EWEB Board of Commissioners — April 19, 2022

0:12 um the first agenda item is just a brief introduction of what we've got number one i want to thank you i've been doing this almost 17 years and this is the greatest the largest group we've ever had on the upcoming so thank you very much because we're going to give you five five-minute presentations about say again well we heard last year uh we're here to give you a little bit of information and then listen because we know that uh there's a lot of things going on up here a lot of big things probably some of the biggest things that's happened in the last 20 years so we want to listen to you and we want to find out what your perceptions are and what your requests are and things such as that we have a lot of staff here so we've got people from tree we've got customer service we've got billing we've got fire recovery we've

0:59 got leeward walterville so we have the people that can answer the question hopefully so with that um i'd just like to say one one small thing i've got a list of the multi-million dollars that have come up to the valley from the prior restoration of things and the one person that's here is heatherbox your county commissioner and she has been very very instrumental carlson and our general manager frank lawson with that you've heard enough from me um the uh what we're going to do

1:45 we're going to go through with the five-minute presentations and then janine parisi will have the microphone for those of you that have questions or comments or if you want to uh if she's going to take it around just raise your hand and we'll try and keep it just going as long as we can and try not to dominate too much time so with that i'll start it off with the very first thing and that's going to be the watershed recovery status carl morgenstern there's carl thank you since there's so many people here i thought i'd use a microphone hopefully can everybody hear me

2:39 well good evening everybody and let's see if i can get this so um my name is carl morgenstern i'm ebe labs uh watershed restoration program manager so ever since the holiday farm fire i've been the one uh now leading the effort amongst many many partners and people that are helping with this effort and so tonight basically i'm just going to give a quick update on the things we're doing and where we are and then hand it off to nancy who's really gonna dive into some of the landowner uh assistance programs we have uh postfire so i'll start by uh

3:30 so um as some of you or most of you may remember uh before the fire we had a program called pure our partners i was really working with about 90 landowners to help restore riparian areas and protect riparian forests and after the fire basically what we were able to do is kind of pivot with that partnership which includes eweb the mackenzie watershed council upper lyman soil and water conservation district and the mckinsey river trust so it's a pretty tight-knit collaborative of working together and we're able to basically pivot from doing riparian assessments to doing erosion and burn assessments and so uh really the update on this is you know we did a lot of work in those early days uh which we're calling the mercy response phase of the recovery and we learned a couple weeks ago that congress did approve fema's reimbursement of our efforts through the

4:16 county and thanks uh heather and then commissioner for helping us um it's a long story to be able to get that money but anyway so we were able to get a recovery of the 1.4 four million dollars that we spent on the emergency response efforts which is really good news for us and so when we after the emergency response basically we we came up with this kind of plan on how we're going to uh work up river and the restoration activities we're going to have and then really trying to engage in and so it kind of went into three buckets uh the risk space which is kind of the erosion and the fire fuels and uh riparian re-vegetation all those efforts that we're doing right now and i was kind of immediate three years post fire maybe four years and then kind of leaning into the resiliency we're doing these larger

5:02 landscape restoration projects that will help mitigate some of the impacts from the burn landscape and then the strategic is kind of that outward looking long term that's really uh just a concept right now and so tonight i'm just going to talk about the first two activities that we have underway and so this work really is based has a seasonality to it which i wanted to try to reflect in this and this isn't a perfect slide but it's a start uh the the light gray is kind of where we're doing that activity just that's not a priority potentially but you see that we just got finished uh revegetating and replanting i'll talk about that a little bit and now we're moving into mulching of those new plants because we don't want to lose a lot of those new plants that we put in the ground uh to the the dry summers and doing hazard fuels and

5:48 starting to lean into the base of weed work and erosion control and so basically what this looks like is we have this dashboard and i started can't really uh see it as well as i thought but basically um what we have about uh 74 uh erosion projects underway which is just starting so we've only completed two the lottery in progress you see up there the fuels work we have about 56 projects underway which we've completed about 35 of them and then the erosion control where we have a a little over looks like 70 or so i believe erosion control we were completed a number of those basically sorry it's too hard to see but anyway bottom line is there's a lot of work going on

6:34 uh we've done about 246 assessments out of the 259 that are on the books and nancy's going to talk a little bit more about kind of the what we're doing in that realm and the landowner portal and how to sign up so just to uh uh honor and uh really celebrate the work that just got done with our partners the watershed council in the upper line of soil water conservation district really were the the energy behind this effort using some great contractors that we had and so we did plant out almost 500 000 nato shrubs and trees in the riparian areas um and basically replanted and entered areas where we had some mortality from last year's planting and then we're using the youth core and other contractors to come in behind that and mulch and then over the summer irrigate where we may need to

7:20 and so that's kind of a quick overview of our risk-based work that's underway and then the second big effort that we have underway are what we're calling these resiliency projects and so this is a shot of the southport mackenzie project that the forest service the watershed kent council completed a few years back you see that in size south fork river and now after this project it's spread out across this flood plain it's reconnected and so what this does for for us is it slows down flow drops out sediment it retains all that water on the landscape so the future fire just acts as a great fire break and so we're looking at doing those uh projects a lot of them are focused right now in the middle mackenzie area and so we have a quartz creek and a fenrock phase two i'm sure a lot of you have seen the fin rock project from phase one that mckenzie

8:05 road trust uh has done with the forest service and then also we're gonna be leaning into some work in the south fork phase three area so all that works kind of being teed up for uh 2023 some of that will happen i believe in 2022 but that's remains to be seen as far as phase three and so the last slide is just to give you an example of what this looks like so on the left is the current uh quartz creek conditions at snow melt and so you just see it's basically a fire hose that's this is velocity that you see so the warmer the color the more red and yellow the higher the velocity and then after uh the restoration project this is using our restoration design you can see how that flow that that creek is now reconnected with this floodplain like it used to be it spreads out flow slows

8:50 down velocities and if you do have landslides or debris flows above here you would hit this and then basically be able to be absorbed into this flood plain and and hopefully attenuate or at least help reduce the impacts of those kinds of things in the years to come so that's uh my quick update and so i'm going to pass it off to nancy to provide you there thank you i think i'm going to scan it right here sit down during this so i'm nancy i'm an environmental specialist with drinking water source protection and i'm going a long way there we go um i know it's tricky so i just wanted to give a brief uh kind of overview of our pure water partners website where you go

9:36 to sign up for a property assessment and so that's www.purewaterpartners.org and there's just a button where you can sign up for a free property assessment and we'll come out to your property and evaluate it for things like replanting needs invasive species control opportunities for fuels reduction and erosion control practices and things like that um we have worked with over 250 landowners on these assessments so far and have over 110 landowners who have signed watershed stewardship agreements with us and i will point out that right now we do have a bit of a waiting list we've had a lot of interest from landowners which is great and we're just working to kind of increase capacity and be able to get to everyone so if you do sign up it

10:22 might be a few weeks to a couple of months before someone is able to come out and do an assessment so just that is a warning but please sign up and we're excited to work with you and i also wanted to say that the mckenzie valley long-term recovery group as a lot of you probably know did a really thorough needs assessment back in january and so we did we have been getting a lot of landowners who got information from that needs assessment about the kind of services we provide and have indicated in interest whether it's in invasive species control or fuels reduction or things like that and then this summer we'll also be working to re-engage landowners outside of the burn area that we were working with before all of them before the fire happened and get everyone back into the program who wants to continue

11:09 and i just wanted to switch to some of eweb's incentives for landowners as as you all are rebuilding we do have some financial incentives so if homeowners are able to move the home or other structure away from the riparian setback area or floodplain area usually that's about 50 feet for residentially zoned areas you will be eligible for this financial incentive and you receive 2 000 once you get the building permits in advance of construction and that's basically an incentive to you know move your home back be protective of water quality and also reduce the flood risk to your property and in addition we will also offer up to five thousand dollars in additional incentives for related

11:54 out-of-pocket expenses associated with moving that home footprint so if you have to rebuild your septic system in a different location or extend your well lines or something like that then that would be an eligible expense and then we recognize that in these situations it's not always possible to move homes back from the river so we do have alternative incentives for installing advanced treatment septic systems which are also can be more protective of water quality than those traditional ones so there are some different options here to look into we also have our septic system zero interest loan program and this is for homeowners who need to make major repairs or replacements and we've recently expanded that from 10 000 to 20

12:40 000 per system because we do recognize that a lot of these more advanced treatment systems that are more protective of water quality are also obviously more expensive as well and so homeowners affected by the fire will have a longer repayment term for these loans and again it's not just for e-web customers it's for any homeowner upstream of our drinking water intake and coming soon we hope any day now there is some grant funding from the state wildfire recovery bill uh for septic system repairs and replacements and this will be targeted towards low and modern income homeowners for these repairs and replacements and the idea is that these grant funds would cover largely cover the cost of installing a new setback system

13:26 so we're hoping that will be available soon and we also are looking into cost share options for those homeowners that don't meet the lower moderate income targets so hopefully there will be lots of funding coming this way but we just don't know the exact time it gets and i wanted to also kind of advertise our nature skating workshop we haven't had one in person in a couple of years we've had some online workshops but this will be in person this will be right here on monday may 2nd at 5 00 and so we're focusing not just on kind of native plants and riparian landscapes but also on fire resilient methods and we will have someone from the oregon department of forestry who's going to come and talk about defensible

14:11 space and firewise practices and again this is hosted by the pure water partners program with some rsvp uh information here and if you stop by our table in the back at the end there are some fire resilient nature scaping type guides that we have available that we worked with the university of oregon their landscape architecture program uh to put those together and and those will come with your rsvps for the workshop so we hope to see many of you there and i will just end with some of our resources and links and then i will pass it on to janine and tyler to talk about wildfire mitigation

15:02 so we're going to switch from uh recovery to fire mitigation i'm janae parisi i'm the resiliency program manager here at eweb um let's see so we know the weather's shifting we know that we're seeing more frequent and larger wildfires and our work practices here at eweb are shifting as well we're building our first wildfire mitigation plan it's in construction and we'll really focus on safety resiliency as the core aspect of it but also bring in some new efforts especially targeted to areas of higher higher risk utilities all have to submit their funds by the summer so ours and one of the first things you have to do in your litigation plan is to develop a map of where your higher fire risk zones are because then you want to target your

15:48 work to those with them and i'm sure it'll be no surprise to anybody here but our first preliminary look at this and identify the upper mckenzie river and the valley here as our primary high fire risk zone plus a small section of south eugene and the hills as another area so this is where we'll be doing some of our candidate activities um so once you have your baseline risk assessment the next thing is you build your mitigation actions to address risk in those areas so if you start at the bottom of this you'll be looking at a really strong maintenance plan and what we're doing up river is we're doing annual patrols for both vegetation so doing those annual tree trimming as well as annual inspections of all of our

16:34 lines so that's kind of a new thing is these extra patrols and in 2021 when we did our first set of extra patrols we found about a hundred crossons that we accelerated replacement of this year we just went through the whole system again and we had about two thirds less priority repairs to be taken care of so we know that this is making a good difference in the system another new practice that i wanted to mention is we did use helicopter trimming up on the carbon transmission line that's a really remote difficult area for us to keep trim with all the vegetation and that was a super efficient way to get through that system very quickly and what we're seeing is not only does it protect against fire risk but also shows a better improvement for winter storms as well

17:19 moving up to targeted investments grid hardening practices i just wanted to bring up a couple of examples for you when we were rebuilding after the fire we did take an opportunity to change the way we configure the overhead lines on our gateway road and really what we're trying to do is keep that vegetation from touching those lines and creating ignition risk when there's storm damage so that was one example of another is that i think we have some 62 new transformers up river after the rebuild and all of those have the less vulnerable fluid inside that's another example and nancy gave a great overview of all the perms that are available for rebuilding one more that i wanted to bring to your attention is we do have an incentive to help you underground your secondary service i

18:04 understand that supply chain issues is making some of that challenging for folks but if you're interested we encourage you to check that out and we'll be happy to help you out with that um so just looking ahead and then i'll pass it to tyler we are going to be uh reviewing all of our construction standards for the up river area and our high-risk fire zone and i'll give you a couple of examples so we know we have um some offspring activity up river we've got some 22 or 30 nesting platforms but if those nests get too big they get unwieldy they can create an ignition source so that's an example of we would do raptor framing and other kinds of mitigation efforts to keep that kind of risk from happening so you might see that workout river as well

18:51 my name is tyler nice i'm the electric division manager here with thank you very much for your time and attention tonight uh really i'm just going to talk a little bit about uh the real-time operations that happen during fire season and also red flag warnings when they come so here's some examples of some of the things we do so what we do during fire season as we change our field practices when we're doing work up river or anywhere where there's restrictions there's a lot of restrictions around wait times and carrying water and tooling and so we train up and that's one thing we're doing in the spring is training up both with our internal safety pulse but also with uh the forest service to to really tune up and make sure we have the most current practices uh that's that's part of the deploying fire suppression equipment as well we have some pull behind trailers with water tanks

19:36 and also some pickups outfitted with water tanks that we use so if we're doing work and we do see something we can we can help also weather monitoring technology that's that's an exciting project a partnership with ufo on smith ridge we have this camera here and it allows us to log in and see uh that part of the valley uh that really gives them eyes way quicker than we could drive up there and look so that's something that other states that are farther along in this have lots of weather stations and this is kind of the first pilot for us so really excited to partner with them you can see the staggering stats you know much better than your iphone 40 40 times zoom on there and stuff like that so hoping to get some good use out of that uh beyond fire season then we have the red flag event so when a when a

20:21 high fire risk situation or fire weather is coming through and a red flag event if you don't know is a set of criteria with temperature humidity and uh you know fuel loading and moisture content and the weather service will declare a red flag and when we get that trigger that goes straight for a dispatch from the weather service kind of a credentialed sign up for that so our dispatchers their 24 7 operations they get that that triggers some processes which is calling crews out they'll do some patrols they'll also do what we're calling protective settings mode in a normal day your lines running to your houses and up and down the road the feeders they will if they get a contact they'll retry to try to keep your power on and these moza

21:06 that's turned off and it's one and done uh they'll also make them more sensitive and trip off quicker and what we do is also uh we will contact 9-1-1 dispatch make sure there's nothing active in the in the area and we'll send our troubleshooters up which are all on call 24 7. um also the outreach to public and safety partners so you'll see on facebook and we coordinate with other agencies and we'll start launching internal procedures to stay in touch on the situation and really de-energization is a last resort but it is a tool we have uh either from a report safety out in the field or one of our staff or if an agency instructs us we will do that too or active fire like it says there so it's kind of a summary of what we do in real time when these events happen i

21:51 really appreciate it i'll pass it on to the generation group and lisa prince next thank you good evening everyone my name is lisa krentz i'm uweb's generation manager so that includes the libra walterville and carmen smith hydroelectric projects here in the mackenzie joining me tonight is mark zineker he's our generation engineering supervisor and he will be sharing um where we're at with options for the libra cornell which i know is of great interest to any of you in this room before i hand it over to mark i did want to take an opportunity to introduce jeremy simoji he's back here at this table jeremy joined eweb last fall as our project manager for the lieberman evaluation and he'll be here this evening tonight to share some more information at the

22:36 table i invite you to come up afterward and with that i'll hand it over to mark to share where we're at with things all right thank you lisa yeah thank you everyone for joining us tonight good evening a few slides to run in run through with you and then with a lot of questions at the end uh the three main topics that i'd like to address are the decision making process that we currently have underway for the libra canal and the timeline associated with that i'd like to provide an overview of a short list of alternatives that we are analyzing in depth and then talk about what will happen after a decision is made and what kind of timelines we might see

23:25 for that for the selected alternative so this is the decision making process that we have currently underway about a year ago is when we started collecting background information that we had a developing communication plan so that we could get information out to our board and public about the factors that play into what the viable realistic alternatives are for the canal going forward currently at this red line uh in q2 of 2022 where we're wanting to reach out and inform the board and the public about the shortlisted alternatives so that we have an opportunity to field questions and uh receive comments about those alternatives and then the uh

24:10 so we can feed that into the next steps of work which include uh putting our planning level cost estimates through that present value financial analysis as well as gathering environmental and social uh feedback to reflecting our triple bottom line so that by the end of this year the board is in a position that we can present them with conclusions that would allow them to make a decision about the leader now the table in the back and the website that we've set up for the library canal contains a lot of detailed information about the process and the milestones i did just want to highlight a few of them here late q2 so maybe early june time frame

24:55 we are expecting to have a survey sent out uh to the community uh regarding the four alternatives that we have um under analysis we're looking for feedback and questions on those um at the august board meeting we will be presenting preliminary results from our analysis to the board there will be write-ups on that that will be available for public review as well and we will be encouraging comments and feedback so that our next phase of work which is to compile all that into a draft summary report um can be completed by october that draft summary report will go to the board and again we'll put out a call for questions and comments on the draft

25:41 and then that will be finalized and presented to the board in december along with our conclusions with uh expectation that the board would then be able to make a path forward decision by the end of the year so those four alternatives on our short list um give you a little bit of background information on those now so we have two return to service options under consideration the first is full facility restoration uh that would involve rehabilitating the four full four and a half miles of the canal to current safety standards uh it would also and in order to accomplish that we would expect that we will need to line the entirety of the canal as well as

26:27 reconstruct portions of the canal to address seepage and seismic stability issues at some specific locations the second return to service alternative under consideration is a partial restoration that would involve construction of a new power plant and rehabilitation of only a short portion of the canal say a mile and a quarter and the remainder of the canal would be converted over to storm water conveyance in both cases uh the return to service options will be maintaining the existing dam the existing lake and the canal intake facilities and then we're also looking at two decommissioning alternatives um the decommissioning alternatives um include full decommissioning

27:13 um this would entail removal of the all of the project features all the project structures so our dam this passage facility the canal itself the power plant would be removed and then the creeks that are currently intercepted by the canal will be rerouted to the river now that is um in keeping with what some other ferc project owners have had to do with their projects the thing is lieberg is quite a bit different than most for projects that might consist of a dam with a power plant at the base in our situation we've got facilities spread out over five miles we have a lot of residential development and a major highway located between the

27:59 canal and the river so which creates some complicating factors um and so we are thinking that a decommissioning uh to a storm water conveyance could be a viable opportunity or option for us so in the decommission took storm water conveyance we would only be returning to pre-construction conditions where it's practical that might be at the dam and the lake select creeks but the remainder of the canal would be converted over to storm water conveyance and then in both of the decommissioning alternatives we would be replacing the dam with a new bridge in approximately the same location

28:45 and then this final slide um shows the road map uh of the future so if the board makes the decision at the end of 2022 there's those two basic paths that we could go down um so what's in the future well a lot of construction is in the future whether we are returning the power canal to its existing configuration or decommissioning either approach is a tremendous amount of construction activity in either case we will be constructing some near-term risk reduction measures um those would focus on isolating portions of the canal that received the high flow inputs from cogswell and johnson creek so we know that that's

29:30 in the near term of construction in either case but the specifics of the work that follows after that will depend on whether it's a return to service or decommissioning path that we're on lots of regulatory processes lots of uh re-licensing processes if we return to service and in neither case would we expect to each reach the finish line until the end of this decade so you know 20 20 30 time range before a new normal is established so that is a quick overview of the the work that's underway i'm really glad to see so many people here we've got a lot of information available and we'll continue to be putting that out to the public and so we encourage you to continue paying attention and asking questions

30:15 and being part of our process so thank you hi everyone i'm julie mcgehee i'm the chief customer officer and joining me is mark duvall he's our customer service team lead and we're here to talk to you about the estimated bills that many customers received just over the past year or so and all customers in the upriver service territory should have received a letter

31:01 and a frequently asked questions document um that really describes more about the estimations that should have come in the mail over the last two weeks if this is not sounding familiar and you think you didn't receive a letter you can go visit kim and samantha over at customer service and they have some extra copies for you so with that i'm going to turn it over to mark and he's going to give us some more information on the details around estimations hi mark duvall i'm a customer service team lead as julie mentioned and i just wanted to mention a few things about the estimated bills i know they've generated a lot of questions and discussion um

31:46 estimated bills have affected many u.s customers over the past six to eight months they have been particularly difficult for our upper customers where we don't have smart meters available staffing shortages and meter reading combined with other operational issues resulted in a higher number of estimations than we have seen in in recent years some customers are estimated intermittently over the last six to eight months others have had multiple estimations consecutively or sometimes two to three months in a row so that creates a real hardship for some people some of our customers upriver were still being estimated in february with true ups occurring in march so this is a

32:31 pretty recent thing for some people here there's no perfect way to estimate to to perform mass destinations estimates are based on task usage and there are almost always higher or lower than the actual consumption for any specific money the fire also had a negative impact on our estimation accuracy because some customers had little or no comparative consumption from the previous year following an estimated period there's a true up or an actual read which self corrects for any under or overfilled consumption that from the estimated period the trump can appear higher or lower than normal depending on how accurate the destination was

33:16 customers who experienced multiple consecutive estimates are more at risk for a larger true imbalance the key point is that the total bill amounts for the larger period from one actual read to the next actual read are correct and accurate our metering department now is fully staffed and is working to address anything within our control to avoid estimated leads going forward uf does understand the impact that unexpected large bills have on customers whether they be from estimates true ups or other high you know winter bill activity we do acknowledge the hardships these situations can create and we strive to consistently work through the issues with our customers

34:03 there are a few programs and strategies that can help including payment plans and budget bills budget billing is an average bill plan which spreads bills out equally over 12 month period after 12 months budget bills are reviewed for correctness and can be adjusted for the next 12 months if they are high or too low the previous year we encourage anyone with questions on their account to give customer service a call generally hope times are short tuesday through fridays but mondays are our busier days we would be happy to spend time analyzing your bill with you and also we are gathering information over here contact information from you or anyone who wants to call back within the next few days we can take some

34:48 advanced reports and analyze your consumption and try to get a picture that makes sense to you that's all that thanks [Music] thank you all for all the presenters now that's our journalism and we've been very much like your input criticism compliments anything you want to do so we've got almost everybody here that can help answer the questions i've got a really good uh level of staff knowledge here and everything and so you have a question raise your hand janine will bring you the mic and then we'll get you to the people that can answer it or if you have a comment or whatever you want to do i

35:33 know you do because my phone's praying a lot in the last six months feel free to ask any question you want anything yes sir john you're getting mike would you please steve oh both the hatcheries uh mckenzie and libra catcher will be affected by any uh decision that's made could someone address how the assessment uh will will treat the two patrons right here mark will right so yeah we've been in very close communication with mckenzie hatchery with the mckenzie hatchery in particular they were immediately

36:18 impacted by the need to take the canal offline and out of service so they have been exploring water supply alternatives with the support of the core engineers that owns the facility so they have their own process uh underway in terms of trying to understand what their alternatives are for water supply going forward um and the same is true with the the lee dirt hatchery they are as as you point out impacted by any decision that lowers the watersheds elevation of the lake um so both those facilities are would be impacted wouldn't have to have an

37:04 alternative source of water supply and we will reflect that impact along with uh you know all of our other um social environment there's an environmental impact not just a social impact with those types of ripple effects so that will be documented and communicated to the board as a factor other questions yes sir so i think i understand this whole canal thing is based upon leakage correct is that right so is that 100 the reason for this whole exercise so the um the canal was taken out of service uh in october 2018 due to indications of internal erosion that is

37:50 excessive seepage seepage is normal but it can progress to the point where it's doing damage to the embankment and we're seeing evidence of that and then in the process of exploring repair alternatives to fix that problem we made it just an unpleasant discovery that that portion of the canal was also um contained very low strength soils that presented a seismic vulnerability and so it was a combination of factors but i guess the tip of the iceberg was the excessive seepage and then a realization that it went beyond that to other hazard considerations that would need to be remedied before we could bring it back online could you do you

38:36 use the word portion could you describe that in the distance length of the of the dikes or whatever you call it the specific area or the initial problem was identified uh was about a thousand feet in length that would need to be uh remediated however the the canal isn't old enough that we don't have great records about the um construction history so our regulator would expect us to explore other portions of the canal with similar characteristics to see if we have any uh vulnerabilities there as well so we know for sure that we have this thousand foot reach but we're suspicious that that

39:22 is not the only area that would need to be remediated so we've noticed that some uh structures some houses along the canal that back up to the canal are being removed and the scuttlebutt is that eweb is buying up properties along the canal is this true um yeah so you have did purchase a home along the canal a few years ago and then just recently we um were entered into purchase agreements for two others um the only home that was removed was the one that was purchased a couple of years ago um we know that

40:08 we're going to need to do some work on the canal but as you can tell from what mark just shared we're still in the process of process of investigating exactly what we need to do and where and so we don't have plans at this time to proactively purchase any additional properties what we have been doing is just monitoring to see if if properties were coincidentally listed for sale that's what happened with the two recent properties um but we do not have um intent or plans to to go in and purchase proactively any additional properties right there well wait wait back there please yes

40:56 um i'm one of your customers and so i would appreciate it i'm seeing a little bit of a difference um i'm saying the properties that are being marketed by a broker from beaverton and i think it's really odd that um there's brokers representing eweb from portland and there's brokers representing homeowners along the canal and none of them are brokers from this area could you explain a little bit about why that's okay um i i can't explain why um sellers chose a particular broker um and that whether that was coincidental or not i don't have any information on that what i can say is that broker although based in portland does have some history in lane county so it's not completely off the off the

41:41 charts for that person to have uh marketed some homes here but otherwise i don't have information on how sellers say so so there's no coincidence that there are several several properties that have been targeted by this bank of community i i honestly can't say what okay one prompted those folks to sell their homes we had no indication of it nor did we express any interest in those particular properties prior to them being listed okay but you have started to purchase those properties as they become available correct no um we purchased those two properties but we are not wholesale purchasing properties along the canal at this time what we're doing is just looking at properties that had coins those two properties that coincidentally came available and they seemed to be in places where we thought we might have an opportunity to

42:27 do some construction there and so we took that opportunity but it's not a plan we have going forward so there are no other homeowners or business owners that should be concerned about being properties being purchased along the canal or should they whether they do what i would say is that we're waiting for the board to make a decision at the end of this year and then we'll have a better idea of what we're going to actually do on the canal and then we'll be able to assess what if any needs we have okay and so the market prices and that you're going to be paying are going to be based on a portland broker just determining what those prices are or are you going to work with local brokers we have a local broker and again we can't control what brokers a seller may choose to do business with and what i will say is that as a public entity we have a

43:12 responsibility to pay fair market value um for our customers and so that is is certainly our goal going forward i mean if we were to make any additional acquisitions in the future okay thank you yes sir is there an e-web person who is at the intersection of uh the water in e-web and uh property owners who have water rights so the question is about the water rights off the canal uh the question ultimately is about water rights off of the canal yes yeah yeah we do we do have people that here we go yes um i'll let mark take

43:58 this one so um there are i think approximately 20 um folks with we all save water rights but there's uh some details here we're right certifications and anyway it gets a bit complex um there of the 20 say uh property owners who are withdrawing water from the canal there's only a small handful of them that had um agreements with eweb that were not subject to interruption so we've been working closely with a subset of the water right holders to come up with alternative solutions

44:45 we've also been working with some of the folks that have right certificates without an obligation from uh to try to help smooth their path forward and help them explore alternatives but uh the water right considerations also are being identified documented for the board's consideration as we're uh presenting that with our bottom line analysis so the effects of the alternatives thank you other questions in the back

45:41 i'm concerned about the irrigation of my property because i feel like my property is much more subject to burn now because i don't have any water to water it and i have very tall trees around my house and i am literally going around with a bucket hand watering all my plants on my property so i'd like to know what are what are our water rights because it doesn't seem like we really have much yeah i would say the majority of the product owners who were drawing water from the canal historically are in that position where um we had uh he would was able to accommodate while we were in operation and unfortunately are unable to accommodate with the canal

46:27 in its current situation the information that we are developing about you know alternatives for our water right holders will share that information so that you can understand what your options are there are options um but uh yeah i i definitely understand those impacts yeah there's there's options through the organ water resources board for transfers of your uh point of diversion and there's a variety of flavors of how that can be done could i suggest that could i suggest that at the end of the meeting you maybe hook up with mark or one of these others

47:12 one or two of the questions and get specifics and they can get your contact info and and hopefully get you the answers you need in this specifics thank you yes sir yeah so to circle back around the properties one of the larger properties that you're i think you're getting agreed with by right now is adjacent to mine and one of the questions i had was if you have any plans of like upkeep and man vegetation management for those areas it's a pretty large area of a lot of vegetation yeah that's a very good question um would say that we we will be developing property management plans for the parcels that we're purchasing it is not our intent to let either the structures or the land itself to go into

47:58 disrepair so um this this was new again we didn't have have plans to purchase these properties so we're just working up those property management plans now for those of us that are down river of the dam what are the implications for flow of the river and could it recreate new floodplains have you thought about those issues yeah no great question and a lot of the dams on mackenzie do provide a flood control role those are the army corps cougar and blue river reservoirs in our case

48:45 the library project is a runner river facility meaning that whatever water flows into liebert lake is immediately released downstream either to the river itself or to the canal and we really don't have a storage capacity um at that facility to that would have a measurable effect on the downstream uh water surface elevation so it's really has always been a pass-through which means you would see no change um with or without the dam so when the water rises under the bridge and the debris comes with it it'll be the same right so if we decommission the dam would go away and yes that degree that we currently pass through the roll gates

49:31 um in like you know in chunks as opposed to one at a time um continuing this uh foreground river uninstructed uh yes sir what happens to the land if you take the dam out to the landowners upstream along there that is now the edge of their property and and that's going to move the river to say highway 126. yeah that is um indeed what would happen the uh the river comes the highway and so when the the lake is drawn down it tends to stay on that side of the channel

50:16 um so far as they're so yes they would have what was like turning into more of a do you have any plans to do anything with that property is it your property whose property is it so the portion along the uh park is you have ownership the portion upstream which the majority of the lake shore is privately owned right and so your privateer property line our property line ends at the lake and if you were to look across and see ike's pizza there's quite a distance between there who owns that property that would be you once the

51:02 tax lot changes um you know i'm not sure what the tax what the process would be by that but um and correct me if i'm wrong there's somebody in the room that understands this differently but the property line would go to the ordinary high water line as the ordinary hot water line changes the property designation changes as well so somebody could get back to me on that yeah if you would you don't mind uh just giving your name and contact info but i think you know you've got a little knowledge on that though so usually because it's not navigable above the dam usually owned at the center of your legal description i'll check it out see you may just go home to the middle of that riverbed and that that liberian area between what's currently the lake where's the center of the river maybe your new property line but i just checked your legal

51:47 description of the title company but give your name and contact info to these people and let them do this or whatever but you know that's that's what we're here for we're here to answer the questions and hopefully get you some answers so um yes sir go ahead you got it back to the canal thing just trying to get this clearly in my mind i've seen you operate the canals at many different levels for very over time i'd also kind of like to know how much how long each of you people are present presenting tonight have been with e-web just if you wouldn't mind just tell us when you came onto e-web it might help us um here's the questions so i think i

52:32 identified two options canal full restored and full canal gone damn gone canal gone is that do i have that correct um no we've got two return to service options in in one case all the canal remains in another case it went in full we if we were to operate the canal in the future we would operate it like we have in the past okay so it's sometimes full it's open level it's only yeah maintain the same operating level it's only full when there's enough water in the river for us to divert our full water rate which is not very much of the year that's why you see it having a variable water surface

53:18 elevation probably the average is about half capacity okay and the other option is gone the other option is um one of them is restored to pre-project conditions so yes essentially gone and then the other is conversion to a stormwater conveyance which would be modified um likely lowering the crest of the canal but it would still convey storm water so the creeks that get intercepted would continue to flow through the canal back in some locations i don't hear an option being mentioned maybe i'm just missing excuse me if i am about canal stays water flows through there at a low at a

54:04 level lower than the upper normal limits right so we so you're wondering if we can solve our problem by just operating the canal at a lower flow rate and not affecting so many people's so much yeah you know that was one of the uh the approaches that we brought to our regulator as a possibility because it is lower risk to operate the canal at a lower level however it makes from our regulators perspective no difference with respect to the type of improvements that would be required so we would have to reconstruct the canal the same way to operate it at half capacity as at full capacity

54:50 and that's in large part due to the potential for the creeks to carry additional water right yeah that's uh part of the part of the story is that the normal flow rate of our canal is 2500 cfs and those creeks that we intercept they can put that much water into the canal under a very large storm scenario it's never happened before but it's theoretically possible that you could have a big enough storm move through that you would fill up the canal to global operating just from rainwater right here so the 2500 cfs normal operation would be what you're shooting for if you were to bring a canal back to full production

55:36 so if you went with the left-hand left-hand speed spillway would that be less between that 2500 because it looks like you'd be generating less power we would be generating less power but we would still um uh want to use our full rot water right if we went to the trouble of building a plant and have it it's possible that we would modify the uh do a cost benefit analysis of that capacity for the cost but um for planning purposes right now before we get into that really detailed analysis we would assume that we were saying 2500 cfs um ladies i have a question about the walterbuilt bond and the over the last few years it's kind of been decommissioned

56:24 so i was just kind of curious if that would be if that is included in your reconstruction project yes that would be reused our current effort is focused on the liebert canal um walter dale pond was decommissioned about 10 years ago i think now um and that was because our regulator uh re-categorized it from low hazard to high hazard and so they were asking us to reconstruct the pond uh to modern safety at a time when we were no longer using it as a pump storage facility that's why it was originally built it was for pump storage and we were just using it for recreational purposes

57:09 at that point in time and so we had really no uh rationale for making what would have been a very significant investment to keep the canal keep palm full i just because it was just part of the connection on the canal that's what made me wonder if that was something that would be reused another question or comments um yes sir first of all i wanted to thank no one's really thanked the pure water partner groups over here um you guys have done exclusive [Applause] all the way through thank you so much we really appreciate it um one of the groups that brought up

57:55 underground power lines i just want to let you know uh we've asked three times uh once on the phone twice to your websites uh we've got about eight power poles on our property uh love to have them underground um i haven't heard anything back for over a year uh last time i asked was probably i don't know about three weeks ago or so um but then the third thing and i i don't need if you guys want to get back to it i'll send it back since then another request from again no problem do you want me to get info and do something with it i can do that as well that's all right i'll send you another request just look for one um who who is the commissioner for the upriver area you guys are spending tens of millions of dollars do we have one uh

58:41 you've actually we're spending hundreds of millions of dollars we've made a common and this thing is gonna really it's gonna be a huge project we have to build it build one in a million year stat standard it's amazing what the feds are requiring us to do we don't have a commissioner up here each one of us represents two city council awards in the city and mindy is at the at large supposed to be that when i was in that position i kind of de-facto took it but she kind of is the one uh it's unfortunate you don't get to vote for any of us sure uh you don't and but we are trying to be as responsible and to you as we are to any of the people that do have a vote for us so if we have comments or concerns after the meeting is there one of the commissioners we should be focusing on right here thank you yeah do that

59:26 thank you for your acknowledgment of pure water partners yes sir right over here my name is richard tracy um my wife and i bought a little over three acres about 20 years ago or three or four blocks up here and one of the reasons we bought that land was because what's the understanding we have water rights coming off the johnson creek drainage you and i have talked a couple of times over those last 15 years a couple of times some uh employees not over here but they came challenging me about my water whether i had water rights or not i think we established

1:00:11 that i have so when we bought that property was with the idea i got water rights like i can have my raspberry bushes i can have my blueberries i can have my orchard i have my garden i can raise my koi and sell them and four years ago i have no water no more i understand that's not your fault or anybody's calling for four years and that was gone by and i don't have those things anymore somebody took it from me and i haven't got it back in another four or five years we probably won't be alive that's very disappointing [Music] i wish we had a solution for you right now because we're working as hard as we can on this and we're spending as much money as we can on it but we're at the

1:00:57 mercy of the federal government you're telling us we wish i mean we just re-licensed believers 150 million dollars and we're not generating power and so we understand we understand not what you're going through but you've got to look it from our perspective we don't i'm not going to debate it i'm just going to respond and kind of give you a fact that we too are so i i did want to make it clear that the what happens with liebert i know has has

1:01:42 a lot of impact on many people in this room either from a social perspective and quality of life perspective as mr tracy um mentioned or also you might be concerned around the environmental impacts that's part of the reason we're doing such a comprehensive triple bottom line analysis for all four of these options that we have and we very much want to hear from you around what the impacts we personally are so again another plug to please take the survey that's going to be coming out and also get in touch with us so that we want to make sure that we fully understand the impacts to you and that we can include that in our analysis one thing i wanted to ask about is um prioritizing foot traffic and air traffic along the run of the canal bank um there's

1:02:28 actually at the stowaway now a blockage so you can't walk from leeward up to the dam and it's not not nearly as important as water rights i know but from a community resource perspective that the canal bank is a considerable resource people people use it all the time people walk their dogs they ride their bikes so as you look at the social impact and if you're doing a social impact survey it would be helpful to evaluate um and prioritize making that a continued use and if you're doing new construction that looks leftman spillway it would be very nice if that construction was done in a way that allowed through foot traffic uh off to the dam

1:03:13 thank you that's that's good feedback that's about what we like to hear because now you don't have any survey or if you do but thank you very much so thank you very much yes ma'am uh just so that i understand the weaker dam generates power correct no no it does not generate no it just diverged water in the labor canal and the power is generated down here in the powerhouse below

1:03:58 and my um attitude is pretty pretty you know sad um bottom line is i 18 years ago i came up here and i looked at a piece of property and it's by ike's and i didn't even look at the house i looked at the view of the leeburg lake and i looked at all the people that were canoeing and kayaking on the morning and enjoying it now we have a place for handicapped people to enjoy the lake and having that emptied i mean i saw it when you guys had to work on that it's a joke there's nothing flown i mean this it's going to be horrible for you know

1:04:43 for people just to not come around the corner my heart rate just goes down i love looking at that water and i overlook the water and i don't want that to change well i i'll speak a little bit to that just from the compassion i have a very strong passion for the mackenzie valley as well but uh we don't want to change either we didn't want any of this to change this isn't i just don't understand why you're thinking about taking the dam out well if the dam diverts water and there's no need to divert the water that's a question that we'll have to answer about the cost because it's an old dam and whether or not we just take the dam out and replace it with a bridge or if we keep the dam and uh because those things uh built saying they eat while you sleep they cost you quite a bit of money a year to just maintain and that'd be a

1:05:28 pretty expensive bridge uh to create that lake but those are some of the things we'll consider because this whole thing is going to be a very very expensive proposition about what we do it'll be expensive for the people too i mean absolutely literally you know we pay everyone's wages and we're also looking at our home values our property values going down tremendously and a lot of people aren't going to be able to use that leg well i will all that will be considered when we get in here but we're hiring other people to give us the options because some of the preliminary cost estimates are very very high and uh we have to be also responsible for the ratepayers because we've got a we're spending 150 million dollars on garmin right now

1:06:14 and this could be this could be you know anywhere from 60 to 100 million dollars as well right but how many millions of dollars are all of us on our properties because of what you're going to do well if we could kind of keep it to you here if you have a specific question could you use it mike and and then ask you i have a lady in the queue back here and then i'll get to you okay thank you um yeah yeah my name is nadine scott and i have a couple hacks here i want to talk about tonight one i'm a property owner on leeburg lake and i'm also a relative and so i see you decommissioned that way for one property values as this gentleman said are going to go down

1:07:00 um and aesthetics for we're trying to rebuild a community here and the aesthetics is going to be awful the other hand i want to say is that i'm also president of the mackenzie chamber of commerce and our economy up here is based on tourism and this thousands of people a summer a year that use leeburg life recreationally and those people are going to lose all that and those people also pay your e-rep bill every month and i as far as i know that is the only access for wheelchair disability people to access the lake to fish our boat

1:07:46 and i think you need to think about that when you make your decisions okay thank you now other questions or comments ma'am did you want to get back in the queue and make another comment i like keep hearing about his cost analysis cost analysis well cost analysis all this take that into consideration we understand that but we also have a fiduciary duty to uh to you know we're a power and a water company and so we have to keep that in mind too so thank you

1:08:31 other questions or comments listen i hear a lot of comments about analysis and surveys and questionnaires and stuff like that but you've mentioned hundreds of me or 60 million dollars or something did i hear that right on this project hundreds of millions of cost estimates yeah okay some preliminary issues that could be over that okay you i've heard you mentioned hundreds of millions for carbon smith 60 million for this canal that that what percentage of that would you say that the right payers pay for 100 okay so wouldn't it seem like we would

1:09:17 deserve a vote instead of a comment shouldn't we be able to vote on what happens literally instead of just throwing a comment out in the air emailing it to somebody maybe getting a response not knowing if anybody really cared why does that why would that not qualify us for a stature why are we not stakeholders than this since we're paying for it to the level of a vote just a little number on the numbers there's 2300 customers that we have up the river we have over 88 000 customers that we serve so everybody would be paying for it so everybody would be voting for it you you this area compromises 50 percent of our service area with only 2 300 people you

1:10:04 saw the map about the fire risk yes the entire valley is uh when we brought the electric service here so we could pump water it was and so the electric service was kind of a side of that and that's something that we've all heard and uh other commissioners want to chime in go ahead john um so some of you may not be familiar with one they mentioned the term triple bottom line okay so that means there's three parts to it one of them is economic right what is the costs how much is it going to cost us what is the cost to actual dollars and cents right the second is the social cut social cost which is what you guys are talking about we drain the lake

1:10:50 it affects the the economy up here and then the third one is the environmental one what is it doing to the river right and and so it's not like at least in my opinion i'm not taking this as a dollar to donuts approach i look at all three of those things and make a balance right so the social aspect at least in my decision making process is as much of value as the dollar in census now i'm going to say that to a certain extent you know there's only so much money that we can afford to do this so some of the options may be less money

1:11:37 and have a little bit different of a trade-off right the stormwater conveyance one may cost less money and it may have a social a little bit higher social cost so that's what i'm going to be looking at when i'm presented with the survey from you people the triple bottom line analysis that is looking at that and then we make that decision you you ask about the vote this is where we're screwed right you guys up here because you don't have a vote for commissioners it to a certain extent in my mind yeah because you can't vote for me you can't vote for mindy but we are elected officials right so we

1:12:22 are accountable to the public and to our ratepayers so since you can't vote for us i feel bad for you but i do hear you and myself especially feel that this is a huge asset not only to you people but to the whole region and so just know that when you're saying these things it's not like we're not hearing it or that it's just going to be a dollar incentive at least my goal that way i'm looking at all three things and going to try and make the best decision that we can for all of our ratepayers um somebody i haven't talked to yet yeah yeah go ahead

1:13:11 um you you've given some hypothetical hypotheticals so many millions so many let's take let's take the 100 million dollar possibility now if you check that have you yet done a spreadsheet analysis as to what would you're saying we've not done a spreadsheet how would the average rate fair of all your rate payers how would that impact their bill their monthly bill um given what you know already mark you want to tell us what a 100 million dollar bond is four percent would be over 20. [Music] i think you're going to do it either way

1:13:56 where's deborah another 100 so we will have an answer to that question we don't have the um don't i already have it you're going to spend the same you're going to spend the money either way you're going to tear it down or you're going to restore it it's going to be spent either way there's a tremendous amount of capital cost in either direction right

1:14:47 i know i've said a lot tonight but what if lieber glake didn't belong to eweb because it doesn't what if another agency who had less encumbrance of some of the other factors that you have to deal with but another agency whose mission it is to preserve recreation and beauty and the aesthetics what what if that were an alternative so that we don't we aren't fake you don't lose we don't lose is there not some way to go that way heather a meeting like this is that i know there's some some pretty strong opinions

1:15:33 here and we respect that but also we're getting some good ideas too and thank you very much for that because you've got elected officials here you've got people that are creative and uh if there's a way to do that maybe that's a that's a thought that uh they'll look at because i get uh you know i think the fish hatchery may be being transferred to the state parks department or from the corps of engineers now or that there was that effort to try and do that so there is some effort to do some things up here with some state parks money so um good idea thank you very much uh in the corner over here man my name is jacqueline miner and i have a little house on metal lake also um and i get more of these so

1:16:18 i've said too much you keep mentioning your regulator so i assume that's better correct correct it's the federal energy regulatory commission might i suggest that we have a meeting that that person come instead of shoving it all on you guys since our federal government seems to have no problem spending money a lot of places just to suggestions when i come to a meeting i'm like all parties that have an interest involved so maybe that's something that instead of you guys gathering everything and going back and

1:17:03 begging them they can come and hear all kinds of people as far as what i hear you guys saying is you're in the ground breaking level coming up with this you kind of brainstormed it came up in four different ways it got written in the mckinsey newspaper we've all seen it but you're really at that ground level you don't know dollars amount you don't know which way you're gonna you're just kind of sending out dealers correct so for us to say what about this and what about that we're not really even there yet but i do think you have a room full of people

1:17:48 that are saying in a perfect world we would like our water rights restored we'd like your canal not to leak onto somebody else's property we'd like to have our handicapped brother be able to get into lee bird wake in a canoe we'd like to keep our property values where they're at in a perfect world so how do we come about that perfect world with the restraints that we have and i don't i think we could all go over and over and over it we need you to hear that we're not real trusting a d-web entity

1:18:33 and really hearing what we want or commissioners or councilmen or people that say my vote doesn't count so it doesn't matter that's what i heard i like my little house i have a big house in southern california i don't like my backpack i like my own class i like the keys like the things that you're all going to have to think about the the birds that migrate through here

1:19:19 the people that use the water the clean water that i get out of my will i keep taking it to town to have it tested to make sure nothing's wrong i like those and i don't think anybody in this room moved up here to have something that they weren't entitled to they live hard wise cleaning up our yards are nothing easy living through fires are not is not easy but we want to trust you we want to work with you and the federal government needs to be part of this i just want to say thank you very much for coming out and

1:20:04 part of the reason that we come up here and we do this work is that we we want to hear from you i mean we could very easily just stay down in eugene and never come up here why are we up here we're up here because we want to hear from you we do care we're all volunteer commissioners we do this in our spare time because we care about the community so we even though you don't have a vote for us not one of us treats you any differently than any of the people down in eugene we do this because we care we care about this community we come up and we enjoy the leeburg lake just as you do maybe we don't live on the lake but i love canoeing on the canal uh fishing on the canal we we love this area up here it's a massive resource for

1:20:49 this entire community so i understand that it's frustrating that you don't get a vote but i can tell you not one of the people up here treats you any differently than the people down in eg but at the same time there are massive costs to any of these decisions that we're going to have to make and i can tell you there are people that are living paycheck to paycheck social security payment to social security payment and when we have to make that decision about how much money we spend up here and who gets the benefit of it there are not going to be any good decisions that we have to make people are going to be angry no matter what we do so i just want you to understand how difficult the decision that's going to

1:21:34 be for us we we came up here because we know how much this affects your livelihoods but the 100 million dollars that we spend up here being spread over the entire eugene region is going to raise rates and that's going to have big impacts on those people too so i just want you to be aware of that as well and again thank you very much for sharing your thoughts and views because they are important this is our community thank you um hi mark i just wondered if is this on okay uh i didn't understand if any of the scenarios will involve um

1:22:19 using water to create energy yes so the two alternatives for return to service do assume power generation revenues at either the existing plant site or at a new plant site so i was wondering how um when weighing the environmental benefits or lack of um how we're valuing the fact that we will in the future be creating some part of clean energy right that would be um

1:23:04 an element of our triple bottom line consideration is that i haven't seen it mentioned anywhere yeah so that you you will start seeing those types of factors show up when we start sharing out um triple bottom line results you know the greenness of the hydropower um there you go there's also some environmental impacts associated with hydropower that you will be reflecting right in the tv okay so this gentleman here i apologize

1:23:49 just give a shout out to all the lions crew people that are working out here and the tree crews that are working out here um they've been really supportive of homeowners that are wanting to take down more hazard trees and helping them in you know taking the line down while they can take down the trees or coming and helping them and supporting them i think for a lot of homeowners up here there's a lot of stress with these hazard trees and some of them don't quite fall in the criteria that they're close enough to the line to be taken care of but i do really want to express our appreciation for your alignments coming up meeting with different landowners i think over 50 with me i've expressed thanks for that um it's really an important piece and i think they're doing a great doing a great job um i do as a volunteer firefighter up here i do

1:24:35 uh want to see if we can work on having a faster response for electrical issues um right now we have olympic lane electric we have a wonderful resident um on-call that can basically be there if there's an issue um here for instance we have an issue having an issue at good pasture bridge on this weekend and it was an almost two-hour wait until the first guy could be there to assess the issue um you know there's lots of things happening in the city and and it's not that simple to get people out there but in these big events windstorm they don't friday's event wasn't quite at midstream it was an offspring instead but uh you know they do their own things but um

1:25:20 those types of responses would be helpful um especially for us in the fire department we did you have a specific question around what we're doing here um well mark can talk about the power plant upgrades and then i can talk about some of the other things i don't know if anyone else is able to take that later yeah on the power plant side of things we've been we are an hour our fifth year of uh work at the carmen plan we are still working on the rehabilitation of the

1:26:06 turbine generator and we have one more to go so we're at we're in year five we are hoping to wrap up the last piece of work um in year six and then basically the entirety of that garment plant will have upgraded from 1963 equipment and technologies to modern and then this summer we are going to be doing a similar round of improvements at the trailbridge [Music] and once that power plant work is completed you're expecting to be able to reopen access into the treasures campground in the smith reservoir area and that would be in 2024 camping season

1:26:51 24. all right and i'll just um mention briefly some of the um fish and wildlife and recreation improvements that we have going on up there mark mentioned um some work we have going on around trail ridge campground we have additional work that will be done at some of the other recreation sites over the next couple of years a really cool project was completed last year to rebuild the um spawning channel where um mostly chinook but also sometimes bull trout would go and spawn in and then we have a number of upcoming habitats both for fish and for wildlife habitat restoration projects coming in the next several years if you want more information we do have some written up information and folks here that can give you more details on timing

1:27:37 yeah sure you and i have the general manager are the members of the members of the political appointees are they civil servants see again the federal energy uh sure are they political appointees or the oil civil service i think they're good we work mostly with the lower level staff that would be um you know salaried staff for the most part right yeah the answer to that is they're both depending on which level we talked about i'm just going to stand up because i wanted to see everybody i couldn't be sitting down um i've worked with this board for a

1:28:22 while and it's really fair to say that we have some pretty big decisions coming up this being one of them and i'll tell you that i would classify this decision and i know that this board is taking this decision as what we would call a legacy decision we know that anything that we do with lieberg as canal is going to be long-lived it's going to last that the impacts of those decisions are going to last a lot longer than we will being in these positions the the triple bottom line is is our way of trying to dream up and think about and learn about all of the different impacts someone mentioned is it going to generate if it doesn't generate you now have

1:29:08 taken a carbon free resource away that has to be replaced with something else it's everything from lake levels to impacts on fish for wildlife for example to property values all of these things have social impacts they have environmental impacts and they have economic impacts there will be you know actually the easiest of those probably to quantify are the financial ones because you can get a spreadsheet out and you can get a spreadsheet you can look at property values you can look at investments and probably 100 million dollars is on the low side of commissioners i've seen the preliminary numbers sorry but there's just a lot of other things to

1:29:53 consider and part of the reason that we're here as commissioner carlson mentioned is we do want to see if there's things that we are missing this is early in the process at the end of this year we're going to try to to present the board with as much detail as we can so that they can provide some direction the next step is to look at directions which might be that there's a preferred path or a preferred and an alternate path or maybe there's a combination once we get to that point ideas like well instead of taking out the dam maybe there's a different ownership different liabilities that you could consider and so and in fact you saw some of the

1:30:39 timelines mark mentioned a lot of construction there's a lot of decision processes over the next years not just you know this year we're trying to gather as much information as we can this is part of the process and so i wasn't i was hoping i didn't have to talk today but just listening to this it does give us a lot of ideas and different considerations and those are the things that we're going to try to gather up and give the board as much detail as we can there's a second piece to this which is is some of the return to generating type of alternatives um ferc who's our regulator

1:31:24 they're a fun group to work with let me tell you there's also this licensing process that occurs so the license on library you have to work with the federal government they grant an operating license it's typically a 40-year kind of process or a 40-year license and it was we're halfway through the labor license so at the end of the 2030s about 20 i think it expired in 2040. so about 2030 we have to start this next 10-year process where we have to develop agreements with stakeholders around how we're going to operate the facility if we operate the facility for the next 20 or 30 or 40

1:32:09 years and that's what happened actually with carmen smith um carmen smith in that in that process some of the stakeholders said well we want a new campground right we want fish and wildlife mitigation and we want other terms and conditions for e-web for you to be able to operate this for 40 years so there's a number of processes here i will tell you this this board is incredibly serious about looking at all these issues because they are viewing this as a legacy decision one that's going to be long-lasting and it affects a lot of different people it affects great peers it affects people who live on the river people who visit the community

1:32:54 who have moved here and so we're going to try to gather as much information as we can and be as thorough as we can to help this board set some direction going forward and there were two cats that had you know off this option or this option but it's very likely we'll get there we'll go okay here's here's what we think might be a good path but there's still more to learn and this is part of that process so i just wanted to say that we're going to look at this from every angle we can and we appreciate the ideas and the concerns and and the thought process and contribution that you're making that's that's why we're here and that's why we take what you say very seriously so [Music] thank you i know that um we've scheduled

1:33:39 i've got two more in the queue we scheduled this for an hour we're a half hour over but we're here as long as you want us to be here to listen and so i'll go with you well and then steve the billing issue i'm wondering if it would be possible for the billing program to note on my bill every month if it's an estimated bill uh that would be very helpful to me because i can't figure out where the averages came from and i'm going to have a discussion later with these folks about it but that would be a request for me the other thing is um there's kind of a sleeping giant called cosa

1:34:24 that i understand was going to be reviewed again mid-year and uh haven't really heard anything about it for those of you who don't know me i'm will rutherford and uh since 2010 i've been attending most every eweb commissioners meeting and so i try to follow this stuff and then report it back through the mackenzie clearwater coalition website and i'm interested in what kosa is or what the schedule is or what's going to happen that's the cost of service analysis which could affect our electric rates

1:35:14 on the front page there's a messages section that will tell you that it's an estimated bill and i believe it's on the second page also it has in red writing that'll it has a little asterisk that'll tell you so you have to really look why not just below the usage graph on every month um you know it's a complex deal putting together a bill and eventually when we get a new cio system we may have all kinds of additional functionality where we could tailor something like that thank you steve just one comment you have a federal agency called hurt that's on your butt tall time we have another fed's agency up here called the corps of

1:35:59 engineers and right now cougar reservoir is down 170 feet might not ever be filled again and it supplies a lot of water to ewell and i just want to know if you guys were concerned when all this thing went about we know that they're making it

1:36:53 as they use we borrow water from the river for a number of purposes generation is one of them we return that it goes through a generator and returns back the other one is drinking water both of those use either very controlled levels of water in the case of generation it's a it's a cfs limitation and sometimes there's too much water in the river and sometimes too little that would impact our generation we already with walterville make adjustments in the summer for conditions that are low water years and we'll actually operate that facility at a lower level so we we can make adjustments if there's different different flows coming because of cougar or other types of reasons the the water usage is

1:37:40 really low from a drinking water perspective city of eugene it sounds like it sounds like a lot on the summer day city of eugene uses about 50 million gallons of water a day but even in the lowest of conditions in the mckenzie that's about four percent of the flow so as much as it may have impacts relative to silt and other things um the actual water level condition is is i would say not a concern for us there are a number of other issues relative to generation and other things not just with cougar but other some of the other dams in the willamette system that bonneville and the corps of engineers have decided are not

1:38:27 affordable to operate as generating facilities so it's not just tourists on the other one so that they've decided what that does but water usage is probably not a concern i i wanted to also will you touched on cosa so um cost of service analysis is something that uh we'll continue to look at but not specifically and just from a river mckenzie valley perspective one of the things that we recognize that we have to do probably over the next few years is to look at how we're pricing electricity relative to the resources that we have to use to to get that electricity i don't know if you really understand

1:39:12 the volatility of the markets that we deal with to buy electricity but those change every hour prices go up and down it's seasonal now we're starting to get more and more wind and solar on the system which creates times of surplus and shortage so prices tend to go all over so time of use matters to us as well and so when we start to look at things like time of use and other rates it'll be over the next few years uh we'll start to look at how we take our costs as a utility and divide those up into the rates that you all pay so um probably not this year it will just put your mind at ease but over the next few years in the

1:39:58 context of how we price electricity in general we'll start to look at how our costs get divided um have we looked at getting any of the infrastructure money uh it's available because we're talking about clean energy use and you know we got biting coming to town on thursday you know anybody going up there

1:40:43 he said that there's a boatload of money coming and i wasn't quite sure what you meant by that now now i get a little bit of a clue but we've we've actually leveraged the county uh a number of other supplement flows you have to follow the money i guess as you say some of it comes through the state some of it through the county um we also had eweb recently hired a grant writer to help with a lot of infrastructure projects water and electricity seems to be pretty high on the list of priorities along with resiliency and some of these other things so we we've put a group together that has basically uh looking at all different kinds of opportunities uh federal state and then um we're trying to get

1:41:28 projects so that they're project ready so that we can pull in the funding and then look at opportunities that we can use that but it's it is a really great opportunity our cfo is right behind you if you want to put a note into her but yeah there's there's a lot of opportunity to spend money but the challenge i don't know if people in this area are we're having challenges right now with supply chain and uh labor workforce um all of those are are having some scarcity issues so even if i never thought that i would say this sometimes it's gonna be hard to spend money tell that to our operations people by

1:42:13 the way but yeah it really is um there's a lot of different challenges but that's a great opportunity i'm glad you brought it up and actually we've so far been able to leverage several million dollars already thank you can i give this up please that's why i get the big bucks i think there's a gentleman here i have an app and then i'll get back over it here of sounds like uh hydroelectric energy is not as demanded anymore as much as it used to be it seems like there's a lot of dams that are being decommissioned uh no it's it's the cleanest thing

1:43:10 it's a great question what's going to replace hydroelectric power so we we are actually under pressure in a couple of different ways if you think about all the resources that historically have operated in the west and we're part of a big grid and so you look it's been a combination of coal nuclear natural gas we are very fortunate in the northwest to have had a lot of hydro which is a carbon free resource now hydro itself is also under attack because of fish and wildlife and operational constraints and so in the evaluation of a lot of projects people look at it for for example eweb i would say out of the 150 or so million dollars that that commissioner brown mentioned earlier to

1:43:56 re-license carmen smith about a quarter of that actually goes to things that generate electricity the other is all the ancillary things becoming very expensive about 30 cents on the dollar for hydroelectricity goes to fish and wildlife costs so 30 about a third of it and then also there's a lot of talk about dam reaching on on the snake river and further operational restrictions state of oregon sued the federal government around operating the dams on the columbia it's just putting a lot of pressure uh on um you know the question that you and asked which is

1:44:41 where is our electricity um we've it's a big it's actually probably my biggest concern personally is you you take away resources that you we had control of as people and you replace it with wind and solar which no offense to mother nature she controls at a different time than we do and so you have to over build that to get the same reliability if you take out would be you know one unit of natural gas you have to replace it with three to five times more wind and solar just to get the same reliability and that becomes very expensive um and also

1:45:26 the reliability is a concern so it's a great question it's part of what goes into our decision around leeburg is that it's a carbon free resource it doesn't generate any carbon emissions it's running the river so when the river's flowing we generate it's not like we store up a bunch and can move around move the electricity around when we need it but it's a big challenge for us i'm not that answering questions but it's we are also this year by by december we're going to do what we call an integrated resource plan which looks at all of our different generating options compared to our consumption and aligns what resources we're going to

1:46:12 need and what will be the most practical combination of resources for all the different characteristics environmental impact reliability cost all those things goes into that and that will give us a little bit of picture as to what kind of resources we're going to need going forward as our as our consumption looks because along that surface i think that might do yeah is kind of on a related topic so i think one of the proposals was to get into fulfillment um to maybe build a new power plant my

1:46:57 question was i know the last when it was a full operation there were questions about the i think the ratio of energy generated and the cost of operation whether maybe a great favorable ratio but a new power plant maybe more efficient and then my comment after that is just if you're going to spend this money this much money on river i would urge the board to consider maybe a committee benefits agreement so that is the job set for yellow pictures all right if you want to comment on the efficiency of the new power plant yeah but there would be a couple of advantages to a new plan we are driving a model a power plant it was built in 28 and it doesn't have a lot of bells and whistles of a 2022

1:47:42 board so yeah it would be a lot more efficient it would be seismic seismically designed so that it persists after a seismic event my t28 building doesn't sound a lot different than what we have currently operating so there's a gentleman right here and then i'll get you that i have one silly question why do you have to run the water four miles downstream yeah oh yeah so we um we divert the water at the dam and then as it's heading downstream it's gaining elevation over the river the river is falling down

1:48:28 faster the canal is essentially flat so by the time we get to the four bay we've got 80 feet of height that's our potential energy that we're converting into electricity okay okay yes ma'am i just wanted to clarify um the four options but now is there only one that generates revenue two the partial and the full return correct voting partial would also generate some income from that as well right would be a shorter canal and instead of having 80 feet ahead we'll have more like 30 feet ahead so it would generate as much power because it doesn't have as much driving uh head

1:49:13 and so that would help to cover some of the costs in the future it would have a yeah it would have a revenue stream that the decommissioning officers do not have mad in the blue you had a question um you said four and a half miles toward the pool and then a mile and a half where's the mile and a half located down the map here um

1:50:07 so i've got a question for everyone in the room if we hadn't i'm thinking about the fire now if we had another wind event in the summer like we did a couple of years ago um how many of you would moan about having your power turned off before the fire how many of you would be critical of e-whip if e-web turned off our power before we caught on fire i think that's the only thing i say at my house correct we volunteer would we all volunteer cut off our power we're used to power outages we all know we know what to

1:51:05 at the very worst you would cut service you know in a in a risk to risk mitigate for a fire and we're telling you tonight don't worry please do it yeah thank you for that feedback we appreciate that thank you just a quick question and maybe you don't know the specifics but in the return to service alternatives um on libre dam would it require a complete rebuilding of the dam itself no so no none of the crossing or the bridge would be effective i i'll mark it speak to that we just had to replace the roll gates remember when they got stuck shots yeah so there would be yeah we would not need to rebuild the dam we would need to continue investing

1:51:51 in the dam to maintain this reliability but not no reconstruction uh there would be a couple of spots where we need to do some seismic uh reinforcement but for the most part the dam is in very good shape okay we're kind of getting towards the end of this i'd like to on behalf of the board meet web staff thank everybody for coming out to seriously the best turnout i've seen in 20 years um i want you to take advantage of all the staff and all the knowledge we have here if you want to see maps of the options they're over here we want to talk about pure water partners customer service tree trimming anything and if you don't find a station and you want to talk about something doctor general manager