EWEB Board of Commissioners — October 5, 2021

0:03 right i am calling uh to order our eugene water and electric board um october 5th 2021 meeting we are now in session um we're going to start off with an agenda check and we don't usually have anything there but um i'm going to propose that we add 20 minutes after public input on our agenda for the commissioners to kind of um debrief about the um work session we had with the city of eugene so i don't know if i need to make a formal motion for that or how that works but maybe john brown you can usually head knobs you get three head nods and you can amend the agenda okay i see some head nods thumbs up okay

0:50 so we will add 20 minutes after public input um for that item is there anything else that anyone else or has for agenda check no okay then we're gonna go right into item number two which is items from board members and general manager so anybody that wants to go first go ahead sonia hi this is sonia carlson i am i wanted to report quickly that i had attended the el the lane council of governments general uh meeting last last week it was last week and wanted to just report back a couple of things they talked about

1:35 cyber security as one of the issues that they're working on helping different government entities with and if there's anything that you know that we've learned that we might be able to partner with them on or you know vice versa anything to learn from them that might be something for staff to reach out about and then another item that we talked about is that the lcc board is going to be selecting a new president the current president has indicated that they are going to be moving on after this upcoming year and they have a survey that they've sent out i will forward that survey they're trying to get public

2:20 public feedback on that as much as possible so they sent it out to all the board members and asked that we shared that with our uh members as well so i will forward that to you and feel free to share widely as well that's it for me uh well i guess i will say uh thank you for the various tours that we've had over the last few weeks they've been infinitely helpful touring the hayden bridge project last last friday and actually seeing some of the progress and the investments that we've made was really remarkable so kudos to staff thank you wonderful to see the lab up and running fantastic to see the um the plant that's generating the um hydrochloric is it hydra i'm gonna mess it up it's not chlorine we got away from

3:06 chlorine to make this plant anyway so really excited to um to see that in operation after you know years of kind of seeing it in construction and such so thank you anyone else have anything to uh commissioner john brown yeah uh several things i'm not going to be able to attend the thin rock the tour of the pinwalk reach i've been through it quite a bit but i'm going to be out of i'll be back east um i presented in front of the northeast neighbors a couple weeks ago told them about rates and where we are with certain projects and things such as that and i'd like to just say that uh i think it was yesterday i'm the line crew was working on a substation of the high voltage lines over off the i-105 off of

3:51 garden way frank i don't know the name of that substation but i pulled over and watched them for 20 minutes and i have never been more impressed with the safety protocols and the way those guys are in those bucket trucks you know 50 feet 75 feet up off the ground around those high voltage lines and i just like to just commend them for what i observed to be an incredibly safe professional group of men and women working up there it was amazing to watch it it really was the first time i've seen that particular thing and not in a strong event so kudos to that group thank you commissioner matt mcrae thanks mindy a couple of items to mention i met with uh janine parisi and

4:38 laura barbing uweb staff up on college hill where they provide a presentation to neighbors who are curious about the progress on replacing the water infrastructure there and as always they did a really nice job of making the information accessible and staying until everybody's questions were asked i just really appreciate the way our team is giving and leans in to provide information to to um i also want to say thanks to the team i know there's a significant group of staff who worked on putting together that joint meeting with the city council and i know that that's just there's a lot that goes into that to making that work and making

5:24 it flow well um so thanks to the team of staff who were making that work and also to mindy for uh helping to herd the cats during that particular meeting that was you know it was just a lot of a lot of logistics and you made it look effortless so thanks for your work on that mindy until i have commissioner barofsky um yeah not a lot to report uh like john brown and i attended a neighborhood association meeting the fairmont neighborhood association meeting um the only thing that really came up there of eweb interest was the fact that there is a new development going up at the top of capitol hill and there was questions regarding well

6:11 one they were they were talking about all the dump trucks that were coming down down the hill and that was something that we knew would be happening but uh just as construction is impacting the hilliard neighbors construction is is also impacting the fairmont neighbors as well but one of the things that was uh a question that came up that i might have to reach out to staff on later was the fact of that there was a an agreement with the developers to put in some sort of a infrastructure to make sure that there was enough water for the new developments so at some point i may be checking the staff to make sure that that is is moving forward as was promised to the neighbors other than that nothing

7:01 frank yes um president schlossberg commissioners good evening um a couple of of updates and mostly thank yous so uh first of all um i did want to thank the hayden bridge uh crew for their tour the other day ray lipold susan fricke and danielle fisher in particular for showing commissioners through a lot of the investments the certified water testing lab which is incredibly important and also the on-site hypochlorite manufacturing system which we now have on site so thanks to ray susan and danielle for their information sharing activities last week i also wanted to reach out and thank the

7:46 ufo soil plant atmosphere research lab especially lucas silva and hilary rose dawson for their tour and and update on the research that they're doing with eweb it's it's actually really exciting um ewe is working with the lab to study the long-term impacts of watershed and riparian restoration on carbon sequestration and we're using our uh high banks road property and working with the ufo on that it's it's really exciting research so i wanted to reach out and thank them and thank staff for for their involvement with that so that was my update thank you um i only have two really small things to add this is um

8:32 commissioner schlossberg one is um i also want to extend my thanks for the hayden bridge tour i found it um super interesting and the enthusiasm of the staff there for all the new stuff that was going on was really great um it hasn't been that long i think since i've been on a tour there because i haven't been a commissioner very long but um there's already so much new stuff there it was pretty cool to see so thank you for that and then my last thing is a really small thing especially because i'm only presiding over two more meetings but um last time one of our um the someone who called in for public input just wanted to wanted me to be clear on who was who i

9:17 was calling on and who was speaking and um just let you know what's going on in my brain a little bit is that i recognize it i need to use everybody's full name and at the same time i'm trying a little harder to be more informal because it kind of breaks down barriers amongst us so um i'm going to kind of flip flop back and forth but um commissioner carlson identified herself when she spoke first and i think that sometimes that just might be helpful for people who are listening in i know that's very small but i just wanted to say that because i wanted to make sure that people who are listening understand that um i hear that you want to know who who's speaking okay so we're moving on to agenda item number

10:03 three which is public input via telephone uh when your name is called remember to unmute your call 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 um you will hear an audio notification when three minutes has elapsed 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

10:48 construed as support of or opposition to any speaker's testimony if a question is presented by a speaker and the board does not provide an answer an eweb staff member will contact the speaker so that the question can be addressed at a later time so um the public testimony period for this meeting is now open and and do we have all of our speakers um we just had one person join it looks like it's mark robinowicz who is up first so i'm going to admit him now and if you'd like to go ahead and call on him and confirm he can be heard he should be with us in just a second okay and i have karen austin as our first speaker is she here

11:35 she has not called in okay um okay so um first up we have mark rabinowitz uh followed by jim new and mark have you can you hear us i can hear you can you hear me yep i can hear you so you're up first followed by jim new okay three minutes starting now yep okay uh good evening a couple of things for your consideration i have heard about your contractor's dump truck getting stuck at the construction site at 40th and patterson

12:20 you may recall a couple months ago i spoke to your board noting that there was a small wetland more or less in the exact spot where your dump truck has gotten stuck it's an unusual wetland to be at elevation but it had the largest oregon ash on the site and rushes and other wetland plants and seasonal springs tend to get soggy when it rains a couple inches so it's kind of ironic to have a water tank built on top of a former wetland but then he webb built your whole new compound out in west eugene in the middle of wetlands so maybe it makes sense

13:05 um i know of another state that was forced to require covers for dump trucks after a state legislator had his windshield cracked by rocks flying out of a similar truck and hoped that e-web will require its contractors to put covers on the dump trucks i guess with the rain the dust is lower now but rocks flying out is still a problem and you're going to be discussing the second source if eweb had paid more attention to maintenance of your big tanks we might be seeing construction of the second intake now instead of scrambling to address broken tanks on college hill and hawkins hill

13:51 you have 23 tanks total around the city and i find it hard to believe that you couldn't find any a configuration that would allow existing sites to be sufficient for water storage for the community and during your public hearing tonight on the long term plans for eweb i will talk about energy depletion and peak electricity and how the western electric grid that we are all on uses a lot more fossil fuels than solar panels and wind turbines uh that is basic physics and it would be nice to acknowledge that green electricity is basically an

14:38 oxymoron so that's my comments for the public input right now and i'll stay on the line you did great thank you very much um so next up we have jim new followed by linda kelly hello commissioners and general manager lawson my name is jim new i live in award 7. uh thank you for the opportunity to give public comment i was encouraged by the eweb and city council joint work session and i hope there are more to come frankly there were many unanswered questions so i hope that they should be held more often than just quarterly 87 percent of fossil gas is made up of methane which is 84 more potent than carbon dioxide in a 20-year period and

15:25 has caused 30 percent of global heating according to a u.n report cutting methane emissions is the quickest way to slow global heating in the united states 590 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent were generated by homes and businesses nine percent of the total u.s greenhouse gases in 2018. for the 2022 energy star most efficient appliance list the epa just announced it will not include gas furnaces boilers or dryers for the first time this is only electric appliances we cannot continue to install new gas appliances that will be around for 10 to 30 years considering the climate crisis we are currently experiencing

16:11 i trust the competent staff and the commissioners at e-web will develop energy policy that makes economic social and reliable sense for generations to come thank you for your time tonight thank you very much next up linda kelly followed by dylan plummer good evening commissioners uh thank you for the opportunity to testify i live in ward 1. um i also want to thank whoever fixed the electronics on the meeting the other day between the city and um eweb i appreciate that took a little bit uh i also want to thank uh city councilor

16:57 excuse me councillor suret and um commissioner matt mcrae sonia carlson and mindy swashburg who spoke at that time and addressed with some good questions the wisdom of the dual source heat pumps frank lawson gave an interesting presentation but i had no clear explanation of why he would be interested in a dual energy heat pump i couldn't understand that um we know that natural gas is on the way out and that we must electrify everything as quickly as possible from all of the recent reports that have been coming our way northwest natural i believe is hoping to be the

17:42 trojan horse with this dual heat pump and be able to create more opportunities for themselves to getting natural gas into homes as our city is hopefully about to pass some sort of an ordinance to actually reduce any new um hookups so i just wanted to thank the people who spoke up it's a terrible idea um the dual source and not really understanding why director lawson would be interested in those another thing i'd like to bring up i stopped by the rental owners association office the other day to ask them what they thought may be the best way to support electric heat pumps into rental properties we had an interesting conversation

18:28 i learned that eweb was formerly a member but had somehow that had slipped away in the last few years and they're no longer a member they were really disappointed with this and they felt that for the yearly 250 approximate membership eweb could be have the opportunity to be putting in monthly articles in their newsletter which goes out to landlords across lane county about the opportunities and benefits of electric heat pumps i would really like to put that on your radar and hopefully you will rejoin that and take that opportunity to really reach out to um all of the rental property owners thank you so much for the opportunity thank you very much next up we have dylan plummer followed

19:14 by phil barnhart you there dylan all right he had said he needed to slip out of the meeting so we'll come back to him uh so we will go to phil barnhart followed by madeleine cohen uh president sloshberg commissioners uh general matter lawson my name is phil barnhart i live in award three i've been a lifetime resident of eugene my children and grandchildren also live here and the children the grandchildren attend school in eugene i was a 18-year state representative and then among other things i served on the energy environment committee after hearing the last two speakers i

19:59 realized that what i want to say is fairly simplistic but it's really important to pay attention i think to the urgency with which we face uh the the the current problems the international uh uh the ipcc has said very recently that we have 10 years to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions by half and by 2050 we have to get to zero and and in order to avoid uh catastrophe um we have no chance at all of uh saving our civilization and maybe even our species uh with the relaxed response that i have

20:44 seen by public agencies up until now i've been watching the response to the governor's executive order on the climate emergency the city council had a plan 10 years ago which has not been implemented and and so and so it goes we're out of time but there are some basic principles that you can follow uh to uh be laser focused on your part to solve the climate problem number one e-web must work with the city to stop adding methane gas to our energy mix there is no time for half measures my recommendation tell the city council to prevent new methane gas hookups now

21:29 and tell the council that eweb will take up the slack and then do it yourselves there are lots of ways you know better than i do what they are uh in order to actually provide the basics that we need in order to continue serving our community number two tell the council that eweb in the city must quickly develop a plan to phase out existing methane gas use in the city and then gear up to get that done others will tell you how to do it and some of them already have but keep those two ideas in mind we don't have any time to wait if we get ahead of the curve we will be saving money and with gas prices going up that's really

22:15 important and getting the limited supply of electric appliances that will be that it will be available those that uh that want gas now for now for their new buildings may grumble a bit but they'll be thanking you later for avoiding the cold winters and the expensive retrofits that they otherwise will have to do that jim newell already referred to thank you very much that here's thank you yeah thank you um next up we have madeline cohen followed by danny noonan

23:00 hi there my name is madeline callan i'm a resident of ward 2 an eweb customer for many years [Applause] vice president brown and commissioners carlton mcrae and um borowski thank you for the opportunity to provide this testimony um again i kind of jumped around a little bit there but my name is madeline cowan and i'm also the grassroots organizer with cascadia violence who is part of the growing fossil free eugene coalition i'm testifying today to request that members of the e-web commission or and or the commission as a whole come out to correct the record record after frank lawson's misleading presentation to city council about the

23:45 utility stance on electrification and its ability to handle the associated load increases in fact i believe that the e-web commission should condemn general manager frank lawson's proposal to the city council in any proposal that would expand gas infrastructure in our city with dramatic wildfire and other extreme weather events hitting the news all the time it's become absolutely apparent that climate change is no longer an imminent threat but a current reality that communities and especially low-income and black indigenous people of color communities across oregon are experiencing it's also apparent that getting off fossil fuels is the number one way that we can mitigate this crisis homes and buildings consume nearly 43 of

24:32 all energy and organs and cause about one-third of the state's climate pollution this is the second largest source of climate pollution after the transportation lecture this comes from gas burns and furnaces water heaters stoves and dryers all in our homes repowering our buildings to run on clean high efficiency energy electric appliances instead is absolutely key to sending the worst impacts of climate change doing this work can also support jobs and communities everywhere including here in eugene in light of this and many other scientifically backed reasons for transition for transitioning off fossil fuels i would like to again urge the eweb commissioners to publicly condemn mr lawson's completely irresponsible

25:17 proposal to the city council this past monday which would connect more homes to fossil fuel gas infrastructure in what we strongly believe is a coordinated effort with northwest natural to avoid regulation and create clear policy to direct ub staff to support efforts for electrification to avoid situations like this in the future again um and dylan plummer uh the sierra club senior campaign representative also um who's working on building electrification in oregon in washington he asked me send me an email to um read into the record his request for the e-web commissioners to publicly announce their support for building electrification policies to trans and to

26:03 transition the city of eugene off of fracked gas thank you so much for your consideration and for all of your work on behalf of our community i really really appreciate it and i look forward to supporting eweb to lead the state on policy on policy to ensure address transition off of fossil fuels into 100 renewable electricity thank you so much thank you very much um last we have danny noonan and if dylan plummer is um able to come back to this call we can end with him but next danny noonan mr noonan has not joined the meeting president schwabsburg all right and is dylan plummer here no he has not joined either okay

26:49 um so i believe that is all of our speakers so the public testimony period for this meeting is now closed uh at this time commissioners are given the opportunity to comment if they choose so is there anybody you can raise your hand commissioners if there's anyone who would like to comment thank you president stottsburg john borowski um and thank you everybody for coming out and testifying today uh as somebody who stood on that side of the microphone several times uh not before this board very much but in front of the city council i know how uh

27:34 how difficult that can be sometimes to fit everything in three minutes um i guess my question would be to uh frank lawson uh the woman brought up the fact that we used to be a member of the renters coalition and that that might be a way for us to reach uh rental property owners uh i i would hope that we could look into that i mean if it is only 250 and that gives us an avenue to get into landlords to help get our word out there i think that that would be something that i would like to have looked into i know that's one of the things that i struggle with is trying to

28:21 to get efficiencies and electrification into uh rental units so if that's an opportunity that we can look into i would i would hope that we can pursue it commissioner borowski we will absolutely look into that i um i don't know if or why we dropped our membership but given the challenge with rentals and the the amount of rental stock in eugene i think it's a good opportunity to explore and i'll follow back up with the board before next meeting thanks sonia hi thanks again uh all for uh for testifying this evening uh real quickly mark uh in case you hadn't seen did ask

29:07 a question during the pre-meeting questions about covering the dump trucks and and progress there so it is something that you know i and others are certainly paying attention to want to make sure that that project is you know low impact as as much as it can be on the 40th uh and patterson uh residents and then to all of the others who have come in and testified especially around natural gas and the city of council meeting um i'm going to save most of my comments for the 20 minutes that we added because i think a lot of this is a process question and some of that information um that i want to share and talk about i think is better reserved for that space um so i hope that you i'm encouraging you all to stick around for that kind of next 20

29:52 minutes that we're saving um because i really do think that we'll get a good discussion out of that and how we interact with the city and where we want to go with these proposals it's certainly something i know many of us carry about so thank you uh matt go ahead thanks cindy matt mcrae um i just want to say thank you all for taking the time to come and provide testimony and i i guess i'll join sonia in saying that if you hadn't heard uh commissioner schlossberg had proposed that we add 20 minutes to the agenda immediately following this public input so we'll have a chance to talk a little bit more and debrief about that

30:37 i'm still um and board like this meeting there was a lot of content there and a lot of you know strong opinions and there's kind of a lot to unpack so thank you all for for weighing in and encouraging us to um you know to support the carbonization in this community and um look forward to the coming conversation uh i'm gonna go ahead first frank so this is commissioner schlossberg um yes and again thank you everybody for calling in um for public testimony i just wanted to address one small thing that i think jim knew maybe said or somebody said about um hoping that this wasn't the only work session that we had around this issue

31:23 and um one idea that's been thrown around in our um leadership meetings with the city of eugene is potentially having another more in-depth work session around um electrification perhaps later in the fall or maybe the winter and more of like a like on a saturday or something that could be a little bit longer and in person when we can be in person so um there's nothing that's been scheduled yet but we we did talk about it um so this hopefully i agree wasn't just a one-off thing um and general manager lawson you had your hand up yes thank you president schlossberg i i

32:08 would like to address before we get to the meeting i think the meeting um there's there's a lot of content to discuss there but but since the number of people in public testimony addressed the fact that the board should condemn me for my my irresponsible comments i i thought i would at least take the opportunity to address that i went out to a website this afternoon it's a it's a local website and they they actually went a little bit further they said that the board should fire general manager frank lawson for his clear collaboration with the fossil fuel industry and work to undermine the meaningful climate action in the city of eugene so i guess first of all i just want to be clear about something

32:53 i am working with and collaborating with other people in the industry i serve on committees with avista i serve on committees with puget sound energy and i have been collaborating and talking with northwest natural on several topics including renewable hydrogen dual fuel heat pump technology and the potential for carbon offset investments in our watershed but certainly not to undermine meaningful climate action um i have to work with a lot of different people on a lot of different levels and so and all of this has been consistent with past direction and policy so i just want to be clear and open that yes i have

33:38 been working and talking with northwest natural just just to be clear about that i also just want to be clear that we have never not supported electrification in fact if you look at eweb we have over 50 different energy efficiency conservation and electrification programs everything from electric vehicle charging incentives to things related to the watershed rental projects and all kinds of different you know heat pump hot water heater incentives you know there's there's just so many programs that we do um that i think we have shown through

34:23 our actions that that we support it um and so i just wanted to be clear about that and and my proposal to the city and all i'll take ownership of my contribution to the unproductiveness of the meeting my proposal to the city council and to e-web commissioners for that matter was it was a proposal to potentially develop a proposal if there was interest in it i've been exploring dual fuel technology for a number of for quite a while because it helps us address some of the issues associated with electrification i'm not an advocate for it necessarily i'm not an opponent of it to me it was

35:08 an option and i didn't propose that it was to be done i didn't advocate for it to be done i simply said it's worth exploring and so um you know just just with that context it's it's interesting the response that i have gotten and that the commissioners have gotten around that one thing that we do have in our values it's the very first one and it says we value the physical and psychological safety of our employees and the public and when we actually surveyed employees as to what psychological safety meant it meant the ability to offer up alternative perspectives or even opposing views without reprisal or retaliation

35:53 and i find it really interesting i'm i'm used to being grilled on subjects in fact almost everywhere i go i get grilled on a subject i think i kind of get used to it but to me what does it say to our employees and to other members of the public when by simply offering up not endorsing just offering up an alternative for evaluation that the general manager gets chastised or to use their word condemned by certain members of the public especially in a community that boasts about its diversity and inclusion and i i just find that kind of pretty pretty ironic i am absolutely not a climate denier i believe we have a

36:38 real and urgent problem in front of us and it's going to take some creative collaboration and innovation for us to make progress on this but we also have to be willing to explore options and ideas because if we do it wrong we're going to take two steps forward and one step back and that to me is the scary part we can actually if we do this right we can make progress that's sustainable and not do something that we then have to take back later and so i just wanted to explain to people since they commented on it and i i really do appreciate i listen to it i hear it i genuinely care about what people think and the direction that this city is

37:23 going but since that was addressed to me i thought i would address it the rest of my comments will be around the meeting and how we can do that better in the future and i'll own my part to the to the meeting certainly for teeing up such an interesting topic for discussion um but i just wanted to respond since i saw that formerly out there that people were calling for my condemnation and for my firing based on the fact that i proposed an idea so thank you president schlossberg i appreciate the opportunity to comment thank you well that is a nice segue into our next um discussion so we'll put 20 minutes on the clock to kind of debrief about that

38:08 work session um i'm just gonna go first if that's okay with everybody and i just i just want to say that um these these zoom meetings are really difficult i just want to acknowledge that and to have a work session with two different entities on a on a remote meeting is especially difficult and um i know we're going to have a lot to talk about but i just think that that kind of lays the foundation um for the um dissatisfaction that some people had felt with with that meeting um it's it's really hard i mean even in our regular meetings when we're each given you know two or three minutes to

38:54 say our piece it's not really a dialogue and so um i found the work session to be particularly difficult because it's just like we're talking to the camera and it wasn't in the spirit of like collaborating and asking and answering questions so if we have any more of these remote work sessions perhaps we can figure out a way to do it differently but um that was that was like kind of my base frustration with that meeting but i know that other people have things that they want to say and delve into topics so i'll leave my part at that right now and um i'm wondering if there's anybody i'm seeing sony's hand going up so sonia

39:43 thank you so much and and frank i really appreciate you know the comments that you had there and you know my intention and any of this i understand and fully trust where you've been coming from um you know it's it's really hard when we're looking at um information for the first time generally in our e-web meetings that is the the cadence that we have staff presents options we get to vet them as uweb commissioners we get to think about the ideas we we say you know positives negatives pros and cons and then we pick solutions and we move forward with that and that's an open and proactive and respectful environment and and i feel like there's a different expectation at the city level and i think you know moving forward we have to have these

40:29 conversations we just need to figure out how to do it with them better because i mean we have policies in place i know that staff and all of us care very deeply about moving forward on carbon medication and how we do that to support this what i would recommend i have kind of a list of responses here quickly or learned lessons in doing this better i think one we absolutely have to figure out ahead of time we have to have our own proposal to put forth for them and say this is what we would really like the city to do um and not just a list of options that we can work with but this is what we need from you from an e-web perspective to and in order to make that work we think that the city needs to do x y and z and that's how we present it and then

41:14 we have a conversation maybe about that proposal instead of more vague options because we didn't see all those options and that that i think was confusing and it's such a quick meeting they have such limited time we get to delve really deep into energy and water topics and they just they have to do everything from homelessness to you know to to carbon policy i mean they just don't have the bandwidth to do that so we need to be very clear and concise and we need to do the front end worked up up front to figure out how to make that happen um you know knowing the time frame up front that that was one that we didn't i i thought we were going until 7 30 and then the meeting just stopped so we didn't get to follow up on that you know we have we typically have three minutes whereas they have two minutes

42:00 it's a very different cadence so you know lesson learned there we ask questions in different ways um i also think it would just be very very helpful if in the future when we do these sorts of meetings staff give the presentation to us we do kind of a debrief on what that looks like we select the policy and and just to to get on that same page really ahead of time with what all of the parameters are that we're looking for we get such limited time with them um that we really got to make it count so i think that's on us um to really do that work ahead of time in the future i'm not gonna no i don't think any of us are gonna forget um that in the future but um i really do appreciate the the conversation finally i'd like to bring up

42:45 um well okay in the next round if if if there is the next round i'd like to have one more comment about sd uh sd15 and potentially amending it okay great thanks um would like to go next or who has anything to add thank you president schlossberg so um first first of all i i do want to acknowledge that um we have a really good relationship with city manager sarah maderi and staff the meeting was very awkward at best it might have been considered unproductive

43:32 i think at worst it was probably very frustrating for a number of the participants but i wanted to acknowledge that that sarah and her staff and e-web staff work on all kinds of things together all the time in a very productive way and supportive way so i want to be really clear that that doesn't get lost in this i also in in the in the vein of continuous improvement and looking at things um there's an opportunity to improve and and i you know as as critical as i might want to be about the meeting i also need to own up to my contribution to that um first of all i teed up a subject into an environment that um and and you know

44:18 commissioner um carlson called it the cadence it's i would classify maybe the culture of the atmosphere or the environment which is much different than what we are used to we are used to exploring ideas you know there's a proposal there's a discussion there's a direction um and um i i made the tactical mistake of doing that into an environment that was not used to that and and i have to own up to that so um and therefore you know being able to make a proposal into that environment um you know in hindsight not surprisingly it it uh created some division within the meeting it brought out positions

45:03 um and other things so i i really need to take uh some personal accountability for that and and i do and and we'll we'll learn from that um i i also you know think that um as we go forward um i do think that it would be better for the board to present the board's position um i sometimes feel a little bit like in those settings that i'm i'm coming from a different perspective um than than commissioners or the board um at larger in aggregate in total um it is one of the differences that i have from the board um each board member can communicate or opine uh pretty

45:49 freely on different subjects um i'm i have to when i present things or or um talk about things can't you know adjust my story i have to provide the full answer to everybody i might be talking with um and it has to be the aggregate view per se or what i've been been authorized to do so it's a little bit different um and so um you know i i just think there's a lot of opportunities to improve um i think that that [Music] commissioner carlson was onto something really really important which is i think it's important for us to align before we try to align with somebody

46:34 else and the other thing i would like to reiterate is the city is making some really important decisions that do impact us and we probably make decisions that impact them and there really would like to encourage the both council leadership and and eweb board leadership to develop some kind of method of which we can provide formal and vetted responses to each in in between entities um i think that that would be there's there's in some of these subjects they're so complex that that you hearsay drives the answer and and really we need to develop more formal and and uh vetted responses to some of these issues than then oh this person

47:20 feels this way or frank said that or you know someone else said this um i think there's got to be a way to clean that up and so offering up some suggestions but i i will own my part about teeing up something that in the into the wrong environment at the wrong time and um thus you you heard some of the feedback that that came from that so i'll alone on i'll own that thank you frank um john brown thank you um i probably have a different perspective than some but that's okay it's uh it's my perspective i saw nothing wrong with what uh commissioner general manager lawson did at the city council meeting um he had an idea he

48:06 asked he just said what if i come back in six weeks and give you a proposal to maybe do a study it wasn't saying we're going to do a study we're not going to do this if we're to the point that we can't ask questions and look at different perspectives and what you know we get a bunch better bang for the buck in electrifying the transportation sector i haven't heard one word about that and and why not and and if all of a sudden the transportation sector comes to us and say we have a new dual fuel um car that can get five times the mileage are we gonna say no can't consider it because it's something else introduced that we you know i i think we have to be able to to at least have the discussion and not be afraid of that discussion and not be pushed around and said you know we can't

48:52 at least talk because that's not the way we do this at least in my opinion and uh you know jim neu has always been very respectful and i really have a lot of respect for him uh and his viewpoints and things and he talked about you know doing this more quarterly this is the first meeting we've had with councilman over three years we have not had a joint meeting with council since then we've had the quarterly meetings that leadership does but the part it's sitting around the table i think the last time i did it was three years ago and that's a long time uh we used to go to them quarterly we used uh the board president used to always go to the podium and say this is where we are this is what we're doing uh to the council meetings and then the sometimes the speaker list got 30 long and nobody wanted to spend three hours there waiting for two minutes and uh that stopped but uh yeah to have that dialogue with council especially

49:37 again you know it's uh in my opinion we need to stop fighting and start you know working together because right now i saw a huge divide there and that's not the way we're going to get this accomplished we all get climate change we all get decarbonization and everything else it's just that we you know we've got to stop this uh this visceral communication in my opinion so we're moving forward and i'm looking forward to others opinions thank you matt go ahead thanks mindy uh i have a number of thoughts uh thanks for your comments frank um i appreciate you you know addressing the

50:22 the comments from the um the public testimony that we had um i want to also say that i'm super grateful for the uh the discussion that we have at this board um you know even in public in front of everybody we have you know sometimes messy uncomfortable conversations and i think that's really healthy and um and hard at the same time and i'm super grateful to be on a board that can have this kind of conversation um i agree with mindy about the challenges of the zoom the zoom environment both for public testimony but also for our conversations it's not ideal and i look forward to in public meetings or impressive meetings when we can resume that i also even with in-person meetings meeting

51:07 with that many elected officials who all want to you know make a statement or ask a few questions it's just there's just 90 minutes can't possibly be enough for us to really kind of chew on anything in a meaningful way and so um i i think mindy had proposed you know maybe we take a different way to organize ourselves in in future conversations i think that's a great idea i also just uh appreciate sonya's comments um across the board sonia i feel like um you're right on thank you for your comments i'm not going to repeat them but i think you're right on um i think part of the issue and probably the reason that it's so heated is that we're so late in turning the ship we've been so addicted to fossil fuels for so long and there's been so little um

51:52 real transformational theft and it's at such a late stage that i think the anxiety and the urgency just leads over into conversation that and it's really hard to um it's really hard to have um frank conversations that are productive because it there we just had we just didn't we needed to turn 30 years ago and we haven't and so um the ability to make you know small shifts in course corrections uh it's just really it's a late hour and that that can be really hard for people to swallow so i think that's part of kind of what what gets interjected into a conversation like we had last week i would agree that i think it's if frank said it i think it's a great idea that we all

52:37 get on uh on the same page before we go to another policy group whether the city or you know anybody else so i appreciate that intent uh two last things um we do have a climate policy for those who haven't seen it i think it's tate worth taking a look at um our climate policy number 15. uh as frank pointed out we have incentives for evs we incentivize electrification of buildings uh we've incentivized efficiency and conservation um so we are taking steps i think that it could be valuable for us to clarify our intent about that those policy statements with clear and measurable goals i think that would make it easier for everybody to see where this utility

53:23 is wanting to go and lastly just as a point of clarification and this is you know frank this is uh just clarification with you i know we you and i have talked a number of times about a whole host of things and i appreciate the candid conversations that we have and um i the the conversation about my my proposal was go to the board which was um you know about providing the increasingly renewable gas into the gas pipeline so you know you and i are thinking the same way there in that if we could get renewable gas into the pipeline it would decarbonize our economy however that proposal was put together put forward a few years ago and i had high hopes that northwest natural would step up the plate and show us that that's

54:09 where they want to go but i just don't see any indication that they're prepared to turn as quickly as is now necessary and so for me it feels risky for us to continue to um to you know make assumption or hope that they're gonna you know provide a renewable gas pipeline i that would be amazing and i i if there's a way for that to happen great but i don't know that i personally don't feel like i can put my eggs in that basket any longer anyway thanks very much for the time for this conversation and mindy thanks for proposing the time to debrief here thank you um i'm just going to kind of give my input

54:54 on dealing with the eugene city council uh i've been on several boards and commissions that uh reported to the city council advisory boards i was on the budget committee for eight years and i was on the planning commission for eight years um and i think that that might be a template to kind of work for in upcoming meetings if if the city council had come to us and said give us your views on electrification and how e-web can can help us get along with our climate action goals using electrification and that was the basis for that work session i think that we could have done that we could have done that as commissioners and we could have done that as staff

55:39 but like some of the other commissioners have said if you go in there and you've got 13 elected officials all trying to make a point it doesn't work so going forward i think we can be used as a very responsible and valuable advisory committee to the city in in certain areas and it can go about both ways we can do the same to them we can ask them and their staff to give us guidance and help in achieving some of the goals that we have things like getting rentals to be more efficient are there ways that we can do that with billing permits and we can go to them and say what can

56:24 we do to help achieve our goals and then have that as the the topic of the work session um i think that might be a way to move forward if we're going forward with other work sessions rather than just putting out a bunch of of information and then have everybody weigh in on it i think if we go go forward with a a specific goal for a work session i think that that would be something that would be advantageous um and then lastly i'm just going to let people know i'm gonna turn my camera off because my wife just made me dinner and i don't want to be on camera chewing in front of everybody so i will be listening and and contributing but for the next five or ten minutes i'm gonna have some dinner

57:13 i hope it's delicious um i know that sonia had said that she has a had a proposal is it okay if we just give her frank did you want to say something before sonia we turn it over to sonia i think i will say it after sonia i based on i think i know what she's gonna s part of what she might say so i'll go after okay go ahead sonia okay thanks i i've been uh pinging frank all day long to get on questions so uh sd15 uh just like matt said earlier i've been curious about actually putting quantifiable goals into sd15 um earlier i asked frank if about that policy to make sure i had the most up-to-date one and it doesn't

57:58 appear to have those uh goals you know reduction of you know uh 50 by uh 20 30 50 compared to night 2009 levels below uh by 2030. that that kind of statement apparently uh frank let me know that there was uh that there was a resolution that uh eweb adopted back in 2011 that had some of those uh those kind of characteristics i wanted to find out if tonight if we could get head nods from at least you know a few other commissioners to ask staff about actually putting those quantifiable goals into sd15 just so we can just reaffirm it we have that's the one that we always refer to as our climate policy and i think it would just

58:43 be really helpful to combine those together unless there are thoughts that frank has had since then that would make it so that we can't do that but are there head nods are there is there interest in even doing that okay i see a couple others and looks like john has a question i do um are we going to try and measure the uh triple bottom line analysis on this and the equity uh analysis by putting you know hard numbers to this uh to say what does this do to the affordability what does it do to the equitability and all those things before we do this because if we do this i mean i this is kind of on a whim we

59:29 talk about bringing you know our earlier conversation talked about you know frank was chastised or bringing something to the board or to to a group and not having any prior discussion or anything else and i unless i'm missing something that's exactly what we're doing right now and i'm i'm not understanding this and what am i missing sonia because hello one i mean this was a resolution that already passed in 2011. we're just reaffirming it in our most up-to-date policy frank already reported to me that this is something that they report to us in december of every year anyway but what it does is it puts it into one place now frank you can correct me if i'm wrong on that but that was my understanding from earlier so this is not intended in any way to be a chastisement it's it's meant to be

1:00:16 uh more of a reaffirmation to us that this is this is what we're about and also to people who are attending tonight that this is the policy that we work with and what staff have been reporting on so it's very easy for them to see what we are about and what we do so that's the intent of it there's no chastisement here this is so i'll elaborate a little bit sonia there's there's no you didn't make any misstatements there at all the um the climate change policy that we have which people refer to as sd15 contains five different elements one of those elements has to do with um decarbonizing our own operations

1:01:04 that's the particular piece and only that piece is the one that has actual numbers that started back in 2011 where we are to reduce um in fact i think the number was 25 by 2020 which which we achieved and i think we're actually at 50 percent that has to do with only one element of sd15 which was our own operations i'll actually talk a little bit more about sd15 and the process there's a couple of ways that the board can do this one of the ways would be to direct staff to come back with various things that you feel are are missing or or look for opportunities in sd15

1:01:50 it's a little bit awkward for staff to do that on a board policy because this is this is your policy as a board and we might it might be better to actually have a facilitated discussion um at a future board meeting specifically around sd-15 and where the board would see opportunities it's a little bit different than some of the other things we do where we bring you two or three options and there's some discussion this is actually a board policy i can see where there's some need for clarification and i'll just use one example because it's very relevant in my mind at the moment and that's that when we talk about helping our community decarbonize we use the expression smart electrification smart electrification

1:02:35 has no defined meaning so part of what even our studies the last couple of years have tried to accomplish is to define what do we mean by smart electrification there are some people including board members which i have a great deal of respect for believe that all electrification is is now smart electrification and that's that's okay um i'm i think this is a board policy that if some specific and i think uh commissioner mcrae said uh the reasoning spoke of the reasoning behind what we're shooting for and why and you know what what's our target out there um i i'm okay with that i i think that's that's fine

1:03:21 um what we will do if we want to turn it into measurements is that we'll have to be pretty precise around you know versus you know what is you know how are we going to do the carbon accounting how are we going you know what baseline are we going to use does this include just eweb operations or eweb electricity supplied or is it is it more than that um or is it community-based is it regional based i mean there's a lot of questions that come along with that but i think there is an opportunity to board for the board to look at sd15 um and call and i just actually decided um to add something to the annual calendar and that's that we feel like on an annual basis the

1:04:06 board should have the opportunity to review all board policies not that any time in between you couldn't do anything specific i think that's okay too but at least once a year and we pick december because it's usually um deborah hart's asking for money and that's about it we can you know we should be able to review on an annual basis all of the policies that are board policies and look for opportunities to improve it we could either do it then or if the board wants to allocate time in november you could do it that there's a number of different different mechanisms but i think commissioner carlson i i think i explained that there is this 2011 but it's only one element of the of the um climate change policy

1:04:57 all right any comments i think what i heard is a proposal by sonia to um delve deeper into sd15 and add some measurable goals or some metrics to it and then um i heard uh kind of a counter proposal maybe from john brown that we need to look not just at carbon targets but also the equity issue and to figure out like i guess basically to take a deeper dive into uh sd15 and did i hear that correctly yeah and i did i'd like apologize for maybe i was misunderstood because i if we're going to go in and just go back and reinstate what we had in 2011 about our operations and those those metrics

1:05:42 that's that's not that's a no-brainer for me to put that back in there i i misunderstood you sonia i thought that you said that we were going to try and because i know there's some effort to try and say okay we're going to have no carbon in our entire electric portfolio and i want you know we can we can talk about that but i want to talk about the economics of it and and the equitability portion of it too so i'm totally open to go back into sd15 i'm totally open to go back to the 2011 metrics on operations so no problem there with me uh president schlossberg what what i think i've heard is a designer and i think i saw three head nods to what i would call open up sd15 for for more discussion

1:06:28 um with with the board um you know where where i see a lot of carbon policy going actually is to establish targets but also have some some off-ramps or adjustability to it you see that in a lot of the carbon legislation for example recently the the cap and trade in washington state and others where there's here's this goal but there's also some consideration for reliability and affordability in that and so it should be an interesting discussion but what i think i've got the conclusion that i can draw is the board would like to open that up and um i guess i would ask the board is is december too late or should we

1:07:13 try to rearrange some things to get that into november that yes that would that would be the question i would have do we have any open work session times or are they all filled already i believe they're filled we only have one right now in october i don't know that we have one in november with with thanksgiving it's a little more of a challenge but um and it could be that this takes a couple of different sessions quite honestly given the complexity of this particular one and um i'll if you want i can work with and call and some others to look at what the schedule could permit um maybe

1:07:59 there's at least an open opening in november and then further discussion if needed for some periods of time after that all right really quickly some last thought sonia just real quick i i will warn all of you who have not been through this before november and december's board packets are already like four or 500 pages because of the budget um if we add it in that time frame i don't know that we will have we will be able to give it the do bandwidth that it will deserve um i know that i'm bringing it up and i and i i would like to get it on the agenda obviously we want this to be sooner rather than later because it's you know something that we have at the tip of our

1:08:44 minds but i would rather give it the the amount of thought that it needs and also get that reporting that they typically do in december around it and propose that you know january's meeting is usually uh very quick um in in many respects i don't know if that's exactly the best time because we typically have a turnover there but it's usually a much smaller meeting maybe you know something in that time frame i'll leave i'll leave it up to the people who set the agenda i mean for me you know i'm fine when you can make it work but i do want to make sure that we have the bandwidth and in memory to be able to do it well and and i would agree with that commissioner carlson i i also sense i also have a sense of urgency from my

1:09:30 perspective because we are doing a lot of work and we the same group that i would like to get moved off of the electrification piece onto integrated resource planning um some of those kinds of policies provide input and direction to things like that so um i i have a bit of a sense of urgency around this as well i hate to you know sort of speed up the board because i do know that there's kind of hundreds of pages but maybe this is a overs not one discussion it's probably several discussions john brown i'm open to extra meetings uh you know i've heard and matt reiterated it better that this

1:10:15 this can been kicked down the road too long and if this is that is this is very important we need to talk about it let's talk about it that's our job and that's why we signed up for this and so we have to have extra meetings as much as they're challenging for us and for staff let's do it because we can't be wrong on this we got to get this right we got to do it right so i i agree you know um but we have to have more meetings let's have more meetings and if that's you know mindy and i will you know i think we will look at the calendar and see if we can't do it all right matt or john barofsky do you have any last thoughts before we move off this topic yeah i i just uh i'll go quickly um

1:11:02 i'm definitely on board with this but i also want it to be well thought out you know i don't want to just throw goals out there and numbers out there because i've seen that happen i've seen that happen at the city of eugene where they threw numbers out and then two years later they came back and said oh those numbers aren't good enough we need to change those numbers i like the idea of being able to show progress towards decarbonization in our community but being tied to specific numbers that we have to abide by like like the city has in their ordinances i think sometimes can hamstring us so i want it to be well thought out and so the urgency

1:11:48 yes i believe in urgency but i also want staff to have enough time to put together a well thought out presentation and give us some things to actually chew on and and have a well-reasoned policy going forward all right matt yeah thanks mindy uh just briefly again super uh appreciative of this group and the ability to just um wrestle conversations thank you all um in terms of time frame i'm open to additional meetings too if that feels like a productive way for us to move the ball down the field and um increments you know a little bit during each of the next few minutes our few meetings seems appropriate uh trust frank and and and

1:12:33 mindy and john for you all to find a schedule that uh that works for us and i appreciate the urgency that everybody has you know generally to try and make sure we can get something on the books soon thank you all right well thank you everybody that was way more than 20 minutes but i really appreciate actually the conversation and the back and forth and i think that this was really productive and helpful and um i think that um we're really lucky that we have a good working relationship that we can talk through these issues and um even though we have differences of opinions that we can figure out a way to move forward so we'll look at getting something scheduled so that we can um take a deeper dive into sd15

1:13:19 and um thank you everybody for that great discussion but now we can shake it off and move back into regular business um and we are moving on to board action items so approval of consent calendar a move to approve it great um all those in favor say aye aye all right consent caller to a is approved next we're going to move on to approval of consent calendar b move to approve second all right all those questions oh yeah go

1:14:05 ahead um is that the one that includes the um investment policy i think it is right yeah did you did you have a question about that um it's just uh an observation um the edits that are proposed in that are fine i don't have any question with those uh but it does feel like there's potentially a possibility there for us to clarify uh investment policies of the utility that are consistent with our climate goal um so just flagging that is something we may want to come back to within the next year to provide targets or clarification there as well but otherwise i uh agree second to approve consent calendar

1:14:54 great great point matt all right all those in favor of consent calendar be say aye hi all right great okay um we can move on to general business items if everyone's okay we're a little bit behind and when our break is going to happen but i think we can maybe maybe we'll catch up or power through but um agenda item number seven which is 2022 draft electric and water budgets and long-term financial plans update with deborah hart and adam rue good evening and thank you commissioners i am deborah hart the chief financial officer adam ruda fiscal services supervisor is

1:15:40 here with me this evening and also available and on the line for questions are senior financial analysts alicia voorhees and ben sachdeva slide tonight we are here to review the um draft budgets and updates to the long-term financial plan and also to hear feedback from the board our presentation is is short and is really concentrated on the changes since the last time we shared this information with you after we review um those budgets will be and financial plans will be looking to you for direction so with that i'm going to pass it off to

1:16:26 adam to go ahead and jump right in thanks debra um i'll walk through a few slides related to the 2022 budget and financial plans for the water and electric utilities so this slide is a high level overview and the more detailed budget will be presented next month with the board material uh you can see the largest portion of the combined water electric utility budget is the purchase power cost for the electric utility the increase year-over-year is shown in the box to the right um it's roughly 20 million dollars due to a number of factors that higher volumes budgeted for trade activities which is an effort to better align the budget and actual

1:17:11 trade volumes higher prices in wholesale market uh wholesale power markets last year's budget was roughly 29 a megawatt hour this year's budget is around 51 megawatt hour and also higher volatility has been talked about recently is another factor so these prices are applied to all index based base trade activities and open positions which impact both purchase power and wholesale revenue so wholesale revenue increased by uh roughly 28 million dollars in the year over year budget so the purchase power increase is offset and since we're structurally long the wholesale revenues they're changed than the purchase power so the next largest segment of the combined budget

1:17:58 is the other electric o m increase year every year there's a number of factors contributing to contributing to that higher technology upgrades for major systems such as the erp system and other upgrades and technology costs as well as some different division changes the energy division increased uh cost related to transmission wheeling hydro generation facilities for things such as sinkhole investigation other resource management of resources including construction agreements for wind and other generating facilities as well as some resource adequacy efforts in the region some electric

1:18:43 division changes year every year are items such as wildfire legal costs and consulting for wildfire mitigation resiliency efforts and some increased vegetation management as well as some pc related costs and there's also changes in our insurance costs as well as a return of some of the um training costs that were reduced in the pandemic shutdown uh the other couple our bars on this chart include higher capital costs for both uh water and electric utilities which are as were presented in july when you review the capital plans uh the water on water utilities o m increased year over year uh largely due

1:19:28 to changes are the investments in the watershed protection uh that the board has reviewed earlier this year so with that we'll jump into the two utilities financial plans do you want to go to the next slide please so the financial plans were last presented in july since that time we have completed the preliminary budgets and those have been incorporated as a new base year end of the plan using these draft 2022 budgets so after five consecutive years and six of the last seven years with no overall rate increases for the uh electric utility we do show um increases in the revenue repair requirement next year and into the future um during the time we're able to hold

1:20:14 rates constant uh over the last five years we had cpi increases over 11 percent uh those cost increases were able to be absorbed through a combination of strategic use of reserves debt restructuring and cost savings measures and as you can see in this uh slide uh we're much closer to board targets in terms of uh cash reserves and debt service coverage so therefore some of the options to mitigate future increases are limited uh relative to where we've been in the past uh since july we've incorporated updated bpa rates for the current rate period um or for the upcoming rate period other power market factors were updated which as mentioned earlier impact both

1:21:00 purchase power and wholesale revenue we corrected a revenue assumption related to the hydro forecast we've updated that 2021 projected year-end performance and associated cash levels that flow into these metrics as well as draft 2022 budget and revenue forecasts and we refined assumptions around funding the capital plans related to um deaths issuance of debt and reserves and rate funded for capital so as you can see all the metrics are above target throughout the plan the highlighted uh yellow reflects when we approach 10 of the board target and uh the rate trajectory is presented

1:21:45 in um july is within that uh cpi threshold we were using of the 23 to 33 over the 10-year period that the next one is the next size the water utility so the water utility has also not increased rates in the most recent five years but is projecting increases in the revenue requirement for 2022 and subsequent years to fund significant investments in infrastructure we've updated the assumptions for the water utility in a manner similar to the electric utility using drop 2022 budgets as a base year and escalating

1:22:30 beyond that water utility metrics are also above target you can see the front loading of the rate increases ahead of the large debt issuance allows for the lowest rate trajectory we're able to come up with through the 10-year period even with the increases in the revenue requirement though you'll see that water utility is highly leveraged as we fund the second treatment plan we'll be discussing that project later in the meeting but the current plan includes the most recent projections for that facility one change that has been incorporated based on some board feedback from july was the related to the 2022 increase this increase um at the current level of four percent is

1:23:16 required to fund um normal capital expenditure even without the second treatment plan so we push those incremental uh increases for the second treatment plant into 2022 and 20 or 2023 and 2024 and we without the second source treatment plant the rate trajectory is uh generally within the cpi guidance and would be expected to maintain our current group within the comparator which is the second lowest among our comparative comparable utilities we projected out applying cpi to the other utilities and then this higher rate trajectory per second source and that showed us moving from the second lowest to the third lowest among our comparators so although the rate

1:24:02 trajectory is a height and percentage turn terms it left us still within that bottom quartile of our comparative groups so we do continue to balance you know affordability with the needed infrastructure investments into the future so that the next slide is next steps and so we have the public hearing and and we'll incorporate feedback from the board and to many comments this evening or continue to develop our cost of service analysis and with that bring back draft budget and price proposals in november and december

1:24:53 okay um so are there any yes sonia there are some questions um president schlossberg could i just interrupt that i think the normal protocol that we've used here is to go through the presentation then have a public hearing and then the board gets to do all kinds of to have discussion after public hearing i think that's what we've traditionally done on this it doesn't have to be that way but that's been what we've typically done in the past that way board the board can hear public testimony before they have their questions and comments got it okay so we will do that um so we will

1:25:39 go on to agenda item number eight which is public hearing on the 2022 budget assumptions and long-term financial plans and i think that we only have one speaker who's signed up and that's mark rabinowitz are you here still mark hello can you hear me yeah we can hear you so you're you've got a great mix on the clock go ahead okay um i'm going to throw a bit of a wild card in this uh about 32 years ago i took a course in how to use solar electricity

1:26:24 and the first lesson of the course was to use solar effectively one has to use less electricity and to figure out ways to not use electricity the reason for mentioning this is you're considering a lot about electrification which will supposedly solve the climate problems and pollution and so forth yet most people don't want to think about well where does electricity come from and in oregon according to the energy information administration of the us department of energy most of the increase in oregon over the past decade has been from natural gas so we are burning natural gas in boardman and klamath falls then sending

1:27:10 the electrons over the cascades which is not my view of how to reduce energy consumption um your commit commissioner matt mcrae mentioned that it's a bit late to deal with climate we should have done this 30 years ago which is an understatement in 1990 the un environmental program warned the 1990s were the decade of decision on the environment i guess we decided so for your long-term plan it'd be nice to think about how to use less energy not more less electricity not more and that we're not addicted to fossil fuels and minerals we're totally dependent on them they're more concentrated than anything else they run airplanes freight trains food

1:27:55 delivery trucks forest fire fightings vaccine and computer chip manufacturing and we're in the feedback loop stage now with deforestation and desertification cutting the ability to even have hydropower like oroville dam in california so it'd be nice to talk about limits to growth while making future projections that energy and the economy can grow forever on a round finite planet otherwise that's a form of denial that's even more popular than denying we're changing the climate by paving everything and cutting down the forests and putting fossil fuel byproducts into the atmosphere

1:28:41 so i'm sure some of you privately understand that but would be really nice to have a public discussion about what the ecologists call overshoot that we have gone past our carrying capacity and as fossil fuels deplete it's all downhill finally it's worth noting also according to energy information administration that covet closures did more much more to reduce consumption than any climate policy ever did thanks for your time thank you very much okay so that was our only speaker so the public hearing part is closed

1:29:26 and we move on to um the discussion about the electric and water budgets and the long-term financial plans so sonya hi i was just curious about what factors you used to account for inflation in the coming year um just due to lots of supply chain challenges it seems like that number is increasing did you use a typical kind of inflationary factor to apply or was it something that was more targeted at the situation that's that we may be facing in the coming year due to continued supply chain challenges

1:30:13 so we used a combination of factors we typically project out a lot of the purchase power costs is separate than any of inflationary adjustments so we look at individual power contracts or wholesale markets for that uh capital costs incorporate some element of contingency planning which presumably incorporates impacts of um inflation escalation and then we do we have a more detailed labor cost escalation incorporating uh individual costs for benefits and stuff but for the kind of non-labor o m costs we did apply the um uh typical two percent non-labor cpi escalation uh that we've used and we

1:30:58 looked at um sensitivities around the potential impacts of higher levels of inflation and strategies to mitigate against that how much legal room do we have there i mean if we see higher levels of of costs i mean how when do we start getting into trouble with like with our you know debt service coverage ratio and how much wiggle room do we have from what you've from what's proposed to kind of where the model could take us um so we the way that we um looked at it was the impact of higher levels of cpi impacting the non-labor o m and let me and then looked at different factors

1:31:44 that we have built in conservative conservatism into the plan and just kind of how we could balance those um those different factors to meet the challenges so i think it would be um as kind of we went through the changes year over year and some of the incremental increase that we did to the extent possible incorporate changes unknown changes going forward i'm in cost that we're going up so those have been incorporated but for the kind of unknown costs um we looked at how we would balance that with our conservative budget assumptions given that okay if they're you know over the next couple of months as we go through this

1:32:29 process if there's any indication that you know it would be better to even budget a little higher just understanding that we're in a very very in a a varied state here of not kind of knowing we have to over plan a little bit i would be supportive of of kind of having a bit more in the plan obviously we don't want to spend that much but just knowing that there's a lot more variance there right now with markets thank you appreciate the all the work that goes into this i know you guys do a great job ahead frank yeah i just i would just like to add commissioner carlson so our rates are developed from our budget and so if for some reason projections um

1:33:17 start to go above or low below budget there's a couple of mechanisms we we can adjust the activity we do or at some point we can come back for a budget amendment to the board if we over budget then we're creating uh higher rates than necessary and if we under budget we're coming back to the board too often which um nobody at least at the staff level likes to do um and so we do have activities that we can adjust especially on the capital side we have um a quite a large percentage where we can adjust schedules and then on a number of cases we do have contingencies and flexibility built in so we've got headroom both in activity and in dollars

1:34:06 great thank you imagining we have our own form of the eweb kicker which would be terrible um okay john brown i saw your hand up thank you and uh i agree with commissioner carlson about um being aaron on the side of maybe inflation going a little and adam correct me if i'm wrong but i think what you said if inflation doesn't meet the two percent that you projected it could be a five percent rate impact uh if if we experience five percent inflation over the next two years i think that's stated on page four um yeah i was looking for that number thank you yeah and and that's that's one little area of concern and other things that are more short-term that are within this projection i i was reading that daddy wilson general manager of lane electric

1:34:52 um reaching out to governor brown about the spill lawsuit on the snake river dams and she's alleging that that could be up to a five percent i think they're going to win and uh that's going to be a five percent monoville rate spike um and that would be more immediate than not and so that coupled with the fact that i i'm pretty sure that we're going to have liberg in here as an expense sometime that in within this projection period um i would just hope that we could go um conservative i remind other commissioners that we used to budget 90 water we would um we would assume there was only a 90 flow for that for the low water years because of generation we don't do that anymore um we got away from that and i know we used

1:35:37 to have pretty robust conversations about the merits of of dropping back in in the budgeting process so i would like to to err on the side and not to air at all but i'd like to be a little conservative here um if i could thank you president schlossberg is okay if i jump in so i just want to be clear uh commissioner brown when you say error on the side of being conservative that means raising rates more than we've projected um just just just when you if if you want us to build numbers in that that's that's what conservative means to us what i will say is that bond there is some risk with bonneville and the federal lawsuit which would

1:36:22 require bonneville to spill more water over the dams thus lowering the amount of generation that comes from those facilities and and depending on your utility that could be five to ten percent of your power cost now remember that you know the the rate impact is slightly different than that but that that is a risk we acknowledge that risk we just don't know the timing on that as well it is it is a lawsuit and sometimes those go quickly and sometimes they take forever so we can we can learn a little bit more about that for the next meeting and bring you back some feedback that'd be fine thank you go ahead debra thank you um commissioner brown i did

1:37:07 just want to chime in that we did move to a contribution margin risk tolerance that represented um both loss of load price fall or or um uh lower hydro conditions and so we do still recognize the uh potential for a lower hydro and that's adding about eight million dollars of cushion to the electric body budget each year and we did maintain for the electric utility uh a continued um expectation that we would still see some lower usage due to covid so there are a couple of pockets of um

1:37:53 fairly significant dollars of conservatism that are built in for the upcoming year thank you thank you uh so i have a couple questions one goes to the inflationary pressures that on my thing is on page 73 of our board packet [Music] so it said that if uh exp if inflation was at five percent in non-labor o m is are you saying five percent higher than the three percent that we're budgeting for or two percent higher than we're budgeting for would cause a two percent rate increase for electric and a five

1:38:38 percent rate increase for water so those are five percent instead of what we budgeted two percent with budgeting well now i i see down here three percent inflation on capital plan and contingencies is it three or is it two well oh sorry it's two percent on the non-labor o m and then three percent on the capital plan so the capital is a little bit higher rate okay my next question goes to the rate stabilization funds that we'll be dr drawing into it's going to be 19 million on the uh electric and 10.5 million on the on the water side in this plan what

1:39:24 effect will drawing that plan down how much points of rate are we are we lowering by dipping into that fund 30 million dollars so the rate impact of the that draws on the rate stabilization fund yeah i mean rate stabilization sounds to me like we're taking money from reserves so that we don't have to raise the rates quite as high that's what rate stabilization fund means to me so by taking let's just take the electricity by taking 20 million dollars over the over the long term plan is that a half a half a point that we're saving in rates is that one point that we're savings and rate what what is that

1:40:10 doing to to reduce the rates um i don't have that number handy because the way that it works in the financial plan is a little bit nuanced where we it impacts two factors in terms of the other ratios both the reserve balance which becomes a pressure point in some years and then the debt service coverage ratio so we'd have to kind of model it without and get back to you for the dollar impact of not drawing down those reserves are the rate impact of not driving down those reserves yeah for me that would be something that would be helpful going forward if we're if if you're asking us to to dip into the rate stabilization fund

1:40:55 i would like to know what that does to the rates that that's that i mean when it's called that i want to make sure that it's doing what it's intended to do and lastly is the rate stabilization fund separate fund and what is the balance of the rate stabilization fund or is that just part of our general reserves the rate stabilization fund is its own separate reserve it um it was established and it has board targets and at different times the board has added surplus revenue to the fund or sales of property so the 19 million on the electric utility for example

1:41:42 that we've scheduled to draw down is an amount that the board originally set aside to defer future borrowing um while maintaining the uh the board target minimum um we will run the effects of if we effectively had to borrow instead of draw down those funds what that rate impact would be uh for both utilities we can run that for you and do we have a balance of what the rate stabilization funds are and you don't have to give that to me now that can come back into the memo um i i think you it's a really appropriate question i was going to reiterate the fact that these

1:42:27 especially on the electric side it was intentionally built up for the carmen smith project a number of years ago so the drawdown was actually part of the financial plan several years ago so this is this is not as if we are doing this because we can't afford our operations this was an intentional move from a financial planning perspective but we will get you those numbers thank you thanks mindy um uh what a great move to make a rate stabilization fund so that we can moderate rates um i just the foresight of the facility is uh

1:43:12 really remarkable in my view um i want to say thanks to marker benowitz for your comments um i agree that continual growth on a finite planet seems like a real problem i also agree that in order to get where we need to go energy efficiency and conservation are essential i appreciate mark's sticking around to provide his comments also to adam and debra i don't know how you put so much information in such a short memo it's super concise and clear um and without a ton of excessive jargon and i'm i really appreciate that i do have a couple of clarifying questions about some of the assumptions um you have key assumptions and there's just a couple of terms that i don't know i wonder if you can clarify for me so in i spent number one

1:43:58 about halfway down um it says 51 megawatt hours melded mid market price curve in 2022 i'm not sure what that means can you help me with that yeah that's a good question the um there's typically an on and off peak at prices that we look at for um for wholesale power uh activity and so the melded price is just kind of the weighted average of that um so kind of a weighted it should be probably a more um typical term for it but we just use this melded and we it's melded mid-sea mid mid c is that on the columbia kind of the trading hub in the northwest so things you can buy and sell in different areas but this you

1:44:43 know mid-sea trading hub's kind of the the benchmark area that people would price power um relative to okay great thank you and then everyone else that the term melded originally came from the fact that it was melding multiple resources so it was kind of a blend of everything you know wind hydro thermal at the trading hub that adam mentioned so it's it's basically taking all the volatility and drawing a straight line through it and saying this this is what we're calling mail did okay great thank you and under that one you have environmental commodities represent roughly three million dollars uh can you remind me what environmental commodities we're talking about

1:45:29 that's um we used to have uh a dis a line about wrecks where with the renewable energy uh certificates which are um attributes of like wind projects that we would sell in wholesale markets if we didn't need them um you know to meet any compliance obligation for eweb we kind of broadened it a little bit because we were able to monetize clean fuel credits which relate to electric vehicles um so that kind of the umbrella of environmental commodities now is uh kind of growing to include different things and so it's that kind of more generic term which could potentially include like carbon offsets or something if that were a commodity that we were transacting in as well but now it's mainly rex and clean fuel credits okay it's also going to be part of our

1:46:14 new environmental product line where we're going to offer to customers the per the off you know the ability to buy renewable energy credits so it's part of that but you know clean clean fuel credits and renewable energy credits is um primarily what's included in that okay great thank you um my time's out i'd be interested in another round if there's time available thank you um my questions have all been answered but are there um other people want another go around or and yes i'm seeing these two yeses okay great so if if you'd like another go around um we can just we'll start with you matt and

1:46:59 then john brofsky i think you also had some more questions great thanks mindy um so on the um the rates keeping rates flat um i think that keeping bills affordable is essential and keeping rates reasonable is also essential i would be interested in seeing discussion of bills alongside rates if that feels like it's reasonable and comparable um i you know we always talk about rates and it's bills that people pay and i think to the extent that we can bring that into the conversation i'd be interested in that i also think that keeping rates flat is admirable and it's a feat in my mind that this utility's been able to keep water and electric rates

1:47:44 flat for several years in a row and that said i'm also interested in avoiding hikes in rates that are greater than the two or three percent rate of inflation whenever possible um i'm interested in seeing a smooth rate hikes as much as possible i think rate increases of a one percent over a few years that prevents a five percent rate hike in any one year would be a good move uh we have a number of financial targets that are very useful that you all have presented for us a number of times i'm wondering if we might also establish a target ceiling for rate increases uh i'm wondering if that's something that staff and other commissioners feel like would be useful as you know one of the ways that we try and manage

1:48:29 finances um i it it would take advantage of the fact that we're doing um we're doing multi-year financial plans we could take advantage of that analysis and planning to try and minimize rate increases over multiple years um and then i'll just reiterate that you know to the extent that we can address bills in addition to rates i'm i think that would be useful thank you i had john borowski i think you had something to say yeah it went to the same line that about the melded price curve uh i was just curious and and deborah maybe you can speak to this but you're you're talking about it going at

1:49:15 51 megawatt hours melded in 2022 and decreasing to 47 by 2031. why do you feel confident that we're going to have a decreasing cost of energy in the out years i mean everything everything's going up pressure on carbon i think is going to make it even more i don't know just give me your thoughts how you how you feel that we're going to be going down in energy prices rather than not i can jump in that first if that endeavor can add on if he wants but i think what we've seen in the near term is um

1:50:00 what seems more like high volatility and price spikes looking at last year's we were at a 29 megawatt hour which was trending up to something uh maybe closer to the 20 to the 47 that we had last year so we're not seeing as much volatility in kind of the second five years of the plan as we're seeing in in the near term so there's a number of factors contributing to kind of that that this year and next year um high prices and volatility um but the longer term trend seems to be at um roughly consistent spot year over year relative to what we're seeing this year that is awesome

1:50:59 sorry about that um there's in the in the near term we're looking at volatility you know one thing um commissioner brown talked about conservative budgeting when you're on average long on electricity it is conservative to underprice the market so it's probably on the conservative side but but we'll look at that in a little bit more detail but between now and when we come back next month and and try to give you a little bit of a feel for the relationship between what we see in the market versus um you know what we're projecting going forward um if that if that would be helpful yeah and that and that's fine and this is an area i mean we're talking 10 10 years out

1:51:46 so that's where we can turn the dials right if we see the trend is is not going the way that we are seeing it today we're going to do this again next year we're going to do the year after and so that's where we can adjust those dials i just again i just wanted to know how how we saw it trending downward rather than than steady or upwards so thank you yeah i appreciate i would also just um commissioner mcrae when we bring back our actual rate proposals which is typically november and december we will have the bill comparisons that you're looking for for both water and electric and then combined and we do that we do those comparators with other utilities and then um we do

1:52:33 have in our rate making principles gradualism and so which is basically the smoothing that you're looking for and we're also going to be talking about a three-year view instead of just a one-year from a from a rate perspective so a few things that i think you'll find in november that you don't get on this on this first view but they'll they'll be coming in that you know hundred page document that commissioner carlson described earlier so all right sonia or john brown any last thoughts all right adam and debra did you get all that you needed from that

1:53:18 i think we have a few takeaways to bring back um more information on but otherwise we're good adam do you i shouldn't answer you thank you all right well thank you very much for that presentation so now we're at our much earned break we have a five minute break so it's 7 40 and we will be back here at 7 45.

1:58:54 all right well it looks like most of us are here um just for the sake of time we'll get going um we are on agenda item number 11 water utility second source project with karen kelly and wally mccullough well good evening president schlossberg commissioners and general manager lawson i'm karen kelly chief operations officer and with me tonight is wally mccullough water engineering and planning supervisor we hope you're arrested because it's time to talk about water we're excited to be here tonight and talk about the proposed second water treatment plant and associated transmission project which serve as integral pieces to our source to tap model of providing safe drinking water

1:59:40 to the city of eugene and surrounding communities in review of prior work on this project i've seen planning date back to 2012. your board materials covers a brief history of these efforts and it has been known for a very long time that eweb having a single source of water to serve a community of almost 200 000 people is an enormous vulnerability in fact we are the only water utility of this size in oregon to have a single source of supply the mckenzie river is an excellent source of water but is vulnerable to harmful algal blooms chemical spills and wildfires just last week there was a diesel tanker crash on the highway right next to the river that resulted in a spill fortunately it was contained before entering the river

2:00:25 but this is yet another near miss in a long list of spills that we train to respond to but have the capability to entirely shut down our drinking water production and i don't need to remind you either of the holiday farm fire nearly evacuating our hayden bridge water filter water filtration plant nor of the potential water quality impacts from the fire in our watershed we were all witness to the impact of harmful algal blooms in the city of salem's drinking water in 2018. in addition we know that hayden bridge will not withstand a significant seismic event it is time to address our vulnerabilities tonight you will hear about the proposed project and how it will address these vulnerabilities increase our resiliency improve our operational flexibility and reliability and protect our water rights

2:01:11 and ensure our ability to meet growing water demands all while keeping our rates among the lowest in the state in fact moving us from the second to the bottom to the fourth from the bottom in the list of our 15 comparators we look forward to your input and direction on this critical strategic project and with that i'm going to hand this over to wally to give you the details of our proposal thank you karen good evening uh commissioners um it's uh good to be back in front of you talking about second source one of my favorite topics i've talked to the board numerous times since well karen mentioned like 2012 or so but i think the only commissioner that was there at that time was maybe john brown so apologize john if some of this might be

2:01:57 a repeat um so next slide please i'm just kind of running through the quick review of the agenda i'm going to touch a little bit on what differs the second source from the emergency water supply we've been working on kind of run through the quality capacity and rel reliability features of our proposed project i'm going to touch briefly on two sources and then get into some of the costs and rates and some of the funding opportunities kind of building upon what deborah and adam had talked about earlier and we'll hopefully talk next steps and get into um some questions and discussion next slide

2:02:44 so the last four years why we really focused on an emergency water supply program and hopefully some of you pre-coded were able to participate in some of our events that we've had down at calipuya and howard and different things and this program and it i want to kind of differentiate the two because oftentimes they're mentioned in the same memo same cip second source emergency water supply but our emergency water supply is really about we lose all water and we need to provide drinking water and two people at distribution points where they go to a point and pick up a jug of drinking water to take home second source the totally different um project in a total different scale

2:03:29 it's all about we lose our primary source which is hayden bridge and it's a about having water coming to your tap at your home and basically normal use of water and sanitation at your house so it's much more substantial next slide kind of in a nutshell the proposed project it includes you know a new robust very reliable plant on the willamette river just downstream of the confluence of the middle fork and the coast fork with the capacity to meet current minimum demands it's located west of the river to provide as direct a

2:04:16 connection into the e-web system as possible includes a transmission system to deliver the water to the e-web system near the knickerbocker bridge and this was actually part of the we acquired the path for this transmission system through our recent negotiations with sub where they needed an electric transmission on our property and vice versa for our water transmission across theirs um getting into some of the details of the project next slide respect to water quality this has been a topic from the very start you know all of a sudden we're going from the mackenzie river to the willamette river we completed an in-depth sampling

2:05:01 program at our proposed intake site on the lammer river from 2013 to 2017 and you know we found a lot of contaminants metals pesticides nutrients herbicides things like that we're actually very similar to the mckenzie nearly loaded tack very low levels of any of those elements but as anticipated there was differences there's quite a few other areas bacteria organics color um well turbidity geosmin which causes taste and odor were all higher on the um willamette and and these were you know anticipated um so but building upon those you know

2:05:47 sampling results we developed a kind of a process stream that can treat all the raw water to better than regulatory requirements and this was a process we vetted through a kind of a public panel blue ribbon panel we brought in with some treatment experts and resiliency experts and kind of worked through and developed that it's kind of shown here in this kind of graphic on the contaminant slides some of the red items are you know items that we were kind of concerned about on the willamette we wanted to make sure we had features in our proposed process that treats for those algal toxins the taste and odors coming from the jasmine the ppcp which is your pharmaceuticals and personal care products

2:06:33 we are downstream from a couple of small wastewater plants so we want to be able to treat for those and one i i actually just added last week which was kind of coming up in the um world of water and wastewater is pposs and i can't even say what it's it's poly floral alcohol something and it's a series of man-made chemicals that it covers everything from non-stick frying pan coatings to fire fighting foam that never lead the system so we developed a treatment process and tried to get a multi-barrier approach to all of these contaminants and hopefully there's there should be two green dots next to

2:07:18 everything except the phos which is still you know we're kind of reviewing that the bottom is kind of our process train and um i highlighted in red some of the items that differ from hayden bridge several of you were at hayden bridge last week i understand and i'll just run through these kind of quickly when you're out there at hayton bridge and i know most everybody has the the big basins the big three basins that look just big bodies of water those are our block and said basins and while they work well for mckenzie river water they're very um basic and we actually go to direct filtration above i think 30 mgd at hayden bridge our new plant will have a very robust um

2:08:06 phlox zen basin which takes care of a lot of the turbidity in the water and a lot of particles probably the biggest feature is the addition of ozone this is the addition of a gas into the water stream it's a powerful oxidant which treats for a myriad of contaminants it's actually the process that salem added well is has i think they're complete by now is adding to their treatment plant after their algal toxin event um several years ago and then a more robust filtration process instead of we use anthracite at haydenbridge it's a granular activated carbon which has a lot of treatment capacity

2:08:51 this next slide when we move on to the capacity that's really related to water quality um when we started the project and developing a second source plant and our pre-design we knew that the water quality had to be much better in regulatory and had to be better than hayden bridge just supposed to public perception and we also knew that at some point in time we could there was a decision point whether we maintain that quality all the way up to our proposed flow of around 16 mgd or maybe we let it drop off a little bit to

2:09:36 um after we get to some minimum initial to kind of our minimum flow that we thought we would need to continually operate the plant on a daily basis and so that was around 10 million gallons per day minimum demand is around 16 million gallons per day so our proposed project basically maintains this high level of water quality up to 10 mtd and it kind of in the thinking and being compatible with our how we would operate the plant above 10 during emergencies we could really ramp up loading rates on those filters and those flock said basins and on the ozone system

2:10:22 and the water quality would drop a little bit there'd be a little few more contaminants in the water you might get a little bit of taste but it's still well would always be well above regulatory requirements and it's really a cost saving measure if we five to all those process units to maintain that quality all the way through up to our 16 million gallon per day a requirement it's probably a 15 to 20 percent higher cost capital cost for the project um go to the next slide kind of moving into reliability and we touched on this on the background a little bit you know it's a lot more than

2:11:08 the treatment plant we want to be able to first off we need to get water out of the river so how do we do that and the key here on the willamette is we have a pre-1909 claim on the willamette river and in 1909 if anybody knows that's when water law first came into being in oregon so you get a claim in pre-1909 you're good shape but you need to register it so we registered that claim with a date of first use in 1887 and it's one of the earliest claims on the willamette river and it gives us the ability to pull out 19 mgd at the intake site um

2:11:53 and not being subject to any in-stream rights so it's a very reliable claim and we're man actively managing that claim currently we have point of diversions on this claim all the way from the uh our intake site near the confluence all the way into north eugene and actually every year delta san and gravel gravelly uses our claim and uses water off of this claim to augment some of their water needs at their their plant site and we submit a report to oregon weather resources department documenting use of this claim it's all about just ensuring it's its future use we also have a 2013 permit which kind of increases the level of certainty on this

2:12:40 claim and our ability to access water but it's subject to the in-stream right so it's not quite as reliable and i think i mentioned about the in-stream rights came in in 1983 so it's all about dates and timing with water rights and permits another item we're looking at is um really because demand's going to increase and we'll we were gonna the plant will be designed for future expansion and because eugene will grow at some point in our water demand will increase so we're probably the best avenue right now we're looking at is access to federal stored water and that's act using

2:13:25 acquiring water and some of the water that's stored between the 13 willamette basin reservoirs it's all been allocated for certain uses and um so we're actually we're actively pursuing this currently there was some legislation that came out of washington that facilitates this access last year and i think just uh the last six months in 2021 session in oregon house bill 3031 was all about allowing municipal water providers to act to access this federal store water so another avenue we're working on to ensure reliability of the source next line

2:14:11 the treatment plan itself it's just it's all redundancy and robustness of design it's making this a reliable plant it's designed to provide full capacity 24 hours after a regional event but beyond just the design that goes into the structural mechanical systems and redundancy it's also how we plan to operate the plant to ensure its reliability and it's really we want to plan when we need it we need to run because this is a significant investment so it's planned for daily operation five mt mgd continuous supply into the system and that's really just about again making it when we started we wanted to start and run and as an

2:14:58 emergency reliable plant once we have the water we do have to get it into our distribution system and to those faucets so um starting with the big pipes we have a numerous current plan projects to strengthen our transmission system which you'll see see on the next slide but also we're you know in the smaller pipes distribution system and i kind of went over this a little bit in our cip presentation in july you know we're doubling our expenditures on main replacements over the next 10 years and i anticipate they're going to double probably every 10 years after that for probably the next 50 years as we ramp up our main replacement program

2:15:53 lost my bullet here but um so getting into the you know with the second source project he will be will become a utility similar to many with two sources supply so since day one 1911 we've had a single source providing water to eugene and as proposed this you kind of see i think that's the problem assuming we can't have pointers or anything so the kind of light blue is our surface area and i put a big entry point into the system that's near the knickerbocker bridge and all the red lines you see are our existing transmission system and hayden bridge is way off the on the right side

2:16:38 there so as proposed this water will enter at into our transmission system near the knickerbocker bridge and it would be depending on time of year if we maintain a constant five million gallons per day it'll probably be between 40 and 80 of the water in that pipeline and that so what that means is south and west eugene i'm just looking at the red lines or receiving the bulk of the water from the new plant or the willamette river depending on how you look at it or and the mckenzie hayden bridge water would be almost the north eugene would see almost

2:17:25 all hayden bridge water so um blending prior to entering the system is almost cost prohibitive we would have to probably take a river crossing and a lot of pipeline and testing is confirmed that the two sources will blend well in the distribution system it's really what most utilities with two sources do they blend the water within the distribution systems some people get water from one source some people get water from another source you know the in the key messages it's all going to far exceed any of our regulatory requirements so but it's just it's it's a message that we have to manage so

2:18:10 um next slide getting into costs um to put the expenditures that are included in our current cip and the long-term financial plan and the the table below along with the activities associated with each just so i can kind of elaborate on those a little bit so 2022 2023 that's really we start in there if the current in the current plan we would start permitting so pretty low dollar amounts in those two years really get into heavy design and finishing up permitting in 2024 and then the real high dollar amounts come in at 25 26 and 27 which we're

2:18:55 anticipating a three year construction window as adam mentioned you know with second source and these rates looking at about a 57 compounded rate 10 years without it's around 36 or 37. another thing i note is that you know these costs are increasing it has been asking past four members you know we used to have a 71 million dollar project now we have a 90 million dollar project and it's really the inflation it's the same the same project um the 71 million took the 2017 to 2021 we took actual construction cost indexes and increases and applied those

2:19:40 and then applied a three percent inflation rate to the time of construction and we get the 90 million i also want to note that it's not these are capital costs there's also some my very minor costs in the long term financial plan on the o m side for staffing there's two additional fte or planned currently planned to help absorb the um work on a second source plant that are in is in the long-term financial plan um next slide um funding obviously any funding would help alleviate some of the pressure on these rates and these rate increases but you know the one certainty i could say is that they're all they're all

2:20:25 evolving and you know we're working on those um to try and see what we might work best on for the second source plant you know there's various you know loan and grant opportunities um state revolving loan fund srf those are mostly low maybe some brands i think those are more geared toward the smaller projects larger projects such as this and where the the next avenue would be the water infrastructure finance and investigation act or finance fo folks call it wikia um they uh that's more geared toward the larger projects and is used several times places in oregon on large

2:21:11 infrastructure um projects it's a loan program with different um kind of conditions on that you know and if with a loan it's really we have to see we're not the advantage over our municipal bonds are really unclear and i'm sure deborah or adam could elaborate more on that um there's probably other things if anybody watches the news or opens the paper you can hear all about the all the wrangling around the infrastructure different programs and options that are proposed there's a lot of water and wastewater projects in there or opportunities we're not really sure what what is going

2:21:56 to happen with those at this time one thing we are excited about is eweb is adding a dedicated resource also known as a person to assist and pursue grant funding and help us kind of try and find some opportunities both on this project and a lot of other projects we're working on um next steps um you know if the current approach and level on investment are supported um you think you know first we need to go meet with the city of springfield kind of resolve the location and land use issues this was kind of some of the hang-ups on

2:22:42 the earlier efforts um there's new leadership to see springfield we've had a couple positive meetings with them already in 2021 um we want to continue exploring partnership opportunities obviously with them in the logical partner would be the springfield utility board currently they're focusing on building their new surface water plant on the mackenzie river so that's where their efforts are going down the road sometime when they're needing to upgrade their willamette river plant which will happen at some point there could be some downstream opportunities there but those discussions still have to occur and mature

2:23:27 but falling really with the city of springfield it's really just permitting land use permitting and then pre-design and environmental permit those are that would be the longest probably three years of environmental permitting just which is normal for building anything in river for an intake and then design and construction and with that i would like to open up with questions discussions next slide all right thank you very much wally and karen um and sony did i see your hand raised to start off with questions go ahead sure i had two quick questions uh well first

2:24:13 thanks for the uh presentation uh first question when you say meet with the city uh city of springfield is that staff meeting with the city of springfield or do you think there's discussions that board members need to have at the city of springfield well our previous meetings had general manager um level discussions with the city of springfield okay i would weigh in that um it's important probably to have multiple levels and so we're trying to understand the issues in the process with the city manager but it is very likely that

2:24:59 we will need the board's assistant assistance in reaching out and working with the mayor and council of springfield okay uh second question in regards to the differences between 2017 and 2021 have there been any plant changes or improvements i think some of those other processes were added on in between when we first discussed this proposal and now is that correct or is it the exact same plant that we were talking about in 2017 it's the exact same plant that it was our a robust um constantly running plant we did in a scenario where we had an emergency

2:25:44 only plant that was presented to the board as an option this is the the full plant got it and it's the same plant in fact the figures from there were the two slides came from the 2017 bluebird panel i think okay all right well i'm at the point where we need to move forward with this um i'm supportive of biting the bullet and spending the money to make it happen i don't think we're going to get there otherwise but if there are any other thoughts on you know public partnerships and how we work you know i'm i'm game but i'm also not really willing to stall

2:26:30 too much longer especially when you see such cost increases i'm also hopeful that you know by the time we actually start building it uh that some of those cost pressures that we're seeing right now with all the volatility around covet and supply chain issues that maybe some of that will work its way out but i'll leave that to later all right thanks john brown i think i saw your hand up yeah thank you um yeah i've been invested in this for a long many many years so a few questions if i could uh the intake i because i would very very much like to have the intake above where the coast fork comes in that we wouldn't have to deal with creswell and cottage groves effluent and there's several dairy farms up there and other things is there any way we can get our intake to

2:27:15 go upstream a thousand year feet and get and not have to draw water from the coast fork to move it upstream we would have to go on to the the middle fork and it'll take uh definitely take some work um it's a different river on the willamette which we it's we can move up and down in the willamette but we would have to reduce our capacity to move it onto the middle fork okay and that's what they did when we we moved there it upstream as far as we could to get above development on the willamette we actually had to give up

2:28:01 i think one and a half cfs out of our 30.9 so about an mgd and we'd probably have to give up even more if we approached wrd about a point of diversion on the middle fork all right are you worried about temperature because i know the coast pork runs 75 78 degrees in the summer uh about the temperature of the water and how that uh or will that all just blend in and not be an issue um i know from our past um preliminary design efforts i do not recall that as being an issue as far as blending water into our system okay and lastly on land use i know that's what pretty much killed us last time and john the other john b may chime in on this because i think it takes a

2:28:47 metro plan amendment to get uh the glenwood refinement plan changed to have a public facility designation off the commercial and industrial designation on that land um that's what probably a couple of years do we and it's very appealable through luba and all the other things so do we run a risk of starting the design and and all the permitting and all these other things and then getting stranded with the land use issue because that stranded this last time or does the second site is that already his own public land that we could buy from sub and alleviate that problem and facilitate it i think the um well you're correct on the land use we need to get on that as soon as possible

2:29:32 the the second site um has similar um constraints as far as land use requirements it still has to go on to the um public facility services plan and still requires amendments to the glenwood refinement plan and and all that the advantage to the second site that we negotiated with the city of springfield are subbed with is it really results in a consolidated utility footprint and glenwood which was the main i think one of the main drivers against the um i guess the project that first in the first place okay and lastly participation in watershed you know like

2:30:18 we do up in the mackenzie watershed protection and everything since there's two utilities drawing they're drinking water from that from that source are we going to collaborate with sub to maybe do some uh collaborative work on uh watershed protection uh the right variant areas and things such as that or is that too far down the road to think about i think it's too i don't believe those have been discussed yet and that that's we have to see how that all plays out okay thank you i don't have an answer karen you may you're going to say something yeah i would just add that that's certainly our hope because there there are multiple agencies actually that would have an interest in protecting that source thank you

2:31:12 thank you um john brown asked one of my questions regarding temperature um what what elevation is this at i mean is it going to gravity feed to our reservoirs in south eugene or is it going to be pumped it it would be pumped just like our hayden bridge plant is okay um so a couple of things jumped out to me one of them was uh the fact that you think you can run this plant with two fte um you know i went out to seneca and saw them run a plant with two fte but uh a water filtration plant and only budgeting two fte seems a little uh a little bit uh

2:31:58 hopeful um i guess that's one question uh another thing that again i probably might need to meet with you guys one on one because i'm new to this this is a long-term plan that sonia and john and and many of you people have been going over for a long time so there's things in here that i don't really know about um the uh the main pipe that you're planning on building back over the willamette at the headquarters is that um going to have in water implications as well um no the um well the the pipe that's um i think it's well we can go back up a

2:32:43 few slides and i can show but there's the pipe between headquarters and knickerbocker what's one of the blue lines that's in construction right now no i'm talking about the one that you have crossing the river from headquarters on the hayden bridge yeah that's um the one the blue line going that way is actually a reuse of an old 30 inch line that we have that's still in place and we were looking at slip lining that pipeline would provide a redundant crossing for both the river and i5 okay um so water is gonna come from the willamette and and serve

2:33:28 south eugene my wards um it's gonna be by all you've represented it's going to be cleaner than the mckenzie water that's coming out of hayden bridge or or higher quality i won't say cleaner because all the water out of hayden bridge is very clean yeah higher higher quality but as john brown mentioned it may be at a higher temperature than what my customers are used to right it's not when you say we're going to mix it it's actually not going to be mixed with mackenzie water correct it will be mixed it you know we're only going to be putting in a constant uh well uh like five million gallons per day we'll say and say

2:34:13 the the orange line coming down next to i-5 from hayden bridge always has more than 5 mgd in it so during a lot of the year it's going to be probably 40 to 50 percent mckenzie water and lima water in that pipeline after they after they tied together okay during high demands well high demands will be more mckenzie water low demands it will be a higher percentage of willamette water and at some point it would be nice to know what the what you feel the south eugene area daily usage are high in low demand so if

2:35:01 it's if we're pumping five five million out every day and we only use three million it's all going to come from the willamette probably right it's always that the flow in that pipeline is always in excess of five million gallons per day okay so it'll be depending on time of year between 40 and 80 percent of that pipeline will be willamette water okay and and i'm i'm along with sonia uh i think it's time to build this uh i do i will have other questions that we can do in one-on-ones that that are just technical questions that aren't policy driven questions um i'm i'm definitely on board with resiliency on the second water treatment site um

2:35:47 and i look forward to having more conversations about this in one on ones yeah and uh i just want to get one quick response to your 2fte question and um many modern treatment plans water treatment plants operate totally unmanned nowadays it's they're really set up for remote operation and this will be set up from mostly remote operation from hayden bridge and it's just a little bit of more maintenance activities but they'll be much more automated so karen i think you had something yeah well you answered the question on the ft and i just wanted to add in on the temperature um you know the temperature can change within the

2:36:33 distribution system depending on how long the water is in the pipes and in the storage system so uh it may actually you may actually not see much change and that's something that we we can measure um once uh the plants online we can actually measure those things and and see if we need to make any changes to how the water is is pumped through the system to alleviate any hot spots so to speak but i don't i don't believe that's going to be an issue and i know that it's not going to be an issue for the treatment plan all right matt did you have any questions i do thanks mindy um quick question about the 2013 permit um

2:37:19 is am i understanding it right that that's a water right in addition to the pre-1909 uh pre-1909 right that we have for 19 million gallons a day yeah it it basically mimics that right and um it refers to that right and it just if for something ever happens to that that claim and again it's kind of complicated i mentioned in the background or so a claim it has to be confirmed at some point in time and it goes through the process of adjudication and at some point in time they will adjudicate

2:38:04 the willamette basin and i'm investigating maybe 50 years from now and they're going to say yep this claim is is good we can use it as much as we want until then um it took they recently adjudicated the klamath basin and it took 20 years to do that and they haven't even planned to start the willamette basin so but the in case some issue ever happened with that claim we have a permit to fall back on and then our hope is to build upon that permit on any to offset any in-stream rights that might affect its reliability with our

2:38:49 federal stored water so we're kind of taking a multiple um faceted approach to kind of ensuring we're always going to be able to take water out of here through some some means it'll either be the claim we think it'll be the claim but if it can't it'll be the permit and if permanent cutoff we can augment that with our federal storm water which we're working on okay um so it's basically hedging our bets and they're overlapping the the claim and the permit are overlapping they're not additive that right yeah okay not additive and they think you're actually set up the claim we can pull out 19 mgd right now

2:39:34 anytime with no conditions the the permit actually subtracts that amount that we pull out from the willamette from our water rights on the mckenzie so which is fine you don't need both at the same time but they're they're all interrelated with the water resources department okay and the reason i asked is that you said that uh in the memo which was super helpful thank you for this memo um that water from that permit is not expected to be unavailable during at least some ports in most years and a large portion of time in very dry years and i just don't know if that's something that we

2:40:19 should be concerned about or or if that's yeah it's um and that's we really need to manage and actively actively manage our claim to ensure its viability you know in the future yeah at some point in time 50 years down the road we need them to convert that into a um i'm really not even sure what it could what a claim gets it'll be a certificate basically after they adjudicate the entire willamette basin okay but that's why we do need you know and we're going to be pushing on getting this access to federal stored

2:41:04 water it's just those points in time where the in-stream rights came in in 83 so it's all timing and they they do affect the permit that we got okay so i need a class in water law 101. most people do yeah commissioner mccree i was just at a conference right here there's two things that are relevant really right now and one of them is that at some point in the near future we need to put the the cl the claims or the permits to beneficial use and that's that will really help sort of put our stake in the ground you know more more than anything else and the other thing is this process is

2:41:49 going to take decades so somebody's going to make a career out of figuring out all the water rights on the willamette and it's way more complicated than the klamath and the klamath took at least 20 years and so the more we can do now to sort of put our stakes in the ground put the put the claim or the permit to beneficial use the better off our future generation is going to be okay great thanks for the clarification i have a couple more questions but i'm also out of time so um mindy if we want to do another round great or if not that's okay too um well i just have a quick question um and i apologize if you said this already or if it was in the background or but um it's about earthquake

2:42:35 so um if there was a major earthquake like we talked about cascadia um would this plant be built like to different specifications than hayden bridge is or or would we still be potentially out be relying on our emergency water source um our goal of this plant is after a cold level earthquake such as a cascadia it would be operable within 24 hours payton bridge would not i mean we've upgraded hayden bridge but you can only you know it's like fixing up an old car i think i use that analogy it's you can fix all the engine the mechanical parts of it which we've done and added little features but it's still

2:43:21 really old plant and you can only do so much to it but this plant is a totally different design structurally that's its criteria is 24 hours after that event that it'll be running great um that's the only question i have i don't know how many other questions you have met or if other people have questions or if you want to maybe join john borowski on like a more of a two-on-two or or whatever to get some more of those background questions answered but i'm also happy if people want to add more time right now um i don't know what you're

2:44:06 thinking yeah i'll just be really quick i would love to join john i was actually proposed that so if you do a tutorial um please include me um so john rusty and i can get to speed at the same time uh and then the other thing is i too am supportive of continuing to move forward on uh this investment so yeah please carry on and thanks for your work all right so karen and wally do you did you feel like you got what you needed from us i do and i appreciate everybody's interest in this project and your support yeah likewise

2:44:53 great thank you very much okay we're in the home stretch here our next big agenda item is eweb headquarters property disposition president schlossberg commissioners good evening i am just going to in without a lot of background i think you know the building we're talking about if you don't look at john barofsky's background i'm going to turn it over to ann kaw who's our administrative services manager in the gm office who will walk you through where we are good evening commissioners and general manager lawson we're here tonight to talk with you about the future of ewobs riverfront property as a reminder we've displayed some of the property's

2:45:38 key information and history on the slide you'll recall the general manager came before the board in june requesting guidance from commissioners as to the potential disposition of the headquarters property during that discussion the board felt that more information was needed to make the best decision for eweb and our customer owners commissioners also expressed a preference for the property to be used in ways that continue to serve our community as anticipated the conditions of the mgp purchase and sale agreement have been met and as such the city of eugene has released their exclusive right to negotiate the purchase or transfer of the property under eugene city code having reached this milestone management

2:46:24 is now seeking the board's direction to guide next steps slide please in this evening's executive session commissioners are provided financial data to inform their decision to sell the property in the near term or to retain this asset for a period of time responsive to commissioners previous guidance we've begun to explore the interest of government and community organ organizations this preliminary outreach was focused on specific entities who we thought might have interest themselves or possibly knowledge of others who would recognizing that a more robust outreach will be needed to fully understand the potential for the property and the community's interest

2:47:09 after our initial communications we followed up with 16 of those organizations by providing a letter information about the property buildings and equipment and a survey of interest this resulted in four meetings and tours with interested parties to date we've received four surveys of interest three of which indicated actual interest in the property according to ewa's property management policies and procedures if the city declines a surplus property the opportunity may be afforded to other public agencies within whose boundary that property lies once the floor determines whether eweb should sell or lease the property we will reach out more broadly to advertise

2:47:54 the property's available status and extend this opportunity to all community focused and public agencies should commissioners choose to sell we will work with the board to carry out an equitable and transparent process to select the offer that is in the best interest of the community our customer owners and e-web and next slide now for now that the board has received additional contacts to base their decisions we'd like to hear your perspectives and receive direction to inform next steps on the slide we've displayed an array of questions for you to consider at this time we're happy to answer any questions you have about the property or the preliminary outreach

2:48:39 or if you have the information you need we can jump right into the discussion and your feedback in which case i'll turn it back over to president shausburg to manage the queue thank you um is there anybody that has any questions that would like to go first i'm not seeing anybody's hands raised i think people are really tired maybe um any comments any feedback anyone oh i'll jump in great um yeah

2:49:24 thanks for the presentation thanks for the background um and the tour that we we were all able to take um i believe that this is a as a community asset that is i hope we can utilize to the its best extent whether that is selling it uh to a public entity selling it to a private entity who will give uh the public some sort of uh give back or public good to come out of it would be one of my hopes um seeing it sit empty would be one of my uh worst outcomes uh just seeing it sitting there empty uh doesn't work for

2:50:11 me um whether we lease it uh or sell it i just want to see bodies in the building because i think that that one that goes to help maintain a building an empty building deteriorates faster than a used building believe it or not so for whatever uses we do whether it's a lease or a sale just getting the the best uses out of it is what i'm hoping for what aspects of public purposes or benefits does the board consider most important i think that needs to be flushed out i think we we talked in an executive session about there were other uh

2:50:56 other projects in our community that went through a similar type of a thing and we can learn from them and maybe use some of the templates that were used on things like civic stadium and those types of things to to learn from so we don't have to reinvent the wheel on this thing and other than that it's a i think it's one of the jewels of our our community we've got a new 17 million dollar park that's going to be adjacent to it we've got a lot of development that's going to be happening there so i think that this property will fit in hopefully with the broader hopes and dreams that the community has

2:51:42 for a renewed riverfront so that's where i'm at for right now thank you john brown um i agree pretty much with what uh john b also said i i do caution uh the board that if we get into a process where we're talking and trying to uh evaluate community values i just don't want to get in i mean civic stadium took over 10 years the ymca still isn't done um because we're going to get lobbied by all the special interest groups you know this should be a museum there should be an art museum there should be education all of those are equally important in my view but how do you pick how do you pick one over the other yeah and so i caution

2:52:29 that if we do this that we put some side boards on it um to make sure that we can evaluate that so we don't have um you know this doesn't go on forever because an empty building that thing eats while we sleep uh if we don't have money in it or or people in it it's not going to be good so i would i would like to get people in it whether it's a lease or a sale and move forward and like i say i can help you with some templates that that other public agencies have used there's a some really good evaluation criteria that the school district has used before and and things such as that but i just hope that we can keep this in a time sensitive manner so we can we can see this is what's going to happen this is when it's going to happen and this is how it's going to happen so uh i'm for moving forward with

2:53:16 uh considering the disposition of the asset frank you want to respond yes uh commissioners you know one of the things that i mean we ask a number of open questions here and it's always difficult to um get direction when you have open questions one of them that would be more directly that i would want to ask more directly is we we are a utility uh most of our focus is on water and electricity and not real estate management um although we do a lot of that um just because we have to um i i would submit that the board consider that this is something that we would want to sell

2:54:01 as opposed to continue to be a landlord that my preference as a general manager would be to to sell the building um but that is one thing that needs to be provided that kind of direction needs to be provided from the board and so if there's anything other than the sort of expeditious sale of the property the details of how we do that can be worked out but it would certainly be helpful for me to hear from the board that yes we would like to expeditiously sell the property um or not um or a different solution but that's that's my preference and i it would be helpful to hear specific

2:54:47 direction on that from the board well i'm not a i haven't been through this process before uh in terms of you know a large community project of this nature and how we dispose of it or you know who gets i really like the idea of having sideboards on there but i also don't want to throw out the opportunity to have creative solutions that really benefit our community i do understand that selling it is you know very easy and in line with what our electric um kind of resource would be and and i'm not that i want to hold it

2:55:33 in perpetuity but it might be helpful for some of these community type groups that could be very beneficial i really want to see people on the riverfront i want to see people utilizing that property and i want to see it be you know public purpose if it can be and if it can't be i'm totally open to to selling it because that's that's also in the best interest of the community and our ratepayers at the same time there might be other opportunities out there that are more creative structures that don't just sell it outright um that you know do some sort of sharing that that brings other community value now i look at one like the the science center uh the eugene science

2:56:18 center for one you know having a really robust education center that can draw people to the area that can promote uh you know other um other types of art and industry around that building something like you know omsi and and the groups that build around there like that would be a really big benefit for the community and it's really hard for me to see how we make that that kind of a decision in an e-web bubble i mean we really for me really have to look at this as a you know community community benefit perspective i see john crinning um but but there is i mean there and you know so i looked i i really appreciate

2:57:04 the opportunity to put sideboards around it i don't want this to dry gone for staff but i also do want to make sure that whatever we land on you know we do give that those other kind of creative solutions and opportunities and a valid look and i don't know how we do that in this process these discussion these questions are actually really challenging for me to answer because i want to know what the opportunities are and then be able to weigh them and i don't know that these questions align with that for me right now so that's where i'm at thank you yeah commissioner carlson just to be clear when i when i mentioned sell it i didn't necessarily mean oh this goes to the highest bidder no

2:57:49 matter what i i did mean that there's a public uh purpose consideration whatever that looks like from the board thanks mindy and uh thanks for the the background around this it's been super helpful um i from my perspective um i think we should continue to prioritize selling to a public in a public party if there's interest but i don't have a strong feeling that we should hang onto the property for any extended period of time i think i agree with john brown that i don't want to see we have so many big

2:58:35 decisions on our plate i don't want to see us wading into a big long drawn-out process of um trying to figure out what's you know what what uses the community wants i um i don't think we need to involve uh a bunch of public uh engagement in this in in this decision i think we should save our public engagement efforts for um other decisions where we'll need more of that um i don't have strong feelings about selling separate parcels to be honest though i'm not sure i understand the implications if we were to sell separate parcels but you know my initial reaction is i don't that doesn't really matter um and

2:59:21 another the last question there um if we lease uh the property for some period of time it makes sense that we would invest to make sure the property doesn't degrade but i don't imagine that it's a great value to the utility to make significant upgrades to the property those are my thoughts thanks for the time um as for me i look forward to getting the information that john brown alluded to about how 4j school district did this and perhaps learning from them so that it doesn't take us 10 years because i think that um this is something that while we don't want to be rash about it'd be great to just get the ball

3:00:06 rolling and and move on this um and i agree with what everybody else said so that's all i have to say thank you commissioners i think one of the the questions that um we need to answer for the board is are the details around the process um i know that this isn't something that we do there's a number of different options there's others that that have been mentioned as examples but i i think we also need to be a little bit more clear as to the step by steps of how this might work and so i i think that's probably an action item that that we need to do as as staff

3:00:53 uh before we ask much more of the board around the priorities and the directions and so i i kind of take that as a take away from from our end great thank you okay item number 13 correspondence and board agendas frank thank you president schlossberg there was um a couple pieces of correspondence one had to do with the um the the city of eugene and the fact that there was um some some work going on with with regards to wards um and so that was just background the other one i think we

3:01:38 talked about more than enough which was the meeting um so i'll really talk about the agenda more specifically there are a couple of events coming up for the board um a work session on uh wildfire mitigation in october on the 19th and then also a few days later uh the the tour of fin rock reach and the repair work that's going on there both of those are i think exciting opportunities there was uh probably two things that i wanted to point out about the agenda itself in december we added two things to the agenda one was the annual board policy review that we mentioned earlier and the other one which

3:02:23 assistant general manager rod price and have been talking about significantly the last few weeks is a 2022 goal setting work session it'll probably be well included in the in the board meeting but in past years um the general manager me i've been trying to bring the board my guess at the goals in january and so this is an opportunity in december to start to formulate and work with the board on those goals before we enter the year and so we've set it aside some and i think that's probably just good habit to get into so we can have more alignment around that so we've added some time to december specifically

3:03:08 for goal setting for 2020 to you and and by the way thank you for approving the strategic plan earlier um that also i added a clause in there that does tie that now into the annual goals and so um it's really sort of bringing those two things together and so i wanted to make note to the board that we have added that into the december board meeting the december board meeting is usually a big packet by page and by volume but usually the meetings are relatively short and so we felt like there was an opportunity to add those two items in december um other than that uh president schlossberg i don't have anything else to add on those two items unless the board has questions

3:04:02 no all right thank you whew i don't know why this maybe this meeting is longer than it's been in the past however many months but this felt like a marathon um we are at wrap up board wrap up so is there anyone that has anything that they would like to say in closing john brown yeah i'd just like to thank all the staff and the other commissioners for what i thought was a very informative and good discussion this evening um just one just plant a seed that you know as we raise our rates it's a financial windfall for the city because they get a benefit from silt and they get all this money that's pretty much many times not in their budget and maybe we should suggest that they could dedicate some of

3:04:47 this money to achieving some of their client recovery goals like you know charging stations and things like that and and things because i know that it's challenging for them financially but if we're going to raise rates through you know and then part of it's through that they're going to get more money and it would be nice if we could at least suggest that they could use some of that money to achieve some of these goals because i know that funding has been a challenge for them so just plant that seed to see where it goes thank you thank you uh and thank you like john said to the staff and everybody um so for me uh being a new commissioner a lot of the a

3:05:32 lot of the things that you know like the water treatment plant and and these things um i feel i need to be brought up to speed a little bit more so i hope there's going to be opportunities in the coming months when things like this arise that that we can i can work with maybe matt and and staff and just you know come out to rock and and spend an hour to digging into these things rather than a two-minute uh question and answer at board meetings um that's definitely something i'd like to do with deborah before the budget comes out because you know i dig into budgets and to go through and really uh get my questions answered in this type of format isn't the appropriate way to do it for me to have a

3:06:18 really robust and deep knowledge of what i'm being asked to sign off on so i'm hoping that in the in the coming months that that's something that we can avail ourselves of uh and i just want to know what the process to get those things done would be things how you know i'm a new i'm still a newbie i'm still a rookie go ahead frank yeah commissioner barofsky i think this this goes for any any commissioner if there's a particular subject that comes up in a meeting like like you've just identified um we are more than willing to dedicate staff time to sit down with you as needed um i i think that other commissioners through the years have have found that

3:07:05 there's opportunities to sit down and all you have to do is mention what you mentioned and we will reach out to you and schedule something for example with deborah hart um or with you and and commissioner mccray on on the history and direction for alternative water treatment plants so um you just mentioned two so we'll do that and and for all commissioners if there's a particular area um that is of of interest or something that you feel like you need to learn more on we're more than happy to to do that and and we've tried to make that available through the years and some some of this stuff you learn through absorption over time um just through field trips and visits and discussions but we recognize that that's an important thing for

3:07:50 commissioner an important really resource that we want to provide you so we have two on the list right now and if anybody else has anything through time or going forward that they need just let us know sonia i i know that i utilized the pre-meeting questions very very extensively in the first um couple of years that i was here to if it was helpful for me i don't know if it would be for you but because you know you just saw you only have a couple of minutes and i would have 15 20 questions and it was helpful for me to be able to send those to staff and have them think about it and then actually write a response that just you know something to think about um

3:08:35 it really helped me get more up to speed and ask those questions without taking everybody else's time too we remember those days very fondly commissioner carlson yeah and to that that's that's a great idea but a lot of times the board run doesn't really come out until thursday or friday before a tuesday board meeting and then for me to go through dig through it and and come up with those questions in my industry fridays and saturdays are usually pretty busy and so being able to to devote that time to it it makes it difficult yeah i know i'd get up at four o'clock in the morning on monday and read it for three hours

3:09:20 so i get it totally understand all right other wrap ups matt or sonia no just an observation estonia it's hardcore getting up at 4 30 in the morning and another word of appreciation to this group for being able to handle uh messy conversation much appreciated um all right just last thing for me um maybe per john borowski's request um if some because sometimes you don't know what you don't know and you get the packet and you think you read through it and then you're in the discussion and and staff are looking for guidance and you think and you realize like oh

3:10:06 there's a lot here i i need a little bit more background on so i'm just wondering i don't want to put the burden on staff but if you do have an agenda like a like a media agenda item that you're looking for information on maybe if we could figure out a way to be proactive to have some of those like one-on-one tutorials before a board meeting is going to happen i know that i don't know when staff prepares their powerpoint presentations but it doesn't have to be a presentation like this just so that commissioners can go into the discussion feeling like they are a little bit up to speed that's just just an idea um and then go ahead frank i just think president um strasberg there's

3:10:52 there's a number of avenues for that some of it is just outreach like we've talked about um the one of the things we try to do with i'll say topics that are especially dense is to have those discussions over a number of months if if you'll if you'll notice that we've we've talked capital plan and budgets and numbers now for a number of months we talked about it again then next month in november we'll bring something specific more about pricing of which that'll repeat again in december and and so the same with a lot of these topics and so um we are recognizing that some of these subjects are just just really deep and and a one or done kind of approach is

3:11:37 going to be really difficult um but but always we don't have to do presentations if there's times that someone just needs to sit down and chat about it um that's that's fine too we can do that with two commissioners we cannot do it with three and so um we're more than open to do that and if there's things that commissioners in particular like i just heard this evening we can facilitate that great thank you um and the last thing is i just want to thank everybody i think that um we had a really productive discussion earlier in a way that we don't often have discussions it was much more of a back and forth and sharing and

3:12:23 um i just really appreciate all of you and um staff for all the hard work and integrity that everybody brings so on that note this meeting is adjourned thank you commissioners have a good evening everybody thanks all