talk about scale several people have brought up you know carbon sequestration global warming habitat for affiliated

18:33 woodpeckers and monarch butterflies i mean i'm here to say i don't believe this is a scale for us to solve those issues this is a municipal water supply you guys have been planning based on that elevation there's only so many sites in our city that have that elevation that are suitable for putting water storage into but it is at a scale that serve that water supply for the entire state and restore a small patch of remnant hoax demand so it's a perfect scale for achieving those two things and that's how i first got involved in this project is to advocate for taking an extra step and dealing with

19:18 smoke savannah while you put the thanks um my recommendation from what i understand about that is that the trees that were over top those should be cut down or turned into snags to allow that oak savannah to release and restore a greatly diminished habitat that will serve many kinds of wildlife and this is a perfect site to make a small addition to that i don't see it as a site to deal with these larger issues that we're all worried about in our world today that you can't solve for our cities thank you i'm sorry for mispronouncing your name

20:03 um next we have bill o'brien followed by joyce gallagher please everybody i hope you all have a wonderful day for so i was extremely disappointed yesterday

21:04 and i've tried to reach for straws as a drowned person i spoke to the mayor and the conversation with the mayor was just going to do whatever you want to do i'm not going to listen to any of these people save upforce.org these are highly intelligent people and we've had an interaction with them as i said before you don't have a public process do whatever you want to do colbin plotters don't use spices and clothes so and want to do the forums city council they also need

21:50 discipline i'm going to probably be very disappointed tonight um i don't know it's fire season lots of fires it was 25 and a half days without rain i thought it was 45 days maybe it's 45 days maybe microscopic drought so still getting dry more fires every day and water is short very disappointing [Music] these people that said go ahead drill on site too we love you you know when you're people walking with open arms well god will praise you for all the whole time i saw one of your white house last night

22:35 yesterday around 9 10 o'clock in the morning he came up started to talk to us people that were watching destroyed his parcel wrong and he had tears in his eyes and i got very angry with him you know you don't know about what they're doing they're not accountable to anyone i don't know anything about your stocks your dividends it's all unknown look at it i can't find anything on i know you've got friends in high places if they can call you you're going to do what they essentially say and uh that's it thank you uh next up we have dwight

23:23 gallagher followed by krista roja michaelson my name is royce gallagher and i've lived 19 years at 685 east 43rd avenue which is directly under one of these sites uh i tried to find out about this um you did send out a mailing informing us that they were going to have a meeting i went to that meeting the first one in 2020 and after that um we didn't hear anything uh we i put my name on a sheet to sign up to go up the hill with because the stuff explained to me but somehow that got through even though i did sign up so um i had no

24:09 idea that this was gonna happen and and it was gonna be two packs uh and a month ago ten of my neighbors who were very close without the people that live a street away from my phone right there and not you know kill you and there's a 100 year old 101 year old woman that lives on corner helium had no idea this for god i have no idea 10 people in the immediate neighborhood and they've been annoying so i'm asking you why why didn't you send out a detailed mailing i know something appeared in the eugene meet weekly but unfortunately i missed that normally i read the weekly but um some people don't so why did you not send out a detailed um explanation in the mail

24:55 to your customers because we got a one about the smart meters i thank you for that and uh but that was it pretty much uh and this is a real you fell down here because if you don't explain things the neighbors they're gonna think something is wrong it's just kind of a natural thing and uh we feel like we were blindsided i mean and we talk with people they're so close and noise is expanded that the noise that's going to create up there it's an amplifying the the way the the terrain is at the amplifies movements so it would be very bad for us we would have liked snow in there some people purchased property not knowing what the books were going to do up there that's

25:41 their problem i'm sorry but the thing is you need to do a better job of this you really fell down on this a lot of neighbors are north and i was personally contacted i don't know who of the 45 people you did contact but we're either five people live in that house okay thank you for your time thank you next up we have krista rojas followed by chloe johnson hi uh i do not live in that neighborhood um i live on river road but we've seen the same kind of thing

26:26 happening the beautiful big leaf maples taken out and uh in the charter they're not supposed to do that anything like that again but they're already talking about taking out what they call doctors for the ms and uh they've gone back and forth but the e-web site was purchased in 55 and the line has been we've known this is coming for a long time but things have changed and eugene pretends to be a green city wouldn't anything but they cut down the trees that he would

27:12 feel that they just cut down trees they go and plant their staff but those are going to take a long time to get to where the trees that you're cutting down and there are and the thing that's so criminal about what you did yesterday morning rushing through because you knew that we were mobilizing because people didn't know and i mean the only people he knew were the immediate neighbors and i talked to some of them and they didn't know that the project had been doubled so um and they they haven't like a lot of people in eugene

27:57 there's just a feeling of resignation that's really sad terrible for democracy and that's because all of our institutions are have just shut the public out pretty much and uh and it's it's concerning for somebody who's concerned about the green washing that goes on here the plains of sustainability we have a beautiful statement mission statement but it doesn't in any way come close to what the reality is and i'm concerned about if we do not change things now with

28:44 the crisis coming prices of water and already several attempts to purchase our water source the mckenzie river i don't know if we can trust you folks to serve the public and and what you're doing here does not engender trust and i'm looking for a relationship with you it will change that and if not i think we need to think about replacing them thank you next up we have chloe johnson oh johnson sorry if i didn't pronounce

29:30 that question followed by marco elliott so my name is bo johnson and i am speaking on myself i'm also a group of the coalition foreign i want to compliment you all because what i think you're really good at doing that is deceiving you deceive the public through your image of being an environmentally conscious company and i've been on your website multiple times since i've been involved in this project i'm trying to help save this forest i've seen the way you advertise yourself how can you save environmentally conscious while doing what you're doing for one i only heard about this project while i was working my job and saw a fire from safety enforcement i didn't hear about it from

30:16 you guys that's my name secondly you tore down a forest which is over 150 years old and being up there i've been out there previously before you guys have even started tearing down i saw plenty of wildlife that definitely relied on that forest i talked to people you know neighbors that day when i was out there on august 2nd you guys started cutting clearly before and much after the time that you said schedules that are kind of happening i talked to people that didn't know that that project was happening i saw tears i saw people crying and running over that forest and the thing is i don't think you're unique in the fact that you guys are able to advertise yourselves as an environmentally conscious company or doing things that don't represent that i think what you

31:02 are is kind of a larger symptom of something that is going on within the entire united states you take ideas of being environmentally conscious and you integrate that into yourself so you can mislead and you can continually do things that are actively hurting us and actively hurting your local community that's a beautiful force out there and it was very devastating to see me down i was out there the entire time and so i just want to say congratulations on misleading us congratulations on destroying an urban forest within eugene congratulations on not representing the public even though you're a public utility congratulations on not being able to inform anyone who you are able to you just chose not to

31:49 and just good job good job we have marco elliott followed by marilyn black commissioners uh thank you for finally listening to us in person

32:34 um i had a lot more than three minutes i would need a lot more than three minutes to speak to you about my concerns anyway my uh my name is marco elliott i live on uh moss street 1944 and i believe i'm in ward 3. um i would like to be positive and give you uh feedback that can help you so first of all i would like to talk about public process i think the july 6 or meeting that i wish to testify on but i couldn't was a total catastrophe in the sense that [Music]

33:23 i heard very eloquent statements from 21 people uh including a young woman who might have been a teenage girl who was literally begging for fairness i remember the word fairness she claimed that it wouldn't be fair to cut down those dreams well i'm a former high school teacher and i felt crushed uh when the um uh testimony by uh witnesses ended and you guys continued your job and literally ignored this young this young girl's plea and everybody else's family so

34:12 and i understand why because your own joe harwood openly stated in the registered part recently that you only listen to experts you don't really care for the bubble so my question is is it really work for me to pull all the strings of eloquence to reach your heart if you only listen to experts so i am um familiar with the theory of the absurd i studied existential philosophy and uh this is a totally absurd situation because i know that i will not change your mind and i know that what i'm saying will not help you so as far as a public relations disaster um

34:58 i made some research and i found in a no registered article about the seneca plant disaster your mission statement caring about our community and the environment being flexible innovative and adaptable to community needs and ironically defining value through the eyes of customers and failed on all of those thank you thank you for listening to me take those words home carolyn block followed by will rutherford

36:10 and i was there yesterday when that very fast coming down the street happened and on friday right um i appreciate your having a an in-person meeting i suggest that you have some other arrangement so that you're not with a light background you're very hard to see it's a little easier if i'm this close but i can't see your faces and also i suggest that you have bigger name tag name plates

37:30 request to keep the lobby open to keep your communication with your repairs um improve your uh your phone system your communication system uh it's really hard to get ahold of people and i tried yesterday to give somebody on the phone and i had to use email and it takes two days or you have two days to respond for an email and i wanted to know about this meeting so um um so so my

38:17 main um thing is pay attention is is communicate with the public better you know have a meeting have a meeting about if you still could do that about this project can be where people are able to speak and come come to the site come and see see what what it looks like i think the trees have been damaged because they went down so fast that they broke each other

39:06 thank you next up we have will rutherford followed by chris jones and i buy electricity for me i previously voiced concerns about your cost of service analysis for electric customers and what i'd like to do this evening is just kind of some of the things that i've told you and maybe introduce a couple new things i have two main concerns one is a potential increase in my

39:51 electric bill the other is e-whips electric rate adjustment strategy itself i'd like to start with the strategy part uh i believe he was making a strategic mistake by attempting to parse its customer base beyond the current uh consumption categories expanding the customer classes by delivery infrastructure is far too complex to maintain and manage accurately so my question to you is do you really understand cosa and do you really agree with the classes that that are being defined or will be defined i've given you some hypothetical examples and i'm going to read them here certainly comparing up river costs to an average of all of the other eweb customers

40:38 delivery costs is in my mind not appropriate now now turn into the rate adjustment strategy itself consider these issues as you contemplate rate adjustments apparently all of e-web customers contribute to attacks by the city of eugene i believe it's maybe six percent not sure and uh up for our customers get absolutely no benefit on this tax as far as i know second i believe all the uf customers bear the burden of repaying bond funding for infrastructure replacements and upgrades and so forth so how much of this infrastructure investment involves up-river facilities that directly serve up for our customers

41:24 i'll take a look at rod price's slides from your july 6th meeting huge investment proposals but not to serve the upriver customers i believe as an uproar customer i should not have to be encumbered with massive debt that does not provide benefit to me if you would to single my class out for a rate change also consider a cost for underground service again if upgrading the river is treated separately why should i share the cost of expensive urban infrastructure upgrades so if you decide to adjust the upgrade rate based on on the premise that revenue is false or

42:11 it costs i urge you to consider in your conclusion that you do not do electric rate adjustments by using close-up and separate classes and financial customers work carefully through your principles and that you if you do decide the next page uh my name is chris jones i live on kincaid street in eugene and i'm here to express my appreciation for the e-web staff who put together the

42:57 preliminary phase two electrification study which you'll hear about in this meeting it's a very thoughtful analysis that incorporated feedback from phase one given by other staff commissioners variety of people and it continued that study in many useful directions it had two main components transportation and building electrification on transportation the phase one report had underestimated the number of electric vehicles that are likely to be on the roads of oregon 2010 and 20 years from now the base two analysis is much more realistic and you'll see that based on trends in electric vehicle markets the study anticipates a significant market share for evs just 5 and 10 years from now essentially reaching 100 of new vehicles

43:43 by 2030. this target is also right in line with recent legislation in california and in washington this is smart scenario planning by e-web staff and the analysis shows that you will experience just a one percent increase per year in average and heat loads which is a very manageable change the study also shows that current vehicle pricing trends even without significant web incentives will result in vehicle electrification that our society needs in order to save off the worst effects of local air pollution and global climate emissions eweb can further encourage ev adoption by removing existing barriers for example by providing differential demand charges for commercial customers

44:29 who want to charge their vehicles during off-peak hours on building electrifications the analysis is based on economic factors and you will see that this study is very pessimistic about the electrification of gas fuel heating and hot water systems uh the grafts if you see them are pretty terrifying um i think that the web analogy you have analysis is sound the analysts did a good job but all reasonable climate analysts tell us that we have to eliminate fossil fuel use in the next 10 to 20 years in order to avoid extreme societal costs so we have to convert nearly 100 of eugene's space heating and water heating systems in the next 10

45:15 years to combine with both city and state carbon reduction goals so the e-web analysis needs to be shared with local and state lawmakers as soon as possible so that they can create additional financial and policy incentives to accelerate the electrification of buildings overall this report is much improved from phase one and i look forward to additional insights and recommendations final version great job by uf staff thank you and thank you for your time thank you and next up we have alan hancock followed by joseph hubble

46:01 hi um 2244 aldersgreen and um sometimes what seems like an imperative at the time doesn't seem so imperative in hindsight and no example of this is more obvious than the e-webs board's decision to build a nuclear power plant born to florence in the 1960s i'm going to quote a little bit from bob warren who's a long-time meeting president he wrote an article about this uh in 1970 eweb ran an ad in the registered guard involved says vote no on measure 52. save your nuclear power plant e-web was predicting a huge demand for power that could only be met

46:47 they asserted with the nuclear option questions began to emerge about the cost and the safety of nuclear power in july 69 city council had a public meeting with e-web discuss whether you should hold a public hearing about the nuke citizens at the meeting were not allowed to speak and e-web announced it would not hold a public hearing a small group of people walked out of the meeting determined to be heard a day later ewen changed his mind and scheduled a public meeting but it was too late he lived continued arrogance and created a group that indiana would win the battle and stop eweb's nuclear dreams ewen had at first dismissed the protesters

47:32 as annoyances and treated them with scarcely disguised hostility members in 1969 put on measure on the bower however rather than calling for an outro for outright ban they opted for a more moderate ballot measure calling for a four-year moratorium and hope for four years e-web would come to its censuses and they adopted the slogan we can't wait we should wait he would have fought back hard and created citizens for the orderly development of electricity to oppose the ballot measure to promote their energy on may 26 1970 fashion 52 passed um would have to wait four years before

48:17 fulfilling its nuclear dreams the lesson was not lost on you ed in 1974 you have formally acknowledged it when keith parks the new general manager said the activists did a great fair for this community they saved its but well history repeats itself as citizens are still saying we can wait we should wait

49:06 joseph level 810 just 36th place um i became aware of this project through a door somebody put a poster on my front foot and it wasn't that long ago and i lived fairly close um then i just spoke with some friends who felt the same way that e-web had not done a good job hopefully inadequate jobs of notifying the public was a uh a meeting to take place at the site soon after i

49:51 found out and i went up there with a friend and it was it was amazing to find out we should do to make it beautiful after we're done blowing the place up i asked the people there i kind of disrupted the meeting from my friend and [Music] it's like hold on hold on you guys did a crappy job of reaching out to the public just a few neighbors in the area with

50:36 such a massive project are you kidding me that's disgusting horrible woeful job and the communication supervisor jen agreed i did a horrible job she said i take responsibility i said well great let's mitigate this let's get some communication going by the way this three-minute thing is crap we gotta be able to talk to each other are you the brain trust are you the brain trust here do you know it all because you have the experts you ask the experts

51:22 you talk to them i happen to ask them i'm an intelligent guy at this point i am disgusted with your job and i think you should all quit in mass all right so those are all the clips that we have so the public testimony period for this meeting is now closed uh at this time commissioners are given the opportunity to comment if they choose so

52:07 i'd like to go i don't have any comments i am looking at you john i'll go uh thank you all for coming here and i've got a lot of things to say that i'll uh be tempered in what i say because uh you know many of you have contacted us but a lot of people that aren't here have contacted us too but we have a very challenging job as you know oha we have somebody just told us that we have a couple years to get rid of college hill we can't just shut that down serves 80 000 people we have to replace it before we do doing a triple bottom line analysis on the 40th site that we've owned for over 70 years people including this bishop that's involved in this knows

52:53 and she knew when she bought her home adjacent to it that this was going to be a result so when we're doing our bottom trip tdl analysis down one or two we built one we still have to remove the trees for the second one we can't build one and then three years later glass right next to it so we have to do all the tree removal as minimally as we can now the man talked about the oak savannah thank you i have the hundreds of acres that we have in spotted al habitat when the feds came in and put the easement on us for that we had 68 groups of savannah savannah habitat thank you for bringing that up but what my point is whether we build one or two we still remove the same amount of trees because the last thing we're going to do is

53:38 build a 7.5 million gallon reservoir and then blast right next to it three years later by doing this project together we save two thousand truckloads that we're not going to go run up down patterson and disrupt it and make a four and a half year project versus we're going to save a lot of time 1.5 million and so we're doing the best we can with the information we have and we're not going to rely on a motion to make a multi-million dollar decision that affects 80 000 people

54:25 um i do want to say thanks to folks for coming out and sharing your thoughts with us um i think we all share an appreciation for that site and really i don't think anybody wants to see creation i'll try and eat them a little bit more is that better okay i don't i think we all share an appreciation for this site and i don't think anybody wants to see trees or something and at the same time the functioning of our water system relies on expansion of that same water system so the water can remain usable and safe for us to consume um anyway i i want to say thanks for coming and

55:10 sharing your thoughts and we do hear what you're saying and and on balance given all the things that this organization has to balance uh it absolutely feels right the right decision to make um i trust our engineers that if there were alternatives that were viable [Music] and i trust our communication folks that they did the very best they could during a challenging time of covid where we're all trying to communicate as best we can and it may not be adequate for your needs but i do trust that our team did the very best they could given circumstances and lastly the

55:55 comment about scale i think is spot on this is a two acre site this is not make or break greenhouse gas emissions or cooling or other environmental impacts in eugene this is my symbolic and i would say on balance when we look at what e-what is doing to preserve and maintain forest and watershed up in mackenzie to protect our water and uh preserving forest lands up there e-web is making a much greater investment in forest preservation um than this particular site of site so i know it's a trade-off i know it stinks i also know that our team is going to do

56:40 everything we can to try and reduce impacts for neighbors there i know it's gonna be hard for folks who live right next to that site um but i but i i do trust that that this board and the staff team working with us are doing the very best we can we don't that's the problem i understand and we're all we're all elected officials and um folks who are you know more than capable of running against us and taking this voluntary seat is great reward faith and fortune thank you

57:32 thank you um thank you for coming out thank you for all reaching out to me directly through voicemails and emails i did my best to contact anybody who contacted me and respond you know i heard like mr brown said i heard both sides of this issue just because i i may not agree with your stance on it doesn't mean that i didn't hear you i do agree i do agree with what was said that our uh communication we can learn from this as far as moving forward on the communications with our ratepayers and the affected communities that we we touch and i hope as a board and as a

58:18 staff we do learn from this experience and do a better job in the future that's something that i'll be pushing for um i do feel that i made the right decision when i voted to give the general manager the authority to move forward with this project and uh i'm i'm comfortable with that decision i'm sorry that that there are people that don't agree with that uh opinion but i thought that was the right uh decision to make at that time and i'll i'll live with consequences so i appreciate you guys coming out i do hear you and uh i hope we can move past this and and make this into a site going forward that will be a place for the community

59:03 to enjoy in perpetuity after the construction is done all right so um lastly i want to echo thanking everybody for coming tonight um i also want to thank everybody for following the mask mandate i really appreciate that everybody has followed those rules so thank you it's no fun to wear a mask but um just something we have to do um i am gonna actually comment on something else i agree with what my fellow commissioners have said about the water storage site but i have a comment about um the lobby being kept open and um frank maybe at some point you can just remind us what our policy was about that or what we were doing with the lobby because i can't remember that's something we talked about

59:48 previously um and then also in response to will rutherford's comments about joseph i believe it's next board meeting where we have more discussion about that topic so um thank you for coming to speak about that and reminding us that that is cheetah on the docket all right what would you like to say i don't have anything to add commissioner all right thank you all right we're moving along on our agenda to board action items we are on um item number four approval of consent calendar a i'll move to a proof concept calendar

1:00:35 second okay um all those in favor i would move too or i would secondly moving without number eight

1:01:22 all right so all those in favor of consent calendar v minus item number eight say all right all right and now item number eight yeah this is a an item to uh that deals with the public testimony and i while i'm in favor of it uh it just came to us and i don't think the board has really had an opportunity to discuss it and i also feel that without commissioner carlson here to weigh in on it i just didn't feel comfortable and i don't know if it's something that's timely that needs to be done at this meeting or not so that's one of the reasons i wanted to pull it to see if there was more discussion from the commission if this is the right

1:02:07 amount of time amount of uh input that we want to do so that's what i wanted for a little bit more discussion on philosophy it's just a comment there is no specific time frame on this what we tried to capture was the previous policy was nebulous and so we tried to capture what has been historically standard practice but there's nothing that is urgent this month versus next month or the month after that i'd be willing to just leave it off and wait you know able to make certain um i would just like to clarify whether you'd like to actually have a discussion or whether you would like to

1:02:52 bring it back at a future consent calendar item where the board could have a more thorough discussion with mr carlson president put it on the consent calendar for the next month's meeting pull it and discuss it if you want to make maybe 10 minutes or whatever but in the intro we'll have a lot of time

1:03:43 yeah that would work great for me thank you okay great all right we passed the consent calendar we just pulled it okay uh i didn't item number seven we're moving into general business we have rebirth evaluation and triple bottom line results and review good evening commissioners can you hear me okay i'm lisa krantz electric generation manager joining me tomorrow tonight is mark seneca our generation engineering supervisor and patty boyle our generation contract supervisor

1:04:28 we'll be providing an update on the proposed path forward and decision making process for the hydroelectric project tonight we're asking the board to provide feedback on our proposed work plan to arrive at a quarter four 2022 recommendation to pursue either the storm water conveyance or return to service option for the liberty hydro project this is part of our organizational goal 4b to collaborate and align with the board to develop directional guidelines using a triple bottom line based approach for the leeward project in compliance with the federal energy regulatory commission and in collaboration with the mckinsey valley community

1:05:16 quick agenda for tonight's presentation i'll be providing a brief background and review of what's occurred to date i'll then give a high level overview of the process and decisions that will need to be made over the next 10 years or so we'll give you results of our preliminary triple bottom line analysis go into greater detail of a work plan for the next year and a half or so we'll provide updates on work that has been completed since the february board meeting discuss near-term risk reduction measures that are needed to ensure we're able to safely convey stormwater in the short term and then finally we'll look ahead beyond 2023 and what that that decision process might look like and then we'll move on to board input

1:06:02 so for background the lever project is part of a joint operating license with the hydro or excuse me with the welterville project license was issued in 2000 and expires in 2040. so we have approximately 20 years left on the current license term because both licensors are under the same license they're tied to each other from a regulatory perspective what that means is the near and long term decision on labor has an effect on the welterweight project as well the liebert project has been out of service since october of 2018 due to significant concerns over the safety of the canal embankment it's been operating as a storm water conveyance facility since then comprehensive risk assessments were completed in 2020

1:06:47 and out of that it's clear that substantial canal safety improvements are needed to return the canal to safe and reliable power generation canal safety improvements are also needed to continue to operate safely as a storm water conveyance but the scope and expense of those improvements are significantly less than the return to service option ultimately we need to decide if we want to continue to operate as a stormwater convenience facility a return to service for the purposes of power generation during this current license term the liebert canal has been a future in the mackenzie valley for 90 years and during that time a portion of the kansas river has been devoted through it and businesses and residencies have grown up around it what that means is there are many

1:07:32 stakeholders who are directly impacted by both the near and long-term future now it's also important to realize that the near-term decision has an impact on our long-term path forward as a reminder the two options that we're considering for the library project are one the return to service option where we would repair or rebuild significant portions of the canal as necessary for power generation the second is a more permanent conversion to storm water conveyance where there would be no diversion of the mckenzie river into the canal so that's basically what's been happening since 2018. and then we'd also need to repair or rebuild some portions of the canal as necessary for safe stormwater conveyance

1:08:17 to the river at the february board meeting staff presented an updated net present value analysis based on 2019 forward wholesale prices that analysis included estimates for cost of capital improvements under both the stormwater conveyance and return to service scenarios now based on that information it was clear that within the remaining license period the stormwater convenience option is a lower cost option from an economic perspective the npv of the stormwater conveyance scenario based on that analysis is negative 50 million while the return to service option was up to negative 80 million for context in order to break even on the investment to return to service

1:09:03 power values would need to be between a hundred and five dollars per megawatt hour and 180 per megawatt hour or roughly two and a half to four and a half times higher than the current forecast of about forty dollars per hour during that same period i remember this was a preliminary analysis only and it doesn't include decommissioning or re-licensing scenarios that can greatly impact the financial outcome of either option therefore understanding the timing and scope of potential relicensing or decommissioning is necessary before we can develop a long-term financial estimate of the project tonight we'll be walking you through our proposed path to get to a board recommendation at the end of 2022

1:09:48 to pursue either the stormwater conveyance or return to service option in the near term so the current license term now in order to effectively evaluate that plan it's important to understand that the near term decision will set the direction for the path we take in the long term now the decision to pursue one option or another does not necessarily prevent our ability to change course but it would be highly inefficient from both the schedule and cost for example the return to service option the investment required is substantial enough to presume that re-licensing the project is necessary to recover those expenses similarly converting to the stormwater conveyance facility requires significant regulatory effort and potential decommissioning planning and deployment we've targeted

1:10:36 the end of 2022 for a recommendation to the board for multiple reasons the first is the potential for board turnover in january 2023 our plan is to walk through this together over the next year and a half as we continue to gather information so that the current board has ample opportunity to digest the information periodically and provide feedback and direction throughout in addition to that waiting longer means that we may unintentionally default to the stormwater conveyance option the longer we wait the more likely it is that significant investments in generating equipment and additional canal maintenance would be required to ultimately return to service so that changes the equation as time goes on i'll walk through this slide in more detail at the end of the presentation

1:11:26 now the decision to operate as either a stormwater conveyance or a return to service has impacts well beyond economics in addition to the finances we also want the board to understand the implications of either option on the environment and the community as such we've developed a preliminary triple bottom line analysis to help inform our work plan between now and the end of 2022 and many of the items identified in the tbl require further research to understand the nature and scope of the impact and more work is needed to verify our assumptions additionally several items such as regulatory constraints were identified as critical path topics to verify that both return to service and stormwater conveyance are truly viable options in the near term research on several of these issues has been completed and will be presented

1:12:11 tonight others have been prioritized in our work plan again this is a preliminary triple bottom line only and it will be updated and expanded as we continue to gather information over the next year and a half the full results of the tbl are included as an appendix in the board memo we'll present our high level takeaways now but we encourage everyone to look at the full results to truly understand the breadth of issues the stormwater conveyance option is favorable in the near term for financial and safety reasons it's a lower cost option and reduces the likelihood and effect of a catastrophic embankment failure it's also generally favorable environmentally but there are many

1:12:56 questions that remain related to water quality and carbon impacts for example we don't fully understand the impact to water quality of operating long-term as a stormwater conveyance facility and there is the potential for adverse conditions from stagnant water or sediment in the canal that may be periodically flushed to the river during storm events notably the stormwater conveyance option has marked social impacts on the upriver community for example loss of irrigation opportunities from the canal can directly affect agricultural businesses and residents the return to service option is favorable from a local community and social impact perspective that is financially expensive in the near term the return to service option is also generally unfavorable

1:13:41 environmentally as compared to the stormwater conveyance option but again many questions remain specifically around water quality again full results are provided in the board memo and these are general conclusions only the nature and scope of the impacts will be verified over the next year and a half the tbl was used to develop our work plan between now and the end of 2022 focusing on the additional information needed to make an informed recommendation on the future now we will be bringing information to the board periodically as identified in this roadmap this may be through memos board meetings work sessions and field trips so that the board has

1:14:26 ample opportunity to ask questions and provide feedback a few topics such as regulatory constraints were identified as critical path items and work on several of these has been completed since february these are the items you see in orange on the graphic the first is a tpl we just discussed the second is a legal analysis of regulatory options that was presented to the board in executive session the third is an analysis of water rights and obligations the results of which will be presented in a few moments moving forward we have the following deliverables in our work plan the first is a communication and stakeholder engagement strategy that will be completed by the end of this year for implementation in 2022 the next step is a water quality technical

1:15:11 analysis that we've prioritized with the target date of quarter 1 2022 we would then develop likely decommissioning and licensing scenarios to inform the near-term decision including both infrastructure needs and other things like what replacement power might look like we do need a better understanding of what the suite of options is so that they can be considered in the near-term decision now as a reminder decommissioning and re-licensing are negotiated agreements involving multiple regulatory agencies and stakeholders and without going through that process you can't see exactly what neither decommissioning or licensing would look like however we would like the board to have an understanding of the general range of options

1:15:56 we would then take the scenarios from the scenario development stage and put estimates of cost for implementing those scenarios again this would include not only infrastructure costs but also things like replacement power and financing options such as federal funding or bonds we take all that information we gathered and expand the triple bottom line analysis so that it's more comprehensive finally we come to the board at the end of 2022 with a recommendation to pursue either the stormwater conveyance or return to service option during this current license term now i'll move on to result support that's been completed since february there are a few general conclusions from the legal analysis of regulatory options if the stormwater conveyance option is

1:16:41 chosen there are multiple regulatory paths that exist the appropriate path is largely dependent on whether or not we want to preserve our ability to license the project after the current license return expires for the return to service option again the near-term investment is substantial enough to presume that licensing the project is necessary to recover those expenses it's important to note that either option has significant regulatory process and expense associated with it and there is no easy answer here now i'd like to hand it over to mark zuniker to discuss water rights and near-term risk production measures great thank you lisa a little information here about the water rights this table

1:17:26 summarizes our situation uh the first line on the table uh gives the context where we have about 100 to 125 properties along the length of the canal and then a subset of those do have water rights um 22 and they break down into a few additional categories here uh first category are the agreements with limited obligation to water supply which there are four and those agreements date back to the original construction of the canal their 1928 vintage agreements because the canal was intercepting tributary creeks that were supplying properties downstream and so those are reflected in the three associated with cogswell creek

1:18:11 and one associated with hanson creek there were others that were developed in 1928 but they've been retired and replaced by new agreements uh the next category are agreements with without the supply guarantees these would have been developed after construction of the canal when it was cleared to eweb that the ability to deliver water was disruptable we could have damn safety issues operational issues and as a result those agreements did clearly identify that the lack of guarantee that depending on operational constraints that water may not be available so we've got

1:18:56 12 um that fall in the cat that category and then 13 rather and one of which is includes the mackenzie hatchery as agreement with the corps of engineers that was made in the 1970s and then finally there's another five water rights agreements that do not have agreements with with eu at all and are in that category of being disruptible i did want to also you know highlight that in in this in the meantime while uh the canal is drawn down and these water right holders are figuring out solutions um in the initial couple of years there

1:19:41 was enough leakage through the intake gates that many of those water rat users were able to limp by with just a couple of feet of water in the canal however this past winter due to debris loading from the holiday farm fire those intake gates completely sealed and there was essentially no water all we had coming in were these tributary creeks and so to help out our commercial irrigators that were relying on that for their farming activities we did install four irrigation check dams um for those commercial enterprises that backed up the water no more than two feet that meant first requirements but kept the irrigators able to continue big by

1:20:29 i did want to run back to this uh table real quick to point out that one of the one of the things we've been doing with respect to the water rights is identifying potential alternatives for those irrigators and um just to summarize what those are in those cases where the water right is not of great value by buying that out is a possibility for those that really do depend on the water right converting their surface water right to a groundwater rate is one alternative we can look into and the other is moving the point of diversion from the canal to the uh mackenzie river itself and then the other topic i wanted to touch on was the near-term risk reduction measures as lisa mentioned even though we're in a

1:21:15 storm water conveyance mode we are not operating risk-free and that's because the canal intercepts a number of creeks shown on this figure uh the two largest of which are johnson creek and cogswell creek and so our focus in terms of near-term risk production will be on on how to manage that storm water condition because during a severe storm those creeks can't actually put it in to the canal more water than we actually operate with under normal power generation activities so the strategy there is to try to focus in um on a couple of key areas of canal that are highlighted in the blue by installing canal plugs such that those larger creeks that flow in can be

1:22:02 focused into those blue areas of the canal and routed to the closest return point to the river would be to focus in on those higher risk areas that see high storm water flows those investments would be conducted in a manner that tries to preserve value for both a future permanent storm water conveyance operation or would also uh be of value to a conversion a return to service scenario where they're operating once again for

1:22:48 power generation that thanks back to lisa all right great this is the graphic you saw at the beginning of the presentation i wanted to make a few points here again the path forward after 2022 it depends on the path chosen the option chosen again the decision to pursue storm water conveyance or return to service doesn't necessarily necessarily prevent us from changing course but it's highly inefficient so what that means is we really do need to start considering our long-term strategy sooner rather than later a couple of things i want to point out um on on these two options the timelines depicted are approximate and they're just intended to give the board a general sense of phasing under

1:23:34 the return to service scenario you'll see that there are again substantial infrastructure improvements that are required those would generally take place between 2023 and 2028-ish with an estimated return to power generation of about 2028. now i think this is a relatively optimistic timeline and schedule given the significant improvements that are needed in the associated permitting and regulatory process and that's probably our best case scenario to return to power generation and again as i've stated many times the return to service option does presume that re-licensing the project is necessary to get a return on that investment so we've shown on starting our re-licensing proceedings in 2030 and that's 10 years ahead of our license expiration date and that's

1:24:21 the general timing that most hydro owners use when trying to figure out how long it'll take to get an additional license didn't quite pay enough for us that way for carmen but 10 years should be enough for the storm water conveyance option again there are infrastructure improvements that are needed and mark just went through some of those those would also generally take place between the 2023 to 2028 timing the difference with this path is that you know around 2025 we would want to recommend a regulatory path forward and start those regulatory proceedings shortly after that all right that's the end of the formal uh presentation

1:25:06 again we're asking for board feedback on our proposed work plan and very specifically we're speaking or asking for feedback on whether our plan includes the critical pieces of information necessary along a suitable timeline and with sufficient opportunities for review and input and i put our um our plan between now and the end of 2022 up on the side for reference with that i'll hand it back over to franklin anybody that wants to jump into first can i just ask for a quick uh repeat of what your changes be back on you just mentioned yeah it's really is this the right information so the things we have identified on this timeline is it the right information is the timeline suitable and are there

1:25:52 appropriate opportunities for you to review information and provide feedback i'm gonna go ahead and jump in since i i'm in control of that um so i don't want to sound like a broken record because i've brought this up several times but i am a little concerned about the timeline and making sure that we have a really thorough understanding um i this is my third year on the board and i feel like this is one of the biggest decisions on the board that we will be making since my time on the board and we also have a bunch of other really important things that are coming up in the near future and so um it can be really easy to get overwhelmed with all this information i

1:26:37 won't speak for my other board members but i will tell you for me i'm not an expert in it and um i i'm not saying that it's not doable in this timeline but i really want to be thoughtful in how we can move forward and make sure that we all have the information that we need um we've talked about having more work sessions i think if we have like one or two work sessions on this it's not going to be enough and i also understand um the expediency of the timeline that you want to make sure that the current board is the one that's making these decisions so you don't have to start all over if there's any people on the board um but what i fear is that we don't give enough time and dedication to it that we're going to either have a split board at the end

1:27:22 or people are not going to want to make a decision because it it really is huge and it's kind of scary and daunting to think that this is what we're deciding on so this is gonna i'm gonna i am gonna become a broken record because i'll probably say something like this similarly with other big projects that we're doing but i really am just gonna advocate that we figure out a way to dedicate more time to this john oh thank you um i don't envy your task this is probably going to be one of the toughest decisions i've made here for 14 years i just some of the questions that i'm going to have before i'm going to be able to give directions about the economics about this uh and give you an example so i see a negative net present value in the stormwater

1:28:07 30 million but i was around i was on the board when we finalized this that was 120 million cost system license plus or minus and just take that straight line and appreciate it and so if we have that strand of unadvertised cost how come that isn't added at 50 million bucks how come that's not ads in the value of 30 in the stormwater because we're going to lose that investment we're not going to be able to capture it to generation and so those are things like that the other thing we missed the temperature or dfw forgot to put the temperature requirement in the lower river i guarantee that's coming back this time and are we gonna with climate change and all this other things are we gonna need to be able to generate in the summer months because we're not gonna be able to meet the temperature so

1:28:52 details like that i'm sorry to get in the weeds now that's the type of stuff that i'm going to want to see because and i'm going to also want to understand about whether or not this qualified product that we produce there if we return to service will qualify as a wreck and we can sell it on the market and give somebody else the rec standard and you can sell it at a much higher thing because i've been in two major decisions seneca and carmen when you have more power prices of a whole lot more than you're talking about here and now you were 200 and some odd dollars to make carmen work in over 20. so i'm going to be a hard sell on this future price thing you know i'm not very smart about that stuff but i remember and so those are the types of things i'm

1:29:38 going to look for is getting into the weeds i agree with mindy that we got a lot of weeds to crawl through um this thing is uh very very complex it's it's every time they sparkle one time we knock and i got a feeling that other people on this board are going to ask some of the questions not that i'm asking so um i appreciate what you're doing i'm looking forward to it but i think we're going to have to allocate a pretty good time to make sure we make that right decision because you know when you say net present value negative stormwater that's perpetuity that's forever and i don't know how we calculate a net negative present value forever when we have something that's going to cost us forever and and we don't have a finite

1:30:24 time when it stops because it never stops and so i need to understand that concept so those are the types of things i'm looking for thank you go ahead all right all right um well first thanks for the presentation and the background there's a lot of work that goes into this um i have a handful of comments uh one having done tbl analyses like this for a local government i know what's involved it's um it's time consuming especially to really kind of get into the details um and i don't know what the resource looks like to

1:31:10 do the kind of next piece of that but i think it might be worth considering um bringing in outside help mostly so that we have a third-party view of that that our tpa wasn't self-generated i think it provides us credibility and i agree with mindy about the time to go to speed you're not a broken record um yes holy cow the decisions that this board have been choked down over

1:31:56 the next few years frank can you do something about it no there's not enough water in this picture um so i i will reiterate my willingness and interest in doing um meetings every other week or twice a month um so we have more time to process and perhaps we shorten some of our meetings three or four hour long meetings a little bit so um i encourage us to you know take that time assuming the other board members are our game for that just feels like there's so much there is no good answer as you said i was waiting for you to deliver one like what's the easy solution just share it with us um and so i think especially the

1:32:42 interaction with the folks upstream who live nearby this to me is perhaps my i have a couple of good concerns one is how much outwards we can do not that we're going to satisfy everybody but i do want us as a board to do what we can to try and reduce the negative impacts on people whatever decision we make i think we have an obligation to those neighbors to really do our best to help them get the water they need or get the other things that they need within the constraints that we're working in and otherwise and i mentioned this in the past as well and i mentioned earlier all things being equal from my perspective uh water

1:33:27 temperatures are not going to get cooler the water quality is not going to get better the constraints on us going forward are going to get more difficult and um especially when we look at the fish in this river that are likely to become endangered i just want us to think about that from my perspective we'll be doing the board in 2040 a huge favor if we're thinking about the fish today um not that the fish are the only thing but again all things being equal from my perspective that's as i said trying to make um i think i'll stop there thanks um yeah for me one one of the things that on one of

1:34:13 your slides that came out was on the triple bottom line stormwater had uh favorable environmental and the return service had unfavorable uh environmental but when i went into the program i saw a lot of favorables and returned to service as opposed to unfavorable so that needs some clarification i mean one of them was fish there was a was an impact fish on on return to service um for me i again i i put out there i'm probably leaning towards return to service for a number of reasons uh but it's early on and i will definitely listen to all kinds of input and read read as many

1:34:59 technical briefings as i can get to but you know a couple things that that stick out to me that help with that is one the complications of of if we surrender the license or amend the license and the can of worms that that's going to open up two this is base power load that is that is green and and and something that we've had in the past and to me that's something that even if it's only 10 and 8 megawatts that's 18 megawatts that's not getting burned right so for me that's something that i that i think is valuable um

1:35:47 and also in the triple bottom line if if we're going to storm water conveyance are we going to look at removing the dam you know and making the river a free-flowing river again um because that's probably the best thing for environmental you know i'm not sure but you know you keep hearing people saying you know tear down dams to make free flowing rivers well if we're not using that dam except for to to do storm water conveyance we could probably pull off a little channel and have that go through so is that going to be part of the triple bottom line and the thing that we're looking at going forward and also to what commissioner brown

1:36:32 brought up you know the money that we've invested in this over the years both physical dollars and community dollars community you know communities have been built up around this infrastructure and that needs to be in my mind that's something that i will be weighing in on you know when that helps making my decision you know there's there's communities up there that have historically been impacted and thrive around these infrastructures that we put in place and it might be our duty to put them back there it's to be expensive either way so those are some of the questions that i'll be looking for and i'm happy to dig into these things

1:37:18 and me not need uh one-on-ones or in humans to dig in further so thank you commissioners i kind of feel like professor lisa just gave you the syllabus to the class and uh and now you need to have time to study and um but as good professors we're going to have to work hard to help you pass the tests so in 2022 is an interesting time frame it's not that we're expecting any commissioners to actually leave us

1:38:03 necessarily but it also coincides pretty well with the integrated resource plan which talks about the value of the different types of resources going forward so i think that's a complementary piece of work that's another class you'll be you'll be taking uh throughout this this couple years um and there is a lot of work here and i think what we have found is that what we've heard is you need time this is this is a if you think about the remaining period of the license and then another license potentially on top of that you know we're talking 50 60 years worth of decision that this board will probably not make fully on its own but we'll have to set up uh the right

1:38:48 criteria and the right options for a future board and there's there's just a number of components to that um including the community component which is incredibly important here it has been there for almost 100 years and which means it served its time really really well but the question remains whether it should continue to serve in that capacity or a new one there is there is value from an environmental perspective impacts both to the river and to the to the climate related to carbon this project can also be influenced by the climate with reduced water flows and other things temperatures so there's a lot of complexity here we understand that

1:39:33 we were trying to do this in a way that you don't have to bite off the elephant all in one i'm not sure elephants are protected so i better not use that as an example but we're going to work through a process either so i think there's just a lot here i do like the idea of some third-party checks and balances on things and a lot of outreach to the other community are you getting what you need yeah absolutely i second that i did want to just um touch briefly on the tbl um and the results of that and commissioner you're correct it's kind of hard when you look at the table to figure out what's favorable which you know how to

1:40:18 weigh the options and the reality is we don't have a good way to weight the pros and cons of each right and so when we make um sort of overarching statements that things are generally favorable or not it really depends on the view of the landscape from where you're standing right and so um those are the types of things that i do believe a third party could help us with um to help kind of put those things into context for us um but the reality is there's impacts and benefits um on in all three buckets social environmental and economic for either option and um what is favorable or not again depends on your perspective and so it's going to be difficult to draw real broad general conclusions

1:41:05 can i just speak to that so so for me i agree with what you're saying but in some of the things that we just that we're learning from our public outreach is when you put that up on a slide in a board meeting that says favorable or unfavorable that's there and that it can be taken and used and said you know eweb says it's unfavorable for return to service environmental right because that's a slide that got presented at a board meeting and now it lives there and so if you're saying that you know it's mixed just make sure that we we put caveats next to that if we're going to be putting them up on slides

1:41:50 especially on triple bottom lines type things yeah um understood and i'll take that to heart and i'll take ownership of that because i'm the one who actually came up with the conclusions from the tbl um and just to you know to explain for the record why um it was my uh assumption that the return to service was generally less favorable um environmentally and that's just based on the fact that diversion of water um into a canal potential temperature impacts impacts to you know migrating fish and um you know macro invertebrate it's very much around the ecology of the river itself um but that doesn't get things like carbon impacts so again there's you know it's um it's relative

1:42:43 yeah just make a couple more comments um about the carbon i appreciate you uh mentioning that there are a number of environmental impacts we have to consider when it comes to carbon it seems like um while hydro base low hydro hydro can be very helpful it's also at the prices that it seems like we're talking about these frosting it just can't compete with other sources of low carbon electricity utility scale pv being on the order 40 or 50 um in the same range um granted that's you know under great conditions but um it will be

1:43:29 hard for us i think for this these projects to really compete in terms of providing low carb electricity is that i've that right is that a correct assumption yeah i think when we look at electrification one of the things that we recognize is that being competitive in that environment is also important from a customer perspective these are not this is not stored hydro which can have a peak capacity impact on the system which is typically when the carbon intensity of the electric system is its highest these are run of the river bike road which means it's available when it's available and one of the things that the resource plan will do it'll look at the characteristics of resources

1:44:15 like right on the river hydro and say what do we think that's worth it what is the replacement cost so i think your point is spot on the value relative to carbon is going to be what are the other options what are the avoided costs what are the values that that contributes towards capacity and growth flexibility so those are the characteristics that we'll look at but you're absolutely right thank you appreciate that um and the other question they have and this may be way out there i suspect we considered it i know there's a kind of there would be a kind of difficulty associated with actually moving because the former river channels have been built upon as i understand it

1:45:01 but from my perspective given the long-term cost of operating this stormwater conveyance and the negative impacts on water quality whatever we do it would be interesting to at least consider what what would it look like for us to buy out those property owners if they if there was a reasonable way to do that enemies in that area you know not not talking about condemning properties but is that something that could be considered as britain restoring those river channels back to their former state so that we're not continuing to operate the storm water conveyance system in perpetuity you know at a fairly significant expense and then it seems like part of that calculation

1:45:46 too is there's a ton of land there that perhaps offset some impostor i don't know what that looks like but it'd be interesting to hear what you all have thought about i know that's been i don't know i suspect you all have thought about that something you're interested to hear thoughts on that if you do that about you know getting rid of the canal and going down back down to the natural street don't we have two miles of canal below walterville that people have waterfront homes and bridges across and everything else that would now be just a big rock pitch on walter bill on the tail race and so that would be an issue

1:46:33 yeah do the stormwater conversion you know i don't know if that's lever or not you know if you're going to do both of them um baltimore in some ways more complicated than lieberg should we end up that we're talking about in that scenario as well

1:47:54 i'm used to sitting through a lot of hearings so right well good evening commissioners uh for the record i'm jason huser your government affairs manager um it's good to see you all it's fun to be here i i didn't mind making the drive at all it's been way too long since i've been here at eweb so happy to be here tonight either 2001 legislative session was historic in many ways notably the first virtual session uh certainly not an ideal way to legislate but i think some parts of it worked better than people expected um actually the the amount of participation for folks in rural oregon for example was probably much higher and uh folks that uh working parents that don't have child

1:48:40 care people sometimes testified from work on bills there certainly were some positive things and i'm sure the legislature will um consider um trying to retain some of that um in the next legislative session because that there were some silver linings about a virtual session and i'll confess uh testifying at an 8 a.m hearing on a rainy day i definitely enjoy doing that virtually rather than looking for a parking spot and hiking through the rain uh i'd say the the central highlight legislatively which to talk about tonight is 100 clean energy standard that was approved by the legislature eweb was heavily involved in the work group that met uh really weekly uh sometimes twice a week at the peak of the session to

1:49:26 iron out the details in that legislation that was by invitation only it was uh not appointed by the legislature we were there with the large investor on utilities i'd say that eweb has acquired a reputation as being very constructive when we do raise concerns about things we often give constructive alternatives or input so we're someone that gets invited to the table for these work groups and we certainly made a difference in trying to fulfill some of our key objectives as to what we hope to see in the legislation um the bill only applies to investor owned utilities that was not something that eweb sought i think we would have been content with a policy that worked well for the entire electric sector but that decision was

1:50:12 made and just because we were exempted didn't mean that we walked away from the table i think general manager frank lawson has occasionally talked about these policies affect everyone in the sector even if you have an exemption for example if electric reliability is jeopardized your exemption doesn't mean you're in the dark if the grid goes down it doesn't mean you're not in the dark if the group goes down so we stayed at the table to raise some pressing concerns about uh reliability and uh and how this policy would affect the investor on utilities because we're all in this together when it comes to keeping the grid up uh the bill is technology neutral that's a positive uh one of our objectives it's also a source-based bill where we measure carbon upstream in the bill rather than

1:50:59 trying to track generation all the way to actual points of consumption the bill ended up surprisingly being an emission-based bill what that means is unlike uh the renewable portfolio standard wrecks are not a currency of compliance this is strictly based on emissions and i think in the process of developing the bill we realize that's a positive because it probably makes it less likely that the region will overbuild renewables and that's that's a good thing for the consumer the bill has important off-ramps for reliability purposes any utility that has a compliance obligation if they need to go make unspecified market purchases for reliability purposes they can do so

1:51:45 without penalty there's a process for them to go to the oregon public utility commission to have that approved after the fact there's also a six percent cost cap an important consumer protection uh one of the areas of concern that we were disappointed in was the bill does have a ban on the sighting of new gas power plants in oregon that was disappointing to us because we don't have a resource adequacy standard in the pacific northwest we don't have uniform standardized methods or [Music] mechanisms for the region to determine whether or not we are resource adequate that's a work in progress our general manager frank lawson's at

1:52:31 the forefront of that he was on a symposium panel uh today on that very topic so for us we felt it was very premature to have a ban of that type especially when you consider that oregon already has a ban on nuclear energy we just didn't understand why you want wait for a resource adequately attitude adequacy standard to be put in place for the region the bill does allow people to go to the market but without a resource adequacy standard in the region we can't be confident that the market can provide the needed capacity for reliability purposes until we have that standardization and coordination to ensure that people aren't double counting what's available in the market um it's

1:53:17 just the time wasn't right so we were disappointed that that happened and we were definitely an outspoken um proponent of waiting for a regional adequacy standard before a decision like that was made um moving along uh there was a wildcard wildfire recovery bill house bill 5006 uh that bill really was only made possible because congress passed the american rescue plan with the help of congressman defazio oregon would have never had the resources in my view to do what they did they invested hundreds of millions of dollars into wildfire recovery into badly damaged areas around oregon from the september fires last year

1:54:02 i'm happy to tell you that through our work watershed recovery on the mckinsey was not lost in the shuffle carl and i testified by my count nine times about wildfire impacts on the mackenzie and the need for state resources to augment what eweb and our ratepayers are already doing as far as investments in watershed recovery i know joe mole from the mckinsey river trust and jared waybright from the council also testified several times we were able to tell a great story our track record at eweb and with the pure water partnership left a really big impression on this joint wildfire committee and the appropriators of ways and beans we showed them we have an existing pipeline and a track record and

1:54:48 any funds that they put towards mckinsey watershed recovery we're ready to go we can get it done there's nothing that needs no wheel that needs to be reinvented and as a result in house bill 5006 the legislature appropriated a four million dollar grant to eweb for riparian and floodplain acquisition and restoration that'll be a pass-through through the oregon watershed enhancement board e-web staff have been in contact with oweb a couple times now try to find about try to find out what kind of flexibility and what time frame we have to obligate those funds we're pretty confident we have the entire biennium which just started at the end of june but if we had even a little bit more time than that if we could show that we have at least contractually obligated

1:55:34 funds but we might spread out the actual spending of that money if you will to projects over a longer time frame that could help us feel a little bit more strategic in how those funds are used there was also a 15 million dollar allocation for mckinsey river water and wastewater infrastructure that includes rebuilding the water system at blue river and also potentially a new community wastewater system at blue river but also that would uh those funds would also go towards dispersed septic replacement and repair too that's going to be overseen by business oregon this is something this is an area where business oregon doesn't have a lot of experience in so it's very possible at the end of the day business oregon may uh

1:56:21 make lean county a sub grantee and we'll work with them since they have the local expertise um moving along there was also a 315 thousand dollar arpa allocation that was sponsored by representative paul holby for finrock restoration phase one each legislature legislator was given a small pot of money they could out get in their districts so we're very grateful to representative holy for selecting finn rock uh as a recipient of our funds uh in general this although we although we did have this great track record and the legislature had confidence we could spend this money wisely it was still not an easy task i i could give a basically an oscar speech to try to thank everyone

1:57:06 the lane county delegation senator porzanski representatives holby and nathanson who both were on the ways and means committee lane county commissioner heather buck who testified repeatedly about mckinsey watershed recovery and my counterpart alex kyler at the county carl rearranged vacations when i needed a heavy hitter a subject matter expert to testify in salem and janine parisi did a fantastic job of coming up with write-ups of the the projects there was a lot of paperwork involved and janine hit a home run whenever we needed a write-up of how we could use this money so kudos to her and last but not least representative brian klim the chair of the special wildfire committee he's a salem legislator and an oregon state beaver but you know he's also a sixth generation oregonian

1:57:53 and he loves the mckenzie river and he was fantastic he went out of his way uh to help us uh as we try to help that watershed recovery so kudos to representative clem moving on there was a wildfire mitigation bill passed senate bill 762. it's going to be pretty straightforward for what ewell would be required to do all consumer-owned electric utilities in oregon must complete and approve a wildfire mitigation plan by the summer of 2022. the e-web board will approve that plan we'll only be sending a copy to the oregon public utility commission just so that they can sort of be sort of have a statewide inventory of all those plans

1:58:38 uh that legislation also codifies the oregon public utility commission workshops on best practices for wildfire mitigation in the electric sector a variety of e-web staff are participating in those workshops voluntarily but we want to stay apprised of best practices and hear what our colleagues in the industry are doing to mitigate wildfire risk lastly i'll just quickly note hospital 3103 was passed it clarifies the legality of changing character of use in water rights for federal stored water this may not seem like a big deal now but this is very very big for ewebs water future and i would say probably 50 or 60 other communities in the willamette basin surface water rights are fully allocated

1:59:24 in the willamette basin and so for any future needs whether it be eweb's second source or other communities that have new water needs due to growth this is the last water that's out there and so this this has been a 20 25 year process to get to a position where municipalities can start accessing federal store water if they need to so it's great to finally finish that that final chapter and put that one to rest i'm clarifying that wrd does have the ability to change the character of use for water rights for that water so that's uh that's all i got i'm happy to take any questions

2:00:10 [Music] sure um yeah actually uh to start with let me comment well thanks jason for this presentation and for the work you do i happen to know that you take your job very seriously [Music] um i also want to reiterate what you were saying about the wildfire um uh the wildfire funds recovery funds so for those who don't know we're lay county doing well by recovery as my day job and um i have seen first hand that other communities that didn't have the type of watershed

2:00:55 or detection entities in place the way we did here they did not have as they're not as successful in finding resources it is more difficult for them to to do watershed recovery work than it is for us because we have the pure water partners program in place and um it's a huge asset so i just think we all should be really proud and supportive of that um and then i just had one question about the 2021 um in the end the last we'll either have there says establishes a 50 million state investment fund for renewable energy projects um is that something that is only for investor loan utilities or can we

2:01:42 access those fences uh yeah it's actually probably the it's actually the reverse um i don't believe private companies will be eligible it would be primarily for local governments and then i think non-profits may be eligible as well so as a as a local government uh eweb would certainly be entitled to apply for for funds and um i'm sure we could come up with some interesting ideas potentially uh renewable hydrogen for resiliency um that's certainly something we could look into so adam schultz is the staff person at the oregon department of energy who will be in charge of setting this up and uh we talked to adam quite a bit and uh we'll be staying tuned uh as to that program

2:02:28 getting off the ground and i think we should certainly take a look at it or something this year you had to follow along on you're doing it for us instead of us having to do it ourselves um the only question i had was um in regards to the arpa fund on finrock i know that that arpa funds have specific uses that they can be used for and i'm just wanting to make sure that that you know the the little christmas presence that each legislature got with arpa funds for two million dollars that they've got to spend that that project will fit it into the

2:03:14 arpa qualified funding box yeah we feel pretty good about that i don't i don't know that representative holy was given given anything in writing or a letter but the arb build does have a very specified uh uh authorization list i don't know that if you're excluded if you're not on this list but if you're on the list you're kind of golden and water infrastructure is one of the authorized uses and as far as we know the us treasury and office of management and budget in washington the instructions that they've passed along to the state we haven't seen any reason to believe that green infrastructure is excluded from that definition of water infrastructure so we feel pretty confident um that there'd

2:04:01 be no hang up on that and i know representative holy like i said i don't i don't know that he got anything in writing but i do know that that was vetted with the legislative fiscal office in salem great thank you just a quick comment thank you very much for your efforts um when we have another area legislator going backwards like that legislative representative do we i mean as a board should we send them thank you letter because we don't get to interact with those people on a regular basis like we do our local legislators but that person [Music] would it be wise to send them a thank you letter as a board i think it would be great i think it'd be outstanding could somebody

2:04:47 maybe do that we could sign him support to acknowledge him because we don't interact with them but it would be nice to say thank you anytime you want to give us money go ahead that would be great i think that anytime we're on the mackenzie river in the future we should definitely think of representative clem and invite him along thank you that mr brown i'll ask jason um i have two questions i don't know if one is for you jason or one star from frank but uh we don't often find ourselves in the position of like maybe having a little too much money sometimes so um with the mackenzie watershed funds you were saying that like it's a lot of money hopefully we can expand over a little bit longer um i'm

2:05:34 just wondering like does this give us an opportunity to think a little bit bigger on some things than we were planning because we have this funding presidential goal and then [Music] do you know carl morgenstern he thinks awfully big on these subjects and i don't think there's too much money actually there's there's a lot of work to do in the watershed i think we identified through some of the strategic work 20 million dollars over the next five years so it's not too much money and but it doesn't facilitate different kinds of thinking absolutely and i think that's the way we want to operate um and part of that is just the

2:06:21 the way we prioritize our whole source to tap approach to water including the watershed jason mentioned the relationships that we've built up in the watershed pre-disaster which were really beneficial in our recovery now so i think it's a great point it's one that we'll have some discussions with management carl and susan fricke and some of the others in that group and say does this open up more possibilities and we'll have to negotiate a little bit with deborah hart who was always looking at the other side of the equation from a financial perspective like it absolutely opens up possibilities and i think that's a great point

2:07:06 i i don't have anything to add i know carl is thinking how to be very strategic now and there are opportunities to scale up but uh i think carl wouldn't really be the person that answers that but i think there's we have some good options great and just for the record i don't want to leave too much money no no i was just saying it's really exciting to have all this to have extra money that we weren't planning on and what the opportunities were making bigger so that that is what i meant by that question um my other one is just that what is in line on the runway for the next legislative session do you think well that's a tough time tough time to ask that everyone's trying to forget the session i've been camping off grid but you know i

2:07:52 i'm certainly interested to see whether anything with a multi-sector approach to carbon reduction happens governor brown as you record me all recall after the failure of the clean jobs cap and trade bill um she did issue an executive order it put in effect carbon caps and reductions for um sectors like natural gas industry transportation but you know that that's all going to be subject to litigation and you know it'll be interesting if the legislature decides we're not sure we want to take chances in court with what the governor perceives as her authority under some of the existing statutes we want to give an explicit statutory

2:08:37 direction to enact carbon caps and reduction paths for across multiple sectors of the economy obviously washington state was successful in doing that in this past legislative session leaving oregon as the only pacific coast state without economy-wide carbon caps so that that will probably come back you know with the quorum issues it's unclear what can be achieved in that area but um certainly you know this time around the electric sector was addressed and i would say we've probably been the sector delivering most of the greenhouse gas reductions for a pretty long time there certainly is some some

2:09:22 some room left to deal with those other parts of the economy thank you for all your hard work and for um thank you and thank you for all the support thanks jason all right so now we are at break we're still running a tiny bit ahead but i think i'm going to break it to everybody yeah okay so we'll take a 10-minute break and then come back

2:20:42 and we're on um agenda item number 10 the electrification impact assessments preliminary residential results thank you good evening commissioners i'm megan capper energy resources manager and i'm going to kick us off this evening and then hand it over to ben ulrich who is our long-term planner to talk about our preliminary findings and we'll end with time for you to ask questions and provide any feedback so the objective of tonight is to share the preliminary base case findings of phase two of our electrification impact study and then in november we will be back with our final phase two results this analysis looks at all possible outcomes if there was future electrification of small passenger vehicles

2:21:27 building space and water heating last november we completed our phase one which took a broad rush approach at understanding the drivers and magnitude of impact from electrification of eweb's future lows this year we narrowed our focus on how economics influences electrification adoption rates and you can see that defined in our goal number five why is it important for us to take time to better understand the potential features around electrification well first of all it's in support of the board's climate change policy that says ewa will assist with their carbon reductions through several measures including smart electrification this study helps us define what is smart electrification

2:22:12 it allows us to better understand and quantify where we see transfers and costs of benefits between anywhere participating customer our rate payers and society at large so it's basically who pays who benefits and where we as a utility should prioritize and support shifting of benefits to help all groups secondly this work allows us to better understand the drivers around how our customers use electric electricity it serves as a key input to the 2021-2 integrated resource plan the integrated resource plan puts together both customer demand which is our electrification study and generation options to help us plan for the future

2:23:00 here i'm going to talk um just give you a quick reminder of what we learned last year in our phase one first of all we found that our peak load could increase by 50 to 70 percent and that's for all of the indies together we also saw that about 75 percent uh they're gonna there will be about a 75 reduction in annual greenhouse gas emissions from an internal combustion engine to a new ev finally we learned that without policy drivers or mandates we were uncertain if we can see the high or even medium electrification adoption rates so we wanted to further explore the other drivers of adoption which is economics and focus on the cost benefit analysis so i'll hand it over to ben

2:23:46 and we'll give you some more of the details about our findings great thanks megan so tonight we're sharing our early findings which again represent our base case assumptions and we plan to do some sensitivities around these assumptions and bring those findings back to the board in november but frank encourages to get to the bottom line up front and so on this slide i just want to try and cover that for electric vehicles we're anticipating higher levels of adoption starting after 2030 and as electric vehicles are expected to become much more cost competitive with gasoline cars by 2040 as much as 85 percent of the vehicles on the road could be electric which is much higher than our high than our high scenario we presented in phase one this could lead to a peak in increase

2:24:33 for e-web in our one-on-ten peaks of 30 for residential water heaters we're anticipating moderate levels of electric electrification by 2040 heat pumps are expected water heaters are expected to become more cost competitive with natural gas although water heating technology is not a large energy use we do anticipate this could increase our peak load by four percent residential space heating is a more complex electrification opportunity under our base case assumptions we would anticipate low levels of adoption the reason we have a question mark here is because our findings are sensitive to assumptions we plan to explore that further and bring back those learnings by november so diving into the methodology we wanted to understand consumer choices

2:25:20 and estimate when and how much electrification we might see in the future ultimately consumers will electrify if they see benefits some will choose to electrify for non-financial reasons like their passion for the environment but those factors are difficult to model reliably instead we focus on financial analysis to quantify the benefits and costs electrifying then we calculated the simple payback period to estimate the levels of adoption simple payback period is the upfront cost of electrifying divided by the annual benefits it gives you a sense of how long it takes to recover your costs the shorter the payback period the more people you would expect to electrify we also looked at costs and benefits from three different perspectives the eweb ratepayer or the uf participant you have rate payers

2:26:06 in society the participant perspective quantifies the benefits and costs for the individual eweb customer and ultimately it's this individual who will choose whether or not they electrify and become a participant in electrification the ratepayer perspective quantifies the benefits and costs for the e-web rate payer even if that ratepayer isn't the individual who chooses to electrify finally we looked at it from the societal perspective which quantifies the benefits for the individual the benefits and costs for the individual as well as the community benefit of carbon reduction exploring costs and benefits from multiple perspectives gives us insights into the extent that all perspectives benefit or there's a lack of alignment among these different perspectives a lack of alignment is when for example

2:26:51 the participant bears all the costs but ratepayers in society receive all the benefits for electric vehicles our base case assumptions assumed reasonable increases in electric electricity and gas rates over time we also assumed that the pacific northwest grid continued to carbonize and that by 2050 we would have very low emissions on the grid in our eb benefits we included federal tax incentives as well as the oregon clean vehicle rebate in in the early years but by 2030 we assume that those incentives will phase out we also assumed an average light duty vehicle useful life 12 years for electric vehicles our early finding is that evs benefit from all perspectives and that these benefits are

2:27:37 anticipated to grow over time looking at the benefit cost ratio at the bottom of the slide you can see that all ratios are above one indicating a net benefit and that by 2030 on the right side of the table these benefits grow in 2021 federal tax credits and the oregon clean vehicle rebate are key drivers to participant benefits implying that if you don't receive those incentives you actually might have a net cost by 2030 though after these incentives go away ev adaption eb adoption is expected to have obvious financial benefits to the participant the simple payback period is expected to decline from six years in 2021 down to only two years in 2030 this would lead to much higher levels of

2:28:22 adoption starting in 2030 this adoption chart helps illustrate that point the total light duty vehicles on the road is represented in gray and the green area shows the increase in the number of evs on the road over time you can see that 85 by 2040 is pretty dramatic and it's higher than our phase one studies show in the high scenario which is illustrated with the black line i want to clarify though that there's still uncertainty regarding the future decreases in evs that's not guaranteed and could could influence this adoption curve to better understand the potential energy impacts of this transition we work with our consultants at e3 to analyze charging behavior in 2030. the estimated future

2:29:10 impacts for peak energy used per vehicle may actually be less than we anticipated in phase one this is because we anticipate higher levels of workplace and public charging in the future this better reflects the reality that some people will not have access to home charging or those will utilize some public and workplace charging during the day assuming unmanaged charging behavior this could increase our peak by 30 in 2040. managed charging behavior would decrease these impacts and we plan to explore that more when we come back in november this transition is expected to be slow at first and we have time to explore peak mitigation opportunities before adoption really ramps up in 2030. we believe this deeper understanding of

2:29:56 vv adoption will be helpful as we project energy demand into the future and we plan to use this data in our upcoming irp moving on space and water heating our assumptions were the same as electric vehicles but we also added in some things that are specific to natural gas we assume that renewable natural gas or renewable gas blending goals would be met which is 15 rng by 2030 and 30 by 2050 we also assumed a useful life of 10 years for water heaters and 16 years for space heating technology the economics of water heating is expected to be favorable in the future today heat pump water heaters have an 11

2:30:43 year simple payback period which is actually longer than the useful life of the equipment however the cost competitiveness of this technology is expected to improve over time the benefit cost ratios below are shown without eweb incentives and while today it doesn't represent a participant benefit you can see that technology improvement by 2030 that it's neutral for the participant and continues to improve after that point today eweb has an 800 energy efficiency incentive for buying a heat pump water heater this is actively influencing the adoption of this technology by reducing the simple payback period from 11 years down to only four years even without these incentives we would expect moderate levels of adoption of heat pump water heaters in the future this could lead to a four

2:31:29 percent increase in our one in ten peak loads by 2040. for space heating an early finding of our phase two study is that the economics are core for space heating electrification simply put heat pumps are not cost competitive natural gas appliances today and that trend is not expected to improve over time in our base case assumptions looking at the table of benefit cost ratios at the bottom of the slide it should be noted that the e-web rate pair consistently benefits from electrification of space heating but the participant remains below one indicating a misalignment of benefits between the ratepayers and participants space heating is a complex electrification opportunity because space heating and cooling causes

2:32:14 eweb's peaks today the benefits of further electrification are not as obvious and our findings are more sensitive to our assumptions each of the heat each of the heat pump technologies we've studied here offers different levels of carbon reduction and different peak impacts to e-web for example dual fuel heat pumps cost more than a standard heat pump but they offer the ability to switch to natural gas during very cold temperatures which would avoid adding to eweb's winter peak loads between now and november we really want to explore how sensitive these early findings are to our assumptions and bring back to board what we learned analyzing economics in our phase 2 study has provided us with some useful insights into our opportunities for smart electrification

2:33:00 for e-web smart electrification means looking for opportunities to benefit participants repairs and society while also considering the peak impacts for the utility today adopting his in ev has benefits from all perspectives and that's expected to improve over time going forward e-well will need to be mindful of the peak impacts and consider how this might impact our future ratepayers if electric grades were to become less affordable participants met participant benefits may decrease over time which would slow ev adoption e-pump water heaters represent a net cost to the participant today but they're being actively influenced by eweb's energy energy efficiency incentive this incentive is a real-life example

2:33:45 of the exchange of value between rate payers and participants and it offers a break-even point where both perspectives can be net beneficiaries continuing this incentive in the short run may encourage further electrification of water heating technology until it matures and eventually becomes more cost competitive with natural gas space heating is a more complex electrification opportunity and cost remains a barrier for the participant in society perspectives ratepayer benefits could be shared for dual fuel and standard efficiency heat pumps because there's a break-even point at which both the rate pair and the participant can both be net beneficiaries cold climate heat pumps don't currently offer that opportunity and they don't have the same rate even under our base case assumptions

2:34:31 between now and november we want to explore how sensitive these early smart electrification bindings are to our assumptions and with a deeper understanding of these sensitivities you can clarify where the smart electrification opportunities exist for our customers thinking of those sensitivities we'd like to explore gasoline and electric price sensitivities for electric vehicle we plan to quantify the impacts of managed and unmanaged charging behavior and explore the financial impacts for space and water heating we plan to explore scenario where the natural gas system reduces its carbon content with high levels of renewable natural gas or some other low carbon synthetic gas like green hydrogen higher levels of renewable natural gas would likely increase natural gas prices

2:35:17 potentially making electrification more beneficial to the participant however there is uncertainty around e-web's electricity supply costs as well we plan to explore these electricity supply cost sensitivities and better understand the potential impacts to our ratepayers and bring that to the board in november with that um okay raise your hand i don't have any questions i just have a compliment that i i'm going to understand it now thank you very much i appreciate it it's you know you got to take things way down the level for me

2:36:03 but i really appreciate the way this has been presented and the way it's going and i think we're heading absolutely in the right direction i want to thank you for your time and efforts to do what i think is a great job thank you very much thank you we'll take that back to the team um yeah just a couple things yeah thank you the presentation was good the slides were good um a couple of i guess the quest one of the questions that i would have is where does did you figure in air conditioning into this with the heat pump thing because and i'll just give you an example right we we don't have a heat pump at our house but with it getting hotter and hotter in the summer

2:36:49 when it's time to replace my furnace which is a gas furnace at this point i would consider heat pump because of the benefits of the air conditioning that i don't have now you know i've just got room air conditioners to do that so was was the other side of that coin that the benefit the of air conditioning put into these analysis yes so in our base case assumptions we assume that when you replace your gas furnace that your air conditioning unit was only 50 depreciated so we figured that they don't happen to just go out at the same time and so we assume that you kind of lose out on that 50 and then one of the sensitivities that we can explore is to say okay well if you electrify right at that perfect moment where both your air conditioner and your

2:37:35 furnace are going out there's actually a better benefit to you as a participant switching over to heat pumps at that moment but our base case assumption assumed that the 50 appreciation and i'm thinking for people who don't have any air right so that would when we've got a month of 90 degree heat i may look to get rid of my gas furnace quicker even it may not be at end of life because i want an air conditioner right or a heat pump that will help cool my my space um so that's just one of the things that i think might be put into some of the scenarios that people might replace it because our summers are getting hotter um the other thing that uh that i think would be

2:38:20 important and it was brought up in public testimony is that we need to share this with our community partners that are developing policies and possible incentives because they've got climate action plans that are based on electrification and goals that they're trying to meet based on electrification and since we've got this great tool for them to look at and say yeah it looks like we can hit it in transportation but we've got a fair ways to go in the space heating and water heating sector and you're playing your assumptions are that we're going to make it in those areas so getting all of our lines to mix

2:39:05 to come together between what we see in our analysis and what their analysis are i think it's going to be a very important thing to move forward i will also say thank you for the presentation and analysis is super helpful super enlightening well put together thank you um i have questions and i'll probably just give a few and then um e3 is helping with this analysis is that right and i didn't see that reflected in the report it might be useful to add just so that other people are reading this recognize that we have that kind of third party support

2:39:59 you remind us of the lesson from the phase one study which i appreciated that that people could be increasing to 70 but that assumes no energy efficiency is that right i think that's a really important caveat because um there's a ton of opportunities i understand there's a lot of opportunities for energy efficiency improvements and so um the the load the increase in people isn't likely to be that because we have some tools to help right um it just so to be super blunt our partners at the city regime um there are some folks who will say hey you can't um can't absorb this high rates of

2:40:44 electrification because um that's going to include something and i think it's important for us to be clear with them as we roll out these final reports that we do have tools to temper that peak load and efficiency is a huge one perhaps demonstrating the the scale of that efficiency opportunity and or the cost or benefit savings there the multiple perspective analysis that you've done where you do that you have the individual the rate payers and the society is super helpful thank you for sending up that way i haven't seen an analysis that does it that way and it's um from my perspective it's super helpful especially in thinking about how as you

2:41:30 pointed out towards the end there we can transfer some of that benefit from the ratepayers to the individual to make this all work um it was surprising to me that electrifying calm eating [Music] compared to the individual uh report we'll kind of get a sense of what that might look like what kind of incentives could we take out of that um that would break theirs to reply to the individual to make that all work

2:42:16 um chris jones made a comment earlier and i don't know people here um you know that it's pretty hard to see the barriers to adoption in heating because that's so significant um but that there is such an opportunity there as demonstrated by the way that you've done this analysis is use some some [Music] thank you for your presentation i have a couple comments and maybe an anecdote but um uh it's so it seems really clear from the way that you've laid it out so evs and home heating slash cooling right

2:43:01 that's where you get the most bang for your buck carbon wise right yeah yeah so um so we know that so um i'm curious if we have had any talk with like the city about i know this is their domain but like if they were to require new homes to be built with electric heating say if you need cooling or something is that is that something that we have brought up with the city or they've talked to us about in order to like increase electrification in that area because it's much harder to get existing people right to adopt this new technology what you're finding versus if there's a requirement that a certain percentage of new homes or i don't know how the city

2:43:47 would work but that would be like easiest uh inroads and just i'm curious how that works or if that's even a place right it's a good comment right now we are really focused on the analysis and just kind of laying out what our preliminary findings are um my other thing is just um i am curious about the cooling piece because i know that maybe this is an off year although i doubt it and but that we tend to focus on um heating during the winter and that we don't really need like uh air conditioning here but it does seem like if we're forecasting many years out that may change um and so what will that

2:44:32 what will that look like and that just brings me to my anecdote i too unlike john where i don't have air conditioning i have a gas furnace i have a high efficiency gas furnace i would love to switch to pump and when i joined the e-web board i panicked because i didn't have heat pump in my house and i have natural gas so i had you would have come out and do it like look at our house i use the program where somebody comes out and does an analysis of your house or whatever and it was going to cost 30 000 just to switch from our just to switch our heating so um that is that's huge and i'm one of these people that would like do i would pay for the benefit to society and all that but not thirty thousand dollars um and

2:45:19 we were told that it wouldn't be as we wouldn't get as much heat it would be a lot anyway it wouldn't be as good so i do think that we need to figure out some other kind like some major incentives if you're going to get people existing um homes to switch and also to find ways eventually once we're into the um like what can we do with this information so yes so great questions commissioners there's a few points i would just like to make relative to the context of this we this is really feeding into a number of other issues it's one thing to say oh here's some data and here's what the interpretation of the data is

2:46:04 the the next step is to how do you use that data and what does it mean in the broader context for example the air conditioning question the region is having trouble in the summer i'll just add that and so while we historically on the sort of the northwest corner have been peaking in the winter that that is starting to shift um we will actually see how we make it through this summer from a regional perspective it used to be very simple in the winter months we imported electricity and we were in surplus in the summer we had extra we shipped it to california because they were they were hot and that's now shifting

2:46:49 so it's one thing to say here it is from uf's perspective it's another to broaden that out a little bit and look at the region which i think is an important part of the equation to me the this answered a couple things pretty quickly one is evs are a great idea they they benefit everybody with or without eweb incentives they benefit everybody the hot water heating was interesting because there was a true shift in value in that equation it makes it makes sense for us when you have benefit to society and you have benefit to a utility that and not benefit to necessarily the participant that you if you can influence that which

2:47:34 it showed that we could keep our incentive keep our 800 100 which i think pushes that along the space heating one and the air conditioning piece of that is a little more complex there are a number of assumptions and all of those assumptions are dynamic including the role of conservation and load shifting peak shaving however you want to look at that what is the value of that has to do with the replacement resources or the carbon intensity of those resources at the time that's why they put a question mark on that one not that we can't make some guesses but there's a lot of dynamics as to the assumptions that we're making so far we have assumed

2:48:20 that conservation for example offsets sort of traditional organic growth not necessarily high electrification growth and so if we're going to change that assumption we have to understand where those opportunities are and how those investments are made that's another area of investment but it did reinforce kind of some of the stuff we're doing but we also recognize there's there's some work here and this is definitely good information it'll feed into the irp we'll definitely share the results and work with with other people on this we also don't want to shift around the other way and have there be a beneficiary to the individual that now society pays for and the beneficiary is the individual um we did include the socialized cost of

2:49:07 carbon and benefit from society so there's there's a value placed on carbon a society you can you can argue all of these assumptions um but um it does show some things very clearly and other things are probably just kind of what we think they're they're a little bit tricky so i think the group's done a really great job of trying to boil this down to here's the here's the key people involved and what does this mean economically it doesn't have to do with your individual values around these things this is just when you place a value on this what does it how does it shake out this so some more work including looking at the sensitivities of cost between natural gas

2:49:54 or they'll see the gas sector and the electricity sector both of those will increase in price um over the next 20 30 years they will both change their carbon intensity over that so there's some there's some work here around what those assumptions look like so it's not an easy answer it's a little tricky but we've got a lot of ways to kind of slice it nicely i know you had more today so we'll do another another go around but we'll start with matt and our work all right sure thanks um i know it's out of scope to talk about the medium duty trucks and industrial energies

2:50:42 and i'm curious maybe you could touch on this if we can just get a sense of scale are those big or those small in terms of um rmi has done have you seen the cost benefit analysis that they've done for a number of cities specifically of electrification of natural gas and so they compare natural gas furnaces and ac to heat ones and the team that has done that they have a building electrification team and um they are available to help uh it

2:51:27 would be worth passing our results and um and then the last question i have you use um co2 for natural gas engine right just musicians associated with [Music] because there's so many missions associated with as you know methane releasing the production of natural gas that you know that's not reflecting here making a note uh i include upstream emissions in the city

2:52:12 so the challenge with looking at total life cycles then you have to look at total likes life cycle of all technologies which would include solar it would include hydro it would include all those and those again are supposed those get harder um we generally recognize the systems in the west are tighter so losses in the system [Music] and the way that it's measured at the well site those are those are changing they're evolving as well so it just we didn't exclude it out of ignorance to it there's assumptions that can be made at the wellhead for example um but we just thought if

2:52:57 you do that for one particular choice you need to do an across the board that becomes pretty tricky yeah uh i agree that you have to do it for all the different technologies could our understanding of natural gas emissions actually continues to grow right we learn about increasing amounts of leakage and our assumptions have been inaccurate by by understanding that we have nothing released the challenge that i think we're going to have with some of this is at some point and i i agree there's there's probably some fall parking sort of logic that we would apply to this at some point i need to get this team up on the higher future

2:53:44 just just just so you know and and electrification is a piece of data and it's important contributing factor to this and i'm not so i i think this is more along the lines of a climate analyst or something where we can take a look at this in a little bit there's just there are a lot of [Music] internally to do this kind of modeling and analysis it's going to be important going forward um i guess the question that i have would be in the modeling

2:54:29 how do i'm concerned about the social equity because of when you're talking about eating eating and cooling spaces for a home owner or a business owner or whoever is going to do it if they own the property the incentives are different than if if somebody is a renter right if you're a renter you have no say on to how you get your heat and cools it's all up to the landlord and so have you figured out a way to incentivize a landlord i mean you say okay well we can give 800 to a to a person to put a water heater in but are we

2:55:15 going to put give a multi-unit apartment complex 800 for 200 units you know and are we going to give some you know these societal benefits aren't going to go to the renters and in the city of eugene 50 of our households are renters and so there's we've got to figure out that incentive or has that been put into the modeling that 50 of these people have no control over whether or not they're going to get those impacts and that goes with efficiencies and electrification so i mean how does that play into your modeling yeah i think this is a great a great time to talk about modeling versus programs because i think what we did in our study is we modeled and we're

2:56:01 looking at averages we're trying to do broad brushes because we don't know mindy's situation she's got a specific house with specific hvac conditions that made electrification not make sense for her um so when we think about e-web programs we have an energy efficiency team we'll come out to your house and help you with your windows and and that kind of that's an example of a program versus our modeling is much more based on averages and assumptions and so i think that's why we spend a lot of time trying to publish what our assumptions are so a reader can go through and go is this true for me you know is this cost that we that you said for an hvac system is that my house and you say oh that's that's way low for me you're way high so i think that's what we're trying to do in our modeling is really be clear about our assumptions try and speak to averages and broad rush

2:56:46 about our community and then we can take this information and use that to help inform our programs and look at that equity component and i guess i'll give a shout out to juan in our electric vehicle program he's always talking about there's an equity component to it um so anyway i really think there's some programmatic things that we can do to help address those um my last comment is actually to you john um we brought up these issues with the city multiple times during our quarterly meetings and one thing that we've talked about with them is that we need to be partnered with them to make these changes especially for renters because like you said they have absolutely no say whatsoever so um as long as i'm on that uh little committee that meets with the

2:57:31 city quarterly i'll continue to push for that and one idea was just that when you advertise rent for a unit that it has to include your um utilities as well because that's an intensive then for landlords to switch to something that is more efficient and cost less for renters conference they have a very good program on weatherization of the non-overratified inventory down there and you may want to reach out to them to see what they did because if you're talking about weatherization you can also talk about

2:58:17 electrification how they did their rental pool and it was they did programs on it it was it seemed very very successful and i don't know if anybody's ever followed up on that because we were talking about whether rising the rental rules that maybe smud has something you could have pretty progressive you killed them down there maybe there's something you learned from them steals up their sleepers yeah i'll comment a little bit we do have some this is really um or julie who's probably still sitting in the back there to evaluate relatively programs as opposed to the assumptions we make around modeling but i think the point it's a challenge for eugene and

2:59:04 inherently utility bills are regressive in who they impact the most um and so when you transfer value from one segment to another uh you have to be really careful you're not creating inequities in that process just because the pure cost of what we do is sort of in regressive fashion i think that's a very good problematic question this kind of topic is also why we've tried to tee up with the city of eugene a joint meeting and looks like potentially late september with council and the board and i think that would be a phenomenal topic to talk with the city about

2:59:50 well thank you for all of your modeling see that we're ready to jump ahead program but um thank you very much for that information and i look forward to seeing you guys coming back in november right yep yep all right thank you thank you all right we're getting to the home stretch here uh agenda item number 11. we are on the quarterly strategic and operational so commissioners uh good evening uh frank lawson for the record this is very abbreviated at this point we we anticipated a very late long meeting this evening and so i um rod and i condensed down this part of the meeting to just a few minutes to hit a

3:00:35 few highlights we actually have added to the agenda in september really kind of a full project for you unfortunately let's catch you up but just just a few things you typically would go through for anything of orderly significance that we think the board needs to know about and where we are with our our annual goals if there's a few things i would like to mention they're probably up here on the screen number three four and five um we have discovered some sinkhole trail bridge reservoir our dam safety staff is working with stakeholders in the area as well as with the fbrc on assessing investigating and

3:01:20 mitigating that um we are presently able to keep the reservoir at its sort of minimum levels to still allow carmen to operate number four some supply chain issues um this is in some cases caused some some delays in receiving certain equipment this has really evolved over the last couple of months primarily and then we've also seen some inflation i think that was in the report in certain areas that that were called out but that's uh some of that is potentially temporary some of it is long-term and one of the areas that that is impacting is the smart meter deployment presently we have 60 thousand meters

3:02:05 deployed electric billy and another 30 000 abruptly on the water side this only affects the electric side in the particular residential meter we'll be slowing the process down until probably mid october we don't think that's going to at this point affect our q1 2022 deployment goal but it is something that has impacted um our most recent uh rate of deployment at this point we wanted to make sure that the board was was aware of that um some of the other things there are are notable i uh like i said uh the goals for next year for the most part we are still on target the mass metering a little bit behind

3:02:50 schedule that was because of some of the deployment issues there but we still think we'll achieve our goal at this point barring further delays from the meter supplier but a lot more detail coming this next month you did get the 75 page report with lots of charts and drafts and information in there financially we seem like we're in strong shape so far this year mostly driven by high consumption retail consumption with some good management on the cost side our expenses are under budget so i'm in pretty good shape financially but yeah a lot more to come we intentionally kind of scheduled this to be just that quick um here's a couple of key points for the

3:03:36 board and then we'll do more of a full report out next month since there was plenty of group monday night just just in question yeah um since i may not be here next month we'll see if i can if i can remote in from italy i might do it but um it'll be it'll be seven in the morning so um first off i wanna give uh kudos for the wendell safety award that the water department had uh i think that's a any time that there's awards given out for safety i'm i'm all for that um and i was digging in a little bit and i just had a question on the

3:04:21 cytotoxins i know we we look for those and measure those and i started thinking about second second uh source water and i'm wondering if we're ever going to start doing monitoring where we might be doing pulling the second source from because to be honest with you i was out on dexter lake last week and that dexter lake is it looks like pesto so you know and it happens every year and and well i wouldn't toss my pasta with it let's put it that way um so i'm just wondering if you know i mean i know that the willamette is more is more prone to algae blooms than mckenzie is uh and i'm just

3:05:09 wondering at what point do we want to start looking into monitoring where we're going to start getting our second source from to figure out how many months we're not going to be able to or what type of extra treatment we're going to have to do if we start pulling water out of the lab there's a couple of comments on that commissioner and then i'll actually ask karen to weigh in as well so originally we did quite a bit of testing on water quality just as a baseline with that it is prone to different kinds of contaminants different water temperatures healthy wounds that's more an issue of treatment process as it is since we have the opportunity to design the plant for the particular environment it's going to operate in that's more of a plant design and

3:05:54 scoping issue than it would be that we would design a plant home and operate certain hours for certain days of the year that that is one of the challenges that one of our neighboring utilities has on that particular source is there's times of the year that it's a challenge to treat with with an older process so i think that's a scoping issue for the new one as to when we might start doing more active monitoring i'm not sure do you know uh i know we've talked a lot about it now that we have our there are upstream samples of other utilities that use the laminate that we have access to their data on so we can watch

3:06:39 you know from other locations what's happening and as frank mentioned um our preliminary plan would be have ozone as a treatment and possibly carbon filtration to handle and we also deal with some of the other constituents that we're concerned about that are emerging such as the pharmaceutical personal care products

3:07:25 and i guess the only question that again i dug in you know i clicked on one of the links and got to the reports and it looked like we're testing every two weeks is that something that is i mean we got no positive tests at least on mckenzie water is two weeks in the summer uh enough or is it or should we go to one week when it gets as hot as it is i guess she's not in your head like two weeks is enough so well i'll speak to that so so the requirement is everything uh i think it's from may through september um and that's the state requirement and we also sample about the upstream um on other timelines and for other purposes to see what's happening so we do have our data then

3:08:11 perhaps what we're reporting just for regulatory compliance purposes when a detection happens it triggers additional so then you're sampling every couple of days depending on what the levels are so it just it's that triggering effect and that's you looking both at raw water and finished okay thank you this is all just my learning process so thank you a couple questions comments page 24 emergency preparedness five and seven metrics were we didn't meet um is that getting to get turned around or are we going to continue their emergency yeah i i think it's it's obviously one of the important things that we work on

3:08:56 um without knowing which which ones you recruit off the top of my head but all the drills and and emergency well drills and exercise emergency all of those didn't get done and uh and it just says out of the metrics and you're just wondering i think that's pretty important and yeah i know it's cold maybe code related i just wanted to get back on the schedule yeah we will get back on schedule there's there's one of those metrics i recall it's fairly challenging you'd be exercising in the valves there's some resourcing behind that one but some of the others are that was part of the maintenance issue okay and the other comment on page 40 we talked about escalation i know the long-term financial plan

3:09:42 you still use three percent construction cost isolation and i've kind of been thankful you know i'm saying it's a whole lot more than that like thirty percent i look at these you know nine percent for tree trimming twenty seven sixty percent for iron and fifty you know all these things are way above what we're using in finals you know are we going to continue to do our forecasting of 3 when reality is telling us it's a lot more well it's telling us a lot more on some specific cases yes and we'll continue to look at the modeling and make adjustments if we have to we're also looking at the fact that this is a a model that stretches over a decade so we have to look at what the sort of the turbulence is in that process but i know that and and also

3:10:30 what are the impacts with a different assumption if we assume four percent versus three percent what does that do does that mean we scaled back certain projects or the risk risk-based projects or do we continue with a certain level of funding this really drives our rate funding more than anything else and can we get the right things done on funding and it comes back to with some of those assumptions but uh i'm sure that deborah hart is probably listening oh yeah i think that's an ongoing process and like i said we'll continue to see if these look more like trends or more like sort of excursions but some of them like tree turning because of the the last year

3:11:16 um that that one actually makes some sense that it's it's due to it an incident or an event-driven activity so that's just one example lastly i'll just say that you know look at the second source when we started that discussion it was 70 million now it's 90 and nothing's changed in the design and or the location or anything else it's just construction costs that's huge 20 million bucks what's the cost of money for that well customer money has actually stayed pretty low borrowing has but just even if you apply a two or two and a half percent over the time when that was developed at the time that's a ten year window if i remember i was saying our original scope and we're talking 2025

3:12:02 construction that's a 10 year uh at two percent that's that's almost 20 percent so you just got translation that's all thank you really quick i know that there's some things that we're not on target with but there's many things that we are and um kudos for keeping us on track during a year and a a lot half good stuff that's still been going on so thank you for the leadership well thanks to steph um more than anything but we'll talk about some more things in detail this next month um i wasn't sure how much time we were going to have for this agenda item

3:12:47 and so really just made it more of a quick here's a couple things to know and we'll come back with some more discussion next time um well then we are moving on to correspondence and board agendas there was only there was only one piece of correspondence having to do with eweb's compensation plan and the charter update that was from

3:13:40 also on the agenda report we've added a couple things we're starting to add in some some field trips and some tours this fall to various and we wanted to take you up and show you the canal we want to revisit in probably october the fin rock reach and show you the progress there peyton bridge will probably go on a tour of that for those who have missed it so a number of different different tours potential meeting with the city it sounds like some potential work sessions um to spread some of the topics out a little bit so there's there's a lot on you know i'll just make a commentary there is a lot on this board's play i don't know you know you've been around

3:14:25 this commissioner ground a lot longer than i have it seems like the next couple of years two to four years there there are some really impactful decisions that this board needs to make and help guide us on i i don't know that i've felt like there's a there's this much for quite a while looking at some of the passports so for me liberty's a big one the irp work is incredibly important the pricing work that we're going to do is is incredibly important we'll talk about cosa he's talking about one small little piece of it um there's there's a lot more to it that needs to be looked at

3:15:10 holistically uh and probably over a period of time so there's a lot of work first okay board wrap-up and start with the imagination okay we'll go down this way i just wanted to thank staff um so this last month was real challenging

3:15:55 uh especially for two and three with the with the storage facility um and i just wanted to thank staff for that all their support that they gave to me and hopefully we've learned from this and can can take the lessons that we've we've learned as far as outreach and those types of things and move forward it's been very challenging both as an organization i believe and as a as a new commissioner to have to to weather this this controversy i think we did a good job of it but again i wanted to put out there to it that the staff has been very supportive to me

3:16:40 in this and i really appreciate it i'd like to acknowledge the security group um you know i noticed that those ones but you know it's uh the type of people that we don't interact with until we really need him that was too late i would like to thank you guys for giving us a sense of security this evening because we had no idea i mean this is the second one i've been through the program thing was pretty contentious but uh just thank you guys and your all your associates code thank you for being here and having that presence and doing in a professional manner and not being intimidating thank you very much it really gave a sense of uh okay we were good and i

3:17:31 i would just like to give a thank you and appreciation to the staff that's been working on the east 40th water project i know that their job has probably been really difficult last month or so and um i'm sure it's hard hard to go to work some days and i just really appreciate all the hard work that they've been doing and um i'm just really grateful that that they're doing this good work that's incredible so so my last thing is i i did want to acknowledge that um karen kelly is a member of our executive team she's our new chief operating officer so she's taking her water expertise and now is going to be asked to expand that across some

3:18:16 other things and i also wanted in that setup i wanted her to give the board just a quick last very up-to-date um status of the east 40th project as it stands almost sort of minute by minute good evening president schlossberg and commissioners and general manager lawson i'm karen kelly for the record i am still the water operations manager until monday then the chief operations officer um but from the bottom of my heart personally and from the project team it means the world to us that we've had your support from the get-go and in my 26 years of doing this kind of

3:19:02 work i am very impressed with the knowledge that you have had in order to answer the questions the thoughtfulness you've had to try and you know meet your constituents where they are yet keep the technical side where it needs to be so i really really appreciate your support and we couldn't do this project without you um we did meet yesterday on the site at uh 7 am tree felling began around 7 45 it went very fast um we have all but 12 of our trees on the site that were slated to be cut are down around 3 30 well let me go back up so around 1 30 the work was done 11 30 the trees were down from 11 30 to

3:19:47 1 30 there was some cutting of limbs and stacking of logs that was taking place uh and so by 1 30 the work on the site had been done around 3 30 we became we were notified of the actual stay on um order from the board of languages field so we did meet with the city of eugene and with our legal counsel and decided it would be best to call off work for today to make sure we understood all of the pieces to this stay order um so that's what happened today there was some movement on the site to move some equipment there was no actual work on any of the actual downed trees and then we did meet with council again and with the city

3:20:32 and have decided that we're moving forward tomorrow beginning at eight with clearing of the site we will not touch any of the remaining 12 trees that were slated to be cut but we do believe that this day allows for us to continue some of that cleanup work so if you have any um no calls or questions about that that's what's going to be happening tomorrow uh as far as the actual stay goes it has not been rescinded um if it if it does not get rescinded then they will do we have to submit legally both parties have to submit their merits for the case on the stay by monday close of business then luba has up to friday as i understand it

3:21:17 to respond to those merits and then that case could potentially be decided at that point anything could happen in between um and we'll keep you apprised as to what we learned so i'd be happy to answer questions if there are any another question do we think the city eugene's gonna wait until monday to provide the information is there any there's a reason i don't believe there's any reason to wait but they but the luba i don't believe would act on it until after monday it's but it's what it looks like and the other party has to get their their piece in by by close to business monday thanks could you send out the appeal

3:22:06 to us so that we can look at it yes thank you do we know whose uh their council is and who's invited you can you answer that question can i answer that question probably yeah you can answer that okay zach metkey zack medkie i can look up his firm um i would have to defer to frank as to whether i can say who but i can't i believe i can say that they did post a 5 000 deposit so that's the money at stake from their end at this point i believe

3:22:53 we can say we filed the appeal yeah i'll have to actually look up and make sure that i communicate with the exact if all the commissioners are interested you know i think i already know i just wondered who and they appealed the erosion control permit yes for construction that was issued by the city on friday okay

3:23:47 i believe it is in the planning department okay all right oh yeah i'll look at it when i see it yeah that's what i know no i know i just didn't know building permits and to give you some indication as to what's going to happen at the site tomorrow and for the next few days you still got a few days to back out exactly that's right so if that's it we're gonna end 30 minutes early and good night everybody

3:24:40 you