EWEB Board of Commissioners — December 7, 2021

0:03 and that is my queue that it is now 5 30 so i'm going to call to order the eugene water and electric board december 7th 2021 meeting um we'll start with an agenda check does anybody have anything to and i'm embarrassed but um remind me how i get more people on my screen because i of the commissioners i only see sonia and matt and i don't see john barofsky yeah got it okay so i nobody shook their head yes nothing for agenda check correct okay then we'll move on to items from

0:50 board members and general manager is there anybody that wants to go first i'm just going to call on someone then john barofsky anything from you no i don't have anything to report this this month as of now mckenzie watershed council will meet this week on thursday i'm going to do my best to attend that virtually but other than that nothing to report i don't believe i have anything at this point either oh actually i did want to follow up i hadn't heard anything about our

1:36 um from last meeting the titles coming up on the screen and um i was curious if i could get a follow-up on that because now i don't see any of our names on the screen whereas before i think we did have names that's all i have right now commissioner carlson that was in the general manager's report that was sent out um today so um there is a way that we can and change that so um through email okay all right perfect thank you commissioner mccray anything from you nothing for me thanks and lastly commissioner brown anything from you yeah several things um open board uh met

2:23 earlier uh this quarter and uh just to summarize the whole thing it's as good as financial shape as it's ever been um it's the uh uh it's really good they're getting good returns and the financial status of that fund is uh is very good um number two i had a a lady contact me she's not in my ward but i know her personally um a tree from our reservoir site fell and took out the fence took out a shed and we denied the claim and this is the second time this happened and i was i've got a learning process i just like to let everybody else know even though it came from our property and destroyed her property we're not liable

3:08 and uh and that's the way the law reads and it wasn't a big claim it was like 800 bucks uh it was settled but staff did what they could they did uh really good but i it i guess it goes both ways and general manager told me that if the tree from her property falls and gets our reservoir she's not liable but it that's a learning experience for me because i would have thought that we would have taken care of that but we don't uh and it's a law and then uh the last thing is i know several of you and others have been asking me whether or not i'm gonna run again and i totally haven't made up my mind i have picked up some papers and uh probably any quarter towards it but uh we'll see i still have a little bit of time to make up my mind and go from there so that's all i have thank you

3:59 great thank you um the only thing that i have to add is that um most of us i think if not all of us took a tour of um the where we got to see the potential second water treatment plant site this past month although it's kind of hard to believe that that was just in the last month it feels like ages ago but that was another one of our field trips and i i really appreciate the field trips i think that they're super helpful and over to you frank uh yes uh president schlossberg commissioners good evening uh just one item from me i just wanted to uh thank all of the volunteers who helped with the run to stay warm which i believe occurred between last meeting and this and this meeting and some of you i know

4:45 participated and so wanted to and as soon as we get final numbers um as to the success of the both the race and the participants and the fundraising piece of that we will provide that feedback to the board but i in the meantime wanted to thank all the volunteers who who took their part of their weekend and and more than part of their weekend to help with that so thank you thank you that also seems like ages ago and um i guess i can just add to mine that i've never run a 5k before but i set the eweb run to stay warm as my goal and i did it so that felt really good

5:31 okay so now we are on to public input um we have three speakers signed up tonight when your name is called remember to unmute your call press star 6 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 your time you will hear an audio notification when three minutes has elapsed and i will interrupt you to let you know as well after all testimony is heard each commissioner will have an opportunity to speak if they choose although by policy we do not engage in a back and forth dialogue please note that failure of a commissioner to speak shall not be construed as support of or opposition to any speaker's testimony

6:17 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 the public testimony period for this meeting is now open and we are going to start off with tim carmichael followed by mark rabinowitz so tim are you on the line right now hi there uh it's tom carmichael oh my gosh so sorry don't worry okay so yeah i just want can i get started here yeah yeah go ahead okay so yeah i'm over on huntsmaker so the reason i was i wanted to speak today was to talk about the second water

7:02 treatment plant that's going to be sourcing water from the lamit um i i'm very you know informed on the mckinsey water plant i've actually did a tour on that with my son several years ago it's a it's a great facility great tasting water i think everything is fantastic can't say enough great things about it uh this move to taking water in from the laminate is something i'm really concerned about concerned about the seas concerned about the water source itself you got mercury coming in from cottage grove off the reservoirs you've got countless fuel tanks and ag runoff that is you know we're planning for this big shake that is going to happen someday all that stuff coming down that that river it's just nasty stuff i don't understand why we

7:47 would invest in a second water plant pulling water off of that river and i did speak with my representatives about this at length they talked about the water temperature being higher and the goal being to restore some of that watershed up there with this water feed that now all the customers are paying so i got concerns along those lines as well it's like it doesn't make sense to me that we're all paying this monthly water bill fee to restore properties up there luxury real estate that most people in town cannot afford to purchase so now we're all all paying this fee and that's that that really bothers me i didn't feel like we had any input on that and we've got you know the auto bill pay with electronic communication there's all kinds of pulling that we could be doing off of this

8:33 and it really feels to me like the commission you know with the best of intentions has really lost touch with the ratepayers and i wanted to reach out and say you know please start being more proactive in reaching out to us and and getting our opinions especially on something this big we all know that seneca has proven to be an epic disaster on so many levels from the cost to the secret contracts that rate payers are being like there's so much scandal with the seneca set up that that we've got and i just have this bad feeling that the willamette water plant is going to end up being our second core investment with repair funds so that's what i wanted to speak to you

9:18 guys about the the water quality in the laminate is it's not even on par with mckenzie i grew up playing on both of those rivers the idea of drinking water out of the willamette is just nasty i i'd probably end up thinking it well before i put water out and think about drinking out of that river and i have looked at all the stuff with the the treatment and understands there's things that they can do to pull that stuff out the nice thing with mckenzie is you don't need to do that it's it's a great clean river it seems like that's something that we should you know invest more money into versus investing into this willamette river watershed so you know if you ask the people in flint michigan if they thought it was a good idea to you know change their water source over the point river they probably would have opted for that but they did it anyways

10:04 great your three minutes are up thank you very much all right um next up we have mark rabinowitz followed by sandra bishop good evening can you hear me now yep we can hear you okay um one thing about the watershed protection it would be very helpful for eweb to advocate for a ban on aerial spraying of poison over the watersheds whether the mackenzie or coast range or middle fork uh decades overdue uh it'd be nice also to see the massive clear-cutting logging

10:49 that's changing our climate to be made illegal if we were really concerned about watersheds a couple years ago i went up one of the watersheds to a hearing of the army corps of engineers which had limited showings of their damn inundation maps and we were allowed to look at them but not take them home or take a photo it did look at a couple places where friends live to reassure or warn them about the potential dangers reason for mentioning this is looking at the photos of your cracked reservoirs on hawkins hill and college hill these are potential risks to downhill neighbors and there need to be similar maps

11:35 made public for people to know what to do in the case of an emergency we have maps for tsunami inundation on the coast and we should know what they are for people in eugene a different concern there's been a lot of public discussion lately about electricity and natural gas which has completely ignored the increase in generation in oregon in the past decade has mostly come from increased use of natural gas so it would be nice for eweb to help educate the public about the western w wecc grid that stretches from bc to tijuana to denver what it takes to power it the potentials for less hydropower as climate change intensifies

12:21 the need to use less electricity not more given the difficulties in sustaining generation we are past peak electricity in the united states which i hope eweb is aware of since you have to count the numbers and maybe we could do things like require insulation of buildings change the building code for passive solar design bring back the solar access law imaging which is gone and other things to recognize we live on a abundant finite planet that is not going to have endless growth forever two decades ago the geologist colin campbell that matt mccrae may remember predicted that a sign of peak energy

13:06 would be wilder oscillations in energy pricing coveted closures managed to reduce energy more than anything else ever has but now that those are being dropped we're seeing a difficulty in sustaining the demand that people have at the end of the pandemic so thank you use less all right thank you very much um last up is sandra bishop on the line i see that there's someone waiting in the lobby i've just admitted miss bishop she should be on the line now okay

13:51 um sandra bishop you are our final public input public testimony person for this evening are you there yes not an easy task to get into this meeting oh i'm sorry about that okay your time starts now okay thank you my name is sandra bishop i'm my my husband and i live at 40th and hilliard adjacent to the 40th and patterson what used to be a hill water reservoir project and i was very hesitant to testify or speak tonight because i know the commissioners do not want to hear from rate payers on this they're all into policy so one talked

14:37 about the policy level but first i just want to preface it with saying that i want to commend the eweb staff and contractors that are working on this project they have been very good at working with us and the other neighbors when things come up so i want to talk about policy tonight and just say the staff's doing a really good job here as you know last month about this exact same time our our house was hit with a blast that there was an error on the site when they did a blast and hit our house contractors taking care of it we have no problems with that it's all going to be made right what i do have a problem with and want to go on the public record and make sure

15:22 this is in the permanent record to say that as eweb commissioners even though you want to stay at the policy level you really need to come out on site and experience the actual impacts oh bad pun of this project so please come and spend part of a day up here watch one of the blasts but don't just come for the blast party please stay and watch the operation of an open pit mine in the middle of the south hills because that's what's happening up here and for the record i want to say that eweb does not have the authority to build two water reservoirs at this site at this time the general manager has arbitrarily

16:10 tripled the gallonage and doubled the size so if you were to listen to neighbors you would have been able to save 150 year olds for us and build one reservoir up here which is in all the metro plan and the underlying facilities document so if you're looking at policy please do your job and you know you should be dialing it back to fit those policies so thank you very much thank you very much um the public testimony period for this meeting is now closed and at this time commissioners are given the opportunity to comment if they choose so um i don't know if they're i see commissioner carlson go ahead

17:02 hi uh so thank you all for your testimony tom it was great talking to you i think we we spoke about the various projects and communication for about an hour really appreciated that um that time that we had and um i did take away some other ideas i do like the idea of of having you know when we have these major projects really doing a bit more on the um kind of the surveying of customers side i think it was a good reminder for me um it is something we've you know done in the past and i think it's something we should probably do again just to you know get feedback from the general public especially as i mean our meetings i think are somewhat more accessible and that you don't have to actually go to the eweb headquarters to be there but it's still a time where you know everybody's busy and being on zoom is challenging so again i really appreciate that time i appreciate the

17:47 phone call that we had um as far as the um the blast site i did want to note that i did um the the week after they resumed the blasting um on site at the 40th and patterson i went down and i i did experience the um the blasting uh during one of the tuesday events that they had uh great to have staff staff walked me through everything down there they showed me um you know kind of the work and how uh how they laid the mats out the different safety measures that they've taken um i felt so comfortable with it and actually there were many neighbors in the area that had come and you know witness it kind of regularly um i actually brought my son down a coup uh i think last week to see the the site as

18:34 well so it it is um i mean you know i'm not going to downplay the fact i mean it's it's certainly an impact on the neighborhood um i did sit around and kind of watch as they as the trucks went in and out and you know unfortunately the the house especially sanders home is right there in the midst of it um i i'm i'm really sorry my heart goes out to you i i do appreciate that um staff and the contractors are you know taking care of the situation that happened um last month and i do you know i do support the fact that we we were going to have to remove all those trees again we were going to have to remove all those trees to build two site do two tanks whether or not we were going to be build two tanks

19:19 now or if we were going to build two tanks in the future so you know for me getting out of the way and not having to impact the neighbors here and then again in the future um i thought was very important and when i've talked to the the people who came to visit the site i got a lot of um positive feedback on the process and the support from staff so um you know i do hope that others get to go down it seems like the the you know the blasting is happening on tuesdays and thursdays and if you haven't had the opportunity to go down i would definitely recommend it it's it's very interesting to see it happen firsthand so thanks again to lauren the team thank you sonia is there anybody john barofsky or matt mcrae anyone if you want to jump in

20:06 go ahead matt yeah sure thank you um i thank you all three for taking the time to provide testimony tonight um i do wonder my guess is we've done some surveys of customers about a second source and frank if we've done that i'd be interested in in seeing whatever work we might have done to you know gauge people's concern about a second source i hear the concern raised about the water quality of the two rivers but knowing that we need a second source um it feels like it doesn't feel like we have that many options um but anyway uh frank if there are um

20:51 if there's any survey work that's been done i'd be interested in taking a look at that i do plan to take a visit to the water reservoir project up on fourier i appreciate the encouragement to do so sandra and um i have heard from others that it's worth taking a look so i will make sure to get up there and see that in the near future um and then lastly um mrs bishop said that we're not authorized to build two tanks and forgive me if there was communication on that front and i missed it but uh could you fill me in frank if there's something there that we need to be aware of that i missed that's all thank you very much all right commissioner brown anything you would

21:36 like to say well nothing directly thank you i just would like to thank all three for testifying and i've taken what they've presented and we'll consider each topic as as it relates to the e-web operations and my participation as a board member thank you um and the only thing i'd like to add is um also to thank everybody for testifying i'm sorry sandra that it was hard to get into this meeting i know that's um even though we've been doing this for almost two years now technology sometimes can still be pretty glitchy and can be frustrating um and also um i would love the opportunity to go if it's still possible to one of the

22:22 blasting days or just to periodically go and visit the site again and see it through its different iterations in construction i think that's a great idea so it looks like we are moving right along to our board action items agenda item number four which is approval of consent calendar a all right i heard a second from sonia all those in favor say aye

23:09 hi great consent calendar a is approved and now we move on to item number five which is approval of consent calendar b all right um all those in favor of a consent calendar b say all right hi that was also unanimously approved great okay and we're on to agenda item number seven which is the 2022 proposed budgets and prices and i believe we have deborah hart and adam roy

23:55 good evening commissioners uh i am for the record deborah hart with me this evening is adam rowe the fiscal services supervisor also on the line and available for questions are alicia voorhees and ben sachdeva they're senior analysts who worked on this budget and the accompanying price proposals slide please this evening we are again going to review the 2022 proposed budgets as well as the update to electric and water prices after which uh comes the final public hearing for the 2022 rates process and with that i'm going to hand it over to adam

24:40 thanks deborah next slide please uh so we've seen this chart the last couple months this is the high level summary of the budget and the more detailed document was provided in the backgrounder uh this is also consistent with the plans that we put together and presented to the board in july as part of the financial plans um so we've seen these numbers throughout the year we'll be happy to address any comments related to the combined budgets but for both water and electric utilities the combined budget is just under 390 million dollars and next slide please

25:25 so after five years of no overall price increases for both utilities we are seeing a shortfall in the revenue requirement both utilities are entering a period of significant capital investment for replacing aging infrastructure and upgrading systems so in addition to this being the first year of overall revenue requirement increase in some time it's also the first year we're implementing that cost of service results um so this will have impacts different impacts to the different customer classes and we'll see those on the next couple slides finally we're also proposing the annual update to the market-based pricing for the electric utility and the wholesale water contract pricing so next slide please

26:11 uh so with the price proposals we did see different impacts for different customer classes this is a function of the cost of service analysis that we put together we tried to mitigate some of the impacts to some extent um by looking at the three-year trend and and presented the results of that three-year cost of service so absent any significant changes over the next couple years we'd expect that 2023 and 2024 to be consistent with these results but this year or but today we're only looking for approval for the 2022 um pricing [Music] so overall so the overall price increases are uh being applied equally to all the different billing determinants so both the basic and the volume charge but next

26:56 year um the board will be uh looking more closely at rate design so the impact of the different fixed versus variable charge and different rate design structures the next slide please so the water cost of service also had different impacts for the different customer classes and when we refer to the smoothing or gradualism we're really referring to to the cost of service results so the overall increases for those years are a function of the revenue requirement for each of those years so for 2023 and 2024 those higher increases are largely um related to the second source treatment plan um and so any changes to the timing or um

27:43 or funding sources of the big that significant investment may impact proposals in those years um but at this point this is the projections for the next couple years rate trajectory um there is no um pre-funding for the second source treatment plan included in the 2022 so this represents um the normal capital expenditure for 2022. um next slide please uh so the impact to both e-web of eweb bills both relative to median household income and comparator utilities is an important factor to demonstrate affordability uh this chart shows a typical water and electric customer for a single family

28:29 all-electrocuted household and it shows us maintaining our position among our comparators though that does reflect the rate increases um this shows our current and proposed changes in prices but also that only looks at the current prices for comparator utilities so any pending uh price changes are not reflected in there um that this shows our current and proposed so with that i'll turn it back to deborah thank you adam this evening management is recommending approval of the 2022 budgets and water and electric prices as presented in your board backgrounder and

29:15 the materials that adam went over this evening our next step from here is a public hearing and then we'll be back to answer any questions and seek your approval thank you i have a process question i know i have to open the public hearing is there a preamble that i'm supposed to read for the public hearing president schlossberg i would i would say it's it's the same as the original one okay so i should just read that again that's what you're saying yes okay thank you

30:01 okay um well i think we only have one person signed up for this public um for the public meeting but you will have three minutes to present your testimony you can state your name optionally your address reward and we will let you know when your three minutes is up um so i will um the public testimony for the public hearing uh period is now open and we have sandra bishop signed up sandra are you still on the line

30:58 and did we have anybody else who signed up later for the public hearing on budgets president schulzberg um miss bishop was the only person signed up for the public hearing and i do not see her phone number any longer in the participant names or numbers all right the um scheduled time for the public oh i think she may have just chimed in okay yes i'll admit her now okay immaculate timing i'm here okay great sorry about that we're running um

31:44 we're running ahead but you are the only person who signed up for public the public hearing on budgets so your three minutes um is about to start now okay thank you sandra bishop um 4096 hillyard and i want to say as a former commissioner it's not easy understanding reading these budgets one thing that i noticed i've been trying to read some of these public documents not public the budgetary documents for about six months and i spent about i don't know five hours one day trying to find any reference to rate increases and then i finally realized that the

32:29 term rate is not usually used anymore and i would strongly urge you to ask your financial people to please revert back to using plain english and the kind of somebody called it orwellian terminology of things like customer requirements the customers customer owners of eweb have a requirement for power and water and when they pay for that it is a rate it's not a customer requirement drives people crazy to not be able to just read documents and find the plane explaining those plain words so please think about that think about how you

33:14 could make it a little more understandable for people the other thing i wanted to point out i know that the commissioners want to stay at the policy level they don't want to deal with operations in any way but part of the policy responsibility of an eweb commissioner is to understand budgets and to track where the money is going and i noticed in a consent calendar item it was in the i think it was the consent calendar a on november 2nd it was under contracts item number nine there was an eight hundred and thirty thousand eight hundred and thirty thousand dollar additional

33:59 cost being put forward to go with a murray smith associates contract for the 40th and patterson water reservoir site their original contract was for 400 000 they then asked for an additional 830 000 which was over a 200 percent increase in in that item and it brought the total up to 1.2 or 1 1 230 000 and not a single commissioner questioned it or thought it was something to be noted so i would really appreciate knowing that someone i'm sure you can assign a staff person

34:44 to do this that someone is actually tracking and going to give reports to back to you as commissioners of what the cost overruns are on this project because that's quite a substantial cost thank you thank you very much all right so the public testimony period for this hearing is now closed um and deborah do we want to i guess i'll hand it back to you for questions uh and i guess i'll hand it back to you for questions so we're here to answer uh any questions that you have and then after that uh seek approval on the

35:31 resolutions that are outlined here all right so if you want to raise your hand i can to jump in the queue for questions um commissioner mccray yeah if i may i just want to um make a comment uh in response to miss bishop's comments um i i i believe i'll speak for myself i do look through those contract items and the changes in prices because i think it's important and i actually really appreciate how how carefully those are documented by staff and i feel like there are costs overruns on many things but i feel like our staff

36:17 are really playing about it and transparent about it and it makes me more comfortable as somebody who's you know providing some level of oversight on budgeting um there are absolutely places where we have costs that we weren't expecting and um and it's in in all kinds of places right not just this project or that contractor anyway i appreciate the transparency and the documentation that we're provided that makes it easy for us to see what's going on i'll also point out to miss bishop uh that you may be aware already there was an opportunity for staff to or for board members to ask staff about specific items in advance the meeting and sometimes the questions about those items will be

37:02 resolved through a publicly published email exchange between staff and board members so um it may not be visible in the middle of a meeting but it is in the public record um often times that's all i have to say um thank you um for putting together these materials for us for you it's um it's dense but i really appreciate the work that goes into making this digestible for us um so thank you staff thanks matt yeah frank you want to jump in yes uh presidential hospital thank thanks to commissioner mcrae for pointing out a couple of things i i

37:47 would say that um you know in um ms bishop's defense there there have been a couple of changes in protocol over the last um several years the publishing of the q a is something that did not uh occur previously the links to the questions and answers are on the website under the agenda items so those are accessible to the public and and like commissioner mcrae pointed out there's a lot of back and forth when there are questions on items like consent calendar items or really any agenda item i would also point out that we we also one of the things that we have started to do in the last several years is to publish a quarterly report

38:32 which highlights by major project where we are from a budgeting perspective and so that that can be a little bit confusing because if you look at sometimes things item by item you want to get a little bit more of a broader picture of the entire project and so the the quarterly financials we tracked the capital projects in the quarterly report as well and so there is uh i i would consider quite a bit of visibility to the board around the major financial issues and and questions that come up so um i appreciate uh commissioner mcrae pointing that out

39:17 i wanted to add on too that the format for each of the calendar consent items has changed from when i started on the board a number of years ago in part because of a lot of the questions that we frequently ask as board members you know when you're looking at a a major item for approval you want to know how much of the budget it is have we worked with this contractor before have we had any cost overruns um why it you know did we have enough bidders on it if we didn't have enough bidders what was the reasoning do we feel like this is actually a competitive rate those were all the kinds of questions that i was frequently asking in those pre-meeting questions and staff ins in response to that said you know what we're going to put a temp template

40:02 together that just puts all of that information up front into the board document so even a lot of my pre-meeting questions have dropped off because those kinds of things are readily available in the board document to see before we even you know before we even need to to look at it and you know i really appreciate staff's response to that i think it's more transparent to the public i think it makes our meetings run more efficiently and if there are other questions you know we give them time to to really dig in to those really meaty questions ahead of time so you know i do take a little bit of an issue when you say that we're not involved in the the policy or we're only want to be on the policy side i'd be happy to talk with with you directly if you want to know my stance on how i you know how i operate with the board and the kind of

40:47 things that i care about um because i'll sit down with the constituent for an hour here and there as needed because i think that's the work that needs to be done when you represent a board and digging into these documents is something i think each and every one of us takes very seriously so you know we may not have that conversation here but that information is documented and i hope that you do understand that each and every one of us cares very much about the work that goes into this and staff takes cr great pride in what they do i mean you can tell is the 400 page document so you know i don't have any questions currently on the budget because i know we've hashed a lot of this out over the last few months and a lot of my questions have already been answered through that process so i am going to support the the work that's done here today and i don't take it lightly because this is this will be

41:32 only the second time in five years they've ever voted on a rate increase when in the past i've actually voted on a rate decrease so you know i this is this is a big step for us and it's a big step for me and it's not something that i take lightly but i do appreciate the work that staff have done especially over the last number of years to make sure that we are being efficient and we're you we're respectfully using the ratepayers dollars because i this is this is a big change and it is something that we've held off for what five out of the last six years at least that so um thank you to staff for all of your work on this i appreciate it and i'll turn it back over thank you sonya john borowski

42:21 thank you um so i do have a couple of questions and a comment um one of the questions would be to debra well first off i want to i want to state that i uh i want to thank deborah and adam for being able to sit down with me uh before last month's meeting and actually we had about an hour and a half dig into the into this proposed budget and i got a lot of the questions that i had about it answered at that point my first question is a process question because this will will be the first budget that i voted on as a commissioner um and so i'm just curious as to overall not in particular this budget but any budget as it goes is there a statutory time frame that we need to vote on this

43:07 and the reason i'm asking that is let's say you know we had one person giving public testimony but let's say that this was a contentious budget and there were 25 people that commented on it and we may have wanted to amend this budget is there a statutory time frame that this budget needs to be uh enacted by that's a good question and yes it is the end of this calendar year so 12 31. okay so in the future if if something like that happened we could make and and the commission felt that it was needed more time to digest it there you've left yourself time to do maybe a second meeting if if it was needed

43:54 looks like frank they're yes this is frank lawson uh commissioner borofsky there are a couple of options one of them is part of the reason that we have two public hearings one in november and one in december so i i would point out that it starts actually in november and if it was very contentious we would we would hope and we advertised for both of those if we did have to go to a special session for some reason we would need to do that uh sometime between now and the and the end of the year and that is a that is an option that is available to the board if needed okay thank you oh go go ahead deborah i just wanted to also add that um it's really important to

44:39 staff that they make sure that they highlight for you all so if there is any change between november and december that's highlighted and if there are significant changes since july when we first started talking about it so we do try and surface that as well if we find something that needs to be changed so um to to give more of a heads up even great and the reason i say that is just in in all my years of giving testimony and doing this you know a public hearing if i hear something from the public i want to make sure that there's an opportunity to implement what i hear from the public and so that's why i was asking the process question on this first first one um the second comment i want to make about this budget and uh this was made clear

45:24 to me um in the meetings that i had with adam and deborah is i'm concerned about the the sharp increases in the water in the out years especially 22 23 and what i what i hope is that we can look at that next spring when it comes out because the the higher rate increases are in the early years of the 10-year financial plan and if if we could do a little bit more smoothing on that i would like to at least dig into that at the appropriate time next spring and see if that's an option moving forward um and then lastly uh kind of like what sonia said i agree with this budget i i will be voting to approve this budget but it's not taken lightly that we're

46:10 increasing rates by 3.7 percent uh in these times uh everything everything is going up our costs are going up our wholesale cup prices are going up our cost of doing business is going up and i think we're seeing that around the board but it doesn't go past me the impact that this will have on our citizens and our ratepayers and so we do take this very seriously we want to at least speaking for myself i want to minimize as much as possible the rate impact on our on our customers but yet also be able to provide the product that they count on us for and so

46:56 with that i will be voting for the 3.7 increase i wish i it could have been less but i agree with where we're going and just know that we do take any time we have to increase the cost to our customers we we take that with a lot of heavy hearts thank you thank you commissioner brown um yeah i think i think a lot of good things have been said i too i'm going to support this budget but i provide caution to everybody about um we don't have anything in there on the outlying years for libra and that's the one that has in my last 15 or

47:41 14 years on this board uh concerns me the most and that's something that we're facing that's going to be substantial and we're not going to get away from and uh i don't i think it's it's revenue negative it's not you know it's not going to generate any revenue when we spend whatever amount of money we do spend uh and so i just want to keep that at the forefront of everybody's minds when we're making these rate increases that in the future um and correctly deborah and adam if i'm wrong but i don't think there's anything in the projections for the next couple years of uh for dealing with the leeber situation thank you all right um

48:26 i guess i'm last up and um just a couple things from me um i appreciate how thorough staff has been over these past several months where we've really dived into the budget um and so a lot of our questions have already been answered um piggybacking on commissioner brown's comments about lieberg i'm just curious if um perhaps in a future memo or something to the board you can talk you could just kind of inform us a little bit about when we make big changes like that that have huge impacts financial impacts on our budget how do you plan for that it's not really a question i'm looking to be answered now but i just have never had done anything like that before and

49:11 i'm curious financially how a organization like this plans for kind of an uncertain um path to follow so that was one thing and then the second thing um this isn't really part of the budget per se but i do know that um for some people this rate increase will have an impact on them and i know that we already have money set aside for assistance for people there's many avenues for that but i'm just wondering if you can maybe keep the board apprised in the first couple months of the year when people tend to take advantage of that um assistance just how that's going and if we're look getting more people requesting um funds than have in the past or if

49:56 we're getting bigger requests just so we can keep track of what are the effects on our limited income customers just so we can know that and yes go ahead frank uh yes president schlossberg um we we will make note certainly that um things like the customer care program and and the rate the burn rate on that i'll use that expression will be included in the quarterly metrics that we we provide um you know a bulk of that and it is um shaped um for the

50:41 the times of most need which tend to be in the winter months and the early spring months and so we do a certain degree of shaping with that and it's targeted to help a certain percentage of customers pay a certain percentage of their bills and so we will report back regularly on that and and the contingency planning that you talk about is part of our long-term financial plan process it's part of the reason that we look at 10 years i was going to ask deborah i believe there was some placeholder in there for for liberg in in its sort of immediacy it is it is not the long-term decommissioning um numbers for example if that was on the table but i believe that and i'll leave her to

51:28 actually confirm the number but there was um deborah you can maybe elaborate on that piece but um we we can talk about the contingency planning more as we go presidential expert uh thank you frank yes sorry i wasn't fast enough with my numbers and on the unmute uh we do have 20 million uh acknowledging though as franken said that's not a if decommissioning without the full amount but there is uh something in there to address more immediate needs great thank you um so do we need to vote is that how it goes

52:20 um you think we have to do each of them separately is that right i i think so yes all right move to approve resolution number two 11 18 2022 budgets second thanks all those in favor say aye aye all right resolution 2118 was unanimously approved moving on to resolution 2119 the electric prices move to approve second all those in favor say aye aye all right and lastly moving on to resolution number 2120 water prices

53:12 move to approved second all those in favor say aye aye was also unanimously approved all right i believe commissioners i i just wanted to say thank you to you all um i i i know that you've been digging into these numbers since this process started which is the the process and look forward to it again starting in about may um and so you don't get a very many months off uh before we start digging into the next one um but appreciate all of your time and then appreciate uh deborah and adam and alicia and van in particular for pulling all this together so thank you very much all right thank you everybody

53:59 thank you okay we are now on agenda item number 10 the 2022 state legislative agenda so jason huser is up good evening commissioners good to see you all again uh the 2022 session i'm expecting a light legislative agenda not only for e-web but also for the legislature um i think you probably all have gathered from the newspapers that that the last last two legislative sessions have had their share of friction and lack of alignment and i think as a result the the legislature is going into 2022

54:46 with a pretty small agenda that's probably a relief to me because i'm i'm right right now this very moment i think i'm tracking and participating in at least six or seven different rule makings uh for legislation from 2021 so i appreciate the breather also i think the one topic that might have been considered in 2022 eviction protections uh that probably will get handled in a special session later this month um given the the light policy uh agenda eweb will be focusing instead on potential funding opportunities that match eweb infrastructure needs

55:32 uh there's a couple different funding sources we'll be looking at the one would be the redeployment of unspent federal american rescue plan act dollars arpa that were allocated to oregon last year additionally we'll be taking a look at any funds that may be coming from the recently passed infrastructure and investment jobs act in congress the iiga and finally there's always the possibility that there may be some state general funds available the state revenue picture looks pretty good right now it's uh not 100 clear that our our efforts on funding will be totally ripe for example arpa and iaga those may be

56:20 decisions that might need to be made later this year after the legislative session i'm not sure if it's well known to you all but there is a state emergency board which is a legislative committee that has special authorities to spend money and allocate resources at any time of the year even when the legislature is not in session some of those decisions may end up falling to the emergency board or potentially even some future special special session in 2022 i i want to talk a little bit about the different revenue sources i just mentioned to you um first i i did mention arpa arpa was a true stimulus bill

57:08 for congress a stimulus bill by nature is meant to be awarded quickly it's a sprint to jump start the economy and as a result from moving so quickly there's knowledge that some arpa projects may not ever be completed either they turn out not to be consistent with u.s treasury guidance or there's other reasons the project proves not to be feasible those unspent funds could be redeployed in the future uh just wanted to note that water infrastructure is one of the approved uses of arpa dollars not electric again there's there's a rightness question here um i don't know how soon we would know of projects that are are

57:54 not going to prove feasible but it's always better to be ready and and be early rather than be late to the game so we'll we'll be seeing if there's any arbor dollars that line up with with e-web infrastructure projects moving forward to the iiga the infrastructure bill in contrast to arpa the stimulus bill the iiga is a true generational infrastructure bill which means it's a multiple year investment over a six or seven year period it's more of a long distance race the project i guess you could say instead of uh shovel ready it'll be focusing on shovel worthy projects and it uses existing federal and state programs wherever possible but there's

58:40 some instances where iiga will require new federal programs to be stood up through federal rulemaking and staffing uh exercises uh which probably will take several months to do that um that means uh there might be some early bird um iiga money that gets on the streets uh at maybe as early as uh q2 or q3 of 2022 but more likely uh the bulk of funds will start becoming available for allocation by the closer to the end of 2022 some funds will funded directly from the federal government agencies to recipients in other instances iiga will

59:25 use state agencies as sub grantees for example i know the grid hardening dollars um they was there there will be an allocation that the federal agencies make directly to recipients and there will be a separate pot of money uh specifically for states and i think also uh that's notable because although states typically receive these iiga funds by a formula uh i think there will be a special supplement that will be made available to western states due to the regional nature of heavy wildfire risk in the west we don't totally know what the state legislative role will be on iiga it's

1:00:10 possible the state agencies will ultimately make a lot of the decisions but we know there will be some oversight rule or so some oversight role for the legislature uh just off the top of my head i know that there are expenditure limitations which are essentially permission to spend money that will need to be adjusted for state budgets for each of the agencies and that's something that's approved by the by the legislature any additional federal funds that are spent by those agencies um as for eweb's process uh we uh our our analysis is still ongoing we're still learning it's a very very long bill and not easy to get your arms around a couple of highlights to share with you this evening are the following um there is the

1:00:55 dedicated funding to electric system hardening and undergrounding there's funding for drinking water infrastructure we're still determining how much of that is in the form of loan versus grant and to what extent eligibility criteria for grants might be relaxed in the future that would make more communities eligible for for grant as opposed to traditional financing where there's also funding for transmission upgrades i don't know the e-web will directly avail ourselves to that but a more modernized and interconnected regional grid will certainly have an indirect benefit to e-web there's going to be funding available for ev charging grants the emphasis will be on highways and

1:01:40 transportation corridors but there certainly will be some funds available within cities for charging at workplaces and there's also a great amount of money uh for ecosystem restoration i don't know that how i don't know the e-web would be a recipient of that or even private entities most of that funding most likely will go to ecosystem restoration on federal or state lands but there could be a lot of upside for water source protection and i'm sure carl uh will be excited to to dig into the details with me on that and finally i did want to note there were provisions in the iiga that um could be quite helpful to uh future renegotiation

1:02:25 of a more equitable columba columbia river treaty with canada that would be good for northwest ratepayers including eweb customers and finally uh the bonneville power administration did get expanded borrowing authority uh through the infrastructure bill so that's regionally noteworthy uh finally the third category of funds uh just general funds from the the state budget or lottery dollars those are totally fungible they can be used for any purpose they're also the most highly competitive dollars so the chance of success could be lower for general fund dollars going towards the web projects but uh i certainly included on the list here hi um as far as the eweb process on

1:03:11 uh identifying projects i go like this uh staff have been in in one instance i know i read the bill uh i'm still digesting parts of it and i went through a lot of black tea in doing so it's been more helpful to use the many executive seminaries that are out there from various uh trade associations the eweb is a member of many of those associations also uh they they have national headquarters in washington dc and of course staff there and they have been um preparing and making available webinars for um electrical water utilities i was just on one this morning with the northwest public power association i'm going to be on another one tomorrow with van ness feldman

1:03:56 a federal lobbying firm so we're getting our radar up we're doing our homework and there are eweb staff meetings this month with a combination of water electric and finance staff uh we'll be going through a process where we match eweb projects that we see being aligned with specific funding opportunity goals we'll be developing project narratives that are engaging gathering any data that would support measurable outcomes of uweb projects building relationships with state and federal program managers some of these some of these programs are going to be unique in that they're not necessarily traditional grant programs where you have no contact with the people making the decisions

1:04:41 they're going to be programs where you're going to have an opportunity to advocate for your project and speak directly with the people making decisions about project awards and finally we'll be identifying and contacting any supportive community partners that can help support our effort to find some of these federal funds and bring them towards local projects that will benefit our community and e-web ratepayers so that's uh that's the lay of the land and i'd be happy to take any questions um and after that uh we'll have a resolution uh that will adopt uh that upholds our traditional e-web principles for each legislative session

1:05:31 i just wanted to thank jason uh back in november right around the same time when we had the tour and the race to stay warm right smack dab in the middle of that i think there were a couple of um i think mindy and john brown and frank were all out and so i was offered the opportunity to go and speak on eweb's behalf with um senator wyden and congressman defazio and i really appreciated jason's uh help with talking points and you know getting up to speed there and making sure that uh hit all the points so uh thank you for that that was around the infrastructure and investment jobs act and it was really interesting to find out you know a bit more about that work and how it pertains to eweb and what we're going to be able to do you know with that so i'm i'm very supportive of you know the agenda that jason has outlined and i appreciate the

1:06:17 the work that you do every day to make sure that the rules are made correctly and that that we um we get the information that we need and i do hope that this upcoming legislative session is a more common one i think we all need that thanks john brosky or mem matt i saw your hand up so we'll go matt then john broski then john brown great thanks mindy uh jason would you be willing to send us your favorite executive summary of the iija i said there are several of them if there's one you feel like this i do have a new one that this came out um i have been going off of uh senator

1:07:03 maria cantwell from washington uh her and her staff put together the best one i saw right out the gate but um i just uh i saw a really good one from uh the northwest public power association and i'd be happy to uh supply that to the the general manager to disseminate to you all that'd be great thank you very much my other question is um have we hired or given that this as you said is a generational investment and this is a right something like this coming along every 20 or 30 years uh we don't want to miss any of the opportunity here have we hired or do we plan to hire additional staff to apply for and manage these um the funds that are headed our

1:07:49 direction i can't answer that but i i i know frank's here do you want to tackle that frank if not i think i know the answer well i know the answer too but i know deborah just popped on because she is the one who's actually doing it so commissioner mcrae very great question and deborah take it away so after all of that yes we did hire uh we hired a grant um specialist and she started i'm gonna say a month ago she's making connections around the utility within the community and i believe that jason referenced a working group that is collaborating to make sure that we're um ready to pursue

1:08:34 any and all opportunities that look promising for us great thanks and we have enough bandwidth in our finance team to manage all the dollars thank you um good to hear i'm glad we're ready for it yeah and thanks for your work jason thank you all thank you all for the support and i i will just add that um i i do know that um on i think our first internal staff meeting on to go over the bill is friday and we're certainly going to be talking about workload and how do we make sure we we have an ongoing process to make this smooth and that we're turning over every rock possible and all the work gets done in a an orderly way so we'll be talking not only about uh

1:09:20 the bill and what's in it but uh how we're gonna plan to do our work uh to respond as effectively as possible and i've met uh our new grant writing uh staff person tegan de bolt and uh look forward to collaborating with her i think my work and her work will be very complimentary of each other and obviously there's many other hands they're going to be uh involved in this and i'm sorry i don't know if there's an opportunity for me to say this i i just wanted to uh again thank commissioner carlson for uh appearing at the event with congressman defazio and senator wyden to celebrate the infrastructure bill and its passage it's a historic achievement and it would not have been possible without congressman defazio he has been a tireless champion for

1:10:06 infrastructure spending i remember him talking about how overdue we were for infrastructure investment back this is back in the early 2000s i mean it was a long time coming but he got it across the finish line and i it's uh we're going to miss him when that day comes and i think it would be fantastic if the board would consider uh sending a letter of congratulations and gratitude for this historic achievement to congressman defazio and i'd be happy to volunteer to prepare our first draft a great idea agreed yeah okay john borowski

1:10:53 thanks for the update jason um a couple of questions um i'm on board with everything that you said as far as as looking at funding one of my questions is though have we also approached the local government agencies in regard to arpa um you know the county got a fair amount of money the city got a fair amount of money i know it's small in comparison to what was allocated to the state however i know that the the city is spending 17 million dollars this year or not spending it but receive 17 million dollars this year and we'll get another 17 million dollars next year the county got more than that um and i just i would

1:11:38 i would like to be able to know that we're going to them and letting them know that eweb does have needs that may fit their goals as well you know i'm thinking specifically we just voted for a rate increase you know so maybe we could approach the city and say is some of your funding that you're not using eligible to help with low-income rate assistance those types of things more at the local level so i just i don't want those buckets to be overlooked just because we're looking at the state in the federal budget commissioner it's a great question and we have actually talked to the city uh once at least once before

1:12:23 um uh very recently about this exact thing and uh we are i'm sure i know that we're gonna be getting together with city staff again soon to update them on some of the projects that we would have available um that would be arpa compliant and we will absolutely put our stuff on the table uh for their consideration great and and with that in mind um you know you talked about infrastructure hardening um and i know a project that that commissioner defazio or congressman defazio uh championed and and got in as a line item was the redesign of franklin boulevard um you know as somebody who's been following that project for about the last 15 years

1:13:09 uh i know that overhead uh overhead utilities in that in that sector are something that are problematic for uh our uh pedestrian and bicycle type of infrastructure so if that could be thrown out there as well as you know make sure when you're designing this that you bring us to the fold and see if if some of this money for hardening could be implemented that would be wonderful again working with all partners is something that i i encourage all along but thank you and i will be voting to give you the thumbs up thank you john brown yeah jason thanks again for another great report and uh your support for

1:13:56 e-web over the years and things such as that i kind of want to follow on uh what uh john borowski said about having our partners deal with some things as you know when we raise rates it's a financial windfall from the city uh because they get a percentage of what utility rates are and the fact that we're paying twice as much as the intended legislation was uh was intended for i mean the original ordinance was three percent and we're paying six and they're gonna get a lot more money because of you look at the rate trajectories we're going and i would hope that we could encourage them to leverage that money in some of the uh achieving some of their climate recovery goals and things such as that because uh right now i think it's just used for general fund so hopefully we can uh we

1:14:41 can have that conversation as well um i want to echo that i feel like i've sat in on so many of these leadership meetings with the city and one of the things that comes up often about uh climate action plan is just there's not the budget for a lot of these projects or we talk about potential projects that we could do with the city and the funding is always an issue so i know this isn't like the big legislative agenda but i do see an opportunity especially once we do raise rates and more of that revenue goes to the city that maybe we push a little bit more for some of the things that perhaps they're putting on our laps to do that we do jointly and some of the

1:15:26 funding for it comes from that increased rate the increased revenue that they get from our rate increase otherwise i think the legislative agenda looks great well thank you all for the input commissioners and i certainly pledge to work with the general manager and my e-web colleagues to uh take take that to the city and find out what we can do uh cooperatively okay so i think maybe we're looking for a motion for resolution number 2117 the 2022 state legislative agenda move to approve

1:16:20 that was unanimously approved i hope that it is a calmer year for you jason thank you thanks jason yeah thanks for all your hard work all right a question we are now at our break time but we are running pretty early and i'm wondering if people want to push people want to go to our next um agenda item which is the climate change policy it's about 30 minutes do you want to just continue and then take our break afterwards or do you want to take our five minute break now i guess raise your hand if you want to take our break now okay then we will take our five minute break now and we'll just say that we will let's give us

1:17:06 a little longer than that you can give us a little longer i think and if it's okay yeah that's good okay we'll see you all back shortly

1:24:04 like everyone's gonna wait to the last 10 seconds to come back let's i think we are okay we are now on agenda item number 12 board policy uh our climate change policy and so frank that is you great thank you president schlossberg again good evening commissioners for the audio record this is frank lawson

1:24:50 general manager i'll go ahead with the next slide please this is a follow-up meeting from an initial discussion that we all had last month regarding potential changes that the board wished to review regarding board policy sd-15 which is eweb's climate change policy and you did receive a backgrounder with a number of pieces of information in it as well as some proposed changes to the policy based on the discussion last month but i'd like to go through some of those at this point just as a review with the board next slide please

1:25:35 just as a quick reminder this policy which originates back in 2007 this is really the first major upgrade and revision to the policy there are a number of places where this policies ties to our strategic plan both in the immediate sort of phases that we're in now as well as setting really the objective targets to maintain this is one of our core values going forward and so it does tie to the strategic plan in a number of areas as well as operations go ahead with the next slide

1:26:20 based on the conversation last month there were a few takeaways that i wanted to reiterate with the board at least my interpretation of what some of those takeaways were from a primary directive standpoint and the primary directives had to do with the sort of major focus areas of the policy uh having to do for example with power generation uh eweb's own operations for example how we help customers to decarbonize there were five different areas and i'll get to those more specifically in the next slide but there was general alignment across the members of the board that they felt pretty comfortable with the categories of which those primary directives fell i think from a uh

1:27:05 the actual statement of metrics or goals there was um some different differences of opinion of uh with the board as to what level of precision to include in the policy versus other places i tried to navigate through that um in the proposals that were included this month to set some broad targets going forward but also to recognize that some of the details fall out in how those get implemented and within the primary directives i tried to provide those linkages as to where those can can be more precise as well one of the other things that was mentioned was that location should be a consideration when looking at

1:27:52 the future of our generating resources specifically this i didn't include specifically in the policy language i do believe it's a consideration that would be one of the sort of tangible areas of evaluation when we're looking at the the design or the ultimate criteria inside of the integrated resource plan so you won't see that one specifically called out for in sd15 although it will be an important thing to be included in the integrated resource plan itself the last one which was included in in really the implementation language of the the revision had to do with equity

1:28:37 equity is something that the board actually does not have a separate policy on diversity equity and inclusion typically i might want to refer something specific like a climate change policy to a general equity policy since we don't have that it's referred to just generically and i do believe that when we tee up the board policy review in general uh next month in january that if if the board doesn't recommend it i think management will recommend that we look at developing a board level diversity equity and inclusion policy and so that's not necessarily directly

1:29:24 included in sd15 other than an implementation reference go ahead with the next slide please so um looking at some of the the revisions that were included in the proposed language to the board under the the power generation category we tried to provide really two things one was to set a target for kind of where we are now and where we're going relative to uh i won't call it a carbon intensity directly but the amount of resource used that's carbon free you right now believing that we're around 90 percent that does change year

1:30:11 by year so the the language that we put in the sd15 policy languages is rather important to us from a how you decide how to measure that but also added the link in there that a number of things such as your targets around certain resources your measurables your milestones as well as your ability to set limits on customer impacts which you might call your off-ramps or your your criteria around achieving you know what what can you what are the limits to achieving going from 90 to 95 for example much of that would be set within the design criteria that you call out in the

1:30:56 integrated resource plan so i tried to to make that a little stronger linkage in the language as well as provide a target for to to shoot for over the next 10 years which is probably pretty significant given we have a number of resource decisions to make in that period several of the other categories i i tried to link in where some of the measures came from as well as where some of the implementation sort of comes in and out for example looking at the fact that you just had a discussion with jason around setting the agenda for next year relative to

1:31:42 measures and in many cases in past years those have been uh related to climate change and so i i wanted to make sure that we had some of these areas that of of implementation called out um operations uh is an area where tried to codify the work that was done basically a decade ago a little over a decade ago relative to reduction of emissions from our own operations which was set at 25 by 2020 those are those are below 2009 levels and then 50 percent by 2030 you'll notice also in the correspondence items that came with the board packet that were presently at 37

1:32:28 below 2009 levels in our carbon emissions reporting which which is a separate item on tonight's agenda customer decarbonization also tried to look at a number of these factors from an implementation perspective also remove the term smart from from from that category we have we have never defined smart and so it didn't feel appropriate to include that without a definition although when we look at conservation energy efficiency demand response a number of these different pieces do come together they are considered resources they're considered customer

1:33:14 side resources which is again uh probably most targeted and most implemented through the the integrated resource planning process but felt it was an important part of what we do which is to help customers to conserve and be more efficient and then finally added a number of different links to implementation that we're looking at relative to resiliency and risk to eweb and our planning process which includes a number of things like wildfire planning for example so i made a number of different references there uh next slide please the the final area that we uh added to the sd15 we we in essence gutted the

1:33:59 last section um and turned it into an implementation guidance section this is where we we look and make sure that we're looking at major decisions from a triple bottom line perspective and this is where we added and made reference to the equity desires of the board that were expressed last month we also um wanted to make sure there was a strong connection to the annual goals that's actually one of the things that we'll talk about next in this meeting is the annual goals that are consistent with other board policies and that certain milestones and metrics can be when appropriate annualized and not just looked at from a longer term perspective

1:34:44 and then also identifying the frequency of reporting which right now by default is quarterly but it could be uh changed um if uh the board felt that was appropriate and then finally reiterating the importance of at least annually making sure that we continue to compile and report emissions reductions and and our basically our carbon inventory if you will across the organization which can be used to and much of that is tracked and published because um this time of year be for the previous year much of that because we we have to wait to get bonneville's numbers uh until later in the year but we do

1:35:29 feel it's important to maintain that that degree of transparency uh with both the board and the public and so we we added a section um specifically around some of the criteria that we heard around implementation and the importance of of implementation next slide please so for tonight's meeting i tried to take what i heard last month and and bring back work with staff and and bring back some changes to the policy that that we felt represented what we heard last month there's a couple of options going forward um we can and and tonight's meeting

1:36:14 again is around the deliberating and providing further guidance if needed um there's two potential paths forward one if there's really just minor revisions that the board feels are appropriate at this point we could bring this back as a consent approval item next month that would typically be via resolution because any any time you change a board policy that typically requires a resolution um and but that could be done with the consent item um in january or if the board feels that it's worth further deliberation and discussion um that the gaps are widened up either between individual commissioners or between what

1:36:59 was proposed or presented and and where you'd like to take it then we could schedule additional time for further discussion in in january um but we took what we thought we heard and we provided um you both a clean copy of a new sd15 um given that the the track changes on the old one was probably going to to um to be very messy um and so both were provided um for as part of the backgrounder and i would be happy to entertain questions or really at this point listen to the board um and your conversation around is this uh hit the mark

1:37:44 or not so with that uh president schlossberg i will turn it back to you for further discussion great thank you thank you is there anybody that wants to start off with some start off with questions or comments first anybody have any questions or comments sonia trying to to not jump in there first that's okay um yeah i really appreciate all the work around this i i like the categories i really appreciate the inclusion of the equity the one question i have is on the on the levels the of reduction specifically in the operations category i think i know the

1:38:29 answer to this but i just want to double check um because it's around it's it's targeted on 2009 levels whereas i know you know some of the other kind of groups like the city of eugene theirs is based on 1990 levels is that because that's when we have our base line data and so going back to 2000 or 1990 would be kind of a stretch to say oh well this is what our levels were in 1990 or or is there some of the reason that we chose that that level so there's there's a couple of reasons that we chose that level that we had data back to to that starting in 2010 basically and so are starting 2009 so that made sense to us

1:39:16 i do believe that the climate action plan from the city of eugene uses 2010 as its baseline which is probably again for for data gathering type of purposes um you're right though commissioner carlson there are a number of different i'll say broad goals that go back to the 80 below 1990 levels and that has to do with the original kyoto accords that go back into the early 90s and so um and that's that's a broader standard that i think a number of organizations use and then they try to translate that into well what does that mean that we can actually get data for so um that's that's the reason that we

1:40:01 chose 2009 as as our baseline to to begin with i'm i'm more concerned that it aligns kind of locally as we're trying to coordinate our reduction efforts and then we make sure that whatever we're reducing is you know in line to i mean we only have a certain portion that we're responsible for of the world and so i recognize that you know there's there's a limit there but i do appreciate that the numbers in there and the plan um i also really appreciated the um the ramping up of levels and the power generation side too even though we are very clean just continuing to focus on that and make sure that we're not um you know changing that mix and

1:40:46 i just it's so important to have that as a metric that we're tracking and something that we're looking at and reporting on so that we pay attention to it and all the decisions that we make as well so um thank you for the for the work on this those were my couple of comments i do i don't think personally that there you know would be i would be willing to support it tonight or not tonight but you know in our next um meeting when we have the resolution but if others have concerns they're more than willing to to push it off to make sure that you know the board itself and all the people in it are um are comfortable with it so i'm fine either way and i look forward to hearing others uh responses thank you uh commissioner carlson i i would say that that going from 90 to 95

1:41:33 is is not easy but it is certainly achievable um i think where we really start to see major impacts to to other arenas is when you start going from 95 percent to a hundred at least that's what most of our data um starts to show is that um and and i will i will tell you within the past five years um there have been a year there was a 2019 in particular where we were below 90 um and it was because um hydro conditions we had planned on leeberg being in full service that year we also took carmen smith offline for some work and so hydro conditions do

1:42:19 impact that 90 percent on a year on year basis that's part of why we i think the wording in there set on a planning basis but that that doesn't mean that um we we can't handle contingencies so i don't want people to think that 95 is not achievable i think it is um i also think it's going to take a conscious effort to get there which i think is one of the purposes of having a target so um and then there are contingencies it that i think the board needs to be able to to weigh into um relative to the impact on other things like reliability or affordability or some of those things and so there's

1:43:04 some contingencies built in there but those would be very intentional that the board would review as as we pursue it all right anybody else want to jump in the queue sure i'll jump in um yeah thank you for the work on this um i did have one small question and it's in the markup uh document that we got and it's under the power generation uh section about halfway down the word safety and reliability are crossed out of a sentence that used to

1:43:51 be there and i'm just anytime that safety and reliability gets crossed out it concerns me i'm sure that it's being covered someplace else in the document but if you can just speak to why you felt it was uh important to take those out of that section uh in the power generation thing that would be one of my questions yes uh thanks commissioner barofsky the contingent there are still contingencies mentioned around the pursuit of going from 90 to 95 percent i think it mentions that uh within criteria that can be set up um and i believe the very next sentence talks about the use of the the integrated resource plan is where you where you

1:44:36 specify that i didn't actually believe that it was important to have a roster of that criteria in the policy you could have also added affordability reliability safety i mean you could have really gone through this and just listed it out it wasn't to remove the contingency it was just trying to link that contingency to um to the actual implementation which takes place elsewhere i think you'll also notice a couple times we just referred to emissions and not carbon emissions that was another change recognizing that not all greenhouse gases are directly related to a carbon dioxide for example but so for example yes we have used a lot of sf6 in in some

1:45:23 of our equipment which is which is 23 000 times more potent than co2 so there were a few changes like that but it was it was not to diminish the importance it just simply made reference elsewhere to it okay um and then again this is just me looking at things and and wondering why or what if we need to add add more to it in the first section you know you say that greenhouse gas emissions from human activity uh and it talks about that the anus anis energy industry agricultural transportation sectors generally identified as the primary sources for me i would also add possibly the construction i mean transportation

1:46:10 and i'm specifically talking about concrete the use of concrete is a major emission emitter of co2 i think it's seven percent of the the world's emission of co2 and that's could be covered in transportation but it's also the building sector so i don't know if we want to add that that as a major contributor you know when you talk seven percent globally that that to me is is a major contributor and then lastly uh in in summing up i'm i'm in forward of moving this forward i think it's important enough to have a standalone action item not just a consent calendar i would like the resolution to be part of the agenda not just a consent calendar so that we can stand up and say

1:46:55 this is what we're doing as far as our board policy on on climate action rather than just approving it in the consent calendar if it wasn't the consent calendar i would pull it and bring attention to it i think it's that it's that important that we stand up and and say what we're in in favor of um and so with that i would say thank you for the hard work and oh one last thing is um i think that it would also be good when we're doing this major of a renovation to a policy to have a check back on it possibly in a year and and see if it's capturing what we want it to do so that when we make the resolution we say let's let's look at this again next year in december and

1:47:40 make sure it's doing what we wanted to do and see if there's any additions or changes that we want to have happen thank you commissioner barofsky just one follow-up question to that um we would typically have scheduled a board policy review in december for all of the board policies would that suffice or would you would you want a separate item when we do make a change that's fairly major separate agenda item for that i think i think it could be rolled into that board policy thing but maybe give a little bit stronger emphasis to it since it's it's an uh new newer revised policy great thank you and i don't believe there would be any issue with adding construction

1:48:25 to the the list of major contributors and also um adding this as an agenda item in january don't see i think that's appropriate all right matt do you have any comments or questions me and the mute button we're having a fight all right i think i won um thank you thanks for the opportunity thanks for the revisions uh frank and i appreciate and agree with commissioner barack's uh thoughts about process in terms of adopting

1:49:13 this particular policy and making sure that and coming back to revisit and make sure it's doing what we wanted to do um thank you for those suggestions john um frank i again i'm grateful for your work on this i feel like it's moving the direction the right direction um i appreciate the link between the board policy and the location of related targets that don't necessarily need to be in this particular policy i appreciate you speaking to the location question uh right at the at the front of the presentation because that's a question that i think is important for us to continue to discuss through the irp and i do feel strongly that we need a separate equity policy so um

1:49:59 i guess at some point here i would move that we uh take steps to put that in place and frank i don't know if you want to draft something or you want the board to work on something you'd guide us on how to start that but i feel we we do want to get that ball rolling so thank you um a couple of specifics to confirm our current level of carbon-free electricity is 90 it hovers right around there is that right it hovers right around 90 if if you think about um kind of that that average of if if i were to put it in carbon intensity the the 0.025 to 0.05 kind of range so it is it is

1:50:46 typically but around a little better than 90 percent um it certainly is not consistently at 95 but it hovers right around there right and i think uh you know stating these like on an annual basis i think as you have is the right way for us to like we don't can't keep that exactly some rate over the course of a year it's just the average over a year so um and i think aiming for 95 by 2030 is a good target um would we all love to see a 100 sure uh i think moving to 95 over the next eight years nine years is a solid move and gets us absolutely in in line with a reasonable target um i do think for for readers of this policy it would

1:51:33 be useful for us to define carbon free um and i'm not sure how you think about it frank but in terms of you know is it just a list of the specific resources that we categorize is carbon free or is it actually the carbon intensity and then if it is the carbon intensity this super wonky language to put into a policy but maybe we want to at least put a footnote of like this is what we mean by carbon free i think that would be valuable um i noted that where you uh struck out the word carbon emissions uh and i agree that carbon emissions may be too limiting i would propose that we say greenhouse gas emissions so that we're capturing the whole thing

1:52:18 the trouble in my experience is that if we just say emissions it can get ex construed to all kinds of different emissions that have nothing to do with greenhouse gases and so we are off away from the climate change that we're focused on in this particular policy uh i have two proposals and and i'm curious whether the board would be on this um it feels to me like this would be an appropriate place for us to state our desire for all new e-web buildings to run on electricity that we that we don't design buildings that would run on natural gas for example um i know that's it you know i think it's

1:53:03 consistent with what we have here it's a slight departure from what's what's already in here so i'd be interested in whether you all feel like that's appropriate uh and if not maybe there's another way for us to provide that uh statement of that desire if the rest of the board feels that that's a useful goal for us to establish and then commissioner borofsky brought up embodied emissions particularly in concrete and i do think it will be valuable for us to make sure we're including those within our greenhouse gas inventory of internal operations so that we're to the extent possible

1:53:48 where where eweb is purchasing concrete or steel or high-intensity products that were we're reporting that as well um i have a couple other questions but i'll i'll leave them for later they're not pressing thanks all right john brown are you still you still on i'm still here thank you a little later than you but i'm still here uh thank you and i agree with most everything that's been said i do have a question frank about you know we're at 90 plus or minus uh wavering to 95 it's kind of like stating and safety you know we get we get up there we get to that last five percent and it just costs way too much

1:54:33 and so when we have that measure of cost of achieving uh 100 i know that it's it's very challenging that aside uh where does nuclear stand in this conversation about renewable versus carbon-free because that's part of the portfolio that bonneville has so um commissioner brown generally speaking you touched on a good point about definitions i i would say nuclear is in general classified as carbon-free most states do not consider it renewable so it it's not considered renewable but it is considered carbon-free there are new developments taking place [Music]

1:55:18 regarding small modular reactors um an organization called new scale for example which is out of oregon state from oregon state so those are probably in the 2030 kind of time frame based on where they are in their regulatory licensing as far as any kind of option and right now it's about seven percent i believe of bonneville's portfolio is the columbia generating station it's somewhere in that range i don't know if that's the specific number okay and then a question about the concrete i understand the desire to get that in the conversation but also understand

1:56:03 that if that's just limited to us because i i look for examples in the marketplace when ltd is building mx and brt all of those routes have to be concrete because electric buses are so heavy they can't be accommodated and that's the more concrete's been forward to accommodate that alternative transportation than any any other construction projects all the other construction projects combined based upon some of the information i've had um well that i mean that effect because i know that we went through that conversation when we built the rock uh the initial plan was to have a concrete parking lot because it had a 30-year life versus our asphalt that now has a 15-year life and it was a cost issue because we had to cut 30

1:56:48 million dollars off of it um are we gonna run the risk of getting into a place where we're not talking about financial feasibility about what we're doing so i would actually classify the question a little bit differently commissioner brown i i do believe that when we're making major decisions including those related to our own operations we do need to use the triple bottom line approach and and look at the balance between the social economic and environment that's that's to include things like the impacts of construction both financially as well as environmentally so i think that's got to

1:57:34 be an important part of those major decisions and i'm not sure that i would well i it is captured actually in the climate change policy but i think it may be captured elsewhere as well regarding the the use of the triple bottom line approach so i think that that's covered under that particular implementation paragraph i do hesitate a little bit when we start getting into and i can't remember the class distinctions but there's a number of different class distinctions around trying to track things that are market-based versus what you influence yourself and and we we tried to and i think this probably predates me at eweb i think that's probably why the

1:58:20 operational targets were set based on carbon reduction and not based on specific activities or classes and and did not include those sort of class 3 or class 4 kinds of emissions um or market based sort of emissions um or i guess i could say consumer based emissions so that's i mean we can we can track that probably project by project i'm not sure that we have the bandwidth to track all of the concrete we use for example on on all of our projects so i um i'll have to explore that particular piece a little further well i've more particularly just for an example uh um lieberg what we have to do to bring that to the

1:59:06 million year standard i'm pretty sure we're not going to do it with construction materials that i understand other than concrete and i don't want to make sure that we're consistent with what we're doing that we're not boxing ourselves in that we're in a catch 22 there so just food for thought so thank you i appreciate it i'm going to support it as revised and i appreciate all the hard work that you and staff have done to get us where we are thank you um i really appreciate this frank i find it i find this version to be very readable and easy to understand i also appreciate you giving us the markup version too so we can see what it was before um i think that it is clear

1:59:51 it makes it clear for us in a year or what you six months or a year when we come back and look at how we're doing that um kind of the different buckets that you've put everything in um makes it easy to tease out that information so i support adopting this with the changes and tweaks that other board members have um suggested and also i like john browski's suggestion that this be kind of a standalone thing that we adopt at our next board meeting and not just package it in with the consent calendar because i think it's pretty important and it sounds like everybody is supportive of it and so i think it's important for us to

2:00:36 publicly take a stand and saying these are the values that we support and that we want to see in the agency um and i see some more hands and that matt you had said you would also had some more questions so is it okay with everyone if we just do a second go around for those who want okay i'm going to start with um john brofsky and then matt and if sonia or john have anything else you can chime into thanks mindy um yeah i just wanted to make make clear that when i when i was talking about the concrete that was in the first line and it it it basically said that these are the areas that uh contribute to the major

2:01:22 contributors to green out gases throughout the whole economy you know it's agriculture it's industry it's transportation and i just wanted to call out construction as part of that i in no means meant that we should be tracking our concrete and the emissions that are there i just wanted it in the board policy that we recognize that there are factors that are within our control and there are factors that are not within our control um you know to a certain extent we can look at concrete and and do the triple bottom line on those on certain instances but it was my by no means me my intention to have that be part of the policy it was just another fact major factor in the greenhouse gases

2:02:07 that the the world produces so that was my attention i just wanted to make that clear thank you yeah thank you commissioner barofsky i i probably interpolated something a little bit too much um because i took some of uh commissioner mccrae's comments around supply chain and your comments around construction and i sort of mind melded those two together i i will note that um andrew janos from our environmental department did point out that we we tracked supply chain emissions from 2009 to 2014 the the big challenge in that is that many of your supply chain ghgs

2:02:52 are estimates and they do vary quite a bit um and so that that does become difficult to track but the point is taken that when we do have major projects or major decisions that the triple bottom line where we're looking at environmental impacts is an important thing to to consider in those decisions and so that's i believe an important aspect that this should call out all right matt thanks mindy um yeah you don't have to take the blame for that frank that was me directly making comments about concrete and the value of tracking it um so uh i will dive in to concrete very

2:03:38 briefly because it is such a substantial source of emissions and eweb does buy a lot of it um i'm not suggesting we stop using concrete it's very valuable i just from my perspective it would be valuable in our internal greenhouse gas inventory to like track the top five uh items that have the greatest greenhouse gas intensity and we already do that with um with refrigerants right those are at the top of the list but if we tracked concrete and steel that probably captured the other two well and then chlorine right we have other chemicals that we use that are high emissions or how high of emissions potential um it's just from my perspective if we can track those things that have high greenhouse gas intensity and report them not that

2:04:24 we necessarily have to do anything about them but just tracking them puts it on our radar and helps us think about um you know how much of that we're buying the other thing is that there are low carbon concrete mixes that are not sci-fi they're available today they sometimes take a couple days longer to cure but they have higher strength when they're cured and so but there has to be demand for those in order for that to start to get used regularly and because we do have uh demand i think we're we're one of those entities that could kind of push the market towards lower carbon concrete so um i'll i'll stop on the concrete piece but i do feel like it's valuable for us to pay attention to those scope 3 emissions um and to the

2:05:09 extent that other board members are supportive of us tracking that i think that would be super valuable uh the other question i had i think is about operation emissions uh the languages in here is that we're planning to reduce our net emissions from operations by 25 50 et cetera um i'm curious how we're thinking about net emissions are there um are there carbon sinks or other um offsets that we would uh count in there as a part of the the net total i think the the term the term net commissioner mcrae opens up the possibility that we could um if if we got to that point i think in

2:05:55 particular when you start looking at uh net carbon neutral in 2050 i i think that starts to become um part of the tool bag i don't believe that we actually do that presently um i believe that most of our reductions so far have been direct reductions so we we have not but the the term net was put in there specifically to to open that possibility if needed okay thanks it looks like adam jumped on there might have something to add my bad i was just sorry i was looking for a lineup of of of boxes the ever-changing boxes on my window uh that's all that i had i am curious if there's a

2:06:41 support among other commissioners around new construction and new eu buildings but that's also a conversation that we can have at a next meeting i don't feel like we have to push that into today so thanks for the time uh commissioner mccree when just just a follow-up on that particular particular item um is you know i i actually kind of view that as um something that would fall under the the operations reduction category um that you know we're we're moving from from whatever we were in 2009 to 25 to 50 to eventually carbon neutral and that sort of the goal by itself would

2:07:28 lend or push the organization towards decisions like that that's that's kind of how i view some of those particular issues as opposed to i i would almost view what you described as a tactic falling within those those carbon goals but i um it's still a valid question for the board and i'm not i'm not trying to uh to um to discourage that i just view that as part of part of that goal so i agree and i'm going to bring out an example that i think makes the point that it could be valuable uh that i think we had these goals on the record in 2010 right ish we web had these goals on on the books when we built the rock and i my

2:08:13 understanding is that the rock uses natural gas for heating right so it you know even though we had clear objectives around reducing operational emissions we still built this super long um long-lived building using natural gas so um suggesting that maybe it's not as clear as it could be or that additional board um uh direction there might be valuable yeah i think that's the issue with with with that and i i think it's it's you know pointing out that we use natural gas at both headquarters and and the rock is is an appropriate thing to point out i the the designing of the rock was well before the the adoption of this policy in 2010 so that was being

2:08:59 designed in 2007 2008 so it was there was there was a misalignment of of timing there and i i would hope that that um this being policy and talking about reductions of operations would would have a different effect today than it it uh it did back then yeah fair point thanks frank all right sonya are you racing you're thinking about raising your hand uh i i just wanted to kind of build on that i i mean i i do think it would be valuable to call that out even as a separate category although i did kind of toy with it with the

2:09:44 construction piece being under operations just because it is such a big part of what we do and you know to ensure that it is seen you know it's a separate category that does really have a big impact now i i guess we need to define you know what what kinds of building and and to what level we would track that because you know just does uh concrete refill in uh um you know in a roadway does that count or is it just major building you know building work that we're doing what if we're just doing repairs i don't know it starts getting into the weeds for me so i think i i would almost like to sit on that one for a little bit and think about kind of

2:10:29 what the the implications would be but i do agree that maybe you know having a different category that calls it out at least for very major projects um would be valuable to have that as a a policy statement this is what we support as a board um and i'd look to you know frank and others for where the the lines are drawn there um as far as the the adding the you know the concrete or the the building portion up in the kind of list of industries i mean for me that you know that's fine that works for me if you want if we want to go that path um i'm also okay if we don't have all of those in there i don't think it really adds anything to the policy

2:11:14 um other than you know because we need to focus on what we're doing um and then i do really like i really appreciate the idea of having this pulled back out as its own separate item during the next meeting to discuss so that's my quick feedback thanks yeah commissioners on the scope i'll call them the scope three those are the um the use of sort of the supply chain um i'll i will get with staff to try to understand that a little bit better as as much as you might think we use a lot of concrete i'm not sure that we use a lot of concrete um you know there's um there there may be some relative to

2:12:01 foundations in substation but or or some street repairs or things like that i'm i'm not i'm struggling to see short of sort of building a hydro facility um where we actually i mean we i'll i'll get my staff to try to understand that that uh baseline a little bit more um you know just just to give just to get some kind of scope to it um my my comments on on commissioner mcrae's um pulling of the board regarding buildings i took that as e-web buildings in the future specifically um which i included as part of operations so just

2:12:46 i treat that separately from the issue of scope 3 or supply chain kind of for our own project so i'm i will investigate those separately sorry just to that end it did the 2009 um baseline report include that kind of work i guess that would be the thing to to ask too because if it if we're expecting it to be included and then it wasn't included before you know what would that mean i'm just curious as we look on it okay oh i can include that in the next session but the the reduction targets were around scope 1 and scope 2 which is really direct

2:13:33 direct contribution of greenhouse gases so the scope 3 was reported for a while but that was not what was the basis for the reduction john brown do you what do you have anything for a second go around yeah i do thank you and uh you know i don't have a problem with the the construction of e-web facilities but when we have that conversation i want to make sure that we talk about our second source and our water treatment facility and how we're going to do that to essential service and still comply with that intent the same thing with some of our reservoirs because they're all concrete and i i don't know if the technology and

2:14:18 things are there you know we've already gone from 70 million to 90 million on second source treatment facility and what that will do to pay the feasibility of even doing it and then be the uh if we can do it and two things such as the cost i again i caution that we think this out but because we do have some major projects coming on that probably have been contemplated using traditional construction characteristics and materials and if we're trying to go into a new thing and we're trying to make it seismic resilient um that we would think this through uh before we go too far with it so i'm not i'm not afraid to have the conversation but i just want to make sure we look at uh

2:15:03 everything other than just making sure that we may not use concrete thank you all right and there's nothing else from me so frank did you get what you needed from this conversation i did president schlossberg and so thank you commissioners for for the guidance both last month and this month i think there are some what i would classify as sort of fairly minor revisions uh to this um we will schedule this as a separate action item for january um and then also make sure that next december when we review board policy we will include this as a

2:15:50 particular call out to a board policy that needs review um but i i do think i got enough guidance to make some some changes um and and i will do the same thing that i did this month i will call out um i will include a markup um in the difference between what was the clean version that you got this time versus the the new version next time um and uh look forward to um hopefully a good discussion and an approved resolution that will implement a new climate change policy for e-web um and the future of eweb so thank you

2:16:35 thank you thank you very much okay our last major uh work item is agenda item number 13 it's our work session on the 2022 organizational goal development so back to you frank well commissioners good evening once again this is frank lawson general manager joining me in this presentation will be rodney price the assistant general manager i'm going to run through a few things and go ahead with the next slide if if you will holly thank you our our goal this evening um and i'll preface this um by identifying that in the old days uh we used to spend a number of i saw well not we because i

2:17:21 wasn't the general manager then but i witnessed a number of boards working with management over the course of several months to eventually get to the annual goals in about april or may um which didn't really seem like they seemed like semi-annual goals at that point over the last couple years we have pulled that in to where management proposes for your consideration the annual goals in january and typically those have been approved either in january or february depending on feedback from the board what we're doing now and what we'd like to get your feedback on today is we've proposed just some sample organizational goals and we'd like to understand from your perspective what some of our priorities should be

2:18:08 as we go into that process so that when we bring uh the first round of proposed annual goals back to the board next month that will be uh in better understanding of what you're looking for so next slide a little bit about kind of where we are again um one of the things about annual goals we're kind of in this yellow area we're going to propose some goals we're going to try to understand your priorities we will also kind of weigh that versus what we know as far as where we are strategically and where we are from an organizational performance perspective so that we hopefully can come back next month and get some annual goals approved

2:18:54 of which the next step after that is to develop very specifically management will develop the metrics and milestones to be able to report back to you on a quarterly basis our progress [Music] or lack thereof toward the the pursuit and and hopefully the achievement of the annual goals throughout the year typically reported in may august and november and then the annual goals the the summary for the previous year in march so this is just give you an indication as to the process that that we're looking at here and the role that we're looking for tonight next slide please they're um you know typically

2:19:40 going to be kind of three types of goals you'll notice these are color coded mr price is going to run through some of our proposed 2022 goals a little later on and you'll notice some colors and the colors kind of match up with the type of goal that they are there are some goals that are just perennial goals you you want to make sure that your operational performance is up up to expectation we have a number of board policies that we fulfill uh that you've already provided direction on there are a number of of still active resolutions um there are certain metrics and understanding that that we just want to make sure that that these

2:20:25 track according to the expectations to make sure that that our organizational performance is on track and what you expect there are also and those tend to be perennial and they look kind of similar from year to year but basically if i were to summarize those goals they would be operate the utility the way you're supposed to and the way we have told you to operate it so that that's kind of how those would appear the the ones in red can kind of come and go and those are either based on gaps weaknesses strengths opportunities you know there's emerging issues that can come up um or up you know opportunities those tend to be in red sometimes those are like i said an area that you want to improve maybe one year

2:21:10 you decide or you find out that there's an area that you're not performing as well as you would like to so it becomes something that to improve the next year or identify um something that needs attention and then the third category is strategic and those if you start to extract the strategic plan you'll start to see some goals that appear to be foundational but there's various elements that you might see a year or two and then they might come or go you know ami would be an example of that where you that's building a capability that's strategic that then can feed into new products or irps or you know other

2:21:55 other types of resources that are and tools that are going to need to balance your supply and demand so there's really business fundamentals discrete opportunities that come and go and then really tactical annual milestones related to strategic objectives and positioning the utility in the future so those are kind of the three areas next slide i won't run through all of these these are again looking at the color codes just some examples you know covet 19 was one that i would call an emergent um but we we didn't necessarily have an annual goal around that but that was now there it took a lot of attention and modified how we were operating um even when you

2:22:40 start to look at an emerging issue of a lieber canal that's something that uh not wasn't necessarily a strategic initiative but something that we feel like we need to address that's that would fall into one of those that might be around for a year or two and then come and go and then some of the business fundamentals you can see around quality water quality uh reliability financial metrics some some of those things and then where we are strategically integrated resource planning ami some of our informational systems rate making which is going to be something that that we feel that the board and management need to work on pretty significantly over the next couple years so these were just some examples i know

2:23:25 that you received this slide ahead of time so i won't run through all of them but just to give you a feel for kind of the the types and styles of how we classify the goals next slide please so with that we did as part of the backgrounder provide you some some food for thought um relative to what some of the areas of opportunities that we saw with the goals and with that i will pass it off to our mr price who can run through these with the board and then we'll open it up for feedback and suggestions after that rod

2:24:11 yeah thank you general manager lawson um commissioners good evening for the record on the audio folks my name is rod price uh i think one of the things frank didn't say is on that previous slide you could have put etc etc under that and we've all heard tonight about the opportunities that that are coming along uh in the expanded budgets and all this and i think one of the things that um you know we we need to do as we consider organizational goals is how do you how do you funnel these down to five to ten things to work on so we can maintain our focus and and uh stay within our resources that that that you folks are are are bringing to us and putting around the table for us so i think another thing i would say real quick

2:24:56 about that particular slide too is if you didn't see something up there and you've got this pet project an idea you know now is the time to start talking about it and bringing it out and let frank kind of shoot it down or or build it up whichever he's gonna do or we're gonna do right so um one of the things i wanted to do though is talk a little bit about some of these goals that we put up uh i think it's important that the goals are tied to especially at the organizational level tied to things that the board can influence and that the not only can you influence you can measure and monitor where they're where they're at and so one of the ways we we measure monitor where they're at the quarterly report and so we

2:25:42 centered the quarterly report around the organizational goals so so you get some pretty direct feedback on that so that first goal that's listed there is is identifying something that has come out of quarterly reports which is improving customer responsiveness and this covers a variety of the metrics that i think that you've seen coming out i think call wait times is an easy one to to call out but uh certainly that came out of the quarterly report and so that's an area of potential focus for us moving ahead uh the other thing we're talking about for for 22 2022 is focusing on operations uh workforce and and finance areas and so there's some

2:26:27 language here reflected around our dynamic workforce which is policies around our new hybrid and way we want to move ahead uh working with telecommuting and mobile workforce and so forth i think the other big thing that's really coming up uh from a workforce perspective though is the collective bargaining agreement will start next year so so those are good examples of things that we do on a day-to-day basis and it will affect our world moving ahead frank talked about sometimes you can have a goal that mixes up things so we have uh the work that travis has brought to the table um a number of times here um to the board and talked about the the need for a new cis and a enterprise-wide

2:27:12 kind of software implementation process and so i think that's the other thing where the board gets a lot of feedback you'll see a lot of our goals uh being presented during the the board meetings if you think back on on the the presentations you're getting around the libra canal or or whatever it is these are all uh goals that are being set up from an organizational perspective so next slide please thank you and i guess the other thing i would say real quick about the organizational goals um you know they need to tie to our strategic plan uh they need to tie to our goals our our values uh in in that plan

2:27:58 but i think something that's sort of not as clear maybe as the goals need to be clear they need to be clear as stated as possible and and the one thing i kind of like to say or emphasize a little bit is they need to be inspirational to performance uh you know i i'll pick on my friends in finance you know a multi-year rate design plan that that's probably really exciting for them and they get that right away right but the rest of the goal sort of ties in the strategic plan and how it relates to the rest of the people that are going to be involved in that because it's a big process so by considering our goals and things that you you think about and talk about so those are all some of the areas that we we tend to focus on when we craft these goals so i would say with that the the real point

2:28:44 of this is to hear the board's feedback so commissioner schlossberg i'll turn it over to you to get some input all right um well i'm going to go first this time just to mix things up a little bit one thing that i noticed you have something about the dynamic workforce but something that we hear about occasionally is that we have difficulty recruiting and hiring for some key positions i know that at our last board meeting on our consent calendar we approved a contract for um a lot of money for a position that we weren't able to recruit for and i'm just curious if that is something that would rise to an organizational goal for the year to kind

2:29:30 of look at how can we fill some of these key positions um so that we don't find ourselves in that same situation yeah i think that's a good suggestion i think one of the things that the if you look in the background of the dynamic workforce some of the principles are the reason we we're doing that is to help with recruiting and retention both but duly noted i think that's a it's a good observation president schlossberg i i think that's that's a really good observation the dynamic workforce model is probably a subset of that it probably doesn't encapsulate what you just described more

2:30:15 broadly um i think one of the in it in fact it's it's not just an emerging issue it's also a strategic issue that we've identified and when we speak of resiliency we speak about workforce resiliency and recruiting and retention and dynamic workforce models which is really a hybrid telecommuting model if you wanted an interpretation of that all of those are subsets of that but i think that your comment might mean that we need to broaden that particular goal out a little bit to include more specifically potentially the organic development of some workforce positions that are hard to fill so um

2:31:01 that's that's a really good suggestion great thank you um that's all that i have right now but john browski i see your hand raised thank you uh mindy and that that is exactly what i was going to bring up too um the fact that i think spelling out dynamic workforce uh and and putting recruitment and retention in there um you know because there's certain there's a certain per you know you can't you can't telecommute alignment right there's there's certain positions you know we like she said the meter the meter technician these are bodies that we need

2:31:46 so i guess one of my questions would be yes i'd like to see that put in there a little bit more so we have metrics you know how many how many unfilled positions do we have for a quarter and what are we doing to uh recruit and retain those those positions would be a metric that i would like to see um and on the other side of that you talked about the contract bargaining agreement i'm not sure where this goes but you know i know a lot of industries are giving signing bonuses and things like that and i'm just wondering if that would have to be something that's going to be negotiated into that contract that hey we want to bring in more linemen but the only way that we can do that is by

2:32:31 giving them a twenty thousand dollar signing bonus is that something that has to be negotiated with ibew or is that something that we can do as a as a policy on our own so that would be a question that i would have but i know that that's in a lot of other industries that's what's out there to get these bodies to come to to your workforce and so if that is does have to be bargained i think that that's something that i would like to have looked at so that there's the opportunity to use all the tools in the toolbox to fill our workforce and then i had one more question and this doesn't really go to the to this goals but frank said in the beginning uh you know that there's a bunch of resolutions and and uh

2:33:17 directions that that we're following as we go as an i i get i get to say this for the last time this month as a new commissioner um it would be interesting to know what resolutions are out there that we are bound to follow and are there resolutions that are out there that are dated and need to be uh stricken from the books you know i mean i know all organizations have legacy uh directives that may be sitting back there somewhere that either are not applicable or just don't don't go to where the goals that we are have now so it'd be interesting to me to

2:34:03 see what the resolutions that we are bound by and maybe do a uh look into seeing if they're still relative commissioner barofsky i know we have um records back to well i know that we have folders with records um back to 2000 the the last inventory we did there was still 40 to 50 that were active um we we can certainly do that um resolutions are are one means of which the board provides direction like you you've actually approved a number this evening relative to budgets and other things um i'll work with staff to

2:34:51 to try to get what you're looking for i'm um i don't know what the the timing on that would be but i'll i'll make sure um a number of different things policy is also the the board policies are pretty pretty significant customer service policies those types of things those uh direct us as well so um i didn't want to over emphasize resolutions but there there are a number of them all right anyone else want to jump in next

2:35:37 thank you um first this is helpful continues to be helpful and i appreciate the um the goals that are here and that you're proposing uh especially around lieberg i think making a decision on that sooner than later or at least setting a time frame by which we want to make a goal a decision there i think is really useful so thank you for proposing that um as well as the rest of these um public draft of the irp that seems really valuable it all all the things that are here feel like substantive and valuable to be included here on the issue it's less about resolutions but more about board policies i know we have some we've had some discussion about updating board policies i don't know if it's reasonable i

2:36:22 i don't know how much we're all going to want to dive into all the details of every board policy but it does feel like perhaps reviewing and revising some portion of them over the course of each year would be a a good way to keep those stressed and and accurate and relevant um i don't like i said i don't know if we can do it all maybe maybe we could go through all of them in a year and i'm okay with setting our ambition a little bit less than that because i know we have a lot of really meaty stuff to work on i think it keeps just like dishing it up uh and then the other question i have is might we want a goal around um workplace injuries not that we have more of them but that we have none of them or a very small number or

2:37:08 less than we had last year um i don't i my perception is that e-web is a pretty safe workplace um and i know we're all pretty committed to seeing it remain that way and it feels like a clear statement of our goal is to have zero significant injuries or um you tell me what's relevant there but that feels like something would be valuable to include um commissioner mcrae um we certainly are very safe utility actually um and and have a really robust program the the very first goal that talks about um continuing to maintain and improve the organizational performance

2:37:55 that particular goal has probably i'll just go out on yeah 50 metrics associated with it um there are a number of safety metrics lost time accidents you know etc etc and those are reported annually in great detail and quarterly in areas that um actually vary enough quarterly to or are important enough quarterly so that the safety metric and in fact one thing for the board to understand whenever we come up with a goal our next step is what milestones what metrics do we have to develop or provide you

2:38:40 to let you know we're on track or we're not off track but the the safety metrics are included in that uh very first goal as it's written now just just so you're aware thank you um that was really important and i'm sorry i missed it super important i forgot all of it so i can't repeat it i'm sorry uh thank you for pointing that out maybe having a separate goal around safety isn't essential as long as we're reporting it and tracking it that way uh i do wonder given our conversation my last question um given our conversation around

2:39:27 the climate policy if we want to incorporate a goal around greenhouse gas movements in any way within here i i don't know it feels like i don't know it would be valuable for a track regularly but potentially there's um so we have the integrated resource planning work which is going to be incredibly important from that sort of first pillar or directive i guess i would call it we also included in that first goal track energy efficiency and conservation which is an important piece of that from a customer perspective the operations piece is um not necessarily reported quarterly

2:40:13 that tends to be annually um so i it's it's worth further consideration but there's a number of different climate pieces that that are included in uh in in various aspects of that but we'll we'll take a look at that okay uh quick questions the where where does the the reservoir you know the like 40th and patterson project and you know decommissioning college hill where does that fall into this

2:41:00 is it under the water plan and the kind of the second slide of the draft goals yeah that would be underwater assets um and the priorities associated with water asset management the it also falls under the capital plan which you you actually approve on an annual basis um so those all of those type 2 projects are included in very specific reporting throughout the uh the year and those are um just really part of i would say part of normal operations

2:41:47 i'm sorry no i was just going to say a given never never mind that's there's a scaling issue that i was going to mention but that's that's covered in the type 1 type 2 work okay okay and so then um so then walterville so i see leeburg is called out specifically on one of these slides is it because we were focusing on lieberg and kind of getting that underway then then we were gonna kind of put walter villain is like a second step so that wouldn't be in 2022 is that right yeah that's that's correct the the time frame for walterville is is not driven by the same kinds of decision criteria

2:42:32 as lee berg lee lieberg hasn't the the emerging issue of the canal and decisions associated with the canal now i'm not even sure walterville would be in the next few years to be honest it's it's a consideration in the long term but you're absolutely right there's there's a reason that lieberg is in the in in 2022 and there may be a follow-on goal in 2023 as well okay got it and then okay so i see that in there i think those are my two and so just unclear because the first two are kind of numbered one and two and

2:43:18 then it kind of leaves the rest of them off is that because it fits in that different framework with the red and the green or is there a different reason for kind of having those in not numbered that i'm missing that was just an oversight okay okay i just i just want to make sure it wasn't like we needed to get feedback on which one you know kind of comes up in priority or or anything no we really those really should have been numbered for ease of conversation but uh um that was an edit that uh i missed okay no no worries no worries um you know couple of things on just the process you know we

2:44:03 we just set the budget which somewhat solidifies the organizational goals right because you set the budget to support the plan sort of seems like the goals are already set because you just set the budget but i i also get that we you know and i appreciate the idea that we are looking at this ahead of you know the next year because the next year is when this all has to be implemented but i also recognize that it's unique that right now we have all of the board members are going to be here through the next you know this next january but that's not always the case from a utility perspective i mean people do come and go and you know we do have to have that opportunity for

2:44:49 the new board members though i think it's challenging coming on to a new board and saying okay yes these are these are the goals but that is part of the the job of that new board so i don't want to lose track of that and and you know locking that into the next board it's something that we um i think it's a worthy goal but it's something we have to be cognizant of in future iterations of the board but appreciate this thank you commissioner carlson it's it is a a good observation as to the sort of hamster wheel that that we're on um a lot of these efforts intertwined we we have um and and actually i think it's

2:45:34 really important to the continuity of the organization that we these we do have a pretty recurring cycle of strategic discussions goal reviews budgets capital plans long term and then it starts all over again and and i actually think that there's a really good purpose for that which is that continuity of thought and you you could actually in a perfect world do you know spend a lot of time developing a strategy work on your operations plans and your budgets and then you and your goals and then that drives your budgets um but the cycle time that we're on especially given the links of projects that we tend to deal with

2:46:19 facilitates a little bit more of sort of this continuous process and um yeah you're right sometimes it feels a little bit like this is before that and that's before this and i think that's that's why the the continuity of these efforts is important over time and i think the the erp goal is a good example of that where the the balance of next year will be working on setting up a governed framework for a multi-year project and setting up the scoping for an rfp and so that's not we're not going to purchase the erp system next year we're going to we're going to prepare how do we prepare the next year's budget in the 5-10 year

2:47:04 plan so the other thing i'd comment on uh commissioner carlson a couple of things one is the you touched on what's kind of a good question right um around where's the where's the the water master plan right one of the things i want to do is work on some resiliency type metrics that will kind of wrap in some of those how are we doing in the big picture um and then matt a couple comments on yours i think one of the things you're saying is you know we're a safe utility how safe are we right and so how how do we answer that question uh how safe is he webb and so that gave me sort of a little different mindset to work with lance i'd already been doodling some ideas we've been

2:47:50 talking a little bit about lance as our safety officer so um and it's kind of the same thing with the carbon the greenhouse um gas kind of thing to you do you really want to know how how we're implementing the the the new uh sd15 that we're working on or do you want to know exactly how many how many carbon molecules we're saving or or whatever and i think really what you want to know is is how how is you have as a whole working towards this goal in the in the dsd so that's kind of how i took that and that's how i would come back with with some some proposals

2:48:38 all right john brown all right thank you um i really appreciate everything that's been said i just have two quick comments or questions about uh things just brief assuring where uh is it a goal to continue to try and weatherize and make energy efficient our rental pool number one and number two if it's in there could you show me where it is or if it is not and then affordability is that a goal and if not why not so um commissioner brown the the very first objective is where we would typically um have our um

2:49:23 include our goals around energy efficiency um for example it it is something to warrant if the goal if the board's desire was to pull out a specific uh sector or you know opportunity within that we are viewing um energy efficiency and conservation as operating and maintaining within what has already been established and part of what's been established is that energy efficiency in our last integrated resource plan needed to offset organic growth that's where our annual target comes in is typically around 10 000 megawatt hours

2:50:09 it does not call out uh specific sectors of the population so that that particular element would is not included specifically affordability is is a is not necessarily an end goal itself um as much as it is part of the values that we we keep in play as we pursue the goals so um that's why it's listed in the strategic plan as a value as opposed to an end goal itself it's obviously very important as to how we implement these things but affordability um especially given the sort of long-term nature of it and the fact that we revisit that on an on an annual basis

2:50:57 wouldn't necessarily be something that we would be tracking on on a you know quarter by quarter basis so um i see that personally as more of a value that's listed as to a criteria for how we operate not not necessarily an end goal itself did that answer your questions i no it didn't maybe it answered my question but i didn't understand the second one because uh uh to me affordability should be a goal or at least it should be a consideration because it um it's uh you know it's just you know 50 of our customers are in rental properties and

2:51:42 that's where you know maybe some people have more uh more challenges on the affordable end of this and this is a this is a non-discretionary commodity that they have to have they have to have water they have electricity and whatever we do they have to adhere to and if that's not a goal for us to keep it affordable for the majority of our population um it's a value i get it but it's if it's not a goal i guess you'd have to tell me why it's not a goal so i i i think commissioner brown you you said um in your statement there it should be a consideration i think it's absolutely a consideration um and i do believe that um it's something

2:52:27 that we could consider around the specifics of looking at some of the programs specific for a limited income but affordability to me is is covered more in in our strategic plan where we we do talk about maintaining our affordability um and we've done that historically through looking at [Music] our affordability index for example which is relative to median income and some of the other things that you and some of the past board members have have asked for so i'm not sure what that goal would look like on a sub-annual basis

2:53:13 but you give me an answer thank you i guess john this is rod the way i would kind of see it is we've been given some spending authority in the budget and and the what we try and do is optimize the spending within that that uh budget that's given so to me that's where the we're meeting our affordability goals by maintaining our budgets that's really what we're pretty focused on okay thank you

2:54:07 all right do you have what you need from us but i see sonya has her hand raised people want another another opportunity or some people want another opportunity or sonya do you have a clarification want to be mindful of time so maybe we make it really fast like one minute each so that's possible okay if others are okay if not i can get it answered otherwise but okay real quick um wildfire planning where does that fall in this in here rod you want to take that one yeah we have both uh we have about a million dollars specifically earmarked in the the capital budget and then we have a number of programs

2:54:52 that are uh janine calls them organic that point towards those both in o m and and in the capital so one of the things you'll see uh in april may when we come back with the more final draft you'll see some more um um defined metrics and and numbers around programs that are earmarked for for wildfire so that will be coming up okay all right that's it thanks john borowski one minute yeah and this is something that i think we touched on earlier and i don't know if it needs to go into goals or where it falls but i think the equity piece that we were talking about earlier developing what that means and what that is and

2:55:39 ways to measure it might be a goal that we could aspire to and i'm not sure if that has risen to the level of this year's goals but it's definitely right back there so i just wanted to bring that up all right john brown do you have anything else in a minute no thank you yeah i would like to echo john brown's uh raise an issue about affordability i think it's uh something that we all prioritize in a number of ways and i think actually a goal around affordability would be

2:56:25 useful um and i would say i'm going to pull up the chart you can't really see it it's the chart that shows uh bill comparisons across a number of utilities that we consider comparators and we could just set a goal about like we don't want to be on the top end of that or we want to be somewhere in the middle or you know we could set some goal around where we want to be in terms of affordability compared to our peers i would argue that it should be around bills and not rates but i do think it's valuable for us to think about how or where that might fit i appreciate that affordability overall is um you know it's a clearly stated witness within this gold document but a specific goal around that could be valuable that's all i have thank you

2:57:10 uh commissioner mcrae and and i guess this would be for commissioner brown as well i i do believe that affordability as a as a goal if it if it resides anywhere it's probably in the strategic plan um and i and the part of the reason i say that is is what what you just mentioned was something that it has a as a longer than an annual time frame to it um and so it would actually have to be something that would survive on an annual bi-annual basis so and and i appreciate mr price bailing me out with with the budgetary comments um because

2:57:55 and oftentimes the budgets are set within the constraints of affordability um and so um on an annual basis being affordable maintaining affordability is is part of how we operate and budget adherence is part of that but if there's something that the board would want to actually state around and and this actually is what the board stated a number of years ago and i think and john brown probably remembers that on the electric side we were near the top of all our comparators and i think the board said we'd like to get down into the middle of the pack somewhere and so that was that was a goal that was it was a multi-year goal which which is

2:58:42 probably means it goes someplace differently and i'm not quite sure how we would state that but i i can go back and review that in in a little bit more of a strategic context if that helps if that would be helpful um i'm just going to take my last minute and frank i agree with you about that affordability piece i mean i think that we have these like central tenants or these central core values affordability reliability safety all those things and i don't think that we need them to be in our organizational goals every year unless there's a problem so if we were at the top end and we were looking at affordability like hey we want to become more affordable and need to switch some things up

2:59:27 but i think that it is addressed just because it's one of those kind of key things that we look at throughout our organization so that's my opinion on that okay but frank i'm guessing that you got what you needed from us yes well we really appreciate the feedback i think and from from all of you there were some things that we can glean out of this conversation and make adjustments so that what we bring back to you next month as proposed for your consideration will align with uh with your thinking and so i think the conversation was

3:00:12 helpful to us um from really feedback from from each of you i you know i have notes here that uh i i think we'll take back and and re-craft and reorganize and make some edits too so appreciate your feedback we absolutely got i think what we needed thank you thank you and thank you too thank you rod okay we are in the home stretch agenda item number 14 correspondence and board agendas frank so commissioners there were seven correspondence items this month which is actually a fairly heavy load of correspondence uh some of those are traditional year-end items most of these

3:00:58 i would say are follow-up items or things that we've been working on throughout the year such as the wildfire mitigation plan and some other things that we we agreed to provide so most of the correspondence is is that but if you had any questions um either myself or staff can can answer those or follow up later or next week during our check-ins but if there's any questions we'd be happy to answer those if needed yeah i just had a quick question regarding the uh greenhouse gas inventory

3:01:44 um you know that has metrics that we're trying to hit by 2025 or by 2020 and then 20 uh 30 and 20 50. and i'm just curious as to when it comes to our internal greenhouse gas metrics when when and if we sell or lease the headquarters property that's going to drop off of our greenhouse gas emissions but i don't want that to be taken as oh we just made a huge gain because it we're not using the natural gas to take care of the headquarters somebody else is i just want to make sure that that metric falls in line so that it doesn't look

3:02:30 like we're getting a big gain uh when that happens commissioner borowski the secret is out darn you you caught us again um in in um something here no i i think it's um i was actually thinking about that too i i think it would warrant a re-establishing of of the baseline um the emissions aren't going away they're just going with the building and so when we get to the point where where we no longer own the the headquarters building we will adjust the metric to to compensate for that so um i absolutely agree it's it's uh

3:03:16 worth making those adjustments when we get to that and that's that's um that will be duly noted by staff going forward yeah i mean the example that i see is is when you sell or or get rid of a building your your facility uh deterioration report you know it's like all of a sudden we got rid of an old building and got a new building our our backlog of deferred maintenance just went way down and it looks really good on paper but i don't want that to be to be corresponded in us meeting our metrics for 2030 and 2050. yep that'll come off both sides of that ledger thank you

3:04:06 anyone else have any questions for frank matt sonia or john brown [Music] go ahead john okay thank you i i just uh for the record so i can get this in the record you don't have to answer it tonight frank uh on the wildfire mitigation plan i really appreciate that but i've always long been an advocate that uh we're doing more than everybody else uh you an example is looking 35th to 50th on willamette street we have our uh some pretty high voltage lines on top of the poles but all the other communication people in town quest and and all those other people there are trees going over them all over the place and if we have a wind storm those trees take the lines down our power lines come down and the puc is not doing a darn thing to

3:04:52 make those people trim those right away then i just wish that hopefully we can press on that because i know that's been a huge source of power outages when we have inclement weather in the winter but i'm worried about it this summer so i just wanted to make that a record and then i'd just like to ask you on the uh on the board officers liaison positions uh the one about the headquarters property i've got a lot of experience and background in disposing of large major public assets like this and i'd like to help if i can if that's really the will of the board but i'm also worried about perception of conflict of interest because of other people in my company have the uh you know have a contract with the web to help you with real estate matters and so could you research that uh in a legal aspect because

3:05:37 um otherwise i'm gonna have to step aside i can't i don't think it would just because of the perception although i know there won't be a conflict it would be the optics of it and i don't want that to come to eweb so could you research that legally before we get to the january meeting please uh yes commissioner brown we actually have done that research and um i i can provide you some feedback during our check-in and then also some correspondence feedback as part of the january backgrounder thank you

3:06:24 uh i also had a quick question on the um the appointees and liaisons groups so the city of eugene i know when we originally set that kind of relationship up it was supposed to be specifically around our work together in climate policy and we think we had the board president and then uh commissioner schlossberg was the you know uh liaison specifically around the climate change piece and in here it it represents it as kind of the board president vice president which obviously that's that's not what we have there so i just want to clarify what what's been happening during those meetings and is that more of a leadership meeting or is it just focused on on kind of the climate aspect do we need to modify that role

3:07:11 what should we do with that position i think that's i wanted to open that up yeah i think it's um it it's important and i'll let president schlossberg weigh in a little bit um as as to the content i think if you go back far enough there there used to be leadership meetings between president and vice president and council president and and um vice president um these you're correct these meetings were set up specifically for uh a climate related discussions um what i have found the meetings to be is a little bit more of a leadership kind of ad hoc um that that's my personal observation sort

3:07:56 of the issues of the day oftentimes climate but other issues as well um but and and it almost feels like from my perspective that would be a better way to look at this going forward um because there are a number of issues there's not just climate issues that we work with the city on um that for me seems more appropriate but um i i would really heavily weigh into the board to to tailor those liaisons a little bit more but president schlossberg i guess appreciate your input um your question sonia was what do we talk about and that is a great question

3:08:44 um i think that um part of part of that kind of depends on who the counselors are that are on that committee as well so um the intention was to talk about climate stuff but um sometimes it is bled over into different topics um just depending on the just the familiarity with city council with some of the stuff that we do i guess i'll say um i would say that lately it's gone a little bit more back towards climate but i think one of the things that will make it a little clearer is that frank and sarah madari um had talked about kind of really coming up

3:09:30 with something for that group like where exactly is the overlap and presenting it to that little leadership group so that we can like really focus on those things because it's kind of been all over the place sometimes and sometimes it's pretty focused so i would say we can whatever we write on that document is fine but we're still kind of in that relationship building phase i think it's it's been a little slow to be honest that's my opinion yes i mean you and i were on that way three years ago and i think you've continued being on that so i was just curious because it did seem like it was kind of all over the board and i just noticed the discrepancy and how this was written versus you know who we have on the board and i mean i i actually i kind of i like having

3:10:16 the liaison specifically around climate policy being you know a part of it personally if that if that's useful i think it's a good way to get other you know board members in there and be involved and also to just have that kind of reminder that this isn't a really big piece that we need to coordinate on um so i'm i i really appreciate how it's you know how it's currently structured so long as that's actually useful and kind of achieving the goal so just wanted to throw that out there all right matt did you have i think don't think we've called on you yet yeah i'll just be really brief i don't

3:11:02 have any questions i just want to acknowledge that in the corresponding there are some really meaty and substantive um pieces of work that i that i think are really solid i don't have questions on but the lieberg canal communication stakeholder holder engagement strategy is like super helpful for me to be able to see you know kind of what we're plotting out and so uh much appreciation to the team who put that together the same for the updated draft wild fire mitigation plan to see that plan evolve and take shape and kind of be able to go along for the ride as as staff are doing that is super helpful so thank you for that and then the final electrification study um both phases all put together i hope that team is celebrating with

3:11:47 more than one cold one after delivering all of that work thank you thank you commissioner mcrae i'm sure they'll need more than one gold one that to just to celebrate that so thank you and nothing from me but also um i feel badly for the people whose things are included that way because i know they put a lot of work into those documents and we get to the end of the meeting and we don't really talk about it so i too appreciate um all of that so one thing president schlossberg just i don't want to leave a hanging chat so to say that i have to date myself because that's when you that's the old

3:12:32 voting method um but um the liaisons with the city um i i would like to know from the board whether that whether those liaisons are specific to climate or whether those are leadership liaisons it does so that when we come back in january that that the board has had time to think about it um and and either reiterate that because i believe the way it's structured right now is that these are specific for climate issues and if the board wants to continue with that that's that's how it'll come back as opposed to leadership so it's um a little bit of board clarity around

3:13:18 that would be helpful do you want that tonight or in january i i prefer to get it tonight so that what we bring back to you in january is is clear um well since i've got unmuted for me i i think i would go for the uh leadership because i think it it there's enough there's enough knowledge amongst the the board right now that they can speak to the climate and getting the relationships going between the leaders of the with the mayor and the council president and our president

3:14:03 and vice president i think is a is a valuable thing and they can bring that back to us so that's just where i i would land but i i can bend with the wind matt you had your hand up did you have you want to weigh in yeah sure from my experience it does feel like it it doesn't it's not it hasn't been constrained to solely climate it does feel like there are places where there's overlap that between you know the work of the two policy bodies that aren't solely climate right when we think about water infrastructure for example or other major projects um there's likely to be overlap there it does feel like

3:14:49 uh part of answering your question frank i think we'll be putting it back to the council and the mayor to see what they're hoping for i'm not sure that they're thinking of it as solely climate related but rather just kind of where the two bodies work overlaps and i don't have a strong opinion about you know what whether it's just climate or a larger body of work i would tend to go back to the leadership issue i mean i it showed me what um our last joint meeting with council i've had quite a few of those

3:15:35 and that was probably the most challenging one for me to um to participate in uh it was very challenging for me and i think we need to figure out how we can work together better because if we if we don't uh whether we're talking about water or climate or anything it's not going to matter if we're going to be flooding heads and and one entity is going to say well this is the policy and you fund it and the other entity says no this is going to happen i think we have to figure out how how we get to uh we get to yes rather than this is yours and this is yours i i think we have to figure out how to work together so i would then lead towards leadership

3:16:24 i also think it should be more towards leadership and i'm wondering if at any point that we could have a conversation at a board meeting on this board just kind of coming up with our ideas as a board what we want to work with the city on and then those liaisons kind of take it to the city um i think that could be really helpful and you know maybe it is just climate but it could also be climate and other things that we've talked about or things that we've um i don't know just ideas that have come up about things that we do with the city or things that we'd want to do so i don't want to hem us in too narrowly and i would also like to include the rest of the board in what it is that we're talking about so maybe formalize this position a little bit more with a

3:17:09 with a our own kind of agenda and a report back that was helpful um [Music] and um yeah that that was perfect i i think i got what what i needed i i think we do have a number of areas we overlap with the city climate obviously is one resiliency is another emergency preparedness joint projects street repairs i mean there's there's all kinds of things financially there are opportunities and some of those were mentioned earlier when jason was was talking about how we partner with this with the city on different funding

3:17:55 opportunities so um i i think that i have enough to to restructure that for january thank you and as far as board agendas go um you have the board agenda report there's there's a lot that's going to be teed up i hate to put the board back to work again um it seems like there's something weird with cobid time because it just seems like we were talking about 2020 uh goals yesterday but we're now talking about 2022 goals and so um if you have any comments on the board agendas by all means we can we can adjust and take your feedback but i don't have anything specific to call out on those

3:18:44 all right thank you um all right then we're on our very last board wrap up anybody have anything to wrap up john brown does three if i may i know i'm jumping the queue in front of everybody so two things number one frank you just said put the word board back to work again that implies that we've got them working or doing but i just want to know what i missed uh so we'll talk about that later but more importantly i would like to thank mindy for her leadership role for the last year uh i i you've done a an exemplary job i've been through a ton of presidents and there's nobody's done it better than you i mean thank you very much for doing what you've done because i know it's it's it's a thankless task and that it's hurting cats and you always eat less

3:19:31 that's the way it is but thank you very much and i i wish you a happy winter holiday and things such as that so thank you and that's all i have thank you very much john um john barofsky thank you um yeah i'll echo that about mindy's leadership it's been a pleasure working with you as as president this year um i just wanted to uh to thank staff you know this is the last time i get to say that this is that i'm a a rookie uh i've been here this will be the the end of the first year uh it was very enjoyable i've learned a ton of things over the years

3:20:17 over this year that's thanks to the staff working with me and doing all the onboarding and helping me drink out of that fire hose so i really want to give shout outs to all the departments that have helped us on board water electricity power generation you know learning about reservoirs all of these things were things that this little noodle boiler didn't know about a year ago and uh i'm learning more i know there's a lot more to learn but i really appreciate all that you have and it's going to be sad for me not to be able to pull the i'm the new guy card next year so thank you again to all the staff

3:21:03 all right anyone else go ahead sonia i see you wanting to raise your hand again mindy i do really appreciate everything you did this year just you know this is it's a challenging format to work in and something that you know kind of had to jump into and just really appreciate you doing that and i've i also want to give the shout out to uh commissioner barofsky and um and mcrae because you know it's it has been new and you guys have done a remarkable job getting up to speed and being really valuable contributors i've i just really love working with you and you know brown it's always a pleasure working with you [Laughter] no it's it's been wonderful so

3:21:50 thank you all i really appreciate that we have such a cordial board that we can respectfully you know hash out ideas and you know staff that bring us you know substantive things to work through um it's always it's it's just really a pleasure serving on this board so thank you everyone for for all the hard work for all the number of years that we've had to deal with really extenuating circumstances so thank you matt any wrap up from you nope right just just one quick thing that commissioner uh schlossberg thanks for your leadership i know we didn't always make it easy on you this year there were a few things

3:22:36 a few wrenches we we threw into the wheels on on you but not just because commissioner brown made a comment but um i did want to thank the board for really what i think was a very productive year under some pretty extraordinary circumstances and appreciate your leadership and and direction and guidance i feel pretty lucky that um i work i get to work with a board that um you know works hard to understand the issues uh you're you provide really good guidance you're respectful to each other and to staff and and that makes a huge difference and so thank you for for all the hard work and the contributions that you've

3:23:21 made to the utility um i think you represent the public very well um and and that's um it's a privilege for me to work with you so on behalf of staff thank you and then also i'd like to thank staff too because they you know i think that um they really do an incredible job um on working on some really complex issues and none of these are easy issues and it because if they were easy i think anybody could do them and i think we have a really good staff and i'm proud to work with them so thank you well i want to thank you all for the opportunity of being the president this year i've really really enjoyed it actually and if you only knew how nervous i was at the beginning of the

3:24:06 year when i took on this role and had to leave the meetings but um anyway i'm really appreciative of being on such a um smart engaged and respectful board and working with you frank and the other staff as well so thank you to everybody and i hope everybody has a good winter holiday and a happy and healthy new year and hopefully 2022 will bring us better things um yep fingers crossed and with that our meeting is adjourned all right good night everybody