EWEB Board of Commissioners — January 4, 2022

0:04 5 30 so um we are going to call to order the january 4th 2022 eugene water and electric board regular board meeting session um and just to let matt and john barofsky know the reason that i am chairing this meeting is that even though we are passing the gavel um i'm still president until we officially do that with election of officers so i'll just share this shortly and then pass it over to john brown if we elect him to be president um so let's just start off with our agenda check well first of all i want to welcome everybody back happy new year to everybody we'd really hope to have this

0:49 meeting in person but the universe had other ideas so maybe in february we'll be back to in person um and now we'll jump in with the agenda check does anybody have anything that they would like to say about the agenda well per oh go ahead president schlossberg i was just going to mention that there's been some interest from commissioners on adding a little bit of time to um agenda item number 12 which is our discussion on the headquarters building there's a number of questions from staff on that particular item it does look like that there's some room

1:34 freeing up in the agenda from you know lack of public testimony this evening and also we can make sure some of the other items stay on track or or under the allotted time so just wanted to mention that if we if we get to that agenda item um whoever the president is can can feel free to extend the time potentially but that's been noted by a few commissioners thank you okay great thank you for that and then um something else that was brought to my attention is that um we have our board retreat dinner coming up in a couple weeks so i don't know that we need to decide on that right now but that is a bored decision um so we might just want to keep our eye on

2:19 that and figure out what to do unless people feel like we need to just go ahead go ahead john brown i'd just like to say you know i know that the state or somebody else will dictate it and people's personal preference will dictate personally i'd like to have them a meeting even if we can stay six feet apart i still go to dinner and and things such as that i think it's really good that that we the filos get together and do it i think it's to me it's some of the best times spent i mean like when we did the libra canal tour and all that other stuff if we can pull it off we can pull it off but i know that to make the decision outside of a quorum is kind of button up against the open meetings law if we decide to do it or not do it so i'm just saying that maybe we ought to just say

3:04 well everybody be aware that we keep hold that date and then let you know nature take its toll whatever it's gonna do it's gonna do and uh personal preference but not have anybody feel if they don't feel comfortable let's not do it would be my preference that sound okay i'm seeing head nods that sounds okay all right fingers crossed that this will be a quick wave okay um going on to items items from board members and general manager so anyone who wants to jump in with anything

3:59 good evening everybody uh i just want to give a shout out to laura farthing and the team who is working on the water storage project up on 40th avenue i got to take a tour of the site and uh and watched the blasting up there which was pretty impressive it is remarkable how much that site has changed um and the work that's being done there it is uh dramatically different to encourage i tell commissioners if you haven't been up there yet it's worth going and taking a look um anyway i just appreciate how easy the staff team made it for me to get up there and take a look and get a tour and it was all really organized and uh and comfortable

4:44 and safe um anyway appreciate the team and the tour yes sonia and then john brofsky i just wanted to thank staff for all their work during the snowstorm ironically i went to colorado to see snow and i think there was more snow here so anyway i really appreciated the updates and all the hard work to get people back in in power because i know it's it's very difficult when the power is out and it's so cold and they're dealing with snow so thanks everyone for their hard work there john barofsky thank you um i just wanted to be

5:30 i guess i want to be the first to uh thank mindy for her excellent service as president this last year you know it was my first year on the board and you did an amazing job of shepherding us newbies through this and i want to really thank you and appreciate you for all you did over the last year thank you very much john brown i'd like to also echo that sentiment i think he did an outstanding job and just for the others education as soon as i said that at the last meeting i gave you a little bit of praise i got a text message from one of our former commissioners saying oh he said i want the beach house and my ring back and you can pretty much figure out which steve mccall that was but uh

6:16 anyhow he said i thought i was the best board president they said not anymore so anyhow i just i thought that was a little levity there but uh and i i too would like to comment on this last snow event having been through many of them and and ice and everything this was the least impactful on our operations that i saw i saw the outages and i saw where they were and uh you know my phone didn't ring once which normally it rings 20 times a day and uh and i just like commend the staff all the people in the field and everybody else that i think did an exemplary job rod and his crew and karen and everybody you guys did outstanding work and thank you very much i mean we're in nice warm homes these guys are out climbing trees and

7:01 poles and it's freezing and snowing and uh thanks again for doing such a great job frank is there anything you would like to say just a couple of things commissioners good evening welcome to 2022. it's it's nice to see everybody we really were hoping this would be in person we had planned it that way um but unfortunately we'll have to to do that hopefully next month or one of the upcoming months to be able to do that i i wanted to thank the crews also um also the the support staff behind the scenes that facilitates all the procurement of materials and coordination and our communications team who did a lot of outreach during the snowstorm and

7:46 also we had some water disruptions as well so we can't forget that people still need water during these times and were able to handle all kinds of disruptions during a holiday period and i thought it it went incredibly well considering the circumstances um and so wanted to thank really everybody at eweb who pitched in on keeping the lights on and the water flowing so thank you for that and then finally i just wanted to do a quick um shout out to one of our neighboring utilities emerald people's utility district epud their general manager some of you know scott coe he retired at the end of the year i wanted to wish him well and then kyle roadman who's going to be his

8:32 replacement i'm looking forward to working with kyle a lot of the local utilities as as the commissioners know work hand in hand on a lot of issues and so looking forward to working with kyle but i wanted to wish scott coe the best in in his retirement so thank you president schlossberg the only small thing i have to add is that i noticed in my um not eweb email today that i got a new eweb pledge to prepare um email so i don't know if we send that out every year or we're just revisiting it again but i really appreciated seeing it because i think this is the perfect time of year to focus on that and as somebody who only has a half put together kit um i really

9:18 appreciated it because i kind of need that extra nudge so thanks for the team that is sending that out okay well we don't have any public input so we're gonna skip over that agenda item and we're gonna move right into our board action items with approval of consent calendar a i'll move to adopt consent calendar a second all those in favor say aye consent calendar a is approved and now we're moving on to consent calendar b we'll move to adopt consent calendar b second all those in favor say aye

10:04 aye consent calendar b is approved all right we're just moving right along with uh agenda item number seven which is election of officers i don't really know how we do this other than does somebody make a nomination sonia you can i nominate john brown for president great i'll clean it a second okay and then do we nominate a vice president or do we vote on the president first tonight usually you ask for additional nominations for the position and if the slate isn't voted then you vote on the president independent and

10:50 then you vote on the vice president if somebody didn't nominate a slate of brown and jones then it would be brown and then you would go to vice chair got it okay so there are additional nominations out there i guess i'm a little confused is this where we would nominate a vice president now no if you had other if you had other presidential nominations okay so no no one's going to jump in and make this exciting looks like [Music] okay so now we vote on the president is what you're saying okay so all those in favor of john brown being our next e-web president say aye all right i'm gonna stay abstain just because

11:40 well good thing that the rest of us voted for it so congratulations john you are now the president okay well thank you very much and thanks again mindy for doing an exemplary job thank you uh i guess my first order of business will be call for nominations for vice chair from the floor are there any nominations for vice chair i move sonia carlson i'll second that if not i'll close the nominations and call a question all those in favor for sonia for being vice chair of the web board signify by saying i and raising your hand hi hi welcome to the team sonia thank you okay four fouriers and one abstention for the

12:26 record thank you very much and uh and uh as you know i've done this before and uh i'm i've been called the task master before and if i push too hard push back um i i like to keep on a schedule um one of the policies i do on the timing is if we have 30 minutes allocated on the agenda i give staff half of it maximum and then i cut them off or at least ask them if we could wrap it up so the board at least has 50 percent of the time to talk um if i'm pushing if people say we need more time to set tell me that uh because it's not my show it's just i'm just the ringleader so to speak uh it's it's we're all equals in this and so um we just get the gavel um so with that the next uh agenda item is going to be agenda number

13:11 eight the appointment of avoid leads and assignments it's an action item and uh frank you want to talk about this or do you want me just to go through the list of the opportunities the the plan was president brown that you would run through the opportunities um one by one and there there are incumbents in some cases and so um just running through those one by one would make sense all right uh let's go to elkhart uh currently we have sonya as a primary and john barath because as the alternate alternate i know sonya is on the i believe the executive committee um as well and that's a pretty good position to be at elkhart

13:57 and things and then she has expressed a desire to continue in that position is there anybody else that would like to be considered for that position if not i will congratulate sonia colors carlson on being reappointed to the elk board and congratulations sonia um what mckenzie watersteed council uh current representative john barofsky uh we don't have an alternate um and uh it's it's i did it for years it's it's a fun position um i know that uh there's some other positions that john could be considered for tube and we want to make sure we spread this out and make it equal um john do you want to express the desire do you want to stay you want to go uh what do you want to do um i've enjoyed my

14:42 tenure up there uh and i'd be i would be willing to do it again but if there's other people that are interested in it i also um could could move around to any other positions so i am open to whatever is the will of the body i have a question for you john barofsky um is this the position that in the past we haven't had a board member be on that carl has taken that role there are a number of staff that attend the mackenzie watershed council um usually there's i would say three to five eweb staff that attend that meeting so i just kind of give a little bit of the board

15:28 perspective and listen to uh a lot of times it's a lot of praise from them for what eweb has done upriver um so uh most of it's handled by carl and some of our other water uh team so i'm just the last link in the cog but there are a couple other elected officials that attend it um commissioner schlossberg you are correct though this this was actually an open liaison position for a number of years that was filled directly by staff up until commissioner barofsky volunteered to to fill this role so it

16:13 has been filled by staff in the past but i also believe that it's good to have public the elected representation there and if he's willing to continue it we'd love to have him well that sounds like a pretty strong endorsement john any if there's nobody else that wants to jump in then i can issue john a congratulations for being reappointed the mackenzie watershed council as the ewebs liaison and thank you very much appreciate it you'll be a good steward of that watershed thank you um oppab or other post employment benefits um i'm currently the the person there i've been there before other board members you're it's a non-voting position so you're kind of there to listen um and and that's it you don't get to vote on anything you meet

16:58 quarterly and you talk about the the funds and the insurance and uh for the retirees and you know where we are with that position it's it's it's not very time consuming it's it's mostly reactive rather than proactive you listen and then you can comment and that's about it i'm willing to do it again but also on board president and there's other physicians that are weaning and so if somebody else would like to get some experience at that um nobody's gonna hurt my feelings if you want to take it um it's it's wide open so if anybody would like to do that um feel free to say you'd like to be an opeb rep looks like i'm gonna get get it i don't care i'll do it again i'll so just put

17:44 me down for opeb um and we'll go from there um next board uh the springfield utility board so um we you we haven't met with them lately but we did for a while i think it's good to have somebody else in there that will be uh that could do that you get to know other board members you can you can meet with them and just uh what we were doing there for a while was meeting with um steve mattel and i were meeting with their board leadership and um it was a pretty good relationship we haven't met in probably a year and uh i don't know frank are we going to continue this or not i i would think that um there's a couple of ways to approach these liaison

18:31 positions with other utilities one would be directly through leadership president to president vice president um the other one is through these positions which which give um other uh commissioners the opportunity to develop some relationships as well with so i would i would like to continue those um we we at the management level continue to work closely with with springfield utility board lane electric epud and and the other local utilities so i would like to see it continue okay all right would anybody else like to step into that position i'd be willing to take a shot at that position

19:19 i'll close the nominations congratulations you are now uh liaison that's it's really good it's it's it's fun to get to know those people and and to understand where they're coming from and learn a little bit about their organization it's a it's a it's a real good group of people that talk talk to and everything the next is about the lane electric um liaison currently it's uh mindy and uh mindy do you have any desire to step off stay on um i would say that i've been i have not been a liaison i've done a terrible job over the last year i will blame it on kovid but um i have not had any meetings with them so i don't know if that's i mean i'm happy to step it up if

20:04 if that's what we should do or if is it i don't know if it's better to have i think i took it because i was told that the president takes that role but i'm open i can do a much better job well that you know that would be nice if you would because we can have some diversity in people and going to different organizations i'm a lean electric customer as well i've got some property that's in their service district but uh one of my business partners husband is on the board so i think it probably wouldn't be good for me to to be there per se uh we're kind of friends in a way so um probably better if you stayed there and did whatever you could do and go from there besides they serve really good dinners too and they when they have their meetings at quarterly meetings you go go around they

20:50 they have really good food and so uh you'll enjoy that okay well mindy schlossberg will be the lane electric uh rep city of eugene i think we discussed that uh at the last meeting that would be board leadership going back to the board chair and vice chair so that would be john brown and sonia carlson unless somebody else has a big burning desire i think we'll go back to that so we can have a little more diversity there um uh and then then the last one i think is going to be the new liaison assignment frank can you help me through that yes president brown we can we can actually do this potentially later at the board there's there's actually two opportunities for liaisons with the

21:37 board one would be with the project team this would be the project team potentially that develops the criteria for evaluation and the other one would be as part of the evaluation team itself and up to either one or two commissioners per team if the if the commissioners want to have those liaisons as part of the process and i think we should probably discuss the process um later on agenda item 12 before the board makes that commitment okay well then that will take care of agenda item number eight uh i think we're through with the appointment of board leads on assignments um next agenda item will be board policy

22:22 sd-15 climate change and i think frank is going to take that yes uh president brown commissioners good evening uh for the record uh this is frank lawson the general manager next slide please so this agenda item is for the board it's your own request to take action this evening on revisions to eweb policy sd-15 which is our climate change policy the board deliberated on these potential changes in both november and december and links to both of the background memos for those meetings was also

23:07 included in this evening's board packet advance this slide please so in summary uh while the board felt comfortable with the general directives of the policy over the past months some additional substance was added along with more direct links to how the policy details will be implemented adapted and tracked over time more details were added in the in that how the board and management will implement decisions uh that have climate change impact as well as how information will be reported uh since the last board meeting some distinction was added to the policy related to scope 1 and 2 ghg emissions

23:53 and reporting still leaving some room for analysis and scope 3 ghg emissions if applicable or practical in some circumstances or decisions um and those uh track changes were included in the board packet this evening final slide please so i'd like to close by thanking the commissioners and staff for collaborating and navigating through these improvements over the last few months to the policy and with that i will recommend to you president brown that the board tee up the motion to potentially approve resolution 2202 which is the update to board policy

24:38 fd sd15 climate change so or fielding further questions or comments i'll turn it back to you president brown thank you thank you since this is an action item i'll open the floor to questions or comments from the other commissioners this time i see no hands in the air and no requests to speak so then i'll call the question um somebody like to make a motion to approve uh uh resolution 2204 the update to board policy sd15 move to approve is there a second i'll second okay moved by carlsen's second by

25:23 borowski uh to adopt resolution 2204. um any further discussion if not i'll call a question all those in favor signify by saying i and raising your hand hi passes unanimously thank you very much um next agenda item as we're rolling right along concerns about time are no longer concerns uh strategic goals and organizational performance measures uh frank and ron uh i think this agenda item thank you president brown um your reputation precedes you we're already uh well ahead of schedule so thank you for keeping us on track um so

26:08 good evening again commissioners uh joining me this is mean for this agenda item is rodney price assistant general manager uh go ahead with the next slide please so the objective of this agenda item is to garner approval from the board on our 2022 organizational goals which represents the general manager's interpretation of the mutual priorities between management and the board next slide please the discussion of the board's priorities began last month along with a general discussion of some straw goals as proposed by management to the board based on the feedback that we received

26:53 from commissioners some of these goals have been modified for better alignment between board and management unlike some organizations that create goals and only revisit them late in the year our process continues following the approval of these goals with the development of metrics and milestones with process and or achievement monitoring and reporting at least quarterly so you can see by this diagram that these are living goals that we work with you and report and and measure as we achieve them or a need to take corrective action so next slide please

27:40 so just as a quick reminder as well as for any public or employee awareness we try to balance and prioritize our goals in order to ensure business continuity while simultaneously strategically positioning the utility for ongoing success and so therefore you know the goals tend to fall into the three categories shown here on this slide some of them are are perennial they're operational others identify very discreet opportunities or weaknesses that we need to address and then there's some that are milestones and have a strategic impact long term so next slide please

28:28 so as detailed in the the board backgrounder management is proposing eight annual goals for 2022. there is a lot here by the way and we recognize that there's a lot of work ahead of us to accomplish these goals i won't read each goal this evening specifically but would like to identify a few of the highlights so this first page is primarily foundational and or ongoing requisite work as you might refer to it the first goal continues healthy operations uh while the second goal clearly identifies uh an an ever emerging challenge and opportunity to cult to cultivate uh the workforce necessary to perform the important work that we do for our

29:14 community uh now and in the future the second goal has been developed significantly uh and expanded quite a bit since our conversation last month in december in part because both the board and management and employee feedback because of the looking at the importance of building that foundation and recognizing that the landscape is changing the third goal recognizes both the the drivers and the commitment necessary to address and fulfill compliance obligations associated with dam safety and our ferc licensing requirement at both lieberg and carmen smith which i know the board is very much aware of next slide please

30:05 this second page is primarily strategic with the exception of the tactical goal that i would really the last one listed there uh associated with the disposition of the headquarters property while all these these goals are important their strategic timing is for the most part self-driven goal number four the modernization of e-webs information system requires us to prepare to replace the ever-changing and ever-aging technology that we have the integrated resource plan is a necessary component to understand the value of resources and products prior to the whole slew of decisions coming in the mid-2020s and then addressing operational resiliency in both water and

30:50 electric along with starting the process to evaluate and understand the impacts and opportunities of of rate design are included in these 2022 goals next slide please so commissioners um as the goals the goals as presented try to capture the feedback not just from last month but really based on observations that we've worked on and opportunities that we've talked about and looked at throughout the year although uh not absolutely required with the additional opportunities we can edit this further but our intent this evening would be to garner your approval of these 2022 goals

31:37 so that we can get started and continue working on the alignment the measurements and the resource allocations necessary for good execution and achievement throughout the year president brown before i pass it back to you i just wanted to invite assistant general manager price to see if he has any additional context or comments he wanted to add and then if once he's done with that he can pass it back to you rod do you have any comments i don't at the moment i think you covered the subject quite thoroughly thank you great so uh back to you um president brown uh again we if there's additional comments or edits that the

32:23 board wishes to discuss that'd be great um or if our ultimate desire this evening would be to get uh our 2020 two goals approved either as presented or or modified with that i'll turn it back to you for discussion thank you um so i'll open it up to the other board members for questions or comments does anybody have any questions or comments for frank or rod regarding the uh the goals for the next year uh mindy yeah i think that these goals look great i think they're really ambitious um i think that this will be like our mellowest meeting of the entire year just looking at what's coming forward and um i just want to once again recommend that we take

33:08 advantage of the time that we have allotted for work sessions because some of these things i think would be great to break up to not work on in a regular board meeting but otherwise i think that they look great and pretty exciting work for us to do in this next year thank you any questions or comments matt and and then sonia thank you um i would second um mindy's suggesting that we use uh the the times we have blocked out for second uh meetings during the months where we can in order to uh to chew on some of the stuff this is as mindy said a very ambitious set of goals um

33:54 the one thing i i would add and i think we're doing it already so it's not like a new but um we are tonight reviewing and and perhaps queuing up revisions to um the board policies uh and i think that's an important um activity for us as a board and it's something that maybe we include in the next round um of updated goals that you know something we're doing anyway and i think it's worth having you know having that reflected there and keeping that on the agenda that's all i have i'm not suggesting we need to push that into this for this particular version and i will certainly be prepared to adopt these thank you sonia i i really appreciate the work that

34:39 we've all done to get to this place i agree that it's ambitious uh i'll put a motion out there to approve as is and yeah if others have a second agreement if somebody wants to second that we can still have discussion or if you want to wait to finish the discussion i mean for purposes of moving it forward i'll second that and then i'll open it uh open that motion up for discussion and uh and if you're through um then i'll i'll go to john b2 and see if he has any questions or comments thank you um you know i'm i i think i'm pretty pretty uh okay with the

35:24 the plan as it's put forward um just for me a couple of things that i would like to see and this just goes to staff as to when when you're implementing this plan a couple of the things that i would be very important to me um in number in number three on the uh lieberg hydro and carmen more so on the lieberg getting some actual dollar amounts as early as possible it you know ballpark type of things in the year is going to be something that i'll be looking forward to same thing with number six on the second treatment plant you know we've been throwing numbers around but when it comes down to

36:10 decisions the earlier that we can kind of that i can kind of start wrapping my head around the numbers and where those no where those dollars are going to come from will be a determining factor in how i want to move forward so the earlier that we can get those again preliminary numbers would be good because that leads me into into number seven which is a multi-year rate design plan so you know if we know we've got these big projects coming forward and yet we're trying to to jump through item number seven without really having a clue as to what number six and number one four are gonna cost us that that would give me pause so i'm i'm fine with moving forward with it as it

36:56 is but just know that those are some of the things that i'll be looking for um going forward because you know if it's gonna that that's going to be one of the driving factors in making my decision so thank you okay and i have a a comment as well before i call the question a goal number one um where we're talking about using integrating and using advanced metering data when we've stopped that project for lack of supply and technicians are is that just the wisdom around a goal that has been stopped and uh whether or not we have a foreseeable future in in i don't want to set us up for not attaining a goal

37:41 and things such as that could you just comment to that real quickly about uh how those two work yeah president brown thank you we wanted to acknowledge first of all that the ami project was not fully accomplished from previous organizational goals we did run into a supply chain issue as soon as that supply chain issue is is corrected we do plan on uh full deployment as well as starting to operationalize the the data this the way that this goal is written is to use this technology as the deployment allows us to so if if we are able to resume

38:27 um a the deployment as we had before we will certainly do that we also didn't want to box ourselves into a corner based on something that at least at this point was a little bit about out of our control um but we wanted to keep ami on the radar um and so it was written in for that purpose thank you i i agree with that thank you very well that's a good explanation any other questions or comments before i call the question for moving this forward if not that has been moved and seconded that we adopt the 2022 organizational goals as presented by staff all those in federer signify by saying i and raising your hand all right passes unanimously

39:12 well look at this thank you commissioners look look forward to a a busy year with lots of work sessions so that we can keep mindy smiling um make sure we we use those but um thank you very much there's a there is a there is a lot here just just so you know and um we're gonna have to roll up our sleeves and get busy on it and and uh um i'm looking forward to it okay well now it's decision time i mean if the way we're going we could have a work session after this meeting um so we're almost an hour and a half ahead and uh so people want to keep moving on and uh and just forgo the break um just head nods that's all i need to see let's continue moving on as long as staff is okay with

39:58 that um and we're going to go to the item number 12 the eweb headquarter property solicitation process frank yes commissioners good evening once again this is frank lawson with me on this uh particular presentation is ann call administrative services manager uh go ahead with the next slide please so the the purpose of this evening is to gather as much guidance as we can from commissioners on the solicitation process associated with the disposition or potential sale of the headquarters property this is something that you did receive a background

40:44 package on a pretty detailed background package that included a description of the process as well as a whole series of questions that we would like to get from uh some feedback from the commissioners on we'll get to those questions in a minute um at this point i would like to have ann caw run through at least a high-level overview of the process what you received was a draft solicitation process so there is still the opportunity to make changes based on your feedback and your comments and your direction so with that i think next slide please

41:38 so with that um and can you provide commissioners with a high level perspective of how we're proposing this process will work certainly thank you general manager lawson good evening commissioners the slide before you outlines the proposed timeline for the rfp from development to completion thoughtful planning and close collaboration with the board will be key to our success and we recognize the importance of creating a fair and equitable process that reflects your values goals and priorities and we know that the solicitation that we put forward will directly influence the quality and quantity of the proposals that we receive the project team including the liaisons

42:23 that will be appointed later this evening will work iteratively with the full board to further develop and refine the solicitation until it ultimately earns your approval and we aim to accomplish this by late q1 or early q2 the project team has prepared the preliminary draft that general manager lost and referenced and this process is very similar to the methods used by 4j's school district when they sold the civic stadium as we were developing the rfp we identified several junctures where the board may wish to provide direction and like our previous headquarters property agendas tonight's agenda item is about listening and we'll also have some time for q a at the end

43:09 but before general manager lawson moves on to some of those specific questions for the board i'd like to pause for a moment to give commissioners the opportunity to comment on the proposed timeline and the solicitation process in general do any board members wish to comment or shall i go ahead and turn it back over to general manager lawson at this time well mindy has a comment and i will have a comment so go ahead mindy i just have a question looking at the timeline so um uh q2 starts in march is that right or april when when is that april um so i was thinking of q1 as being january through march and q2 being

43:56 april and so um we're assuming that we're going to get all of this done and then like starting in april is when we'll start collecting proposals does that am i reading this right that's what we're aiming for what my thought was is once we have the liaisons appointed the project team will work offline with that group to bring back another iteration for the board and depending on your feedback tonight if that's something we can turn around quickly we'll bring that back in february either the regular meeting or perhaps we can leverage some of those work sessions and if not then then it would be in march that the next iteration would come

44:42 back to the board um and i am just going to um rely on the expertise of my fellow board members and also of staff like i've never been through a process like this before and i am just curious like how long it takes people to get the funding part together like is is this um a realistic timeline i know john brown has something to say about he has some thoughts too but i'm just gonna say i've never been through a process like this so i don't know if this is an overly ambitious timeline or if this is totally reasonable so i guess i'm just it's not a question specifically for you anne i'm just it's something that i'm wondering out loud i don't know how to

45:27 get the answer to that but i'm curious what others think about that well i'm gonna i had a comment too if i may and i you know having been through this process with numerous organizations and uh uh you know i have this little thing that says that you know it time kills deals and uh this seems like to me it's it's stretched out quite a bit and we've got a we got a lot of utility work to do not real estate work and uh you know look how long it took us to sell that just to bear land um we're losing between twelve and fifteen hundred dollars every day that we don't monetize that asset if you're three to four percent on 15 million it's just a rough number but you think of that plus our holding costs and what it costs to mothball that thing i mean we're still ensuring it we're still

46:13 eating it we're still maintaining it and things such as that so um i would hope that we could move this along uh because this economy can change just like that and everything else it's an ambitious thing but just a question for you ann so we start january 4th um by um december 1st what do you envision will you have in your will will eweb have in his possession or frank have in his possession is that to negotiate a purchase or to consummate a purchase by in in the 12-month period i'm aiming to be in a position to negotiate by q4 whether that be december or not um

46:58 there are some questions we have later in the the board meeting tonight around how long we should leave the solicitation open we're proposing 90 days but we're looking for your feedback on that as well as the liaisons and a lot of it will depend on the proposals we receive and what those potential buyers would need to negotiate as far as timing another question we had is whether the board would entertain a lease to own and some of those options that may be presented to the board so a lot of it will depend what's brought to us i think yeah okay well i just i just i go back to my timing deal about

47:43 uh you know this i'll go with this but i just i just don't want to get so bogged down that in december somebody comes and says now we have to apply for grants from the legislature and we have to do a fundraising thing and it's going to be 12 to 18 months to do that and uh as we continue to go on and on um i think it took us nine years to do civic stadium uh between the the public input the challenges the funding um you remember we had three or four proposals for that and uh and it was a very challenging thing to to to get through and uh it consumed the school board for many many meetings and many executive sessions and it's just

48:28 um i want to make sure everybody's prepared for that type of a time thing time crunch on us or because most of this has to go into executive session when we're talking about negotiating things such as that so i'm just putting it out there the timing is i'll accept it but um i just don't want to go beyond this because it's uh this thing can have a life of its own and that's the only thing we'll be doing is real estate that's what we did for quite a period of time when we sold the land it was just dominated us and it cost us millions of dollars yeah president brown i this looks pretty good compared to 10 years i'll just that's an editorial comment um but i

49:15 would um i would also say there's there's some potential opportunity in the questions coming up to simplify this uh the more that the board can simplify it um than the potentially more expeditious it can be um i would also um want us as part of the criteria to be able to consider the financial terms so that someone doesn't come to us in the negotiating phase and say oh we have we still need to go get our financing the the disclosure of the financing would have to be part of what we're evaluating so that we would once an award is or an organization or recipient is identified a primary one

50:01 that there's a pretty tight boundary around what those negotiations are to complete the deal um and if someone comes to the to the table with a proposal that doesn't have secure financing then i think that would be uh included in the evaluation criteria as such so um that that at least that would be what i think we we intend okay thank you any other questions or comments john b thank you um yeah as somebody who's been in a couple of these rfps um both on the scoring side and the developmental side i.e it was more for affordable housing that i was was involved with it but still it's

50:46 it's something i've done a few times through some positions that i've had through the city one of the things uh and and i'll touch on some of the other things as we go through the questions but specifically to ann's question on the timeline one of the things that i think would be helpful to the people who might be putting together these rfps is uh a commun you know the communication of what we're looking for once we have the rfp we have a communication plan that is put in place but i think it would also be advantageous to do kind of an early bird you know hey eweb is going to be developing an rfp for the headquarters

51:32 to give people some heads up so that they can start getting some ducks in a row whether that's financing or whatever even before the rfp qualifications are put out there because i think it is a quite a condensed timeline for for this type of property especially if we're look looking at you know some non-profits or other community-based organizations they're not going to be able to move as swift as as private market people might be able to so any kind of advanced warning even if it's just a press release that says hey the the board has decided to start developing an rfp process for the headquarters building and this is our timeline uh that might be helpful to some of the people that are coming

52:17 forward yeah thank you commissioner borofsky i know that i did see the draft communications plan earlier today i don't recall if it had the the i'll call it the pre-release communications as part of that phase um potentially uh miss call could actually elaborate on that um if she knows off the top of her head but i do think that's a good suggestion and and um we'll um incorporate that into the communications plan absolutely uh press releases on the docket we hadn't decided on timing but with this guidance i think it's a great

53:02 idea thank you so president brown there's a a series of questions if we wanted to advance to the next slide um there i don't remember exactly there's there's probably a series of of a dozen questions and i didn't if you would prefer to moderate this you know one question at a time and if people feel like there's a particular question that they want to lean into more than others then we can just go through these or if you'd rather have me do it as part of this presentation i can do that i know the board did receive the presentation ahead of time so you

53:48 probably have a little idea of what questions are coming but do you have a preference to to lead that president brown or leave it up to me i think it'd be better if you did frank just because of the fact that uh if i'm participating or i'm even considered to participate in this process whether it be you know in the rfp or the or the criteria or the evaluation i i want to i don't want to lead it because you can direct conversation sometimes and i just think it would be better if i respond if you don't mind sure i'd be happy to do that so well we'll kick this right off with the first uh question which has to do with the uh the role of the potentially two different sets of board liaisons one as a as a team member and the other in the

54:35 as the project team which is creating the criteria and the other one which is part of the evaluation team and the the question really um is for the board as to the roles of those individuals whether they are full participants or whether they are liaisons who are bringing back information and to the board um from the board perspective um so there there can be a full participation on one end or there could be simply an advisory and role on the other end and so this question has to do with does the board want to have participation in both the project team and the evaluation team and to what

55:21 extent would those potentially one or two individual members and they are acting as individuals they are not acting as the collective board participating with the project team so this is to solicit your ideas around and your thoughts around the roles that these liaisons could fill could fulfill within both the project team and the evaluation team any any uh commissioner comments um as sonia's i'm going to ask everybody for comments sony i'll start with you and then just go through the list okay uh i i think it would be good to have uh liaisons to both the project team and the evaluation team and i would advocate

56:06 that we have those be if we if we choose to have two people i'd say you know have a different person for the project team versus the evaluation team or if we have two people for the project team then we have a separate you know one person for the evaluation team just so there's a little bit more diversity and board involvement but i think it would be valuable from my perspective to have some of us sitting on there and being involved in it okay mindy um i completely agree with sonia i think that um my my hesitation well i i absolutely think that the board should be involved in this my hesitation is that um if we're acting as individuals as part of

56:52 this team i really want to make sure that um that we have a diversity of opinions or you know um that that board that board members equally get to um kind of participate even if they are not specifically on the team does that i don't know if that makes sense but i just want to make sure that it's um that we all kind of get a a voice in this but um otherwise i agree with what sonia just said matt it seems to me that um you know board involvement here is is important uh i don't have strong feelings about exactly how the liaisons

57:38 are broken up i have to say with this goal this whole particular decision making i i kind of share your concerns brown about this absorbing a lot of time so um you know however these liaison positions are set up i just hope that we can make them a reasonable lift for the board members who take those positions so that they also have bandwidth to deal with the other pile of huge decisions that we'll be making this year that's all i have thank you john b2 thank you um yeah i also believe that board participation as a team member is important

58:25 if we split them and and do both i think that's important as well i think that any one of us as board members bring something to the team that may not be in there as as a wholly staff driven team as far as the makeup of the different committees you know the first one the rfp criteria you know that's kind of uh quantitative you know what are the metrics we're looking for and then the second one is more of a qualitative we're scoring them and that's more of a feel how do we feel about this does it check the boxes what are the points that we can award

59:11 but the other thing to cons that we also have to always consider is that these are just going to be recommendations that are brought back to us as a whole board so it's not like oh this is going to be john b two's recommendations we're gonna come back and we're going to chew this over as a full board um and so i i'm not so worried about the consistency of how these things are made up because it's just a matter of getting the values and what we want as a utility to get out of this situation and then it comes back to us to really chew on as a full board

59:59 i agree and my two cents worth is is that uh i think diversity on these positions is very important because to one of us um what uh what a museum or science or arts may have different weights and different values and if we're going to assign hardline points to intended use or projected use or community benefit that's a very subjective thing and and that's going to have to become you know as board members we're going to have to represent a constituency we're going to have to think about how we're gonna weigh that that's that's not easy to do uh and so i i i appreciate this and i think the diversity on on both the project team and evaluation team um will be good and john b said it best to it's all coming back to the board

1:00:44 so president brown i think that there's a couple of really important um nuances that i think really everybody who's commented has touched on all of the decisions are made by the board as a whole and there are multiple check-in points for the board as a whole as individual contributors to these teams you are basically contributing to the team um it's not a subcommittee which then has different um legal requirements but you as individuals would be acting as a contributor to the process that would then absolutely correctly come back to the

1:01:30 board at various points for various decisions i just wanted to make sure that there's a clear distinction there and what i'm hearing is the board is interested as individual commissioners having participation at both the project team and the evaluation team level and we can have up to two and it sounds like based on the fact that there's four um that there's the diversity of four different individuals participating is is uh something that's definitely of interest to the board so someone unfortunately will be left left out since we have five but um it's it won't be left out from they will not be left out from the decision-making process

1:02:15 okay so you have what you need on that particular um decision i think so um and you've been part of the project um team it was is does that an adequate level of feedback and i guess i'll get to john barofsky here in a second yes that's what we needed to know main question was will the liaisons participate fully as team members and i'm hearing a a yes the only question would be does the board want to circle back to the actual appointment of those liaisons since we skipped over that earlier in the agenda

1:03:00 i think the answer to that is yes i was actually going to go to that next but i i saw commissioner borofsky had a uh had his hand up yeah the the question that i had would be since there's four of us and there were four positions and five commissioners would it be appropriate to have an alternate uh person who could sit in i mean this could be several several meetings and there's probably going to be conflicts at some point so do you think there's a possibility and this may be a legal thing but would there be a possibility that the fifth commissioner could be the alternate i'm not sure commissioner borowski how practical that is given the fact that i think this even though there's probably

1:03:46 several two or three meetings there's a lot of continuity between those meetings and i and i think we might miss something if someone was dropping off and on but i i will um but i can also evaluate the legal perspective on that as well i don't know what that would be i think we might be bumping up against a quorum which would trigger a public meeting but we can explore that further to confirm how would only two commissioners constitute a quorum oh i meant if there was a third commissioner that sat in as a as an alternate they wouldn't sit in unless one of the other people couldn't make the meeting i think was the intent

1:04:32 oh okay so john john b and matt are the two liaisons to the evaluation team and john b can't make it so uh mindy's going to be the alternate there'll never be more than two board members participating in the process it's not three is the way i understood it okay thank you for clarifying i will look into that i understand the clarification on that um president brown i i also know that there's some there are some legal pieces to that that we'll need to check out okay mindy um well this is an exciting project that has all of our interest i think before we get too far down that rabbit hole we should make sure that everybody even wants a spot as one of these

1:05:17 uh liaisons so maybe not everybody does and so that point is moot well that that's a great segue uh commissioner schlossberg um i was going to ask um president brown to do what he did with advice with the vice president role with both the project team um if there are people who are interested in the project team or the and or the evaluation team i guess i could just ask for volunteers and if there's more than two volunteers then we i would have to lean back on the board to make a selection between those two um i guess i guess i can just do it i can do it that way i guess we would start with the project

1:06:02 team and see if there are any uh commissioner volunteers to serve as members on the project team so to be clear that's the one that's setting up the the criteria for how it's evaluated later correct that's that's correct okay there's a template for it in the background that they kind of took from the civic stadium process about you know they had an example of points for price and for intended use and qualifications of the developer and things such as that and that you would be setting up those criteria i believe so we're not going to do

1:06:49 is there anybody else would like to volunteer for that position commissioner barofsky is that a volunteer or is that a question i'd volunteer for that one okay the project team is filled unless i hear somebody else having a desire to do that okay very good thank you very much i appreciate that yeah and then the evaluation team is the second one and we have any volunteers for the evaluation team

1:07:35 make sure that everybody else has an opportunity as well because uh you know you're going to hear from me whether it's beginning or the end and so you know think about how you play your cards if you if you want me in there at the initial part of it i can do that or i can just wait until it comes to the board i'm okay with however it plays out i just want to make sure that everybody has an opportunity and if this doesn't work for somebody that's fine i'll step up and be uh be there with mindy i don't care yeah so um john i think you should take that role if you'd like i'm happy to do it um but i'm i'm not like jumping at the bit to do it so that's fine that's i'll do it man i'll i'll be more invited to do it i just want to make sure that the opportunity was out there for everybody

1:08:21 and if it's not something that you're just jumping up and down then don't do it because it's going to be it's going to be time consuming and it's going to be especially the valuation team you know it's it's going to be it's a fun process thanks for stepping up it sounds like uh john b two and uh sonia are on the project team and uh john brown and mindy schlossberg are on the evaluation team so my question to you john is i know you're hesitating and waiting to waiting to uh jump in and and i really uh am kind of leaning on your expertise on this because you've been through these several times and this is kind of your belly look you know if if somebody came to the board and said i want to learn

1:09:06 how to or i want to sell noodles you know i would want to be on that committee i'm just wondering do you think that you know i i could switch and go back and forth to either either one of these two do you think you would be better off in the in the first one or the second one and and i'd let you take your pick they're equally important because uh you know when when we get the project team that has the criteria that we're going to evaluate we're all going to get to weigh in on that john and so i as long as we get to weigh in on it early enough so we don't have people feeling that all their efforts and their proposals were for not because we may have a different perspective and so as long as it's communicated well and we go through that process uh i'm i'm okay with where i am

1:09:57 i'll stay where i am then thank you all right thank you commissioners this will be helpful as we develop what we bring back to the board at large and so um i appreciate your willingness to participate and contribute but both as as board members as a board as well as individual commissioners so thank you the next slide please um ms call i was just curious at the stars are those the important questions yes they are okay all right well i just wanted to make sure that in the um sensitive sensitivity of time um so this this is an opportunity to

1:10:45 clarify a little bit from the board as to the goals for the disposition of the property and and there's you know elements that may be missing in the evaluation criteria we provided some general gut you know some general information around that and this is an opportunity to weigh in um although without a lot of of commentary at this point we will bring back our interpretation of it but this is an opportunity for the board to weigh in on the on the goals for disposition of the property this also might be an opportunity to weigh in on on number three um which could be part of the goals around position is this really something the board is interested in just selling uh leasing

1:11:31 trading you know how uh what are the options that could be on the table um from the from the outset um is it strictly a fee sale or is there other kinds of options that the board would be willing to entertain and so with with that i guess i would open it up too to comments i'll start with commissioner carlson um i i know that i've heard a lot about you know time and we want to get this through quickly but i do want to make sure that whatever we end up doing is the best decision for the community and sometimes that takes a little bit more you know thought and time and process and so i may be i may be in the minority there and that's okay i want to make sure that that space

1:12:17 whatever decision you know gets made is a fair process and that it's one that will be a major benefit to the community because it's a really it's a it's just such a valuable and wonderful community resource that i want to make sure that we whatever process we choose and the criteria that we choose it ends up being one that's valuable for the community so i'm not one to say you know it should be just a cash sale and do this quick um i'm personally willing to look at other options mostly because there might be other opportunities out there that i think could be very beneficial in the community but um

1:13:02 that's why we have diversity on these panels so thank you thank you commissioner carlson other other thoughts um i have a couple thoughts if i could i i um we want to get out of the real estate business i'm not so sure if we want to do a long-term lease unless we want to be a property manager and do that um a trade okay somebody offers us a trade then we're going to have to evaluate that property and consider it and do you know the appraisals the environmental and all that and this thing will go on and on and we're going to have to ascribe the value to it um and then when sonya said something about an all cash i don't think legally we can carry a contract can we frank i think we can't obligate future we have it has to be cash

1:13:47 and uh and so things such as that so uh um you know i i don't want to make the wrong decision but i want to make the one that you know when we talk about moving this forward you know just like i say the economics of twelve to fifteen hundred dollars a day in interest that we could use this money to pay off debt that's accruing interest at three and four percent is as a factor that i'm going to consider too so um going from there because we have a pretty large community to serve your correct president brown relative to the ability of a private of a public entity like eweb carrying um the financing for um the sale of real estate um i'm sure

1:14:32 we will clarify that as part of the evaluation criteria of more but um it does any time we would end up with a long-term lease or a trade that that is going to complicate things things significantly um and i don't think that's what commissioner carlson was asking for i think she was really more concerned about the ultimate end use of the property and making sure that it had some degree of benefit for the community any other comments on this um i i just have a quick question if i could ann the in the in the background you have things in the property description and then that's just is that just a placeholder or is that something that is is going out because i had some

1:15:17 comments on some of the things that we made representations in there i kind of have some concerns about what's being said about the property um i'd like to discuss those with you the information that we have in there for the most part is what we used in the survey of interest there's been some additional details added so if you have some areas of concern let's talk about those and i will get those updated for our next um iteration you want me to tell you what they are right now it could be real quick sure it's just on number two property description where we make representations that what the city of eugene is doing will have a positive impact on uh on the properties on our property's real estate value i would

1:16:02 caution against making any representations about an increase in value from what they're doing because this market can change in two seconds and somebody buys it and said well we said it was going to be enhanced because of the development and it's not and then boom they're back on us i just i would just let other people make their their decisions about what that adjacent development is going to do because um people that are in this league are going to know what it's going to do and if we make representations and it doesn't happen um then they say well you guys said it's going to have a positive impact and it didn't i just don't want to get into that representation thing and that was just kind of a concern on some of the background material thank you for that i'll definitely strike it thank you thank you president brown i

1:16:47 believe um commissioner barofsky and then uh commissioner mccray had some comments thank you um yeah for me um for the board's goals for disposition of the property you know i i know that commissioner brown has uh has alluded to the fact that past boards have have said that you know they're going to use the the proceeds from this property to help retire the rock uh debt um you know prior boards have no say over over these boards um you know if that bore i think if those boards had had known that there was going to be a 80 to 100 million dollar possible fix to the lieber dam they may have may have

1:17:32 had other thoughts about how this money might get spent um so just where where it's going that's that's coming up um as far as the number three which is number two on my list um you know trade like like commissioner brown said that would have to be uh it would have to be a heck of a good trade for me to even consider it um as far as combination of purchase lease trade i can foresee something where it would be a lease to buy you know where somebody's gonna leave we say yeah it's gonna be two years before you can get it going but you're gonna have to lease it from us for that two years before you purchase it

1:18:17 something like that i would be amenable to the long-term lease again it would have to i would have to look at the uh the financial qualifications of the entity to to be able to say yes to a long-term lease thank you thank you commissioner barofsky um independent of past board comments on the the retiring of debt with the rock um the the way that we would treat that today there's there is no legal obligation to re use this for retiring that particular debt it would be used in in in essence the highest and best use of cash um and so our financial people when we talk about

1:19:03 reserves and and things of that nature the uses of the of the funding would be um at the board's discretion but it would not be legally obligated to retire debt at the rock just just so just to make that clear um commissioner mcrae yeah just my quick reaction to the two questions uh i feel like the the elements you have here in terms of uh uh evaluating different proposals are complete and and sufficient and then in terms of the different options from my perspective and i haven't been through this so i i definitely defer to those who have greater experience but

1:19:49 i would want to see i guess all the options available to people who want to make proposals it's it seems reasonable that we would probably not look as fondly at a trade proposal as we would at a cash sale but it seems like cutting off those options may leave some potentially good options off the table that really we might want to consider so my inclination will be to leave all the options available thank you commissioner any other thoughts before we move on to the next i i just had a quick question yes um commissioner carlson so on the long-term lease option

1:20:35 i heard you say earlier that that may be something that we can't do as a uh as a utility we we cannot do it as a holder of a note for example i mean we have a we have a tenant in there now for example um but we we have to be careful about how we would use um public funds to finance real estate purchases and then that's that's in essence how we would be viewed if we were to loan somebody money for example to facilitate that so we'll have to it's a legal definition on it so it could potentially be a lease versus the sale but if we do it as a financial transaction where we're holding the actual note

1:21:20 then that might be a problem right and i'm getting just the impression i have from commissioners is that a sale a disposition of the property a divestiture of the property is preferred um leaving some options for uh creativity that could help facilitate the financing of some something it would be part of of what would be evaluated in the criteria but as opposed to just saying let's just continue to lease this forever which i'm not hearing from the board i'm hearing let's get out of the real estate business but let's do things that can facilitate that and the evaluation criteria we could actually put some ranking around these to some extent that's correct

1:22:05 okay great thank you yeah thank you next slide please so um i i guess i will just leave these all up there um for the for the board to consider uh having to do a time frame the the the um the comment around competitive range is to provide a mechanism to narrow the field for a second round um which would be we get it we get a number of proposals those those come in and then um there's a the board views this as as an opportunity to narrow the the scope to two or three probably at the most which

1:22:50 could go through another round and potentially a best and final offer type of approach and so as opposed to just doing something from the very beginning looking for an award i will just leave these up um there's a number uh of uh there's some advantage for example to leaving an open-ended closing date um so that if there's other proposals that come in that those can be given a certain degree of opportunity to be evaluated um and so i think that's but any any comments just generally from the board on the these don't have stars by them which what that what that means is that we can bring concepts back to the board around these issues if

1:23:37 there are no strong feelings from the board one way or the other on these we we can actually take these and and um try to predict what we think the best answer would be for your review included in the next the next round of the process i feel really strongly that whatever um proposal we accept should have some community value like sonya said but i also realize that that kind of can open a big can of worms and can i i take to heart what john brown has to say that it can go on forever so i think what you're asking here is do

1:24:22 we put some pretty firm boundaries on this process so that we can um maybe have the best of both worlds in a way um and i support like putting both like guard rails and timelines on so that we can stay within that um my fear with this process is that this is something that's a little bit easier for well i'll speak for myself to understand than some of the um other decisions that we undertake and so i have a tendency to um jump in to this kind of process and this is making me sound terrible but i guess what i'm trying to say is i can see this mushrooming and becoming like a long drawn out thing

1:25:07 um and we have so many other really important things that we have to to deal with so i support um kind of firming up our our boundaries as much as we can thank you commissioner commissioner mccray and then commissioner carlson agree with uh with mindy i think the open-ended closing date makes me nervous because i'm concerned that we get close to some kind of decision and then another opportunity comes our proposal comes in and we you know start going down the road incorporating that and that that could make the

1:25:53 make it feel kind of never ending um so i'd be uh not inclined to have an open ending closing date perhaps it's a longer window than 90 days to facilitate a broad variety of proposal um and then i have a question about the the competitive range concept um the way it's described in here um you talk about you know different points in ranking but then um it says we expected there'd be a short list that would be perhaps a small number of proposals which sounds more like ranking to me and so i'm not sure if the are we just liking it by like whatever proposals have above some certain threshold of scoring or are we just saying we're going to look at the top whatever three or five

1:26:41 proposals i i'm not sure which you're proposing um it would be the latter of those um commissioner mccray and it would probably not be more than three okay yeah that makes sense to me and and typically what happens in scoring is you might get a little bit of a cluster at the top and then you then you typically have a gap and we would we would do this where if if that's the approach then it might be two or three um it would not be more than three okay great yeah that sounds good to me thank you um i just want to do a time check with with president brown

1:27:33 um you're you're muted at the moment not anymore sorry um the overall agenda we've used up our time our allocated time but we're way ahead of schedule so if uh without objection if other people you know we're on we've got three more uh bullet points to go through after these uh four through seven if you're okay to just extend this for another 10 to 15 minutes um if i don't see objection i'll just do it administratively and yeah we're going to just keep keep going frank okay thank you um commissioner carlson um i believe you had your hand up next um you you are muted also i'm sorry

1:28:19 uh one quick clarification after what um what matt brought up i'm so the criteria that's set up we're not beholden to the top one once the you know once everything gets scored the board will get brought back the the top three and then we would decide you know among those top three or top two or whatever the kind of cutoff is is that what i understand you would go through a scoring phase and then um if the process includes a competitive range then um it would be brought back to the board to discuss you know here's the top two or three that we're recommending as the competitive range and then that would give the board the opportunity to bless those to the next step which might be a proposal

1:29:05 best and final offer there it would it would go from there okay i'm supportive of a competitive range um i have no idea in the 90 days if that's an adequate amount of time i'd love to hear others thoughts on whether or not that's you know a typical amount of time it sounded like this was the this was the amount of time the school board allotted so i'm fine with that if that seems like it's reasonable um the open-ended closing date i would love to hear some other uh maybe benefits to that because otherwise that also sounds like it would be something that would drag it on um and then the best and final offers i guess that goes along with the competitive range and that we have

1:29:50 a grouping of them that we bring back yeah um [Music] i wanted to address the open-ended closing date but i'll go ahead with president brown you had your hand up first i do um uh regarding number seven uh option for best and final offers in the process i just did one with the springfield school board we sold their headquarters building and what we did is we had an offer that said uh we'll give you twenty thousand dollars more than anybody else's highest offer so how do you respond to that uh and so it becomes an auction and not a sale and and you can't you know and how do you do that and not you know and so i just i caution against if somebody makes that uh representation saying okay

1:30:35 here's one for 727.50 and this guy says i'll give you 20 grand more than anybody else then how is that fair to the others uh it becomes i'm concerned about that i wouldn't you know i think 90 days for proposers to respond is is fine but i don't think that's going to i mean that's going to give them we're going to give them a due diligence package with age and condition of all the mechanical systems and such as that they're not going to get financing together and i mean this is a big chunk of money and uh and and i don't even know do we have to do a land use process has this been rezoned to allow the range of uses that we're soliciting for um because i haven't checked last last i knew it was on public land and private entities can't own public land and it takes it's a metro plan process that's

1:31:23 18 months i'll double check on that uh commissioner brown i don't believe we have to go through a land use process um but i i will we'll make sure that we double check we'll make sure that the property will be properly zoned to allow the range of uses which we intend which we think would be community benefit if it doesn't have to be just a strict old generic office or things like that or retail uh you know if somebody wants to put a museum in there let them but i just want to make sure that we have the proper land use stuff in order so um i just you know i say i want to move this forward so uh and the 90-day response time is for the as for the proposal not to close the financing yeah yeah no that's plenty of time to put together a proposal in my opinion yeah the um

1:32:09 ms there were some benefits to having an open-ended closing date um i don't i don't know who on the project team could elaborate on that maybe we can bring that back to the board um this next this next go around or explain that to the the appropriate liaison um uh commissioner carlson and borofsky that there were some some benefits to doing that um but i off the top of my head i can't recall what those are the primary benefit would be if we didn't have a set of proposals that had a good chance of resulting in a sale and so we wouldn't have to start over if we had that open-ended closing date once we have an opening date specified the

1:32:55 board could say we have all the proposals we want and they could decline to put any additional proposals in um it would just leave that option open okay yeah that's that that actually sounds like good practice to me but um and we can um bring that back in the next round of details let let's go with the next slide please wait oh commissioner barofsky yeah i wanted to weigh in on these if that's okay if that's okay um competitive range yes i think that's definitely appropriate um but just just because we're bringing back two or three that doesn't mean that the board won't see all our all

1:33:41 proposals and the board could could come back and and elevate one of the ones that may not be in the top two or three um i think from the from the rfp scorings and things that i've been in it there's always a lot of good proposals the hardest thing is is weighing two good proposals against each other um and which is the best that's the hardest part and that's what i'm hoping that's my best case scenario is that we've got two or three just knocking out of the park proposals and and they're all win-win wins and we just have to pick them the biggest winner um 90 days seems seems uh

1:34:26 pretty short for the for the type of interest that i think we're going to be gleaming on this property so i would i would lean towards open-ended um and then best and final you know that one i think we can we can look at that as far as the criteria and and put waiting on ones that will be timed better more as a as opposed to saying this we're looking for best and finals so those are my uh thoughts on these thank you commissioner barofsky all commissioners i think this was this was helpful that number seven and number four can can work together um you can develop a competitive range and then as

1:35:12 part of that process there could be the option you don't have to take it there could be an option for a best and final offer instead of an actual um award to negotiate at that point so um next next slide please thank you um let's see um a protest process um the the other um these these are actually ones that i think we can probably bring back um in to the board um

1:35:58 i'm i guess i'll just open this up to see if the board has any comments on these and there's one final element that i wanted to ask the board about a detail um regarding a potential lot line adjustment so for me i would need to know more what a pro protest process means that wasn't spelled out clear enough to me but it seems like something that i would probably want to steer away from yes president brown yeah just uh uh just

1:36:45 from history of uh on the protest process um i think we need to to know about protocol and when somebody asks for a clarifying question or additional information uh if we disseminate that if it's not the original packet we have to give that to all proposers and if not you see because maybe one group thinks of something that other people don't think of that's kind of proprietary but if we're providing information to somebody and you know to one group and we don't provide it to another are we penalizing that group for thinking outside the box and asking a question that nobody else thought of that's very relevant in in the evaluation criteria do we do we provide that response and that information to

1:37:30 everybody or just to the people that ask the questions i think we'll have to navigate through that commissioner brown i don't have the answer off the top of my head i think there's there's some degree of confidentiality that we're trying to protect through the nda process at the same time if if it's a a piece of information that's useful regarding the property i would think that we would share that to to all of the potential proposers so there's i think it depends the answer probably to me would be it it would depend on the type of information that is being requested um but we'll have to look into that a little bit more and and how that could relate

1:38:15 to a process in nda i'm fine that's not a non-disclosure agreement and uh and other than that i think that we got a good framework to start with thank you thank you president commissioner carlson i guess the piece that i'm um toiling with right now and that are we missing anything of importance since a lot of this is going to be um you know in executive sessions and such um and the actual proposals i i mean it seems to me that there are there are pieces that you know the the different interested groups would want to be

1:39:01 under nda or something of that that sort where is the piece where we have the ability to get public input um for me i'm looking maybe at the evaluation criteria to get some more thoughts on you know we put that together and then we do outreach to the public i know that 90 day window is pretty short to get a robust process but i don't want the community to come back and say well the commissioners just made this huge decision totally behind closed doors because this was a real estate thing and it was exempt from these kinds of transactions but it's i really do feel like it's so important that we have community input on this and so i i just want to make sure that there's a way that we can do that and if that's maybe in the evaluation criteria up

1:39:47 front so that there's buy-in there that we we get that piece yeah thank you commissioner carlson um we'll we'll take that feedback back and see how um the public communications piece of this and and how that will work throughout the process at probably intermittent phases throughout it but thank you for that feedback okay is there anything else you need from us frank or anne i i need one more thing uh president brown it should should be relatively quick hopefully um there is a

1:40:32 the the question um to the commissioners is there is a um the very corner the southeast corner of the the parcel uh just south of the south building it's that um the property line presently runs diagonally through and i'm speaking to the the the slide now diagonally through um what is that rectangle there combination red and blue that's the existing property line the the plan um the redevelopment plan riverfront development plan actually has a a building or a lot that

1:41:18 presently includes some of eweb's property and it's that triangle in blue that is coupled with the red triangle in as a a parcel in the riverfront development my my question to commissioners would be whether they are open to the possibility of selling that blue triangle independently ahead of the headquarters building to the city of eugene or the the urban renewal agency separate from the headquarters building and that that's that's my my open-ended

1:42:03 question or whether we leave it intact and let the um city or the developer um have discussions with a potential future owner of the headquarters building um i'll jump in here i think that it would be fine to sell it off to the city the question that i would have is could we use this as a bargaining chip to release us from that the stipulation that if we separate the properties we have to give the urban renewal agency right of first refusal if we went to them and said we'll give you that we'll we'll sell you this

1:42:48 property but you've got to relinquish that much like we did with the mpg um commissioner barofsky um we we could potentially tie whatever terms we believe is appropriate with with the offer to the city um if um would it would it trigger that clause if we sold this it would it would not trigger the cause independently we we would have to include language in the purchase and sale agreement that the right of first negotiation

1:43:33 for the what what are called the mill street lots and the the credit union lots which are separate lots um associated with the headquarters parking that those could be marketed or sold independently so we would have to tie the purchase and sale agreement of this particular parcel to that if the city would agree to that commissioner carlson how quickly could they turn it around i mean we just said we're going to do 90 days on the other piece of property if they decide for some reason that they don't want it after we've gone through six

1:44:18 months of this process now what are we doing adding it back on to the other property um well there's a couple of things first of all the the lot line adjustment process is not an overnight process you're you're dealing with some some uh administrative and um you know legal def you know lot line definitions there that would that would take some time what could be approached with the city is is a to engage their interests and the potential terms of that interest um and then um in in full disclosure with anybody associated with the marketing of the headquarters property this would um would

1:45:03 be marketed as excluding this particular triangle even before the line adjustment would would be done but um that i i would hope that they could respond relatively quickly with yes our interest is this these are the terms of which um we would we would probably offer them the terms and if they decide not to they decide not to it would it would truly be we know that this is in the interest of your development plan here's what we think is the fair value of it here's some terms associated with that and give them a set period of time to respond would it be feasible to say like 90 days so while we're going through the criteria evaluation process they have the ability to say yay

1:45:48 nay we want it so when we start marketing it come april it's said or is that that's way too emphasis what we do typically with our surplus declarations is we give them 30 days so i i don't believe that they would need 90 days to respond with a particular interest in a property that we we all know is there we roughly know what the boundaries are we know what the value is um and we could spell out the terms i i don't expect it would take as long as 90 days for them to decide whether they um would be interested in fulfilling that sale agreement okay then i guess i would be supportive

1:46:34 of that as so long as that process can be completed before the 90-day mark for us that we just determined yeah what i would probably do what i would do commissioner carlson is i would um schedule an executive session um for february where i could review the proposed specific terms and conditions um with commissioners and um you know and then within the the boundaries that commissioners provide the board provides i couldn't negotiate and potentially execute with the city

1:47:22 frank yes um i just got a couple comments and questions and so uh uh having been through a few iterations with the city and not feeling that we were treated as fairly as we could have been i'm just did some quick math here and so you're you're looking at you put the assessment down there at 200 grand for a reason that's about 57 bucks a foot you extrapolate down on the entire site that means that means that somebody's indicating that the site we sold for 7 million or 5 million is worth 42. um i'm just i'm just saying i i don't see the benefit um of of this beyond i mean how do we know this isn't going to advocately affect somebody's intended use of the turning radius or things such as that for the building or things they can always sell it to the

1:48:07 city can't they yeah they absolutely can that's part of the just the reason for this discussion of president brown is we originally wanted to keep that because our tenant was looking to put in a uh loading dock on that end of the building i'm not sure that it's a building that facilitates a loading dock of that type but um um we and and that's the rmv for it i don't know that what we would do from an actual pricing perspective we would we have to look at that a little bit a bit further but there is um there is no um i mean the commissioners can decide that um we're gonna sell this in its entirety

1:48:52 and um the the future the city can approach the future owner that that's that's an option for the board to consider that would be my preference i mean i why restrict the utility of the building we've already got a major national tenant that expressed a desire to have that for functionality and if we take that away um and then we try and market the property we've just limited the range of potential uses and users uh by doing so because once that's gone it's gone and they can't they can't achieve what that what phillips wanted to do there and um you know they're they're a big tenant i mean they're a fortune 200 i think they're they're a huge uh tenant they won't be there but i'm just thinking about somebody else in the future if we we put a museum in there and they need a loading

1:49:37 dock or you know somebody else needs something they can't have it if we if we do this and i i don't think it's for the money and and uh if it's okay to have it and that's that's we just don't know if this is a criteria somebody can always sell in the future i would i would say let's hold off on it but it's i'm one of five so um commissioner barofsky yeah just a question free frank so you you mentioned that the city had this plotted the developer that's coming in there has this plotted as one of their plots the whole thing so it's in their master plan they they're planning to use to buy that from that plot from

1:50:23 the city and develop it in their master plan so you know is it a deal point that could throw a monkey wrench into the whole dame's project probably not but it's something else that that they're dealing with and for me who's who's seen that riverfront master plan worked through over many years and and redeveloped and re-jig it it um they've got a pretty set plan and you know if we're hanging on to this for what if whereas and they've got this planned into their

1:51:08 master development plan i would be hesitant to stand in the way for a what if what has that's just my my take thank you commissioner it you know based on the feedback um i think i will um need to develop some kind of a a more formal approach to the board around this this particular topic um as opposed to i was hoping if everybody was in alignment it would have been it would have been easy i think what i'll do here is to look into the details of this and bring something back um for the board to

1:51:54 uh more officially deliberate on based on the facts of the and the possibilities of of the case that we're dealing with so um i i won't take any action based on tonight's feedback other than using it for information to bring something further back for the board commissioner carlson this may be in an odd question but i'm curious you know we had a number of groups that had submitted proposals i'm wondering if if it would be you know worthwhile or legal uh of sorts to reach out to them and just ask if this would hamper i mean if those were top candidates that are most likely to get feedback and all of

1:52:40 them say no it's not as big of a deal for us then we can move forward i know that doesn't it's not the entire universe of possible applicants but it might give us a little bit more insight into whether or not that is you know a piece of land that they would need or not yeah thanks commissioner carlson i i don't know um but we'll have to look into that i i don't know what the possibilities are there well i appreciate the varying perspectives on this i um i will work to bring something back to the board that um will provide the opportunity for commissioners to um

1:53:27 look at this more uniformly and more officially and i will target that for february um for the february board meeting and and likely um we'll follow up then i believe uh president brown that was all that we had on this particular agenda item [Music] well thank you and uh appreciate that we had the extra time because this thing morphed into a whole lot more time than we we we suspected it would but it did so thank you i appreciate it and you got all the answers you need yes i did thank you um president brown and thanks for your leniency on the time

1:54:12 and a premonition of things to come potentially on real estate well look how much fun we had trying to get rid of 3 400 square feet right and get rid of 150 000 square foot building it's going to be fun um that said um i want to uh do a kind of an agenda check with the rest of the board because right now is about the time that we had our our 10-minute break schedule for would people like to uh take a 10-minute break i see one hand up that's all it takes okay we're going to take a 10-minute break and then reconvene at uh 7 [Music] 234. does that sound okay with everybody okay see you back in 10 minutes

2:03:25 it's kind of like waiting for a rocket to launch we're sitting here looking at that timer and say really well we just experienced new year's john so this is this is like watching the ball drop no so you so you didn't get up for the james webb launch nope i went to a wedding at six o'clock and i went and watched fireworks over italian middle school at eight and i was off the off the charts by ten the james webb thing was on the 25th at

2:04:12 like four o'clock in the morning we got up so early to watch that it was ridiculous it's like oh good it made it it actually took off and nothing blew up or fell off everything seemed to work well i'm going back to bed it looks like we're ready let's start again i think i can uh john b is around some place maybe the noodles are going to boil in too long

2:04:57 give him about two seconds and then we're gonna start there he is okay good i'll reconvene the uh january 4th 2022 uh regular meeting of the eugene water electric board uh the next agenda item was item 13 annual board policy review frank lawson general manager we've got 30 minutes scheduled and so we'll put 15 on the clock for frank and 15 for us thank you president brown i don't think i will need 15 minutes this is uh really more of a maybe board discussion go ahead with the next slide thank you um the concept is that um on an annual basis the board will have the opportunity to

2:05:43 identify um or review policies um that um that govern the utility this is um at this particular meeting i wouldn't necessarily um think that the board is actually going to wordsmith different documents but i would think that if the board had areas of concern or had through the course of our work together had found something that needed to be updated this would be a regular interval uh that we would have the opportunity to do so and normally this meeting will be in december uh this this time it got got pushed um go ahead for the the next

2:06:28 slide please [Music] so as as most of you have have memorized these completely there are actually just under 50 there are 48 different board policies they are grouped according to to governance the linkage with primarily myself and staff there's a number of strategic uh policies we we actually revised one um um over the last few months sd-15 having to do with the climate change policy and then there's a number of different financial and control policies as well and so uh that many of these are mature

2:07:15 policies they've been in existence for um many of them created and originally authored in the the mid kind of 2005 to 2008 range um some of them have been updated um more than once some have not been updated at all um and so there's there's an opportunity as we go through the the course of the year and deal with issues that there could be opportunities to do that though the one that we have talked about and go ahead with the next slide please um the one that we have talked about which has been one that we think there's opportunity um has been that we we don't uh in that

2:08:00 list find um an equity policy and so um i would like to get some feedback from the board uh relative to what um type of substance or categories or uh comments you would have uh in in your direction to to myself and staff to create an equity policy for review and potential incorporation by the board the previous slide we don't have to go back to it one of the things that has come up um with the board and this was i thought a really good suggestion that when we do have a major revision that we

2:08:46 pull that out pull those policies out specifically to take a look at um to see if those changes over the past typically it'll be within a year or year and a half whether those policies have accomplished what we we wanted them to um or the changes or the revisions have accomplished what we wanted to so there was a roster included in the presentation of ones that have been updated over the last year and a half or so but with that really commissioners this was an opportunity for you to either identify uh policies that you think need um further investigation or review um and i'd also hope to get your comments on a potential

2:09:34 um substance that we or or goals or ideas that we would include in an equity policy um that would be a new policy added to the list of 48 so it would be policy number 49. so with that president brown i'll turn it back to you and see if there's any further discussion or comments or policies identified for potential further work i'll open it up to the board and ask for questions or comments from any of the board members on anything that frank has talked about the policy review john b thank you um it was it was good to have this and go for myself to have this and go through

2:10:19 and uh read a lot of these policies again you know i skimmed them when i got my huge fire hose last year and being going through and reviewing them again was was something that was uh helpful to me just to remind me and grind me where we are one of the one of the policies and i'm i apologize that i haven't dug into this quite enough but um is sd3 which is the customer service policy i didn't actually dig into the customer service policy but i think that that's something that i need to do um you know we had a lot of or at least for me i heard a lot of people talking about

2:11:04 our customer service over the last year and so i don't know if that's something we need i would like to dig into and look into see if it needs a little bit more tweaking if it's addressing the needs that we saw presented to us over the last year that would that's the only comment that i have out of that as far as the questions on the content of diversity equity and inclusion i think it would be helpful to look to other agencies and other uh bodies in in the area because a lot of work has been done on this and i i would hate to have to you know start building the wheel from scratch when somebody's got already the spokes and the rims and all we have to do is

2:11:49 pump up the tires on it so i think that there's resources whether it's the city of eugene lane county the state other agencies that are dealing with the same things that we are to kind of be able to draw from to to uh to help us craft a good policy in this area thank you other questions or comments if okay okay first i'll go with sonia and then matt i i agree with you know getting a framework from another organization and working through that there's a lot of work done on this um i'm actually going through a diversity equity training right now and

2:12:37 and looking forward to this work so thank you i really appreciate that this is something that we're bringing up as for the other policies i didn't nothing else stuck out to me we've already edited the climate change policy um so you know the other other policies or more legacy policies didn't seem there wasn't anything that stuck out to me thank you matt john um so i i will provide um i think comments on the dei policy to you frank by email i'm not sure i'm gonna be able to put together a very um graceful language and thoughts right on um on the spot here um but thank you for the invitation to provide some input on

2:13:22 that um and then i have one just kind of peculiar thing that i saw when i was looking through here um gp7 which is page 12 in this packet it's the governance policy process policies board parliamentary procedures as you go down toward the bottom there's vacancy on the board i certainly hope we don't have a vacancy on the board but the way that this is written right now it says to their vacancy occur on the board the remaining commissioners will appoint a qualified elector to fill such a vacancy um and so my question is one has this ever happened have we had a vacancy and had it filled in this way um with four commissioners remaining i

2:14:07 could imagine there could be a split in in who those commissioners wanted to appoint and so i was just wondering if if it would be useful to add some additional profits around that um it would certainly think to lose a commissioner and then have to be wrestling with this policy if it weren't wasn't serving our needs i hope that makes sense i i cannot speak to the history commissioner mcrae i don't know if commissioner brown can since he's been on the board the longest um but we we can certainly take a look at gp7 i i haven't been so inclined to do so in my 10 years

2:14:53 so far for for probably obvious reasons um but i also know there are some some city charter timelines that that drive board replacement as well so i'll have to double check and ensure that if if there's changes to be made that we would have to do that in the context of the charter that that does influence our governance somewhat sure yeah and then the last piece is that i assume that the appointed board member would finish out the term but that's not stated in there it's assuming that this is kind of where we would go to if a commissioner left for

2:15:38 some unexpected reason um it feels like some additional detail might make that transition easier um i agree with the comments about the equity policy i would love to see what other utilities specifically have created i'm sure that they have created some equity policies um and um this is just like a really small kind of weird question but like the world has kind of changed a little bit now with the pandemic that we can do things virtually and i'm just curious about the there's the requirement that um

2:16:24 if you miss three or more meetings that you're no longer a board member and i'm just wondering like once we go back to in person or we're constantly shifting virtual or not um like what happens if some board members only want to remain virtual like is that is that just am i worrying about something that's not an issue or should there be some kind of clarifying language like maybe it's okay that people can um participate virtually like what john did when he was on vacation i think it's a great option if you so choose anyway it's a really small thing it's just something i've been thinking about um we don't really need to take up time with it but i just wanted to ask that question

2:17:09 thank you commissioner schlossberg i actually think it's it's one of those issues that we should really apply a so in internally we're looking at what we're calling the dynamic workforce model which is telecommuting is a piece of that and there's there's a number of things as to how you manage and motivate and attract and retain the right people under a different workforce environment and there's probably some similarity to um an application to the board and i think what we can do is go back and look at the policies with that kind of filter to it with that kind of lens or opportunity however you want to describe that and see if those

2:17:54 are still applicable um based on that perspective so i appreciate that um i think that's a good observation the other thing i was going to mention uh president brown was um relative to the customer service policies we we we i don't know i don't know if we've done it this year but it's it's fairly common that we have some type of review with the board around specifically the customer service policies some of that is because we've made a lot of changes over the last several years relative to things like

2:18:39 metering and and terms and conditions and things like that so it's pretty common that we actually review that policy a lot more often the the attached documents the policy and procedures that attach to the customer service policy so i'll i'll take a look and see when the last time we did that and if there's an opportunity to incorporate that and bring something to the board for review in a little more detail there okay sonia you look like you want to say something sorry just one last thing i i forgot earlier um on gp 15 i did notice that it said the board president or their designee is responsible for orientation of new commissioners um i i'm assuming that that means that the

2:19:25 president has designated staff to do that i mean it seems like that's mostly been a staff run thing primarily because the president may not be the same president when the person comes on board and a lot of that orientation work has been done prior to the person even taking office um so i i don't know it seems a little bit outdated maybe it's not maybe there's a reasoning for it but it was something that was kind of like well i'm not really sure we do that anymore thanks uh commissioner carlson we'll take a look at that i don't know that a lot that work i've always felt like it was delegated so maybe that's an assumption that i i made um falsely um um probably starting with you when

2:20:10 you were president i probably just assumed that you you wanted to stop and and to do that so we'll we'll take a look at at gp15 okay thank you and i'll just i'll just respond to matt's question about anybody uh quitting the board not during my tenure but prior to that there was there was some some a little bit of controversy here about there was a couple recall efforts and there were some issues around the general manager years before i came on and i believe some there was a board one or two board vacancies as a result of some of that those challenges they had but i don't know the history behind it or anything but um i i agree with you that that we should probably tighten that up because somebody does quit and you know what's the duration how do you what what if two

2:20:55 board you know what if it's to um you know that those are really good observations and i think that's one and i really like staff's comment that when we do them into policy a year later we go back and see if those amendments have have actually affected what we wanted them to do so i think you know 12 months from now we're going to go back and look at our our our policies on energy and things and see what see what happens there so good for you all right anything else frank about this particular agenda item no thank you then the next scheduled sort of full review of of the policies and we'll we'll take your suggestions for now and run with those but the next sort of planned

2:21:42 iteration of this will be in december of this year we'll start to get on that december cycle we don't want to put new commissioners in a position of reviewing policies their first month or two um on the board but it does make sense at the end of the year that we would take a look at policies and their applicability and any changes so thank you very much commissioners okay thank you next agenda items correspondence and board agendas break um there was i believe only one um correspondence item and that was uh an in-depth more than you would ever want to know history of the silt arrangement um with the the various cities and and eweb um we did receive one question and i

2:22:29 believe that you got a response to that commissioner barofsky uh this afternoon uh relative to increased prices and what that means for um increased budget into into silt for the city of eugene so if there were any further questions i know that deborah hart would be more than happy to to answer those but that was the individual correspondence item commissioner mcrae yeah not a question i just want to thank staff for putting it together it's really a very succinct and and clear and complete uh summary so thank you deborah and team for putting that memo together on this

2:23:23 yeah so so the question that i asked and this was brought forward kind of from president brown talking about how when we have a rate increase it is proportionately advantageous to the city of eugene and i thought he had a great idea that that we make a recommendation to the city and i don't know if we want to do this but i i personally will do it on my own um you know the city of eugene just did a work session on trying to figure out how to fund their climate action plan and uh and other type of things where they're they feel that they need funding um and for me you know for us to say hey we're doing a rate increase and the the correspondence

2:24:10 i got back from deborah was that our rate increase is going to increase their silt by almost 300 000 per year you know so if we made a recommendation that they tie any increases in the silt to their climate action plan that may uh that may forego a uh bond or a levy that might be placed on the citizens citizens of eugene and move that plan forward i don't know it's just an idea that it's it's a lex it's a nexus you know the amount of electricity being used could go to help further the city's climate action plan

2:25:00 i guess the first thing i thought when you when you mention that and i i don't think it's a bad idea is that that that we would get a lot of pressure then from various groups that want more funding for climate action to increase our rates to get that money to this city i don't know if we want that dichotomy if we're gonna give them a windfall and they're willing to say you know oh we got this windfall let's do it um i just hope that that doesn't become a pressure point for us but i i do appreciate the question about the you know about the 300 000 that they're they're just getting because this is now extra money that citizens are paying i would really like to look at how that

2:25:45 how it's either allocated or how much we actually pay them and if there's you know something that we could use around a negotiation around it in some way because it just does it doesn't seem right that they just get a straight windfall from it thanks mindy um perhaps i don't know frank when you have conversations with the city manager to bring up some ideas but also john and sonia when you start meeting with the leadership city leadership one thing that we've been talking about in these leadership meetings for a very long time is doing some kind of pilot project to help landlords take advantage of our efficiency programs but there's no

2:26:31 incentive for them to do it so how can we get them to do it anyway if there was a way that we could somehow uh do a pilot program with this extra money i know we can't tell the city what to do but something that that is like in both of our best interests that relate to climate or energy related issues i think could be a interesting idea i agree any other comments um i i'd like to comment too on that i i you know i just talked about that because uh you know it's i'm not worried about the pressure sonia like you are from uh groups trying to do that because that we don't raise rates at least i've never raised a rate because i wanted to

2:27:17 it's because i had to um because you know we you haven't experienced that recently and some of you've never experienced it but when people come to the podium and say that three bucks is not going to work for me you know i'm going to have to give something up that gets to you when people come and say that that little amount that by our raising our rates is going to increase their their cost it's uh it resonates with me quite a bit and we've had people do that in the past and so i'm not worried about pressure from the environmental group saying raise your rates so the city can have money um and you know the city's already getting twice as much as their the the intent of silt was intended for it was that the legislative action was three percent they're getting six i don't know of any other agency that's getting six percent sub gets three percent um and so they're getting

2:28:04 they're getting twice as much as they should and i don't think it's a big heavy ask and so i'm gonna you know as an individual uh whether or not we want to do this as a board or an individual but as an individual i'm going to suggest it because i think it uh it has a merit for consideration so um you know they just i don't think they have a chance to pass in a levy for climate change so anyhow any other questions or comments yeah president brown i was just going to to weigh in and this kind of transitions to the board agendas that we we do have in march time allocated for the board to discuss the uh the docket

2:28:49 for uh you and vice president carlson for your liaison ship to the city of eugene and that was that's scheduled for march now we could potentially move it up to a work session in earlier february and that would give the board collectively the opportunity to craft the messages and desired outcomes for this this particular issue is what what to do with the additional silt or what opportunities to look forward to to finance further so um i think that that would be a pretty effective mechanism that the board in total could use as opposed to just

2:29:34 and maybe in addition to individual commissioners um i mostly just wanted to explain the facial expression i made when i was listening to the the comment but i think what you all are saying um has convinced me that you know they won they can't raise a levy my my main concern is that we i like tying things directly to a source that makes sense and having it kind of be a roundabout thing is strange to me from a policy perspective but i also get we're saying that they can't raise a you know a levy very easily this is a way that we're already paying into it it ties into both of our economic interests

2:30:20 and our you know climate interests so i think you've actually convinced me the other way that that that is a good idea and that i don't have i don't have as many qualms with it even though it seems roundabout which is what initially got me thank you thank you yeah and i think it's also important to make sure that our non-eugene residents that pay into silt are also acknowledged in this conversation because you know we got a lot of people that pay into this that don't benefit from the city but if the city's programs on you know climate change and recovery like charging stations and weatherization of rentals that doesn't have to be in the city limits of eugene it could be to e-web customers and so we can put borders on it too so the people upriver

2:31:05 and in thurston and springfield don't feel or in river road don't feel that they're not getting their fair share they're paying for something they're not getting the benefit for so i think we think about it we can i think hopefully craft it in a good way so other questions and comments john b yeah i just want to circle back and just say you know the where the money goes right now it just goes into the general fund right the money goes into the city of eugene's general fund and it is just part of their you know they get their property taxes they get their fees they get this and this and this and it's just part of the general fund and it's not a decision that we can make but i think it as a utility that is providing these funds we can say there's like like mindy said

2:31:50 i loved her idea you know there's mutual uh advantageous things that we can use this money for that has a direct nexus to the amount of amount of energy that we are producing and selling and you know that's where i think you know to say that i i want to do a property levy to do climate change well this has a nexus what my property's worth has no nexus to the to the you know the amount of energy i'm using i mean it does to a certain extent but you know i think just making recommendations to them we can't tell them what to do it's a budgetary process just like ours is a budgetary process and they can't tell us but we can give constructive

2:32:35 ideas to them and that's what i was hoping for out of this all right thank you any other questions or comments if not then we'll move on to the board wrap up anything that any of the commissioners have to say about this meeting about the results about future meetings coming up mindy excellent job john and thank you for ending us an hour early well thank you and i i just hope the next time we meet is i hope we can meet on the on for our board retreat i really think we can all benefit from that but i also want to respect people's personal desires too and

2:33:21 if it causes anybody any grief then we won't be we'll just figure it out but uh go from there so frank anything else for the good of the order yeah the two quick wrap-up items you're not quite done an hour early yet john um there's there's two things that are headed the board direction later this week one of them is a a um a mutual memo that's been crafted by jeff nelson ewebs her subs general manager and myself regarding the the status and closeout of the resolution that was jointly passed by sub and eweb a couple years ago and and what the outcome is of that it's it's

2:34:06 kind of a wrap up and he and i are both uh sending that to our our mutual boards at the same time at the end of the week and then um the other thing is you'll get the the summary of your self-evaluation um also near the end of this week which is should provide some some input to your retreat so those are two things that'll that'll be coming from me and and also from uh from ann later this week thank you anything else for the good of the order john b yeah two things one um i was wondering if if over the next couple of weeks if staff could send out a memo

2:34:51 as to um this was a probably our first major major storm event since the fire and just kind of any kind of updates that they have on the turbidity or anything that they can give us any updates on you know how this major weather event has affect you know we've been worrying about this and so it'd be nice if there's any kind of an update that could get sent out in a memo to us that would be great and then the second thing um do you think it would be appropriate i'll ask this question to frank do you think it would be appropriate for us as a board to send a thank you and uh congratulations on the retirement to of the e-web or e-pod manager from our board and thank you for the uh the the

2:35:37 collaboration over the years would that be something that would be appropriate from our board to to him yeah that that would be fine that would certainly be appropriate on commissioner if you'd like i can i can put together a draft for the board and and if uh if the if the board seems like it it works then we can send that off and and your memo requests i'm i'm assuming it's specific to water quality yeah and and maybe if there's any like landslides or those types of things that would be just a heads up okay thank you thank you any any other questions or comments regarding things um i just have to just

2:36:23 jump in one thing frank is as you're doing that turbidity thing and everything is there do we have any idea how much storm water the lieber canal is conveying right now given the fact that we have low-level snowmelt and heavy rains i mean is it 50 capacity 100 capacity how's it how's that working i i don't know commissioner but we can certainly find out i think maybe in you know just kind of a follow-up to save me driving up there and looking at it but i'm kind of curious to see what you know we're if we're going to have to maintain its minimum as a storm water drainage facility i don't i can't think of a time when it would be used more heavily than it would be right now for storm water conveyance yeah we'll we'll follow up with you okay we'll follow up with the entire board on

2:37:08 that okay thank you any other questions or comments for the general manager or anybody else all right well i hope to see you all in a couple weeks if not before but uh we'll see what happens and thank you for allowing me to lead you through this meeting process and hopefully we'll have some more good meetings all right with that adjourn the meeting and say good evening and happy new year thank you have a good evening