EWEB Board of Commissioners — September 7, 2021

0:01 head and call to order the september 7th 2021 eugene water and electric board meeting um so we are just going to launch right into our agenda because we have a full evening and um we're going to start with our agenda check is there any thing that anybody wants to comment on the agenda i see lots of no's so we'll say we're good to go on the agenda next we're going to move on to items from board members and the general manager i will just start off by saying that i know that today is the one year anniversary of the holiday farm fire so i just wanted to acknowledge that i know that later we're going to get an update on the um recovery work

0:47 that's going on upriver so i don't know if that was planned exactly for this time or it's just coincidence but um i my hearts go out to all the people that were affected by the fire and um it will be heartening to hear some of the good things that are happening now in terms of recovery um and i believe that is all that i have um if it's okay with commissioners i might just call on you as i see you on my screen um so i will start with um john barofsky thank you um the only thing that i would like to say

1:33 is um in the past month or so uh my my business has been targeted by some people that weren't uh happy with the decision that i made as an e-web commissioner regarding the 40th and uh hilliard water treatment or water tanks i just want to let people know that you know this has been a real difficult time for my industry as a whole and our business in particular and i just hope that moving forward people will keep my business and my employees that i've tried to employ

2:18 through this difficult period separate from my position as an e-web commissioner and the decisions that i need to make therefore i just hope that that's something we can keep separate in the in the time moving forward and that's all i'd like to say thank you i'm really sorry to hear that um sonia i i also wanted to acknowledge the i won't repeat anything that mindy said but that was the item on my agenda as well just you know acknowledging that we're one year here and um sending thoughts and best wishes out to those who have been you know greatly affected

3:04 and who are also being affected by other fires throughout the region currently thank you for everyone's help to help those recover and put us in a better place moving thanks mindy uh i'll echo that just acknowledging where we are a year from the fire uh i know it's a really hard time for folks who have been affected by the fires i also want to acknowledge that we are in the middle of a covet spike that is um you know a high risk and compounds the difficulty for people who are trying to recover from wildfire as well as the rest of community trying to go about their regular business and i want to again acknowledge our technical team and

3:50 our support staff who continue to pivot and adjust to make all of these meetings work flawlessly thanks to the team behind the scenes here making this all happen thanks john brown um yeah thank you and number one uh the other john b um i too i'm sorry to hear that because i um have experienced some of that with i've got hundreds of signs around town and every once in a while we get a lovely little note but that aside uh i know what one thing that we as a board could do to help and that's always go out to dinner more often you know and have a nice little uh i mean that's a win-win if you ask me and we haven't been uh doing any of these meals lately so why not frank um take a hint uh the

4:37 other thing i'd like to acknowledge matt and everybody else doing things that uh the salmon are starting to run back up over the uh the dam and i would like to just thank eweb and the employees and everybody for working with odfw and everybody else because it's been a tough year for everything and everybody and mother nature especially and see that the salmonella start coming back up into the ladder and going over and going up into the spawning grounds is a great thing and i think eweb has been cooperating with odfw and others to help that process through because of especially with the leeward shutdown so thank you

5:26 i i am muted you think i'd be used to this by now um commissioners good evening i did have a couple of updates i i wanted to share this evening i was going to mention unfortunately we are still operating in the covet environment thus we have this this meeting and also our operational protocols specific to the the present conditions in effect at eweb for example right now we do have 14 employees uh covering eight departments that are uh in quarantine and so we continue to work within that environment and we'll continue to do so as long as necessary uh second i'd also like to mention that the specific payment processing incident with eweb's merchant services provider

6:13 that was avalon which is a u.s bancor subsidiary is close to being resolved um the the issue did not only impact eweb but also other customers mostly commercial customers of avalon and other than the timing coincidence this issue had nothing to do with eweb's new customer portal evalon since then has reversed the inaccurate payments and will reprocess the correct payments sometime around the middle of this week potentially wednesday even though this was technically not an e-web issue we did treat it as such because it manifested itself that way with our customers and so we adjusted our communications

6:59 and response accordingly and even during what was normally a really busy time of year for us with college move-ins and other things i did want to thank our customer service agents and our communications staff who were really inundated with this issue for their assistance with what were a few pretty upset customers understandably so and also you know i wanted to commend those who work to diagnose and develop solutions to the problem but again this the timing was quite unfortunate but it it was a an issue with our payment processor and then finally i would like to also acknowledge the one-year anniversary of the holiday farm fire

7:44 we have many partners that we work with that we'd like to thank over the last year to help the mckinsey valley and the watershed start to recover the recovery's recovery is still ongoing we do have some media releases coming out later this week some videos we'll also have a two bit two page insert in the eugene weekly highlighting some of the recovery work that's taken place so far in the past year and acknowledging some of the partnerships that have developed and so those were three of my items i appreciate the opportunity to give the board an update and i'll pass it back to you great sony did i see that you had something to add yes i didn't i forgot i'd wanted to ask

8:30 because i had a number of um people reach out to me through various means about the um about the payment system and troubles with getting into the new payment processor um and i was curious for those citizens who did receive erroneous payments that may have resulted in overdraft charges i think we were told that we can help that is there is there a way to proactively work with the banks to get those reversed so people don't have to call in every time to get that is that something that we can do you know to continue to rectify that yeah um commissioner carlson i i will channel my my inner debra she can actually weigh in if she wants to but i

9:15 believe customers can work directly with their banks to reverse a lot of those charges especially if a customer worked with their bank originally to identify this as a as a incorrect or fraudulent charge and i'm not sure if fraudulents are right we're in inaccurate charge so they can work with their their bank directly is that correct deborah um halfway there so in the event that uh that a customer did work directly with their financial institution early on and advised them that that the amount was unauthorized and the financial institution um would would handle that unfortunately the only way we know

10:00 that a charge that a customer has incurred uh a charge as a result of that of this is if they reach out to us and we'll make it as straightforward as possible to make sure that they're reimbursed some banks have heard from us and credit unions we have had some correspondence uh uh throughout the process but uh not able to universally request that anything associated with this be automatically reversed and that we would handle that okay thank you i it's a shame that we couldn't but i understand it's a you know tricky situation and i appreciate everybody's attention to

10:45 jumping on to try to fix it again i understand it's not something that we it started but we definitely have to make it right with our customers so appreciate your work for that thank you thank you thank you denver yeah sorry i forgot one other thing too frank could we get kind of a update on the call hold times because you know i experienced 30 minutes and i i've seen other people complaining about 30 to 45 minutes and i to me that's just unacceptable i mean i know it's a it's a situation but um is that just the exception and not the rule now or could you get back to me on what the average wait time is and everything because when i experienced it it was not an exception it was pretty much

11:31 standard you waited for 30 minutes is a long time to sit and listen to that music and uh yeah we can come back to you with the full details um those kinds of hold times are unacceptable to us too um the we have to be careful about looking at average versus peak hours and so we'll try to get um more of that detail to you and the rest of the commissioners thank you all right and are both of our um both of the people who signed up for public testimony here at the meeting yes they are great then we will go on to agenda item number three which is input via telephone

12:18 and um when your name is called remember to unmute your call you can press star six if you're calling from a landline or simply use the unmute button if calling from your cell phone please state your name and optionally your address reward and speak clearly into the phone each speaker will be offered three minutes to present their testimony please keep track of time although we will give you a reminder and you'll hear an audio notification when three minutes has lapsed after all testimony is heard each commissioner will have an opportunity to speak if they choose although by policy we do not engage in a back and forth dialogue please note that failure of a commissioner to speak shall not be construed as support of or opposition to any speaker's testimony

13:04 if a question is presented by a speaker and the board does not provide an answer an eweb staff member will contact the speaker so that the question can be addressed at a later time um so the public testimony period for this meeting is now open i had a gavel of gavel in and we have two speakers signed up tonight so first we have mark rabinowitz followed by marilyn block so mark you're up can you hear me yeah we can hear you okay great uh today of course is the anniversary of the holiday farm fire i call it the warehouse of fire given

13:49 where most of the burning was there two questions for eweb has eweb ever over the decade said anything about conversion of forests into the tree farms that were much more flammable i'm also curious if eweb has ever objected to weyerhaeuser corporations spraying poison from helicopters over the mackenzie watershed since that flows downstream into the drinking water intake and a suggestion uh you're about to appropriate a little more money for the contractor that has been clear-cutting your reservoir site it would be awfully nice if you require them to have

14:36 covers for the dump trucks so they don't spew dust all over south eugene and maybe you could use the water line you added to the site to wet down the dust the air is officially unhealthy today in eugene and at three o'clock this afternoon the count in fall creek was 1470 and i hope that all the commissioners and the senior staff at eweb managed to take a look and smell your forest as it was being cut down it would be nice to consider that you know we're not really such a green city in eugene we were formed

15:21 cutting down one of the nicest forests on the planet and the distance from east 40th to your new compound in the west region wetlands is the breathable thickness of the atmosphere in other words if you went seven miles straight up you would no longer be able to breathe properly and everything we do in that thin film of the atmosphere will impact our great great great grandchildren but of course you all know that and finally i appreciated the documents i got from the public records request especially of the cracked walls in hawkins hill tank and it suggests a lack of maintenance for a couple of decades since we've known

16:08 about the subduction zone for over 35 years and if these tanks were to break open in a seismic event what would be the impact of downhill neighbors for hawkins hill or college hill and why is there no public discussion of that i would love to see eweb provide a formal response about the dangers of these tanks to downhill neighbors um next up we have marilyn block okay i'm marilyn block i live in ward 2

16:55 and i wanted to comment on the contractor's work up at 40th and patterson starting off with the cutting down the trees pretty much all happened in one day i heard that the um time allotted to it was six to eight weeks and the trees were falling down on top of each other and cracking breaking them and um good-sized trees were being ground up

17:44 i'd heard ahead of time that you were going to make some into benches in the city and i'd like to know how that project project is going um also i wanted to talk about the same thing that mark did about the trucks are not covered and they're not wetted down so a friend followed one and got pelted with dirt and rocks and there's dirt and rocks along the gutter headed heading down hillyard it's it's adding pollution and i wonder if it's even illegal to do that so i i hope you can do

18:30 something about covering them up and also i'd like to know [Music] how much the how much more money it's going to cost so far to do this project how much have you added to the project and one last request is when you call on the commissioners to speak at the beginning of the meeting could you please say their whole names and maybe the fact that they are commissioners i would appreciate it listening i appreciate that it just

19:15 seems like a prettiest thing to do okay thank you very much thank you very much um so those are all the public speakers we have so the public testimony period for this meeting is now closed at this time commissioners are given the opportunity to comment if they choose so um i don't know if this time if people want to raise their hands and then i can call on you and i will start with um commission commissioner sonia carlson that was a good reminder of me to use everybody's full name

20:01 okay well thank you both appreciate the public testimony some good ideas in there i i definitely agree with uh looking at how to cover the um the trucks and mitigate the impact there i i do think those things can be very dangerous with a large gravel coming off covering it or you know wetting it down if there's a way to do that we don't we certainly don't add any other pollution um and so i would be supportive of you know staff reviewing what can be done there to make sure that that that impact is lightened in that community as much as possible um and i i also appreciate the other comments uh particularly the you know names i think that one is a very important one i noticed it myself when i

20:47 was going back and reviewing the um the audio from the previous meeting so anyway thank you again for your comments and i'll leave it to others to make others all right i don't see any other hands at this point but this is um mindy schlossberg and i will just um again reiterate that the using of the first names is on me i think that um maybe i've been pushing back a little bit about some of the formality of these meetings and have become a little too casual so um thank you for that reminder that i will use everybody's full name and um

21:32 that will make it a little bit easier and hopefully we're just in a little bit of a blip for having virtual meetings and maybe soon we'll be back in person and it won't be an issue um is there anybody else who would like to make a comment yes commissioner mcrae thanks maybe um very briefly i trust our project team will take a look at the dust complaints and make sure we're doing all we can to mitigate the dust rocks and once it starts raining uh the mud on that site i i will do everything we can and appreciate the concerns being brought to us another one about the seismic comment comment about our reservoirs my understanding is that that is a primary

22:17 driver for our fairly quick paced um replacement of many of these exact reservoirs so yes they're an issue and i think we are moving as quickly as we possibly can to eliminate or at least substantially reduce that risk thanks for bringing it up that's all i have thank you mindy thank you um and thank you for your testimony people one of the questions was how much more money are we spending in addition to what's already been budgeted that's an item that's coming up in our consent calendar and a couple of them go directly to com some of the concerns that were

23:04 raised in public comment there's an increase of about nine thousand dollars for rock that we put up on the site to to cut down on the dust so that when the heavy equipment's moving around it's not pushing up a lot of dust i know that doesn't specifically speak to the dust that's coming off of the the trucks but it was a increased cost that we felt was was uh well worth it we also spent a couple thousand dollars to have the crews leave some snags for habitat for wildlife up there and then we also incurred uh rather or the the ratepayers i should say incurred a rather substantial cost of about 24

23:50 000 for the delay that was that was uh imposed on us by the stay we had to pay the contractors that were there to basically not work and that was a almost a twenty four thousand dollar hit to our rate payers so that's where the increase in the budget that's going to be coming up in our consent calendar yes um commissioners this is frank lawson for the record um i will reiterate that that throughout the course of this project staff will continue to and i think as as commissioner mccray stated we'll continue to look at the protocols for

24:35 mitigating noise for mitigating dust later mud um and a number of other construction related activities it's it's very unlikely that we'll we will cover dump trucks that's pretty impractical but some of the other things mentioned are possibility how we load those to what extent and to some other protocols relative to keeping the dust down so there's there's some things but staff will continue to review those i'm not sure if the question on price was related to the additional cost of some of the items that commissioner barofsky mentioned which are sort of incremental items because of activities over the last month or so or the additional cost of

25:20 doing the second tank instead of doing two tanks instead of one and that's covered quite extensively throughout the course of the last year and a half and specifically was covered last april in the record of decision associated with the finances of the project so there's there's a number of things i would also add in the watershed our watershed protection program is pretty extensive when it comes to looking at data relative to forestry activities and so that is something that is covered pretty extensively um in some of our source protection work so there's there's information out there but i will you know commit the fact that

26:07 staff will continue to monitor the protocols at the east 40th site and try to mitigate those things that impact neighbors as we go forward as best we can thank you all right there's no other comments then we will move on to our board action items agenda item number four approval of consent calendar a move to adopt consent calendar a um all those in favor raise your hand and say aye

26:53 any opposed nope okay so consent calendar a passes um moving on to item number five approval of consent calendar b move to adopt consent calendar b by commissioner brown those in favor raise your hand and say aye bye hi hi all right all right that's then calendar b was approved um moving right along to our general business items to the the meat of the meeting um

27:38 item number seven the cosa cost of service analysis discussion this will be deborah hart and adam aru so i guess deborah our chief financial officer will kick this off thank you deborah thank you uh good evening commissioners uh as general manager lawson said myself and uh um the fiscal services supervisor adam are here this evening for a cost of service um analysis discussion uh holly could i get the next slide

28:23 uh so this evening we're going to start off with the with a brief uh overview of some industry trends that we're seeing follow that with a review of the electric system as it pertains to a cosa analysis then move on to water adam rue will also be providing a model overview of the cost of service we'll dig a little deeper into the allocation factors and then review next steps so with that i'm going to hand it over to adam thanks deborah next last week so before we got into the cost of service detail i wanted to provide some

29:09 context related to the industry trends that might be impacting or informing the broader rate design issue so when we think about electrification impacts on load or need to modernize modernize infrastructure as well as for the electric utility growing renewable energy supplies and energy market volatility as well as climate and regulatory changes those are factors that might influence future rate design discussion and issues that's our next slide please so there's a strategic organizational goal related to cost of service and rate making alignment with strategic

29:54 objectives and organizational policies and goals is an important consideration for rate design and in turn cost of service analysis so this is some language from the strategic plan so the memo addresses kind of three phases of the rate making process the purpose of this presentation is really to look at the middle one the cost of service analysis but we'll also touch on the revenue requirement which we address in our budget process as well as rate design which is a board touch point where rates are approved by the board every year so next slide please

30:41 so here's kind of a simple image of an electric system that um will kind of highlight some of the issues related to cost allocation um it'll illustrate some of our infrastructure investments and operating costs and how those align with customers and so this is kind of maybe a visual image to keep in mind as we walk through the cost of service analysis so if you look at the um the end point of the residential customer uh we would have a meter and service drop kind of dedicated customer specific infrastructure and uh facilities uh if you go further up the chain and we get to transformer and feeder and substation investments those are going to be more broadly

31:27 distributed and their investments that are going to be not really customer specific but more design based on specific criteria related to the demands of the input of the investments um so kind of a peak allocated type of investment and infrastructure and then as you get farther back to kind of power plant or long-term power contracts and transmission to get power to the system those are more energy related investments so next slide goods so here's an image related to water system overview as well and here we have a similar uh principles at play uh individual customers will have dedicated infrastructure and investments and we'll also have some

32:13 per uh kind of volumetric based investments related to stuff items such as pumping equipment to pump to haydenbridge or chemicals for treatment that'll be allocated on a volumetric basis as well as um having peak um kind of meeting peak day demand investments this is like reservoirs of those kind of stores memphis dresser so here kind of a um probably any cost of service uh analysis or presentation tends to uh reference the concept of the different cost buckets so we start at the top with the revenue requirement uh which for each the water and electric utility is going to be the big kind of bucket of the

32:58 company's budget that gets broken down or we as we refer to it functionalized into production transmission and distribution and customer costs and shared costs um those are further classified by uh demand whether they're investments to meet peak demand or the kind of commodity via water or electricity for the respective utilities those variable expenses and then the customer specific expenses so those are allocated to the different customer classes and at the end of the cost of service modeling so with that we'll jump a little bit more unless i please jump a little bit more into the weeds of kind of the structure of the cost of service model

33:43 so here's kind of a high level overview you look at the left um there's uh specific categories and so our budget and our expenses um are categorized by ferc account we have planned account which is for investment in assets that we own at the end of the day and then we have expense accounts that are ongoing kind of operation and maintenance expenses those fercs are defined um and and uh correlate with specific mapping to these different functions the production transmission distribution so that mapping is um is uh occurs in the cost of service model to put them into those specific buckets um once we get to the classification stage

34:29 um we have been recently been working with a consultant we engaged that works with other utilities on this cost of service analysis but we look at each specific cost type and determine whether what the best means of allocating those costs to the different customer class so there can be production perks that are allocated on a volumetric basis for kilowatt hour purchases or they can be allocated on a peak basis based on meeting the peak demand transmission similarly can be allocated in some cases on volumetric in some cases on a peak demand and distribution can be is allocated on both demand volumetric or customer specific

35:14 basis but and we also look at locational differentiation in the case of things such as the um elevation charges for water customers or the um tree trimming type costs or meter reading for um electric customers so different locations can have a different cost basis as well and so here's kind of an overview we thought it might be helpful to look at some specific examples so the next slide is kind of the same structure but just looking at some more examples to hopefully resonate so the first one chlorine costs has allocated to a specific ferc account um there's a the function is the production and then

35:59 and so that mapping occurs automatically and that's uh going to the water utility of that production function it's classified as a per kgal allocation method so we allocate it to each of the customer classes based on their um kgal consumption and then as we move kind of into the rate design discussions that kind of ideal rate design for that will be recovering it from customers in a per kg chart and so the energy like energy purchase power agreement this second example has a similar um uh type of allocation and classification for the electric utility uh transmission wheeling just has a peak instead of a energy basis for allocating costs but similar structure uh

36:44 thing an item that we've discussed in the past the contribution in lieu of tax that's collected and remitted to the city on a revenue basis so every dollar collected by e-web a percentage of that is remitted to the city um for a contribution in lieu of tax so that's the basis we allocate those costs to the different customer classes and ultimately collect from customers the storage reservoir maintenance and tree trimming are examples of those location-based distribution charges and then meters would be an example of a individual customer type cost uh so next slide um so now we move into uh kind of a simplified example of the

37:30 allocation factor so you can see um this is for the electric utility the next slide will be one for the water utility and but when we look at the different allocation factors you can see residential commercial and industrial um customer classes listed on the left and each class's contribution to our coincident peak or kind of eweb's um e-web's peak is listed there there's also their non-coincident peaks so each individual classes and peak demand and then the megawatt hours that we sell the customers and then the customer count so these are different factors uh the cost of service uh model has um there are quite a few more factors that are used to allocate costs but here's kind of an example of them if

38:15 you go down to the bottom you can see looking at the residential customer class just a different percentage they represent for each of those different cost types so customer specific costs such as meter reading is going to be a much higher allocation to residential customers since that's where the majority of the meter count is and versus that per megawatt hours based on their actual consumption of energy so next slide please um so that water uses a similar example they have a peak day demand factor in the cost of service consumption and is uh gallons sold to end use customers as well as customer accounts so those

39:00 out different percentages for each of those factors and those get allocated based on how those individual perk accounts are classified and functionalized through the customer service model so next slide so one change that we're um proposing this year is looking at the multi-year cost of service analysis so we're still finalizing the 2022 budget and the 2023 and 2024 year projections in the cost of service model but here's kind of a preliminary look for illustrative purposes of the results so you can see what we would normally see in the financial plan would be kind of the top of those lines which would be an overall

39:45 revenue requirement increase and here's some some of the big kind of buckets of costs uh represented and you can see you know the different cost categories either going up or down slightly year over year to give us kind of a trend in where where they'll um be at the end of the three years um so the cost of service model has you know each of the individual perks listed and this is kind of a roll up a high level overview of that you know the next slide is a water version as well and you can see looking at both of these roll-ups from the water and electric utility and the projections that overall the um the general makeup of costs doesn't shift dramatically year over year and we've seen pretty consistent trends but as we make significant infrastructure

40:31 investments or have changes in the costs throughout the organization those can shift over time so something we try to track in our cost of service analysis every year and it's extending to the multi-year gives us a little bit more stability in that so the next slide please so um hopefully this is a slide that helps kind of bring it together so there's a bit of information on it so i'll walk through it um a little bit but the 20 22 20 the three bars in the middle represent the information for the electric utility on the prior slide this is scaled to um kind of a typical electric customer

41:16 bill of i think eight or nine hundred dollars per kilowatt hour or eight or 900 kilowatt hours per month um and so you can see the kind of cost shifting over time and the contra the factors that contribute to uh kind of average monthly bill a little over a hundred dollars a month um so you can see if you look at 2022 we've highlighted kind of the fixed versus variable costs um components of those and looking on the very left is our current rates which are a little over twenty dollars per month basic cars we have our we recover our delivery costs um which are allocated generally on on a demand basis but we recover them in a per kilowatt-hour basis and then we recover energy charges also

42:02 on a volumetric basis so when we look at these kind of fix versus variable you can see collecting roughly twenty dollars a month in fixed charges and i'm having roughly forty dollars a month in these uh fixed costs if you look at the um chart to the right it's kind of uh projecting out an end state and converting the cost allocation factors to different billing um billing determinants so just kind of looking at a fixed fixed versus variable costs and kind of demand or on off peak um energy costs to kind of get a highlight into a potential future end state um so alignment kind of working towards better alignment of our

42:47 costs and our rates and prices will facilitate customer choice um potentially by uh allowing and potentially allow um for development of products and services this is um because we're protecting the choices of one customers from impacting another customer um if we move towards higher fixed costs recovery for example then if one customer makes an investment um in solar or conservation then there's not a bundle of fixed costs that are left to be recovered by other customers so this does impact the payback of those investments um and and can impact you know how long it takes for somebody to pay back for making a conservation or solar investment um but that's kind of a driver behind the

43:33 gradualism approach looking out three years and kind of gradually easing into a new rate design over time one thing that's different examples of areas with high solar investment by different utilities are moving towards things such as residential demand charge so i think looking at the cost of service analysis provides some insight into the different cost structure and different ways of recovering those thoughts from our different customer classes um so cut the next slide [Music] um so some next steps in the process are we still will be working towards finalizing

44:19 the 2022 budget which sets the overall revenue requirement for both water and electric utilities and we're also we'll be updating those um results and projections into the cost of service analysis for um for both utilities and bringing that back to the board in november december for those board meetings um so just kind of with those next steps in mind if there's any uh questions or feedback we'd be happy to hear that all right all right um i see okay uh one quick question i think it's quick uh when you do the cost of service analysis

45:04 do you start with the end in mind and then break it out into all of these different categories and customer classes or do you start with the costs and allocate and then see if that actually comes close to how much we're paying just curious what the how that breaks down okay well the time so the the order of the process um actually works towards we project out the revenue at current rates for each class um because those some of the inputs into the revenue forecast such as like per kilowatt hour sales and customer count flow into the cost allocation so we can work on the revenue at current rates from each of the classes kind of

45:49 independent of any other organizational process we need to have the budget and the projections for 2022 through 2024 completed before we can move into that cost phase um so that's kind of something in terms of our organizational timeline as we do budgeting over the summer so the last maybe it was maybe a week or two ago the budget closed for everyone to input what their projections are and then we just kind of go through and reconcile and make sure um we have opportunity to explain any differences from like the last financial plan that the board saw so we're kind of tying stuff back to july now and going through that process and making sure everything was budgeted the way that we thought it was going to be inaccurately so that's kind of what the

46:36 where we are in the process right now just kind of making sure budget completed by the organization ties to what we thought it was going to and making sure we can answer for any changes that makes is that a considered question could i inject one thing a little bit i think so this is one area commissioner carlson where i think there's likely going to be some evolution we we do start as adam mentioned with an initial baseline which is what is our current sort of state of pricing and we use that as at a high level to come up with long-term financial plan impacts revenue requirements what are we going to have to recover in rates for example sort of generally so you you start and then you iterate a little bit

47:23 after that um but where where i think we'd like to go moving forward is and adam didn't mention this we have literally hundreds of account codes we we have lots of precision to our costs it's it's a matter of how do we interpret and allocate those costs some of them are really easy as adam mentioned some of those really good examples the amount of chlorine is definitely tied to how much water you produce so that's a really easy volumetric alignment some of the other ones just take a pipe for example a pipe in the ground some of that cost is whether you use one gallon or 10 000 gallons um then there but the pipe

48:09 is sized based on your peak need so there's a peak aspect to it there's a fixed aspect to it and then it's used to deliver some volumetric portion so there's a little bit of a of a interpretation that takes place how much of that pipe cost is in the various categories so i do think going forward looking at the cost of service analysis is i think incredibly important strategically because at some point we're going to have products and services whether those are conservation related demand response related [Music] distributed energy related all of those things all those products and services

48:54 need to be equitable and cost neutral to your neighbors if you make one choice you don't want your neighbor paying for it or at least most people don't want their neighbor paying for their particular choice so having a really good alignment between cost and price will become more important as we get into more and more kind of volatile um and unpredictable resources and and other things so it really is important strategically that we eventually get a really good alignment between cost and price okay no no i'm not sure either of those technically answer my question but uh maybe i can dig in with you at a later

49:39 date frank it's more a matter of you know if if you have the full cost um projected of what it's going to cost to run the utility based on the various projections do you take that and then kind of work backwards to get how much each group gets or do you look at what we project that we're going to serve and you have all those different accounts codes kind of dialed in and estimate what it will be to kind of you know cover the cost and then you kind of tweak it to say okay are we close to the final projections and that's where you get those adjustments because to me there's there's kind of a difference in nuance about how dialed in you are if you do it from

50:24 this side versus how you do it from this side but anyway i'll i'll leave it at that thank you thank you um i have a question you you mentioned that the fixed costs on items such as solar and efficiencies would drive the price for those to those if a customer chose to weatherize or chose to install solar the fix

51:31 all right well commissioner if you can hear us which i don't think you can you're frozen are you back i don't know am i back yes you're back okay um what i was saying trying to get to is on things like solar and efficiencies if the fixed cost is higher from somebody who chooses to add solar or get efficiencies you mentioned that their payback would be longer for me i think that this may be an area where it is a policy decision whether we want to incentivize those by spreading those savings that those people are going to be making

52:17 over the whole customer class and and the reason i say that is if we can reduce our energy that we need to purchase by incentivizing the solar and the the weatherizations and those types of things wouldn't that offset by the amount of power we have to purchase cover the difference in the fixed costs that are being put along the way just i'm not sure how that works well i can't i can give a shout out or take a shot at um trying to answer because i think there is probably um different philosophical approaches to it i think um the point i was trying to

53:03 make i guess was that for the cost not for the customer installing the the solar or the conservation but someone installed solar um the system's still built to deliver power to their house so paying those kind of like um fixed infrastructure costs through a basic you know kind of a fixed monthly charge or a demand charge where those investments the utility makes to maintain um the ability to serve them is recovered by that customer if we um the way that we have uh net metering in place if they're able to net their full usage then those costs are spread to other customers i guess then you get into the philosophical

53:48 discussion about the best way if you if there's a desire to subsidize solar is the best mechanism through a rate design that spreads the costs around in this way or through like a direct incentive to you know collect the money from customers whoever owes the money and then um use some of that to provide some kind of ins an incentive um or some kind of subsidy that you kind of have a little bit more control about adding the right amount you want and the investments you make instead of it being kind of buried in the rate design so i think it's just to provide transparency would be um the goal i was trying to articulate frank uh yes um

54:33 commissioner barofsky so first of all a lot of what you're getting toward is a policy decision and some of this gets to the point of how do you want your pricing to reflect the strategic direction that the organization wants to go now i will point out that this is a cost of service analysis not a benefit of service service analysis so we don't actually look at the benefits from a customer perspective and and some you know one of the examples of that is is the silt that is collected across our entire customer base whether i mean we capture that as a cost and put it into the cost model it doesn't that's independent of the benefit so

55:22 it is absolutely what you describe as a policy decision i will say in the example that was mentioned if abs absolutely if a customer puts in solar and we save the kilowatt hour expense that go that is offset by that offset by that solar then that would be a natural benefit for for that customer and it's a cost savings to everybody else but if in those volumetric rates we also are recouping fixed charges then by saving that volumetric charge someone else has to pick up those fixed attributes that are covered in that volumetric cost and that's where the misalignment is today

56:07 um if if a customer and that and that's part of the reason why in our solar program we for those who generate an offset there's a net metering aspect but we do it monthly because there's a fixed component to the cost that that that they are incurring so those those are absolutely policy decisions that we want to get to in the next few years when it comes to conservation when it comes to pricing and how pricing is and rates are formulated and what kinds of things we might intentionally want to incentivize that can be handled as an incentive and not necessarily as a rate benefit so and then those become very conscious choices the board can make those

56:53 i don't know if that helped or not yeah um and then one other question that i had is as far as um the water side now that we're going to smart meters on the water is there a way to have lower non-peak rates for water um i know it's it's very easy to figure that out for or for electricity because we're having to buy buy electricity at peak prices per let's say but water is kind of a fixed cost is is there a place down the la the road where if i water my lawn at three in the morning i will have less

57:39 cost than if i water it at three in the afternoon and is that some place that we can get to with the smart water meters yeah i think that's a good uh question and something that would be uh worth looking into i think it probably from my perspective might be a little bit down the road just figuring out how we quantify those uh costs and then cost savings because it probably would be a longer term benefit essence as you mentioned those are kind of like longer term investments but if there was a cost differential between for the on peak usage it might be something to consider but i guess we get into the implementation and is the cost and administrative

58:26 burden of implementing it and sufficient to justify that so that'll be kind of the trade-offs needed i i would add to that sorry this is general manager lawson again for those listening i got it learned from the testimony earlier um commissioner barofsky in the near term we are probably more capacity constrained or that the costs on the electric side are more more dictated by capacity directly than they are on the water side i i think in the long term as you start to get constraints with capacity over time on the water system you'll find some of the same benefits start to occur and some of

59:11 those benefits would be you know how much storage do you need for example how much pumping do you need to do can you can you do this can you operate at a time when resources are more constrained or less constrained so i think on the water side that will occur in a little bit longer time frame than it does on the electric side where you definitely see some time of use or capacity related costs that sort of jump up in our pretty significant part of of the cost base right now and and those are going to get probably become a larger part of the cost base over the next five to ten years so it it is relevant on the water side but

59:56 probably a little different time frame okay i'm gonna go ahead and jump in and um with the the risk of embarrassing myself i'm just gonna say that i'm gonna maybe request a more a little bit more in depth on this topic one-on-one or something because i am there's some things that i'm just a little bit confused about and i want to make sure that i fully understand it because i know that we're going to be voting eventually um i think one of my questions is if it really is like a like a policy or a strategic decision that we're making um for me like strategy wise i want to see

1:00:44 us encouraging as many people as possible to um invest in solar or alternative energy or take advantage of weatherization programs um so that we can reduce our energy use or find alternate sources of energy reduce our carbon footprint um and i'm just afraid if we go this route are we disincentivizing that because it's kind of every person for his or herself versus looking at the system more holistically like i don't mind subsidizing somebody else's solar or somebody else's weatherization um because as a society that that benefits everybody although if you're looking at it at a cost basis

1:01:30 maybe not so much so it's kind of like a maybe a world view am i am i off base in thinking that that's a question i'm i just want to make sure that i'm clear yeah i'm president schlossberg oh go ahead adam oh no it's fine i was going to say part of what you described is the reason why we view this as a policy or directional decision that the board eventually weighs in on if if it's an issue of mapping a cost to a number on a bill we we can we can figure that out um you know with the hundreds of different codes we can figure out where it's going to land i think the challenge is

1:02:15 what you just mentioned about you're willing to pay for somebody else's solar i'm i'm you know that needs to me that's a that's a board policy decision you know at at what point do we incentivize people through something that's socialized across all of the customer base and and how is that done those those are policy based decisions to me i don't i don't want staff or us to unilaterally say no this is this is what we think we should do what we can do is provide the board with here's the implications of being and adhering to all of those principles because one of the principles is equity so if you have something that's equitable

1:03:00 across the customer base does that mean that someone decides to to put in solar so we are as a neighbor going to pay for that beyond the benefits that occur if you um look at the financial piece and and maybe that is that's that's fine maybe there are environmental attributes that the board feels like is important therefore that becomes a policy decision to me so um you're absolutely right you're not missing anything there are implications to how you do your pricing it's um probably in most organizations um you know if you're running your own business from a large company to a small how you price your product is pretty

1:03:45 important to how it's perceived and how successful it is and and all that this particular step the cosa step is we need to be as precise and accurate as possible so that if the board decides to place something as a priority going forward that the implications of that are well understood and we then bounce that off the principles so it's abs you're not missing anything that's this this is why this becomes very tricky okay thank you commissioner mccray uh thanks for the presentation and uh the the memo to help us get up to speed on this much appreciated um if you end

1:04:32 up doing a tutorial with mindy i would like to join i definitely um need some more time with this material in order to understand it more fruitfully um i do have a couple things that for like the next iteration i would be useful to me as we start talking about the in you know the where policy decisions are to be made um you know understanding which particular variables or levers we might be addressing that would influence customer behavior is going to be important um and then which have the greatest sensitivity you know which ones can you turn it doesn't do anything but which ones do we have to be really um careful about how we adjust those that would be useful to know as we kind of continue down the path of detail in this conversation

1:05:17 also i um i was introduced to this topic of cosa when we were up river uh in lieburg for a meeting several months ago and people were talking about a differential um pricing for that rural community and the customers there compared to here i recognize that's not what we're compared to here in eugene springfield i recognize that's not the conversation we're having today but i just we're laying the groundwork i assume for that conversation in the future um and so one i want to clarify that i'm not missing something we're not yet talking about differential pricing for different geographies correct we are not in this conversation commissioner mccree

1:06:03 great thanks um and as we get into those uh those conversations uh particularly that one because i thought some about it the different geographies um but also you know as we're talking about investments in energy efficiency or renewable you know localized renewable rooftop solar what have you um to me it'd be super valuable to have some level of a triple bottom line assessment that helps us kind of see all of the implications to the best of our ability um and to the extent that it's easy to get a third party to help us with those tbls i think it helps lend credibility and take some of the weight off of staff doing those tbls but i think that would be a valuable

1:06:49 thing for us to have um accompany this kind of analysis as we go forward and lastly um will the variables in some form of this calculator be available to the public to see i'm curious how transparent the cosa calculations are or will be as we carry on that's all i have thanks i i'll i'll do actually i'll defer to adam so adam and debra given i'm i don't run the model myself personally i don't know how the best way and what the most transparent way to

1:07:35 um to communicate the what you describe as the variables or all described as the inputs and sort of the range of the inputs and and how those get captured um there we're certainly willing to be as transparent as we as we can without you know hopefully confusing people it's it's a complicated thing so i guess i'll ask adam to and over deborah to elaborate a little bit on that piece of it yeah because we've presented in the past really high level summary so i think if the kind of the request or the desire for a greater granularity it is something that we could um uh put together something that provides

1:08:21 more level of detail and if even if you mentioned that kind of working group session we can kind of get a feel for that if you didn't want to see some of the summary because it does end up getting i can see publishing the thing might might get a little bit uh confusing um just to follow and just figuring out how to format in a way that is easily distributed and but will there be a way to you know within the different functions you know functions being production transmission and distribution a way to capture the i'll say the 10 largest inputs to each of those areas and kind of what feeds into so you know kind of the 80 20

1:09:08 rule i mean you don't given that there's hundreds of accounts there's a lot of things that uh uh you you could increase 200 percent and it wouldn't wouldn't make a dent in it but maybe we could look at something that would kind of scale this that we could discuss for both water and electric because those are different what are some of the key drivers within each of those areas and then where do they land from a commodity capacity or or demand and then customer piece and just kind of work on a map maybe we can maybe debra you and i can brainstorm a little bit on that but i think that would probably be helpful i think we also have an opportunity anywhere that we see it cost shifting to call out and provide further explanation in

1:09:54 those areas and anywhere where we've seen questions from the public for sure so yes frank let's talk a little bit more and and see what we can come up with for october and then um the actual model itself is available through a public records request but it is probably not all that useful for the average consumer and so certainly finding way to be more proactive and giving people the kind of information that would be useful to them upfront at that by the november meeting would be um our best course yes that approach all sounds right i i appreciate

1:10:39 your proposal there frank uh also you know any major assumptions that we're making that are kind of baked into the cake would be useful to have made super clear anyway thank you both yeah thank you deborah is it and and adam is it fair to say that while we're going through this we're looking at a multi-year cosa we're talking about the middle function between revenue requirement and rate making we're not actually proposing significant rate redesign at this point that's the policy discussions that we're probably going to have next but understanding the middle piece which is the cosa is a part of that rate design which is i think i had tapped for 2022 to work

1:11:25 with the board on and about a whole new rate design approach but this is a foundational piece to that we're not talking about changing rate design this year this is this is really the underpinnings of it all or the foundation for sure and i'm hopeful that you'll invite us back for a similar conversation around the um basics of rate design to start that 2022 conversation yeah okay thank you i just wanted to make that clear all right commissioner brown thank you a comment and a question a comment just for those of you that are going to get more up to speed on what's going on you

1:12:11 know i know it's a daunting task to understand this but we went through uh rate design and changing the fixed rate maybe 10 15 years ago and there was a lot of a lot of input and a lot of discussion about it we used to have tiered rates on consumption the first cut you know amount was a certain rate and the more you consumed the more you paid and it was regressive and then we had a discussion about the equitability because you're doing things like changing the base rate and you're subsidizing solar well 50 of the housing stock is rentals and they don't there you tend to be the the entities that would have to support that and uh and there was kind of a an equity discussion so there's a history behind having this discussion before on rate design so you may want to make sure that

1:12:57 that's brought into your discussion so um adam thank you for the presentation a real quick question uh you mentioned that if the utility has major cost changes or shifts during this this period that that can affect the cosa significantly or it can is that is that did i hear you correctly yeah and i guess when i was saying that i was thinking about once we start looking at like the second source i'd imagine a three-year trajectory that has all this you know second source investments in it probably will look different than the scale of the buckets here where they all look pretty similar and that type of thing right thinking not only second source but libra uh i think we've got a couple huge uh things that could potentially uh do that

1:13:42 and if it's premature to ask about how that's going to affect us if this is a five to ten year projection that's one thing but i think reality is that we're going to realize both of those uh entities in the next you know not outside of a 10-year window and so i'm wondering how we may uh do we just wait till it happens and then go into it or kind of like on commissioner carlson mentioned earlier about we get the cost and then we back into it or how will we deal with those two major things well i think that the approach that i would see at least would be starting now since we're looking probably at a three year trajectory that doesn't include those investments it'll give us an opportunity both kind of

1:14:27 internally um to see how effectively we're tracking with kind of a longer term more detailed view where in the past we've always been doing the 10-year plan but this is a little bit more granular and then also having these dialogues uh with internally and with the board in terms of looking at how these cost shape these cost shifting um occurs over time and how well it tracks and how it impacts because i think if the next uh iteration of a three-year cost of service had results um that were impacting significant investments that were causing costs to shift then we'd probably be having a different discussion around uh gradualism and rate design for that trajectory um than one

1:15:13 that's relatively stable i think if the costs are pretty similar every year then probably next year's is a good um step towards um or you know that following year's coast is probably a good step towards where our costs will be in a few years but if they are shifting i think this multi-year view hopefully provides some information to uh inform the board to make those decisions okay thank you commissioner brown i would i would add to uh what adam just said and there's kind of two pieces to this one is for fiscal planning you want to have and put in high level estimates and forecasts for the the large lumps in the oatmeal as you describe them

1:15:58 and kind of understand their impact going forward on the revenue requirement and to a certain extent how they filter through in in a potential change in a cost of service analysis and then eventually pricing so there's a planning piece to this but there's also the the reality of the projects that we look at them there is a difference between capital and expensed items so o m and capital are uh and in many ways a smaller blip in capital gets dampened over a period of time naturally because as you recover those costs and so depending on where those costs fall the the second source will certainly be significant relative to the size of the budget the the lieberg one depending on the

1:16:43 path may or may not be overly influential on the cosa itself it it might still be in production it might still be um in some of the same recovery category so it it may or may not impact the allocation of costs although it is a large expanse all right um are there any further questions or comments from commissioners i don't see any uh deborah and adam did you get what you needed from us

1:17:29 i think i did thank you very much and then i'll just um look to hear maybe from holly or ann if there is an interest in doing a smaller um further introduction to cosa like our budget introduction and our pers introduction that we've done for new board members in the past all right so um we are about 20 minutes ahead of schedule so i'm wondering if people want to have our five-minute break now or i don't even know if carl's here for his um presentation if we wanted to push ahead i guess i

1:18:15 should ask that first lastburg i am here and ready to present if you all want me to present all right so um maybe commissioners just to show of hands if you want to have our five minute break now raise your hand okay so then nobody raised their hand so it seems like we want to push on through and we will do our five-minute break after the mckenzie watershed recovery and restoration plan so um we will move on to agenda item number nine and carl it you are up thank you president slashberg and commissioners uh yes it is fitting on

1:19:00 this one-year anniversary that we're talking about our recovery and restoration efforts of the mckinsey to protect and restore our sole source of drinking water my name is for the record carl morgenstern i'm the the water uh watershed restoration program manager and leading the recovery effort as part of the task force next slide please so tonight i was basically going to spend a little bit of time kind of putting a wrapping up the mercy response phase kind of putting a bow on it and moving on to the next phase of work which is longer term watershed restoration so kind of bringing you up to speed on that and updating you where we are with the work done to date in 2021

1:19:45 and then really shifting towards looking at the 2022 budget and the work that we're hoping to get done in 2022 and lay that out for you so that uh we can get direction and information back from you as to if we're heading in the right direction or not and then wanted to kind of tee up a discussion on the opportunities that we have to scale work up versus uh the need to be cognizant of using customer money and and look at balancing those in the future i don't think obviously today we need to worry about that but just wanted to kind of throw that out there to start thinking about that uh next slide please so this is just kind of a refresher we are still operating and working under

1:20:32 the uh this recovery task force uh organization and so there are six teams that are and and i think we like this uh organization and structure because it helps us get everything we need done and coordinate the work in very manageable bite-sized chunks but the really though the point of slide is really given where we are today i just want to first off uh just reiterate that these teams each of these teams play a key function and are made up of a multi-agency organization so it's not just e-web so we have lane county forest service bureau of land management um you know a host of organizations and agencies working under these teams together but i particularly wanted to pay special uh recognition to

1:21:19 the core pure water partners uh team members that have really done the heavy lifting and has frankly worked their butts off over this last year to get some great work done on the ground and really are in need of uh you know some rest to be honest um and that is the mckinsey watershed council the berlin swarm water conservation district and the mckinsey river trust they have been the uh essentially the heroes of this effort in my mind next slide please so to kind of uh remind you of where we've been um since the fire uh the board as you recall back in october uh approved initial one million dollar investment in kind of this emergency response uh phase of work and really trying to to address some of

1:22:04 those immediate threats that we faced right after the fire uh erupted and when we finally got access to the watershed to start doing work in the watershed and so as you recall you know we had toxic ash debris houses burned along the river that were ready to just dump stuff into the river with the coming rains and so there was uh very much a a race against rain to make some stuff happen on the ground and we did i think a pretty admirable job of trying to stabilize at least the high priority areas that we could get into to stabilize in partnership with the environmental protection agency and one of the things to kind of point out and remember is that you know i know you've heard the story of using our pure water partners program

1:22:49 infrastructure to pivot from doing riparian health assessments and working with landowners on protecting healthy riparian forests to doing burn assessments and designing erosion control and that worked well for us one of the other things that you have to keep in mind as we do this work is it is on private property and so we need to have the property owners access agreement we need we need their permission to do any work on their property we need their support and so one of the things the other things that the pure water partners program provided us was that we already had 90 landowners in the pipeline of that program when the fire occurred so allowed us to work on those landowners properties that we already had access under the old pure water partners program quickly and with and why we tried to track down folks that were displaced by the fire to try and uh to get access agreements from

1:23:35 them so that was you know up front a big part of work that um really uh determined how quickly we could move um so i just wanted to remind the board of that um i'm not gonna go through these stats you've seen these before um but you know a lot of work was done in a quick amount of time and and once again just hats off to the watershed council the saltwater conservation district and mckinser trust and others lane council governments and others that really helped efficiently get this work on the ground as quick as we could so this work wrapped up in april and now we're moving into the next phase of work which next slide please holly so this phase of work uh and i and this uh title doesn't really um mislead you that we're already done with

1:24:20 this work i just realized as look at the slides we are not done with this work even though it says august 2021 it's just you know that's up to this the stats that you see on here are up to august but this work is going to be ongoing for the next three four years or more um but this work is really transitioning to uh increasing the amount of work and scaling up that work and doing more of what needs to be done on the ground to make us uh in a better position to restore the watershed and so one of the things that that we're looking at is really uh there's kind of four major bodies of work in this next phase of work that we're doing this year and that is uh you know continuing to take care of the plants we put in the ground those 90 acres that were planted over the winter to make sure as many of those

1:25:06 survive in the drought while we're essentially scaling and and doing plans on where we do the next level planting this coming winter and if you remember we had 210 000 plants that we put in the ground native plants in last winter we now have uh an order that is over 500 000 plants that we're going to be putting in the ground uh this next winter so that work is scaling up as it should um focused on repairing in floodplain areas but the thing that really kind of tripped us coming out of the emergency response phase was we got an odf uh accessed odf organ department forestry funds about 200 thousand dollars to do fuels work but that money had to be spent by the end of june and so when we came out of the merchant response phase we immediately had to

1:25:52 just run literally to spend money over two months in order to use ods funds to do a lot of really good work on the ground across 35 properties so after that work was completed we're able to kind of take a pause and literally allow folks to get some rest why we started transitioning to this next phase of work so we are a little bit behind we were hoping to be but you know you can only you know uh whip a horse so so hard to get going so fast so we need to lay off and and allow the work to catch up to us and what this really looked at was redesigning our gis field tools that allows us to collect information on the ground and prioritize that work and we're doing we're adding some efficiencies into that so that we can actually feed this work and assign it to

1:26:38 contractors as we map it on the ground and so as you see in the the chart in the bottom left there uh these are the land owners that are kind of in the in the in motion right now to do these assessments and then as we do this assessments it'll form the amount of work we do this fall and into next winter next slide please and of course one of the main things we're doing this work for is water quality and so i just wanted to kind of you know bring this back to you um and and really these i know these graphs are pretty small for you see the point is to look at the pattern not so much the individual uh measurements but i i tried to take essentially surrogates of each kind of area that we expected impacts from the fire nutrient loads metals bacteria organic carbon those are

1:27:25 the big ones and and basically just pull a parameter out that kind of helps look at the rest of them so like for example nitrate uh really mirrors uh similar to phosphorus and other nutrients the same with aluminum mirrors similar to manganese and other metals and so what you can see is the arrow is where the fire uh when the fire started and um and you can see in those early storms in november december uh and a little bit into january we had some peak flushing happening as ash got washed off the landscape and so forth and then that has dropped down into basically pre-fire levels um except for eco e coli did not really have we don't really have an e coli problem in the

1:28:11 watershed the fire obviously mobilized a lot of bacteria and the other thing to point out that the blue line you see there is gate creek which drains a large burned area and then the red line is is uh the mackenzie at hendricks bridge so that's kind of the closest point we have a monitoring downstream of the fire and so um so you can see that the trib that is draining areas actually brings a lot of more stuff to it as it should than what we're seeing on the river i guess the other thing to point out is that you know last year as you all know the lack of storms really was good for water quality it's bad for the drought we're in but we do not expect to have that to dodge that bullet again this winter and so we fully anticipate uh more significant storms and as a result you know we do have our

1:28:57 uh network of water quality stations that helps inform us real time and when things are coming unraveled and where they're coming unraveled that helps us respond as well as help our treatment operators plan for it so we'll continue that uh the other piece is the organic compounds that we expected to see polyaromatic hydrocarbons uh semi-volatile organics all these other things that are that we expect to come off the landscape we really did not see an issue what we did see was a lot of esta an uptick in the number of compounds we're seeing that are estimated mean that the lab couldn't really see them at the detection limits they have and so they know something might be there but they can't quantify it so i call this kind of a a chatter so to speak and so we really want to maintain monitoring of these so that if that chatter becomes something

1:29:43 more real where we are starting to see some of those compounds show up in the river we want to know about it so that is another piece that we'll definitely be uh monitoring for as we move forward next slide please so if you remember when uh presented to the board back in march we kind of uh categorized the work for the watershed protection plan into three kind of buckets the wrist space which kind of the last three slides uh really alluded to and that also includes the smart rebuilding incentives which i think i failed to mention on the previous slide that we are implementing with lane county and starting to get some traction on and then there's the resiliency which is really the actions to help mitigate the the impacts of the fire but

1:30:30 really set up long-term resiliency to future climate disasters so whether it's drought flooding or future fires so it not only helps us in the near term but really increases the watershed resiliency to future events and that's really based on the idea that we're keeping more water in the landscape and uh and helping with that um and the third is that strategic category where we're looking kind of at a bigger opportunity that the fire presents to do some things that help with carbon sequestration and and kind of the co-benefits of watershed restoration and carbon sequestration and you'll hear from anna wade in the next presentation a little bit about how this is being kind of thought about in a uh in our customer-facing uh view of things next slide please

1:31:17 so the proposed 2022 budget for the risk-based work is uh 2.15 million a little over two million dollars what we're expecting um and really the eweb surcharge fee really funds is critical to funding this work we really can't uh find a lot of outside funding mechanisms for doing these kind of assessments erosion control monitoring and the rebuild incentives we do see opportunity for funding support around revegetation invasive weeds treatment fuels work uh from uh oregon watershed enhancement board oregon department forestry and bureau of land management to name a few so uh the the key piece of this work as pointed out earlier are these property assessments which is under that pwp operations bar

1:32:02 and really that is for any landowner that that comes in through our portal and asks for assessment we will do an assessment and what that does is it starts a relationship with landowner but then also allows us to look at the property and and highlight the priority work we we know or want to do and then kind of be able to identify some of the lower priority stuff that maybe the landowner can do on their own and still help us move in a good direction and so really our our design of this risk-based work is to get landowners in to help with immediate needs while they're also struggling with rebuilding and other things that if we can help them take care of a few things then i think we've helped in some way and really start building that longer term trust and relationship

1:32:47 next slide please and so the resiliency work is a little bit more complex in that it's there's really three kind of uh categories of that work one is these floodway acquisitions that we're doing with the mckinsey river trust to basically help landowners that are really don't want to rebuild want to move on but see an opportunity to give towards conservation to be able to acquire those floodway properties remove that infrastructure of the burned home the septic systems of driveways and then restore that area and then the other two areas are really into uh restoring large-scale flood plains and then in the tributary systems themselves being able to set a large wood placement that acts as what we're calling kind of catcher meds to

1:33:33 sediment and and trying to slow down flows and treat uh things that are coming at us and there's a significant outside investment as you can see from outside sources for this work um i think this is what a lot of people see as quote-unquote green infrastructure and so i think it we are attracting uh some good outside investments that will make this happen and really we're in kind of a short-term window here where we know that in the next two to four years a lot of the opportunities we're seeing today will not exist so uh we see this work as nearly two million dollars in next year's budget and a lot of the majority of that is going towards acquisitions with the the rest of it kind of helping feed the restoration work that others are paying for next slide please

1:34:19 so let's just example i know um you know on october 22nd if we're still doing this given covet uh we do plan a tour with the board to look at uh thin rock reach project and the deer creek project that did very similar to what you're seeing here and this is south fork mckenzie in the lower part where you can see in the pre-project you have that in-sized river channel and then what the work does is essentially divert the river while we're doing work in the flood plain and we take the berms and stuff that the materials are keeping the river in size and then we fill in the incise channel then reintroduce the river back onto its flood plain and let it pick where it wants to go you see a lot of large wood there that would because the velocities are knocked down so much there was a lot of concern about high velocity flows

1:35:05 sending that wood downstream and we have not seen that happen even up to 5000 cfs so the wood is fairly stable and it's designed to to kind of maintain that stability over time but as you can see it spreads that flow across the landscape slows it down drops out sediment and provides excellent habitat for for fish and avian and amphibian species and nick's slightly so this is uh a map showing i know it's kind of crude i was trying to come up with something fancy but this is the best i could do as you should yeah i had crayons but then i graduated to this but um so the red projects and those the kind of ovals are the floodplain restoration projects um that one in the middle there between

1:35:50 of the three is finrock reach then the one to the right is lower uh south fork of the delta campground area and then the other one is uh quartz creek um so these three you know the fenrock reach is done and the other two are in planning design phase and then you see those little what i uh i refer to them as catcher mitts but i've heard them karen kelly looked at him and said those look like eyebrows or eyelashes but um anyway those are what we're calling uh those are large wood projects and tributaries that typically don't have flood plains and are higher gradient systems and so putting in large wood that actually slows down flows and drops out sediment is are the are what those symbols represent and so you can see the three red ones are we've completed one and two are

1:36:36 under design right now then the black ones are areas that we can see uh opportunity and are already working towards that opportunity uh to do future projects in the near future and and basically the ideas to one of our our grant requests to fema is to help us pay for the design and permitting of these future opportunities as well and so one thing that that if if we are successful beyond all belief and apple able to actually do all these projects and if if i was if i drew a kind of a shading upstream of each of those projects of as to what the drainage area these projects collected from and treated for basically 70 percent of the over 70 of the burned area would be pre-treated before hitting the river so that's the

1:37:22 level of success we have opportunity to achieve whether we get there or not obviously it depends on land owners it depends on funding and many many other things but we feel like we are in a good position to make a lot of this work happen next slide please so finally the strategic actions is really uh looking at that intersection between some of the work we're doing in the watershed restoration and the opportunity to provide carbon sequestration benefits and so we're working with the university of oregon on on a lot of the research that is kind of building the the knowledge and design that we'll use to that will help influence future project design but really they're they're focused on these depositional environments that we're creating from these these

1:38:08 floodplain areas that where we have essentially are able to sequester carbon in a way that secures it from future fires for example so we don't release what carbon we've achieved uh from future climate change disasters and these future projects and you know a lot of the research being done is is on this high banks road property which someday we'll be able to bring you out there and you can see um and then we're also kind of leaning into ufos doing some uh baseline carbon measurements on the floodplain project areas before we actually do projects and we'll measure post project and compare that to control areas to show the the carbon uh the benefits of those projects for carbon sequestration but really this is all kind of uh you

1:38:54 know the strategic is really looking at what is what is the potential here and as we start developing these projects and getting a little bit more meat on them uh we'll bring them back for board discussion and you know they'll be out there'll be other sources of funding if we decide to move in these directions so this is not part of the surcharge next slide please and so basically to summarize this whole budget request is we're looking at the total budget next year of 4.275 million to do all this work and it's pretty uh neatly split between risk-based and resiliency projects um we are

1:39:39 you know we are pursuing and have been successful and will continue to pursue outside funding which brings up that question which uh in our minds by 2023 we should have a pretty good picture to then have a good conversation with the board around how do we use this increase in outside funding do we do we scale up what we're doing or do we start reducing our customers obligations and and in that sense so i think that's a future discussion but i wanted to kind of start painting it out here so that we can start thinking about as we understand better what outside investments we're attracting next slide please so with that i will leave it for questions and there's kind of three areas looking at you know kind of our overall approach to restoration and

1:40:24 recovery any feedback on uh what we're missing uh questions on how we're doing it and then our budget proposal and direction on that and then this kind of balancing of outside investments versus eweb surcharge any thoughts on that or anything else you have so i'll stop there thank you thank you carl um i see sonia eagerly raising her hand so commissioner carlson i'm also willing to hold if others have i just i wrote my questions down so they're at the ready um uh one i'm curious the plants that were planted last fall that we kind of all

1:41:09 saw out there did they survive the immense heat or as part of the uh i think i think you said something like 500 000 plants that are coming in is that part of a replacement to to deal with some that that didn't make it yeah um well first off when we designed the revegetation efforts we over there they're built in i'm a certain mortality is built into that design so we over plant knowing that there will be mortality but the drought has uh has caused uh an increase in mortality and we try to mitigate that through some of our plant maintenance activities and we've been successful and at least heading off some of the worst um but yes so of those 500 000 plants a

1:41:54 certain percentage of those will go into implanting the areas that that need uh kind of some help this winter okay we don't know what that looks like yet until we finish our assessments but we'll have a pretty clear picture in a couple months how that is all playing out okay all right fair enough uh floodplains they seem effective at reducing the sediment i'm curious that do does that work does it raise the temperature of the water and would that in turn increase risk of cyanotoxins yeah that's a excellent question um what we're what we're seeing in the research especially on south fork which has is the oldest projects um that have been done and it's starting to really ramp up monitoring is that we actually see a cooling effect because what you're

1:42:40 what you're doing is you're slowing down the flow and you're increasing you have an increase in canopy cover and so you have some heating happening but the majority of that flow is flowing through gravels cooling down and then coming out in cold water pockets so the overall effect is is in some ways a cooling of water it's not going to be an increase in temperature there's also a seasonality to it as well um as far as the cyanotoxins and back and uh harmful algal blooms it really does not you know given the the you're resetting an ecosystem to be a lot more healthy and what it does and and morphological blooms and toxins tend to uh to bloom in areas that are kind of out of balance and so

1:43:25 given the dynamics of the systems and the floodplain we really don't expect to see harmful blooms and haven't seen them in the projects that have been completed but that is certainly obviously something that we're going to be uh really focused on it's not something we expect based on what we've seen today but we'll certainly keep an eye on it and monitor for it so you don't anticipate i mean just even with the burned area would you typically see a higher rate of cyanotoxins coming off of a big burn like that because it is a shock and now kind of a new change outside of the floodplain question and if if so is there there isn't really a way to treat cyanotoxins correct uh no i mean the one the natural way to

1:44:12 treat it is to increase your zooplankton populations to eat the the bacteria or the uh the algae um but yes your your point is a good one and that's that's one that we are currently engaged in in multi-year research with oregon state university and the usgs on around the tuesday or rebel fires we've been monitoring to see if those are actually increasing nutrient loads to cougar and then that then leads to harmful algal blooms that's kind of the operating theory but we haven't seen that play out yet just because as you know things are very complex based on your water year how much rain you have snow and sun yeah there's so many variables um but we have not seen that but that is certainly

1:44:57 possible but the other piece is that um and we've seen this in south fork and deer creek where these these floodplain projects act as a essentially a really good fire break and so you still have the green trees and vegetation that's up taking those nutrients and creating shade even after a fire because they didn't burn and so you have that benefit as well excellent yeah that was actually my next question was the flood plain just part of a kind of restoration piece or does it actually reduce the the risk of fire because the water is so much more spread out so that that's excellent um last question i had and then i have one comment um fema uh do we have any anticipation that some of this will be reimbursed by femur was that really just kind of the early on work that was more reimbursed by fema

1:45:42 because i know it takes a long time for fema to turn around yeah um and i and i actually had a note i forgot the on the on the one slide that was showing the emergency response efforts we did um obviously those we did apply for female reimbursement expect 75 of that million dollars to be reimbursed we have not seen anything saying otherwise um and then for the other fema projects it's it's interesting because these projects obviously are new to fema's uh kind of purview and so we're having to go through a little bit more hurdles uh to for the applications we're going to submit this january to show that there's the benefit versus cost um and and we've engaged with uh you know even folks in england who who do this

1:46:28 work and actually it's now a national policy to do this these kind of floodplain restoration projects because of the flood mitigation benefits so i think we are yeah at first we're like oh boy we have to go over this this pretty high bar to show fema this is worth it but now we're like ah this is gonna be easy in some ways i mean i'm being yeah yeah easy compared to what you know normal things are yeah we're seeing some good information and data that i think will help us make a really solid case and so we do expect uh fema to reimburse us for this a large part of this work got it well excellent thank you so much for all the efforts out there i'm really encouraged by all the different things that you're doing i feel very thankful that we have the partnerships that we do in this region that you've helped build

1:47:14 and and cultivate and um because i know that this is not happening everywhere across the state so it just it it makes me very proud to be a you know a little fly on the wall to help say rob rob keep going you're doing a great job thanks thank you thank you and thank you for the presentation and all the work that everybody's done upriver um i have two questions and then a little bit of a comment i guess um first question on one of the slides you you showed the the spike at gate creek do we have monitoring on gate creek

1:48:01 sorry the i missed the first part of your question the what on gate creek well you showed a slide that had big spikes because of the the influence of gate creek on the watershed and i'm just wondering do we have monitoring on gate creek yes we're as you see on you know those big spikes for those early storms after the the fire if you look to the right of that you know the blue lines kind of go and then disappear so we are continuing to monitor gate creek in fact we put it there's an early warning water quality station on gate creek now as well as a gauge a usgs gauge so we've really ramped up uh our visibility of what's happening on gate creek as a result of what we saw early does that answer your question

1:48:46 yes yeah that was i just wanted to make sure i knew we had we had monitoring further upriver i wasn't sure if we had uh um a monitor hidden concrete um the second thing that i wanted to speak to was um i'm i'm totally on board with the budget going forward with with uh the two strategies that are there the resiliency and the other one what i want to speak to is the strategic one um when we first passed the the surcharge one of the things that i was excited about was the strategic portion of that and the opportunity to to do carbon offsets and and what my thought on that was

1:49:32 was if we could acquire right-of-way or stream buffers from some of the larger timber land owners and say give us 150 feet each side of these of these streams and we will use them as carbon offsets that we can sell and keep them in you know replant them and have them in perpetuity that was something that was really exciting to me and i don't necessarily see that in the budget you know i see a small portions you know for planning and those types of things but i really see that as an opportunity that i would like to see pursued going forward i mean i know that the city of eugene is purchasing carbon offsets right now

1:50:19 out of the state right up in washington well can we partner with some of our local people that are buying carbon offsets to spend their money upriver so i would like to see that explored more so and hopefully something that we can we can talk about when we have our joint meeting with the city coming up this later this fall maybe a partnership to to work with that so that's something that i'm excited about would like to see us pursue more thank you thank you i think john brown has his hand up he has his

1:51:04 camera is not quite situated yeah go go for it i can't sleep if i don't do that i'm sorry um seriously uh carl as you know i've always uh really put you in the forefront of what you're doing and i'm i'm once again impressed with what you've done in the organizational skills in 12 months you've done this and uh keep going so a few technical questions um the court just recently ruled on the corps of engineers have to really substantially increase the flow of the south fork is that going to a affect your project or b affect the projects that have already been implemented there because they've been doing that for 10 years a short answer is no we do not anticipate increased flows impacting those projects in fact increased flows will help those projects

1:51:50 by spreading out flow into more areas uh that we've opened up for it so um no we do not anticipate that i said you had a project scheduled for quartz creek and i know historically even before the fire that thing has been a huge source of sediment and things up for of that drainage did we get to did somebody acquire that riparian area uh down by where quartz creek meets right below finrock and and uh and so we can plant it and restore it so essentially um where we are in that is we're working to get a conservation easement as we speak actually this week we have a meeting to start you know to continue going over the terms and conditions so um yeah the short answer is we're a conservation easement is in motion

1:52:36 to allow us to do that work um in the next year or two that'd be huge thank you and lastly consent you brought up the carbon project on high banks um i just want to make sure i you know that's not in the area that was affected by the fire it's absolutely right above our intake but we have some other projects there that i haven't heard anything about that were significant and that's the 42nd street storm water outflow project that we've kind of been at odds with oregon fishing wildlife about it what's the status of that so i mean since you brought up high banks i want to bring it up because that's something that i want to make sure that doesn't fall by the wayside that gets done because storm water entering the water right above your intake is something i want to pay attention to no commissioner it's a great question

1:53:22 and you know in my new position i am no longer uh managing that work susan fricke is but um but i i that is still a priority for source protection is the urban urban runoff and addressing and treating urban runoff um to be honest i i am not 100 sure where they are on that i know she is still moving forward on that work in fact i think on the 52nd street um you know we did a a large planting to try and re store some of that lower area that's already kind of a wetland and then uh what i think i remember her saying is that in the last visit the beavers have actually done some of the work that we were planning on doing so um it seems like it's moving in the right direction but i

1:54:08 can't you know i'd have to uh connect with susan to see where that work is okay thank you and i know you wanted feedback on the direction of the budget number one i support it and i would give you more money if you needed it and number two if we can leverage our funds with other things and grants um go for it i'm all in on what you're doing and thank you very much for your tireless efforts matt i know that's kind of your job too but in a different venue but thank you for what you're doing because like i said i'll take water you take electricity and we'll see who lasts the longest uh it's so so important and i really appreciate everything you've done uh you get my vote so thank you thank you commissioner mcrae

1:54:56 thanks mindy uh got my vote too carl thanks for the presentation uh thanks for the work you're doing i know it's been said a number of times i'll just say really quickly we are super blessed to have uh this team and the pure water partners doing the work in this waterstead other fire affected communities do not have the same asset and we are leaps ahead so thanks for leading that team uh and and as you said kudos to those other organizations that are doing uh a ton of the lifting with with eweb a couple of questions um as we think about you you said you were there weren't as many pollutants as we'd expect or as we were kind of anticipating but with higher flows we may see more of that

1:55:41 i'm curious what pollutants weeks are most concerned about i.e are most difficult to take out at the treatment plant and and how we might be targeting those specific pollutants and as an example i know that a common practice after uh clear-cut logging on large-scale industrial fourth is to apply herbicide to keep the broadleaf plants from re-sprouting do we expect to see herbicide i mean i would assume we just expect to see oversight of applications across the watershed and do we expect to see that show up in the water and if so is there anything we can do about it yeah those are excellent questions

1:56:26 uh commissioner i appreciate that um well i guess the short answer well there's i'll start trying to start at the beginning of your question um so some of the the areas that we do that we're somewhat uh nervous about but we expect to see increases in are those uh things that are related to uh combustion and fire and destruction of or partially combusted materials and so those would lead us down the you know the polyaromatic hydrocarbons and some of those similar semi-volatile compounds um and those are a lot of those that tend to attenuate to sediment and so they would be addressed in our treatment process through dropping out sediments for example

1:57:11 um there are some that uh you know are more related to as you pointed out herbicide use posts fire as you re-vegetate and we do anticipate given the the scale and magnitude of salvage logging that has occurred to uh to see herbicide use go up and are concerned about that um some of the the what i call chatter earlier you know those estimated values those trace amounts that really aren't quantified by the labs they're so low right now we are seeing some some of those herbicide compounds in that chatter um and so we do want to that is something that we do want to continue monitoring for some of those dissolved uh organic compounds have a harder uh

1:57:56 are harder to treat not that we can't i know some of the things that um that the treatment plant is doing and ray lightbulb has been you know amazing at at staying one step ahead is putting essentially like a uh activated uh carbon on top of our our filter system so that activated carbon not only removes some of those contaminates as it goes through the filter system but also provides a kind of a better habitat for the biofilter to increase the other parts of that that the filters take out even cyanotoxins so i think you know i have full faith in our treatment plant that as we work and and you know and and the beauty is that we you know reorganize what is it now four years i don't remember now but we

1:58:41 brought it you know water quality together with treatment up at payton bridge and so we are joined at the hip and as we know things they know things and as they're seeing things they tell us so uh it's it's a great um it's a great work environment up there and a lot of good collaboration going on so i have confidence that as long as we're continuing to look at these and and and because it's not going to be you know we're not going to see an increase like overnight where it goes from you know trace amounts to acute levels we will start seeing trends pick up and then we start uh taking appropriate action to address them and increase our monitoring to get better uh kind of better uh visibility of it does that answer your question

1:59:26 yeah that's helpful um i yep thank you i appreciate that um i want to echo um commissioner barofsky's thoughts about uh buffers i i do wonder if there's an opportunity for us to work with some large-scale landowners to either purchase the the land itself or perceive conservation easements along those buffers i'm certain that the team you're working with is looking at that um and i just hope we take every opportunity we can because it seems like that's a big long-term lasting investment in really addressing some of the pollutants i'm curious what partners we have in terms of the landscape scale acquisition i know mckinsey river trust is the partner here in that are there other

2:00:12 partners locally or statewide or nationally that we are engaging to assist with um some of this acquisition uh yes um the forest service is a excellent partner we're working with who's who can also bring funding to these large-scale acquisitions so they can uh fund up to 75 of an acquisition we're also working with the columbia land trust and the world resources institute that also bring kind of this uh this experience and more uh and more depth into kind of looking at the situation and helping us understand what what we should be thinking and where we should be going and and funding opportunities that would help us

2:00:57 actually acquire without using repay or money those are a few i'm sure i'm missing a couple that's kind of that's great i just was curious if we're expanding beyond uh you know our local area it sounds like we are i'm grateful for that thank you for leveraging every dollar and all of our partners to get the work done uh lastly the question about um you know how to use these funds i haven't heard any uh complaints about the new fee i believe it started in july um so there's not a lot of history there but um i'll certainly be listening to hear if people start to raise questions about how is this money being used or if they're if they're concerned about it but i haven't heard that yet i given that as you know

2:01:42 landslide risk and and erosion risk actually increases over the first several years and we would expect to see you know peak landslide risk in that watershed uh in three to five years out from this fire um i think you know we may not the worst is definitely not behind us in terms of water quality impacts and so i encourage us to go full force you know as heavy as we can to try and mitigate you know water quality impacts erosion potential as much as possible and so at least for the time being i say hang on to those dollars and reinvest them i'm with john brown on that one thanks very much for the presentation and and your efforts thank you

2:02:30 all right this is commissioner schlossberg and last but not least and thank you carl i just have a few questions for you one really simple what is smart rebuild excellent question i kind of glossed over that didn't i um so we have a suite of incentives that we are uh rolling out for landowners who are looking to rebuild if one you know their home that got destroyed and a few of those are basically helping them or incentivize them to make it essentially cost neutral for them to move their house footprint away from the river out of the flood plain and out of the riparian area and so those those uh the grants that we have available for that allow them to move the house and then adjust their you

2:03:16 know their the piping from their well and their septic system as they need to accommodate that new footprint and then we also have incentives around the septic systems to upgrade septic systems and make them better i think i forgot to mention on the last one the septic piece the the legislature did provide us 1.5 million for septic upgrades and repairs replacements so i think any of our funds that we spend towards that will be reimbursed by the state but that's all being worked out still as to how we can use that money and what it's for does that answer the question yeah yeah so um i'm curious so it sounds like there's a lot of incentives and there's a lot of funding for these incentives and

2:04:01 like going forward looking to the future is there any talk of um legislation about just learning lessons from this like around zoning or or building codes close to the close to the rivers not just here on the mackenzie but just like the lessons that we can take from this i know it's not our job at eweb to propose legislation but and you're talking with legislators um is there any look to doing something like that so that we're not just incentivizing landowners but we're actually making things safer from the get-go um yeah that's a that's a tough one because there's a kind of a two-sided sword that you know

2:04:46 there there is talk about having uh you know better land-use laws i don't allow people to build and say the floodway but that smacks up against private property rights that are you know that people are very passionate about and so even in the wildfire recovery uh bill um initially there was some impetus to try to encourage folks not to rebuild where they're rebuilding a hazardous area but that got essentially over um overturned with the with basically allowing rebuilding a footprint without any any really any need to do any kind of uh mitigation for potential future hazards so it's it's a you know i i'm not aware of any i know jason

2:05:33 might be tracking some stuff um i would obviously fully encourage that given the dynamics of climate change and what we have coming at us but uh yeah that is that's a tough tough one to uh to get at all right well if anything like that happens i will hardly support eweb getting behind legislation like that because it would certainly make things a lot easier um my other question is and well i know that you all are really busy with all of this right now and just trying to like keep put one foot in front of the other but eventually is there any plan to take this work further out into the state or other areas like

2:06:19 we don't want other places to have to reinvent the wheel and we're so far ahead um are there any any plans to kind of take the show on the road there is an immediate plan to take it into the mid fort coast fork as we build out our second source and we are helping the santiam um but yes i think you know there are some good lessons learned we are talking to the american waterworks association folks and you know some of these national associations organizations to in fact i have a webinar on monday uh to that point to say here's our lessons learned this is how we responded and these are kind of the benefits we see out of this and kind of the heartaches that we experience mainly from like fema um because they're not used to locals

2:07:05 taking this role on and so we kind of threw them for a loop i think they're used to it or they've kind of grown with us to appreciate what we've done but initially as you know they wouldn't they they denied us uh reimbursement because they didn't think we're authorized to even do the work in the first place so there is some learning happening and i think yeah i think we are making an impression or at least a statement across the state in in the region of what how we can respond to these disasters in a better way with locals uh taking the lead great um and my last comment is about just budget recommendations in the fee i feel like if we've learned anything over these last 18 months is that just when you think all the

2:07:52 turmoil and chaos is over then something else happens so um it seems a little premature for us to say like well maybe we should think about um not having that fee anymore or whatever because who knows what's coming uh what if we happen to have like a really really wet year or god forbid there's another fire event or something like that so i think just knowing that we have that like built-in funding mechanism for now is really great it is great to look ahead and i'm guessing with the work that you have planned there's plenty of ways that we can spend and invest that money and make a positive impact so i continue to i

2:08:37 support continuing the fee and um just looking at opportunities that we can take advantage of with a fully funded program thank you i fully concur yes frank yes commissioners i know we're at times so i'll be brief um i don't think carl has ever proposed that that the fee actually go away um i i think what he was was teeing up was the fact that we do have and planned on significant outside investment and at some point do we get to the do we get to the point where we are expanding scope or is there an opportunity and it's probably not for a couple of years anyway

2:09:22 um at least till 2023 to where we would actually look to mitigate the fee itself um so i don't think we're anywhere near there and and carl would not be voting for that um even if we even if we could um we've only to commissioner mccray's point we've only had a spattering of people who have in one form or another complained about the fee usually it was a misunderstanding of what the fee was going for um they thought it was an investment in electrical systems or something where you know they um they didn't feel like the water bill was the appropriate place for it but but usually it was a misunderstanding and so that that's just one piece of feedback and and the other one on the strategic piece is you'll hear a little bit more about

2:10:08 that from anna later around the environmental product line that we're developing part of what we've done is we have to have a product and so we're in the product development mode for that some of it is we we do have our heads up looking at the horizon and talking about some of these issues and exploring land acquisition issues or conservation easement issues or opportunities to both sequester carbon as well as protect the watershed so those those things are being pursued we looked at those as opportunistic and we just haven't found an opportunity yet to bring back to the board specifically that would that would um rise to sort of your attention level so there's there is work going on there

2:10:54 it's just hasn't risen to the specifics of coming back to the board yet so more to come on that and more actually in this meeting even with anna so thank you all right well thank you very much for that carl and um we are now at our five minute break um commissioner brofsky i'm not sure if you're you're gonna join us after the break you're doing a great job hanging in there no i'm just gonna let you guys know that as intrigued i am with the strategic and operational plan it's 5 00 am here and

2:11:39 i'm going to bed so i'm going to leave the meeting at this point all right well kudos to you for hanging in there for so long and having intelligent questions good morning um okay it is 7 57 so we will come we'll just say that we come back at 805 if that's okay with everyone okay see you all soon

2:20:14 all right everyone is coming back at the very last second okay so moving right along welcome back everybody um with agenda item number 10 quarterly strategic and operational report [Music] yeah um i'm just going to take this for frank just seize it away from him good evening commissioners before i go ahead and hand this over to to the experts to to give some updates i just want to set a little context for for the quarterly report and and why we're we're kind of taking this route tonight which is a little different than what we've done in the past so the quarterly report of course is a high level uh

2:20:59 they were meant to be a high level report of how how the organization is operating or how we're doing with our goals right um but i mean you can see from uh adam's report and and carl's report there's a lot of details that go on underneath the organization and one of the things frank and i talked a little bit about is giving some daylight to to some of these uh programs and projects that don't normally hit the the quarterly report or there's actually some current topics i think that you'll uh recognize from the headlines you know how does the web react to some of these things so so that's why we're we invited some folks in to to come in and talk for us [Music] one of the things though before i turn

2:21:44 over is i wanted to address um supply chains we continue to see uh supply supply chain issues just like most everybody in the world if not the united states for sure most of those supply chain issues are in common items simple items like conduit ducting pipes pieces parts it's just a very similar story to what you read in the newspaper one of the things though that that is starting to impact this is and i wanted to give you a little bit of a heads up is electronic chips are also in short supply you know cars all these things will it's also impacting you have in our ami smart meter

2:22:29 particularly the electronic meter supply so we had talked earlier in the year i think a little bit about a slowdown at this point we're we're now becoming concerned that we don't have enough meters to to install uh and keep our our deployment going so i haven't got all the details yet but they're projecting delays of even up to six months or something like that before we start seeing meters so again we're still working on some of the details and this is sort of hot off the press kind of information but i just wanted to give folks a heads up that our deployment may be especially in electric uh specifically water will continue as normal um but you know i think the natural question is you know what is eweb doing about this

2:23:14 uh one of the things we're really doing this being the supply chain stuff is for monitoring and looking at shortages where are we going to be shorting uh the purchasing department's working really hard um and looking at projections and even to the point where one of the the consent items you approved tonight was the vault lids for for the water meter boxes that was that consent item was an rfp item which basically focused on delivery alternate supply chains uh and some of these kind of non-traditional things where we're not just looking at price anymore we're looking at availability um compatibility safety was another item in this as well so anyway we're watching this stuff we're

2:23:59 monitoring it doing the best we can adjusting lead times and i'm sure you'll probably hear more about this in different projects here and there so uh with that a little bit of context i'm going to go ahead and turn it over to julie all right thank you rod good evening commissioners i am julie mcgehee and i'm going to kick us off with a quick update on the customer portal so the portal went live to customers on june 14th and our goal is to match our previous customer participation by 90 days into the launch which is actually coming up next week so as you can see from the charts on the left as of last week we were at 117 of our registration target with over 44

2:24:45 000 customers signed up and we're at 94 percent of our auto pay enrollment goal with over 20 000 accounts signed up so for some perspective it took us eight years to get this many enrollments in our previous online payment system and we have gotten here in just 11 weeks this does help to explain why we are seeing such an increase in phone calls and emails and much longer hold times than we would like in addition to um the usual late summer volume that we just normally see we have quite a few customers who would like to get assistance setting their accounts up all at once so you can see from the chart on the

2:25:30 right we did a big communications push in the first few weeks of the launch to get customers moved over to the new system the numbers are declining as we would expect but we're still averaging 150 registrations each day and about 100 auto pay enrollments each day we are currently in a transition period between supporting the launch of the new system and then looking at some new adoption campaigns to reach customers who maybe have never used ewebs online systems before so that is all i have on the portal and next up is greg kelleher good evening commissioners my name is greg kelleher customer operations

2:26:15 manager and i'm here to update you on energy efficiency so through through august we've achieved approximately 6 700 megawatt hours of energy savings and with our projected projects coming in the rest of the year we expect to be surpassed target and be slightly below budget so the two charts side by side here are intended to illustrate the distribution of savings versus eweb investment this year most of the savings have come from non-residential projects but the majority of the cost is residential um just for your reference and looking at the chart 71 of the savings here on the chart on the left are

2:27:00 non-residential and only 39 percent of the eweb investment on the chart on the right are non-residential that's the gray areas typically ewa investment residential savings is about per kilowatt hour is about double or triple 57 cents typical for residential versus about 20 cents for commercial and then limited income is is about seven or eight times higher than the commercial running about about 50 bucks 60 a kilowatt hour so why the big difference part of it is because some commercial measures like led lighting are less expensive per kilowatt hour of savings

2:27:47 the other part is particularly for the limited income measures eweb is shouldering a higher percentage of the total cost of the measures just just for reference on on the graphs here the aggregate investments uh eweb investments per kilowatt hour are kind of lower than typical because um we've we've done a lot of commercial lighting this year and that's that's really low cost that's only about 12 cents a kilowatt hour versus you know some of the more expensive commercial measures in in heating and cooling and the other thing is that's not on the graph here is we we mitigate some of the costs in our residential sector by offering zero interest loans and they don't show up in

2:28:33 this budget so year to date we we have closed about just over a million dollars uh one million sixty thousand dollars in uh residential zero interest loans that we we we get back over a period of four to five years so for reference on all this um commercial industrial sectors generate about 48 percent of retail sales or retail revenue and but we only invest about 40 percent of our conservation funds to that to those sectors but we have recently updated

2:29:19 some of our incentive levels for the commercial industrial sectors to really kind of give give ourselves the more efficient tool to get tap into some of those savings because there's a lot of potential savings in commercial hvc heating ventilating air conditioning and and lighting and as well as new construction so we've we've increased those incentives just a bit um to help bring some more of those projects in um but just um to if we're going to continue to achieve our targets we really have to look at balancing our offerings to kind of reduce investments and some of those super expensive measurement measures um to really kind of go after some more of those less expensive measures or we will need to increase our budget so

2:30:05 that's just something to think about going forward in the next few years but so far so good on on target just a little budget next slide please so speaking of in the rental and multi-family activity approximately eighteen percent of our energy savings in single-family homes are achieved in rental units and there's a variety of sources out there around um what percentage of single family homes are rentals and depending on the source we're slightly lagging there it's in the range of 20 to 25 so we're we're pretty close to um

2:30:51 parity with the percentage of um our our limited pardon me our efficiency activity and rentals versus owners single-family ownership pumps um historically we're about 17 to 20 percent so we're right on where we historically are generally and also historically about 15 to 25 percent of residential efficiency savings are in limited income dwellings so just wanted to mention home energy scores we've been partnering with university of oregon and city of eugene since 2017 on home energy scores this is a way for tenants to tenants can apply we've been marketing

2:31:37 to rental units tenants can apply and this empowers them to kind of initiate an assessment of their dwelling and possibly initiate upgrades by providing information to the property owner of course with covid we had a little bit of slowdown but we kind of pivoted to remote assessments so using the data that we have in data that's available from other sources and questionnaires and conversations with the tenants we're able to continue to provide those assessments we have several opportunities and measures that that we've initiated in the multi-family sector for efficient new construction

2:32:23 and one of the kind of standard and simple things that we have is a 450 or 1100 dollars per unit for this energy efficient or zero energy ready and then the energy efficient category is something like earth advantage and that's usually about ten percent better than code and the zero energy ready is about twenty five percent better the code and and what this is is a list of um kind of standard programs that would qualify for that that are that are more regional and in addition to the standard incentives we do have a 20 premium for limited income nonprofits and we have several other measures we're offering in this category

2:33:08 so just want to give you a brief summary of the multi-family activity this year we've completed efficiency projects in 105 units in limited income nonprofits so far this year and we have 138 units in progress and that's a mix of retrofits and existing uh dwellings and and also some new construction and also in progress this year we have 382 units in they're not limited income specific but they're 382 apartment units that are going through the energy efficient dwelling for 450 per unit i think uh next we have juan

2:33:53 just some election news yeah thanks craig uh hello and good evening commissioners uh general manager leadership team members of the public and fellow staff my name is juan sato munoz and i'm a business line manager on electrification and energy efficiency tonight i will be sharing on ewebs electric mobility efforts for 2021 and 2022. these are broken down into six areas you see on your screen and include an overview of proposed investment amounts by sector and year which increased in 2022 as we further invest in egypt's own charging infrastructure specifically in direct current fast charging funding for our electric mobility investments come from the monetization of clean field credits and the intent of these efforts is to provide a comprehensive suite of programs to increase electric mobility while

2:34:40 taking steps to bring access to this technology provide affordable options for charging create value for e-web and our customers and help us prepare to meet the energy demands of this increasing sector due to limited time i cannot expand on the various programs of each section but instead i'll highlight it for you a major area of investment will be e-whip bone charging stations these will provide a new revenue stream for our product of electricity enable us to bring affordable costs for public electric mobility charging and allow us to guide the operations of these stations including calibration of delivery of delivered power and if needed excuse me calrissian deliver power when and as needed with opportunities for

2:35:25 demand response in the future efforts will be broken down into level one for electric micro mobility such as electric bikes and level two in the recurrent fast charging or dcfc for electric automobiles dcfc stations can provide very fast charging speeds but can also be very expensive a single station hardware can cost thirty thousand to seventy five thousand or higher depending on the power output with installation costs of twenty five to fifty thousand these costs will drive the increase in investment in 2022 as we move forward with the installations of the efc dcfc units and continue to expand and operate our charging infrastructure in consideration social equity in our efforts we are looking at opportunities

2:36:10 to bring access to this technology the availability of electric vehicles does not necessarily mean the equitable access to them so in this area efforts cannot necessarily have a primary driver of financial return on investment but a return of equitable access to electric mobility a path to address this is the launching of an affordable housing ed sharing pilot program in partnership with st vista de paul the city of eugene enforced mobility to provide charging infrastructure and an electric vehicle for the complex to share initially we have two locations but only one will be able to participate in the program additionally electric mobility community grants will be offered to help community agencies implement efforts they need and in turn maximize the benefit for the populations they serve

2:36:55 we continue to have a residential and commercial charging station rebates but we're expanding those to multi-family employee and workplace charging to help address future peak concerns and adding rebates for the recurrent fast charging stations all these efforts require the stations to meet the open adr standard which will allow for future demand response utility operations when a business considers installing charging infrastructure the process can be very complex and involved including assessing the total power capacity needs of these stations and the cost of potential service upgrades in response in addition to our rebates we offer guidance and assessment of these capacity needs and that service upgrade loan to help with added costs quickly on the electric mobility rebates we will offer rebates for electric

2:37:41 bicycles which can help displace internal combustion engine and electric vehicles to further reduce emissions on the marketing side we have various efforts including the introduction of a city-wide ev sharing pilot program at two identified locations this effort is in partnership with the city of eugene lane transit district enforced mobility to help bring access for the public to experience and use electric vehicles with the current epidemic pandemic vehicles will be cleaned regularly and we will pause or stop the effort if needed these guidelines will also apply to the affordable housing tv showing pilot program mentioned earlier in addition we continue our ongoing rev up ev education classes which are almost monthly and allow for attendees to take advantage of msrp markdowns from

2:38:26 participating local dealerships this is an effort in partnership with the emerald valley electric vehicle association the city eugene and other local entities and utilities lastly on the partnership side ewip has access to total gear electric vehicle registrations in our services but through a partnership with the oregon department of energy we will receive gis data with the actual locations of these vehicles and this will help us evaluate electric vehicle adaption to various lenses but also the potential impact to our grid and implement plans and work accordingly additionally it will help us be more effective as we launch our various e-web on charging infrastructure work with this i conclude my presentation thank you for your time today board members and this is exciting to work to

2:39:12 increase electric mobility and access while bringing value to our customers and even i will now pass it to you my colleague anna wayne thank you one and good evening commissioners for the record i'm anna wade business line manager in customer solutions as with all as with juan i'm here tonight to share a sneak preview of a few environmental products that i'm currently working on cutting right to the chase the primary goals for this product line are carbon mitigation and preparing customers for the resilient and efficient delivery future we envision in the strategic plan this product line utilizes simple strategies to help get us there namely market access education through doing incentives and

2:39:57 advancing carbon sequestration opportunities so we're planning for a future in which our customers drive evs and they charge them overnight during off-peak hours they'll have smart meters um and access to real kind real-time consumption data to make sense of future uh price signals a lot of smart appliances thermostats and other tech enabled for demand response big projects like ami and enterprise resource planning are prerequisite for this future but in as much as we need to be prepared as a utility we also need to bring our customers along so the force the forthcoming environmental product lines represent near-term uh carbon solutions that can serve as stepping stones towards eweb's

2:40:42 vision of demand supply alignment and carbon-friendly delivery of electricity and water can i get the next slide please holly thank you so i want to touch on uh three areas that are in that are impacting the carbon conversation and then specifically some product offerings related to each so those are commodities technology and behavior and carbon sequestration so as you'll recall at the august board meeting jason gave a legislative update of note was the 100 percent clean energy standard to which gas utilities will be subject um carbon carbon offsets are the currency to which they will meet those requirements for now eweb is exempt so we'll continue

2:41:29 to look at oregon rps where rex rule the day ewebs trade floor has access to both and we can leverage that for our customers nationally and locally businesses have a growing appetite for these environmental products beginning in q4 we will offer retail rack sales to our customers this will provide a more economic option for larger customers to advance operational goals that as i said increasingly include environmental impact minimum and maximum participation thresholds will enable planning staff to manage eweb's direct portfolio in a prudent manner we also want to offer carbon offsets offsets will allow all customers to address carbon above and beyond their

2:42:16 energy their energy consumption by retailing carbon offsets we can really showcase eweb's low carbon portfolio but also inform customer investments in things like solar or energy efficiency or transportation um pricing for both product lines will be commodity based and approved by the board annually through the standard tariff pricing process also i want to really quickly mention supply lines eweb has a pretty robust rec portfolio that is pre-existing at the outset carbon offsets will be market sourced until we bring along some of those projects that we're looking to the future where we can create a local supply line technology and behavior so to achieve our vision customers will

2:43:02 have to accept new technology and find value in using it which includes effective utilization of ami and consumption data there's typically three barriers to the adoption of new tech there's cost that's pretty obvious identifying value so what's in it for me and then finally privacy issues so how can eweb facilitate well again cost is the obvious one we will offer customer incentives for smart thermostats and appliances my partner wand has done a lot of upfront work on on that front so um but the three of us myself greg and juan will be working together on advancing eweb's incentives to address carbon in the coming year in addition to encouraging customer

2:43:48 adoption of technology we aim to share power market dynamics through a peak hero program participants will receive info on things like time of use pricing carbon intensity and peak event alerts this this program will provide a no-cost option for customers to gain exposure on e-web's playing field so getting comfortable with these dynamics on a voluntary basis will help customers to identify value and develop confidence in adopting some of these new behaviors lastly i want to talk about carbon sequestration projects these can offer as you know carl's presentation indicated these can offer dual benefits for source protection and potentially carbon offset generation in

2:44:34 the future the high banks project with ufo super cool project that will advance carbon forestry technology in our region and position eweb to have a voice in protocol development it's a super cool project that we can and should be really proud of and we should invite our customers to be a part of it too voluntary subscriptions to fund the purchase of plant materials at the high banks or other future watershed sites will allow e-web to stretch these investments and improve customer awareness in them so we talked to carl talked a little bit earlier about you know where those watershed feed dollars are going and where they're not this is a project where we can bring customers along to support them on a

2:45:19 voluntary basis um let's see i'm also evaluating an urban tree planting program a lack of tree canopy creates urban heat islands which are dis disproportionately associated with lower income neighborhoods friends of trees will be doing a grant funded pilot program planting and nurturing shade trees on residential properties and open spaces within these low canopy neighborhoods establishing a stable funding stream could create long-term benefits for energy conservation social equity neighborhood vitality and then of course carbon sequestration can i get the last slide please holly

2:46:04 thank you so timeline um in q4 we'll be rolling out the most basic components of this product line providing market access to rex and carbon offsets to start we'll focus on the most accessible market segment so those early adopters green innovators throughout 2022 we'll build upon and enhance these offerings to reach the mainstream through the peak hero program um through customer facing tools for carbon calculation and incentives for smart technology over time voluntary programs will give way to formal price signals and demand response and again that future where we really create efficiencies between our demand and supply and build those flexible spines

2:46:50 in conclusion um each of the product lines covered by greg juan and i can help our our community address climate change uh and contribute to utility goals around stewardship and conservation and resiliency of course we'll be working collaboratively to develop e-web programs using carbon as sort of our common currency um and thinking with a sort of when matters communication strategy with our customers it's really exciting work i'm happy to be a part of it and with that i will pass it along to megan great thank you anna uh good evening commissioners i'm megan capper energy resources manager and i get to share with you how we managed our recent high

2:47:35 temperature events including our highest temperature on record for sunday june 27th we know that temperatures drive customer demand and in the table here you can see eweb's customer demand reached a peak of 407 megawatts in june our loads were also high in august but i'm going to focus on june because first of all june is typically a more mild month and we didn't anticipate high temperatures and secondly it was very well publicized five days prior so it's a good time to ask ourselves what happened and what did we learn next slide please we did expect hotter temperatures and a strained resource stack this summer and in spring we received approval from our risk management committee on our summer strategy the strategy included

2:48:20 maintaining adequate resources to cover a load of night for 90 degree day we planned to continuously incorporate new information and purchase additional generation for hotter days but we didn't want to be any longer for those milder days this strategy was for june july through september we did not have this strategy for june so why was that first of all june's load volatility is generally low and our resources are generally very abundant the latter was true in this june thankfully and we saw we were in a good position with enough regional resources but let's look at a graph next slide at um what we actually saw it's more fun to look at a graph i think here we have temperatures in blue and

2:49:06 energy demand in orange and they track together as you would expect you can see the nights were not cooling off and the highs and the lows each day increased cons you know each consecutive day you can really see this uh early monday morning the temperature at 3am was like 75 degrees you probably all remember that because i know i did so while monday temperatures were lower loads were on a trajectory to be higher than sunday until the wind blew in cooler air you can see this with the green line decreasing the temperatures and our load soon followed so next next diagram this is another way to look at this it's a scatter diagram and it shows eweb's customer loans for all june hours all days of the week

2:49:52 load and temperature and this is from 2017 to 2020. in the green you have just our june hot days and the green circle represents monday morning loads here you can clearly see at the lower temperatures lows were significantly higher than any other historical point so monday morning shows that this situation was not only unprecedented but by a large margin so next slide so we learned some lessons and we're translating them into future operations this includes the importance of our load forecasts we see that the past is not a good indication anymore of the future actually let alone the present and we look forward to being able to include um ami data and customer service

2:50:39 survey data in our future forecasting one thing um we don't quite understand yet is the correlation of temperature to summer lobe we don't have the granular information like how many uh ac units are we have in our service territory or how they're growing and we think of ourselves as a winter picking utility but as we start to see increased loads driven by these high temperatures our past assumptions don't align with the future and we need to do some work on that and we recognize that but the good news here is that staff successfully navigated a such a difficult situation um another lesson learned so next slide please another lesson learned is that these extreme events um like i mentioned they're not really unprecedented anymore

2:51:26 and so i want to briefly mention what the northwest is doing to increase our trading partners and develop new market opportunities and eweb is part of these discussions here on this slide this shows you how the northwest markets operate today in the blue so we currently buy and sell power they're in hourly blocks they're actually nighttime and daytime blocks you probably heard the heavy load hour and light load hour and so at some point and we do it though so bilaterally so it's between two parties and only in the day of delivery do we buy and sell on an hourly basis otherwise it's these blocks well the yellow represents opportunities in the northwest to develop markets like hourly automated markets prior to that

2:52:12 actual day of and five-minute markets that are during the day and these new efforts would provide automated matching of larger pools of buyers and sellers over smaller time periods and next slide um on this slide you can see the summary of discussions to develop these types of markets and i know we've shared with you um about several of them so i want to focus down on the last one eweb is a member utility of the public generating pool and the members commissioned a study to look at potential benefits of these markets and early indications are promising for a utility like uf where we could see a significant reduction in operating costs and this would that we think this is

2:52:57 from more day-to-day day ahead hourly transactions instead of block so instead of having to buy those blocks of 16 and eight hours we can actually buy individual hours according to our need so i hope that provides you with some context around how we manage the heat events and are engaging in the regional energy issues so next slide and i think we have time for questions okay commissioner mcrae i see your hand up

2:53:45 yes thank you mindy uh i have a whole bunch of questions because there was so much content there that was like speed dating at eweb that was kind of awesome thank you for the rapid fire update on a bunch of friends um so i i'm going to assume that i'm probably not going to get all my questions answered and i will follow up by email if i may with those presenters with whom i didn't have a chance to ask questions i have one question that i think a comment for one and a question for frank about electric vehicles thank you for the presentation juan i i feel like uh you and i have talked before about uweb's uh ev incentive program and i feel like the continued emphasis on

2:54:30 trying to reach uh lower income markets or or lower income households or those households that wouldn't have access to electric vehicles and the affordability that comes with that is exactly where we should be so i appreciate the effort and your focus in that arena specifically the analysis that we just uh last month showed us that um electric vehicles are are competitive now and we don't have to do a bunch of incentives but it seems appropriate that we continue to work on those places where people wouldn't otherwise have access um so thank you um my question is the other side of electrification we've um you know we've got a really robust ev program i do wonder frank how uh if if we

2:55:17 have somebody doing the same work is as one on the building side or if we have that in the works or if that's you know in the plans in some way it seems like there's uh the electrification studies suggest that there's going to be required incentives and policy change in order to catalyze notification of buildings um just with the thoughts on that front yeah so um in we we do so you met greg as part of our overall um efficiency he's actually the manager over the customer solutions group um and i would expect that to initially fall within his purview as it develops further

2:56:02 great okay thank you and then um if i may i'm just gonna take a couple more minutes to ask questions from greg while you're while you're there uh thank you for the presentation that it was a bunch of good information that and some of it that i wasn't familiar with um you said we have a 10 000 megawatt hour target i assume that's the target for just one year is that the same target year to year do we does it our target tend to remain around 10 000 megawatt hours per year um historically we've been varying it according to our methodology in the ierp which is to um offset 100 of load growth that isn't a large single load like a

2:56:47 fake new factory but offsetting 100 of that growth with conservation and we've been achieving that for several years in a row um we're holding at 10 000 megawatt hours for this year because we're experiencing some unexpected volatility in our loads due to coveted and its effect on the economy right now um so we really want conservation or our targets to be really based on more of a long-term growth in offsetting long-term growth rather than trying to offset it year to year so um that's approximately what it is and we're holding there rather than saying let's do nothing this year and then let's do forty thousand next year

2:57:32 so about where we need to be commissioner mccray i would also add that there's a a reimbursement um from bonneville which is also part of what we take into account every year and that varies a little bit every year but it's it's been pretty consistent around uh the same level for the last several years so we do take the reimbursement level and the targets from bonneville into consideration okay that's helpful uh how much more cost-effective energy efficiency exists in our area we do what's called the conservation potential assessment and other utilities do this occasionally as well we did it

2:58:18 in 2012 with our ierp and we found at the time there were over 85 average megawatts of conservation available [Music] however it's hard to take that um and move it forward into the future because it does not consider new technology that arises at the time we did the conservation potential assessment for example ductless heat heat pumps just barely made it in they had just really started hitting the market so since then we've had commercial led lighting residential led lighting as well and and variable refrigerant flow technologies and a variety of new

2:59:03 technologies and we expect to continue to see that so the short answer for that is there's a lot there's always something that we can do at any given time i would estimate there's at least 80 average megawatts of conservation available it's really not a question of how much is available it's a question of really how much sense does it make to get it in terms of what it costs and um what the other benefits are beyond beyond the cost and what customers are willing to do to get it hope that helps yes that's great i would also i think it comes up this next year's the national energy efficiency association does a regional building stock

2:59:48 assessment housing stock assessment and there's information that we can glean out of that i think that's due for its next report i believe it's in 2022 but i'm not sure um but that also could inform us a little further as to what potential is available in some of these different market segments okay that's great those studies repeat every five years there's a residential and there's a commercial and they really give us a good idea of what the baseline is now so we can compare that with what what potential measures might be available so that's a really good point great all right and two comments and then i'll uh turn it over to somebody else uh i am thrilled that we are seeing

3:00:35 that we are investing in new multi-family construction to increase the energy efficiency in in new buildings so thank you and i hope we'll continue to do that and i'm thrilled to see that we have some tools to address the renter's paradox where we're able to invest in energy efficiency and rental properties that's fantastic i'm curious to learn more about that but i'll do that at a later time and turn that time over to somebody else thanks mindy commissioner mcrae if you can send your questions to to myself and rod and and then we'll get them to the right people perfect thank you all right commissioner brown did you have

3:01:21 just a couple quick questions thank you that was very informative i like that format um about the supply chain issues i know during snowmageddon uh a lot of the our neighboring utilities ran out of things like poles and wire and transformers and we let them our supply now that we don't have the potential to resupply is that going to change our policy on um you know if we're down to limited things and that puts our people at risk if we give out uh commodities such as such as that during a large event have we thought about that yeah i don't um i think really the the answer john is that we look at every situation uh in request on its own basis and so i i

3:02:08 think absolutely we would we would look at the any request that comes to us at this point uh with the with the knowledge we have now of what we have and what we think we can get so um you know we really try and help each other out as much as possible the utility operational world just thrives on that on that concept and so um you know we try to honor where we can but we're certainly not going to give away stuff that we need okay thank you and the second one on uh the i echo matt's comments about helping the rental pool and energy efficiency and i do a lot of work with cornerstone homes for good and things but just a question on process so when we subsidize

3:02:54 like a homes for good project and make it energy efficient the tenants of those buildings also qualify for the uh energy assistance program and since we have limited income do we limited resources if somebody if we if somebody's living in let's say bascom village and it's an energy efficient unit that we subsidized do they also do is there any criteria to say that you can or cannot qualify for the liheap or any of those other programs that give energy assistance to limited income people no sir those are treated completely independently so your ability to get some sort of bill assistance whether it be customer care or energy share or

3:03:41 otherwise is independent of whether you are just an electric customer whether you're an electric and water customer just a water customer or or where you live or what your consumption or what your actual bill is those are two independent things all together um just just where we are now so you can live in in occupy one of the units that that we provided the funding to subsidize so their energy is low and still qualify for assistance to uh for based on your income there's no we're not i just wanted to just make sure because because there's some people that don't get any assistance and i was just wondering if maybe that's something that you may want to think about in the future if somebody's utility bills are

3:04:27 half of what you know living in in a new brand new apartment complex um versus somebody that's living in a duplex um where they have electric stealing heat um i would hope we could spread our resources and not have somebody paying no utility bills and have other people paying a larger percentage of their income especially the limited income people just just a comment that's a great option yeah commissioner brown we've we've never used consumption as a criteria and and ly he does not either like he be in the federal program but that's something we're considering especially if we provided these subsidies to drive the the consumption down to begin with

3:05:14 yeah i just i mean it's just the concept of getting two benefits when somebody isn't getting any benefit if there's a way to spread it out it would be it would be nice but other than that so um thank you very much i also have some extra questions but i'm out of time so i'll submit an email thank you commissioner carlson do you have any questions or comments nope i might have been answered thank you um okay i have a few um that was a lot of information and i kind of wrote furiously so i'm going to see if i can um make sense of what i wrote first of all this is kind of neither here nor there but i just want to point out that sonya asked about supply chain issues i think the first month of the pandemic in our

3:05:59 in our board meeting so that was very prescient uh sonia um i think that there's a lot of really exciting things that you've all talked about i'm i'm particularly interested in the rebates for electric bikes i think that's great and i can't wait to when we roll that out i have a question about the rental units and i'm curious what percentage of of renters that come to us for an energy audit end up taking advantage of some of our incentive programs or their landlords do i don't know if we have statistics on that that's a great question that's something that we've tried to

3:06:45 um track it and it's it's been a challenge to track because there's usually a pretty good time lag so i do not have an answer for you today um we can explore that further and see if we can get you something okay um i'm just i'm just curious about the effectiveness and also i mean it's great to have tenants be empowered i'm just curious how much change they can actually make and how empowered they are to um approach their their landlords so anyway i'm just curious about that um i guess the one comment that i have is that

3:07:30 um what we've heard through this board meeting tonight are some really exciting incentives that eweb is offering like through um the mckenzie watershed restoration stuff all of these programs that's really great but um we can't incentivize our way through the climate crisis and so i guess just my personal feeling as a board member as we talk about strategic plans or policies or whatever i want to make sure that we have these incentives but that that isn't our main um effort in lowering our collective carbon footprint so i i i just want to make sure that um as we move forward that we have policies

3:08:16 that are climate friendly but it's not only through incentives if that makes sense it's not very well formed but that's just the thought that i have about incentives and that the incentives sound really exciting too so they're great but i don't want that to be our only form of action um and i'll just leave it at that for now um president schlossberg one of the things that we will talk a little bit about during our strategic work and in a couple in a few gosh a couple weeks i believe it actually is um part of the premise of an uh of a alignment between supply and demand

3:09:02 is that not only do you optimize financially but you optimize environmentally we know that consumption impacts the carbon footprint of the supply chain that we have and that's both water and electric and the resiliency thereof and so the biggest piece of this while it's strategic it's also a little bit longer term and there's things that we can do to help the customer and so there's five things on our in our climate change policy one of which is to work with the customer through various incentives as far as electrification as far as energy efficiency conservation and those types of things but that's only one of five so there are some other things and probably

3:09:48 the biggest one having to do with our ongoing portfolio and our own carbon footprint within our operations great thank you okay we are now going to move along toward the end of our agenda uh item number 11 correspondence and board agendas and i just want to say thank you everybody for that presentation it was great yes um thank you you know it was a little bit different last month we had the opportunity to actually go through the report we the report was from last month but um i thought rod captured it well taking a deeper dive into a few of these subjects i think is is worth doing every

3:10:34 now and then so i appreciate um staff's attention to detail in all these matters so thank you very much um correspondence and um board agendas there were two pieces of correspondence they both had to do with uh i think deborah hart one was on the management letter follow-up that was some follow-up to the management letter and the audit in april and the other one had to do with the the history of the rate stabilization fund and kind of where that came from and and what it's used for so i don't know if there are any questions on that and if if there are we can we can answer those i'll probably defer those to deborah but if not we can just move on to board agendas as well

3:11:25 i'm not seeing any hand raised so moving on to board agendas we have quite a few activities coming up for the board um um the probably the one that's um on a number of people's minds is the the joint meeting with the city of eugene at the end of september between now and then i believe it's september 14th um president schlossberg and matt mcrae and myself commissioner mcrae are meeting with uh the mayor and and council leadership and so if there are particular items from the city that you would like on that agenda it would probably be best to work through president schlossberg and and myself with just what those suggestions are so far we we um think

3:12:11 that um a climate action plan update would be a good update from their perspective to us for example and then from our end to them kind of what's going on with electrification and resiliency specifically on the water side and so those are kind of two topics that we we teed up this this cannot be a meeting with a long presentation given that there's eight eight counselors a mayor and five commissioners all with their opportunity to speak and interact so we're going to try to keep any presentation really short so um we can do some background material obviously but that's that's kind of if there's feedback that you want to

3:12:56 provide i'd suggest that that mindy you be kind of the collector as well as as myself and and and so we can review that with the city in in a couple weeks oh in a week or in a week actually other than that i think everything's kind of out there and published i don't have any further comments unless you have questions on board agendas i think commissioner carlson had a question i was just curious are they doing in-person meetings are they still meeting virtually as well this meeting yep this meeting from my understanding is in is going to be virtual okay thank you

3:13:47 i don't see anything else so that concludes that agenda item so president schlossberg i'll turn it back to you great we are on then our last item which is board wrap up um i just want to thank the staff for all the presentations um sometimes it's easy for me to forget to thank people because i'm so busy with my questions or running the meeting but i just would like to let people know that i really appreciate the level of detail that goes into these presentations and their ability to answer all of our questions and i know that it's not easy to give a presentation in normal times but in this format it's particularly difficult when you can't see people so i just want to say that i really appreciate all the work that the

3:14:33 staff is doing um both the ones who are presenting and the ones who are supporting this format and that is it for me nope people are too tired i i will i just want to say thank you to everybody that did the presentations tonight and most importantly i'm really looking forward to the board dinner at beppy and johnny's thank you frank all right anybody else you can jump in all right thanks again mindy for hurting the cats the way you do

3:15:20 keeping us all in line much appreciated all right well if there is nothing else then we can all go home or we can all get off our computers 19 minutes early i guess i better work on some dinner reservations it was a subtle hint wasn't it yeah commissioners thanks thanks for all of your participation guidance advice support it's it's really helpful i know we're throwing a lot at you in a lot of different areas and we're trying to pace it a little bit at the same time we

3:16:05 know you have a very high capacity so we're we we are turning things up a little bit so thank you great thank you good night everybody have a good evening thank you