EWEB Board of Commissioners — October 25, 2022

0:03 follow the October 25th 2022 uh work session review is there anybody that has anything to comments people say that our meals are going to run between 5 and 5 15. that range she's just going to be thank you very much agenda item is going to be uh leader of the project alternative to death Lisa you're going to start it off first I sure am thank you sir very much good afternoon Commissioners we're looking forward to the next few hours and discussing the long-term options for the Liebert Canal I'm Lisa Grant's generation manager as for tonight's uh

0:48 agenda I'll be giving just a very brief intro about five minutes or so the rest of time is then yours for discussion and questions joining me at the table this evening is Mark zaneker Our Generation engineering supervisor Jeremy simoji our Weber of strategic evaluation project manager I'm Alicia for Humanity financial analyst we also have additional subject matter experts in the audience so hopefully between all of us we should be able to answer most of your questions with that I'll share just a few slides to set the stage for this evening Holly if you can go to the next slide please all right so over the last year we've been collecting information for triple bottom line analysis that aims to characterize the social environmental and economic impacts of four

1:34 alternatives for the New York canal preliminary results were provided to the board in a lengthy memo a few weeks ago at the regular October board session as a quick reminder now I'll just show the high level issues that were identified at each of the TBL categories next slide please Holly the social category is the TBL aspect with the largest number of issues or attributes as we call them we initially developed this list with help from our Consultants subject matter experts and staff and then we launched an extensive public Outreach effort during which we received more than 400 comments that effort allowed us to confirm that we weren't missing any of the substantial social impact issues in our analysis a detailed report of those results will be provided to the board in

2:20 the coming weeks next slide please Holly we also identified a range of environmental issues that also have been vetted with subject matter experts and staff they're shown here on this slide and finally next slide please Holly thank you the financial and economic issues that are including in the triple bottom line analysis we're going to check each attribute and assigned it a relative score for each alternative based on whether the impact was negative neutral or positive as compared to current conditions developed a scoring based on again professional opinion from subject matter experts staff and Consultants scoring is color coded on the table in

3:05 this slide so you can easily see positive versus negative impacts yellow orange and red and brown are negative with yellow being a minor negative impact in a red meaning through negative impact green and blue are positive impacts with green being minorly positive and blue being majorly positive as you can see there are both negative and positive impacts for each alternative really comes down to the trade-offs next slide please to better understand how the board May view the trade-offs we recently asked Commissioners to individually weight the attributes within each category so essentially assigning a relative level of importance to the attributes in making this decision here are the combined scores for all

3:50 Commissioners all Alternatives have a total score that is negative which means that overall all Alternatives have a net negative outcome according to how the board waited attributes so in other words again the decision comes down to choosing the least negative and recognizing that there are trade-offs please note that due to our mandate from the Federal Energy Regulatory commissioning doing nothing is not an option commissioner scores were added together to stormwater conveyance option comes in with the least negative number followed by the partial return to service that involves building a new power plant near the leftman spillway it's slightly sorry this graphic shows how each commissioner's weights were divided amongst the three major TBL categories

4:36 social environmental and economic there's both consistency and diversity in the waiting for example all Commissioners rated the social aspect as relatively High there's also consistency amongst four Commissioners on the relative weight of economics some Divergent perspectives emerged as well for example the commissioner shown in Gray rated environmental and social concerns higher than economics and the commissioner shown in Orange rated social issues as considerably higher than the other two categories slide please follow finally I'd like to present some preliminary rate impacts for each alternative now it's no surprise that there will be a rate impact regardless of which option is chosen Alternatives three and four the partial

5:21 return to service and the stormwater conveyance options have a rate impact of about 10 to 10 and a half percent full decommissioning is roughly a 14 impact and a full return to service is roughly a 15 impact now there are a lot of assumptions that went into these calculations so these are just estimates and they're subject to change but it does give you a relative sense of scope in terms of customer rates slightly solid that's all we have for formal slides we wanted to leave most of the time for you we do have several reference slides that are loaded that we can pull up later on if needed that'll turn it over to you Commissioners for your discussion thank you very much so format we haven't talked about it but I preached some the consensus is that we

6:09 just want to have a free-flowing discussion if we questions we can either question each other disagree that's okay but experts here the staff and this one is time to get it out on the table open there I want everybody to be respectful until there's time got four hours that's a ton of time but we also have a lot of heavy lifting so just starting this out if anybody want to just talk about the process where we've been and things like that I haven't heard I have some technical questions that I've got you know two major concerns and a technical question that I need to pose because I'm not ready to make a decision close and so if you want me to lead I will and and just

6:54 ask the question or if anybody else wants to Mindy want to say something about the process so I really appreciate um process and the whole even score and um I think that it was very in formative in many ways surprising that maybe we'll do another round of it because I'm guessing that um I might make things differently or new things might come up thank you for that comment we have been sort of out of a placeholder in that over the next couple of weeks assuming that that you all might want that yeah if I could just uh as an overview

7:42 um likewise just want to acknowledge all the work that the team has done to get us here all the nation that you provided us where you've been really candid about where there's uncertainty um I've never seen a TBL that says thorough as this I feel like you know it's been a really really nice job of providing us everything is possible uh it's also you know there's so much uncertainty and as you just acknowledged the options have some real drawbacks I think all cost us significantly there's not one here that's Revenue positive um so it's uh it's going to be a tough decision but I really appreciate all the effort that's gone into the Outreach and the packaging materials for us

8:32 okay I'm going to jump in the queue if you don't mind and just hit you with a technical question it's about rate impacts where you if you could bring that slide back up that would help me I would note that Frank had a Frank did a lot of work on the rate impacts and so it might be best to be here in five minutes he protected me yeah we can give it a shot and then I'll pull up the question and see what happens so you have these great impacts anywhere from uh you know that from 10 to 15 percent so uh This is Gonna uh we're gonna raise rates 35 plus or minus over the next 10 years anyhow and so the compounding function of my my let's just say my bill is a hundred dollars a month right now

9:17 and in five years from now it's going to be 120 because of the natural rate impacts and then we're going to compound that rate impact it's not going to be like are you compounding from today's rates are you compounding from the future rates Lisa thank you Deborah sorry commissioner O'Brien finished that's cool we're here to get answers you don't even have to call me commissioner I don't care I I could just feel Lisa willing me to jump in um so this raid example was all brought back to today if we borrowed that money today

10:04 because these were the net present values on the project you're right it will have a compounding effect so those other rate increases that we showed you in the long-term financial plan will Compound on top of this yeah so you raised mine rates 35 and then we raised from that 35 percent we go up another 15. it's a whole lot more it's a ton more than if we just look at take today's rates at 15 and uh so I'm just I'm concerned about I'm getting a real number because if we you look at the time frame of how we do that and we already have those in the 10-year Capital plan those projected rate increases um to me that will help me because I can't tell a constituent right now only what this is going to be but to me I

10:50 think it's going to be a lot more than that and I I hate to be the Dark Cloud but if I'm wrong help me but I'm that's that was my just question it doesn't need to be answered now but if you could do that for me I would it would help and then a couple of my general concerns that I had about this no matter what the decision is uh and you've seen them uh is that you know they're not going to withhold water and cougar anymore and so it's going to be run of the river we're not going to have the ability to adjust the flows to to meet environmental and other things and so that being said and we know in Salmon or what friends now but if they can become endangered and that flow continues the way it is if we return to service we run the risk of

11:35 having ferc or the national Fisheries say we're not going to divert water anymore and generate power because the fish don't have a way to get up the river and I don't want to spend a quarter of a billion dollars generating power for five years because we already have a stranded asset we realize the sleepers will also 15 years ago and we haven't amortized yet we're going to have a stranded cost there that if not in this number so that's one of my concerns and and um my other concern was uh uh I'll come back well I know it will uh it was was that was the water and the other one was um

12:26 if we either either scenario where we go and return to service we don't have any costs of fixing Walter bill and it's leaking and I don't think ferca is going to decouple the license if so if we go out and say we want to select either either option that generates power we're going to open the license back up and when we open the license back up you have temperature regimen that's going to kick in it was missed on the last license which we know and then we also have the potential cost to have to fix Walter Bill and none of those costs are in here correct that's correct um that said we our financial team has been running Net Present values uh assuming either a re-licensing or decommissioning for Walter Bill and you

13:11 will be seeing those numbers um the sometime in the next couple of weeks right Frank my concern was Return to service in either option either full return or left month because either way we got to get a new license and I'll just get we're calculating 190 million or 225 million that's totally absent of what Walter bill is going to be and how do we how do we factor that into this decision-making process because if this board comes down leaning towards some form of returning to service we're going to have to factor in re-licensing multiple bill as well and could that add 50 to 100 million bucks to this

13:56 thanks for stopping at the vet to get in yes so I can't make a decision a million dollar yeah you you will have the full cost of re-licensing for Walter bill in in the information that you get over the next month so we're married to a decision making an assumption that for the Mandate that we fixed that Canal to yeah we've we've looked at and and yeah there's there's it's somewhere between 50 and 100 million just to give you a rough rough idea those numbers will be included um in the re-licensing options so that you can and and that would be um the same anticipated kind of things we would get with any relicensing which would be fish mitigation water you know

14:41 uh generation repair I mean all of those things would be included so we would add 50 to 100 million to either one of the options of return to Services potentially yeah okay I just I need to understand that now I've started this I mean I have a lot of questions but I guess my big question really is can we meet with ferc and get some information from them first there's so many unknowns and is it possible meet with somebody and say like if we're considering uh return to service like what is the likelihood that you would X Y or Z it just seems like there's so there's so many unknowns that you must be able to get some information yeah there are a lot of unknowns so

15:28 either of Licensed to render so decommissioning scenario or re-licensing scenario is generally a negotiated agreement not just with ferc but with a number of other settlement parties and that is really where where the uncertainty lies there is some uncertainty in terms of decommissioning whether um it would be an option to keep the dam in place but in terms of of other components that's really if if UF comes to an agreement with our settlement parties which are federal and state Fisheries agencies tribes a number of not non-profits are generally the the cast of characters then if we we go to work with a negotiated agreement that's generally what work for the most part will agree too

16:14 it's getting to that negotiated agreement and what that looks like for all of the stakeholders that creates the large uncertainty in addition to whether or not we could do a decommissioning scenario that maintained it down because that is actually common I don't know I can't think of an example that we don't know is that something that we could find out ahead of time because if we have that information technical conferences with the ferc but usually that doesn't come at this stage in a decision-making process that comes

17:00 um you know later on when we're trying to move towards a path ferc is generally silent for the most part um as you know with the exception of their written rules uh they have asked us to give them quarterly updates of where we are at with our Lieber decision making process because their their urgency is really around the public safety component at this point we did have our attorneys look into the various regulatory options and what ferc is likely to do and uh from that we do have a pretty good sense that we've got a little bit of time to figure it out but we don't have forever and that whatever option we choose for leiburg is going to result in something that will as

17:45 commissioner Brown um says triggers an alternative for Walter build because they're they are licensed together however we do believe we could move down the path of a decommissioning alternative for leiburg and a different separate license for Walter Bill if we chose to do that bring me in Reflections comments many or excuse me Sonia um one the slide that has commissioner waiting waiting not accurate at all if anybody's in the crowd wondering oh why'd they just go one way or the other to see the positive they're not they're all negative we have no good choices I mean they're they're all very challenging they're all very tricky

18:30 it's there's no winners in any of these things it's we're choosing the least worse are you talking about the bottom line commissioner Carlson because there are a couple of positive numbers that are accurate full decommissioning on the environmental side is positive oh okay all right well if you totally oh sorry the totals at the bottom those are all negative okay um so I'm just going to kind of roll through my list and begin to stop and James the rates and the so the rates under the economic category and the social social justice seemed like very similar to measurements to me I'm curious if they're like how you distinguish those

19:15 you know slightly differently I'm guessing it's more that social justice aspect hits lower income whereas the rates everybody equally but to me they're very interlinked I think it's two slides it might just be one it's the slide that has all the colors on it yeah this one is this way yeah in the you know the document I don't know if others felt that way but for me I had kind of a challenge when I was ranking them thinking about two of them because I feel like they're very similar measurements I mean if you raise the rate someone you're going to impact exploring and people who are going to impact the rates so um you know for me it was curious how those

20:00 were braided in here too like uh project costs and impact rates there's you know slightly different mix of how those are ranked on the social justice even though I approach it seems very similar to me so I don't know what the Nuance is between those and you know for me I I really appreciate the the ranking and I like that we're reading them so it gives it a bigger spread but like the environmental ones there's only six categories in total so the opportunity for impact there is only really a 30 point spread over five categories where there's 14 categories on the social side and there's

20:46 bought four on the economic side so kind of the amount of numbers available just just thinking about the process and how we're rating this and using this as a tool um and I don't know if others had thoughts about that but I want to think about how those numbers calculate if we are actually using these as a tool for decision making um some of these don't really like hand out to anything at all like the wetlands one they're all ranked exactly the same all the way across no matter what point you choose right so it doesn't like it's a decision making point it doesn't really sway anything neither does the noise level um just one other one that has two so the domestic ground water wells like none of those are impact they're all

21:32 impacted you know roughly by this metric the same way across all of them so I tried to you know think about how those interact with one another really good point so there's definitely a number of them that are on here that have relatively similar levels of negative or positive impact regardless of the alternative we felt like it was still important to list them on there absolutely so that folks that raised those concerns or had those concerns could see that yep it was made the list and it got its comparative score absolutely it's something that we consider it's in here but also swaying it between the

22:17 and I'm just pointing those out as we think about kind of the how we use this tool others want to chime in or stop me I'm happy I've got lots of these kinds of comments so Matt's got a hand his hand up so maybe we can just get some information here yeah just one thought about the TBL at least from my perspective it just going through it that exercise caused me to think a lot about what's important and how are we collectively creating these things I don't personally see it as a decision making tool I see it as a way to get us all thinking about the the relative values and how we collectively feel about it but to me like none of the scores here are like oh that's obvious what we're going to do so I don't feel that the numbers have to be as precise I think it's it's good fodder to help us

23:03 really achieve this um foreign typically um you know joined the conversation this early uh but this also feels like and maybe I'm wrong this feels like a very unusual project all together and I wonder if they would control the conversation right now anyway I mean any inclination towards you know a couple of the the versions you know the the partial return to service will well there's some interest in that like could they tell us if that's like completely off the table uh that would be really helpful from my perspective so I I would I would encourage us to see

23:50 if there's any information we get from ferc that can help inform our discussion recognizing there there may just not be at this stage but I'd be valuable to ask um I would say for tonight from my perspective it's really valuable to see if there was one scenario that we were all like yeah we don't want to do that um you know even just taking one off even if we're not more clear about where we want to go you know just narrowing the list would be valuable um we have four hours of conversation but from my perspective that could be one thing to get done tonight right wants to chime in and I'm gonna hear from JP but I was going to say that the issue of there's a couple ways that that we've approached this and then there's a lot further to go one of the things that we did do and it's surprising how many

24:36 different case histories there are within the the ferc I'll refer to a sort of a case law they they have dealt with partial return to Services they have dealt with splitting of projects there's a certain degree of legal review that has taken place that without the the exact discussion with all the settlement parties we've been able to say this is this is Perks history and so we can weigh some of that in there the other piece of it is part of the final recommendation for the board's consideration will include one of the other values of the TBL which is where and how can you mitigate parts of the decision I think commissioner Carlson's Point around some of these are kind of the same no matter what what the

25:21 choices I think when when I went through the exercise I put zeros on a number of and it wasn't because I didn't care about those particular issues I didn't see the decision as being impactful for those for those particular elements and so I think we will have recommendations around a go forward path with ferc for example there are going to be a number of areas that we will want to have specific discussions with Ferg around a particular issue you know one of them that that we're starting to look into is what's the impact of this million year versus say a 10 000 year maximum flow um because we we would want to know if

26:06 that's something that could be negotiated and what's the value of that um and so if it doesn't make any difference to our project then then that's something that we might get a zero on the on the on the chart but uh there's the recommendation and part of the value of the TBL is to identify these these areas that you talked about where there's commonality where there's differences and then where can you applied mitigation efforts before we move on from work I think Mark had a yeah one other thought response to Mr McRae get good participation in 2021 in our semi-quantitative risk assessment now these were the folks from the dam safety side of the equation so their

26:51 participation in that process gave us a pretty good idea about what they would expect for a return to service so and as we show on our cost estimates is not cheap there's a lot of improvements that would be demanded in order for it to be acceptable for long-term operation okay thanks do you go to anything yeah um yeah I like hearing from the rest of the group but um you know a couple of things that I have taken away is uh this is a obviously it's a generational project

27:37 no matter which way we go and and more than generational I mean this is a you know you're talking a millionaire flight well this is a 100 year Legacy in my mind it's it's going forward 100 years we've used the the power for the last 90 years and and it helped build this community right that you in the presentation we had before it was like they built this so that there would be electricity for the City of Eugene and that's how this town got started so that ways into it you know to me it's not just about the dollars I mean the dollars are going to be there it's going to cost it's going to cost us a

28:22 lot of money one way or another um between 140 and 240 . yeah that's a lot of money yeah it has impacts on repairs but built a city using using this power and and it's a legacy going forward um I did feel that in in a lot of the material was weighted against some of the some of the conclusions I think return to return to service because of the economic challenges that return to service has I felt in the material it was weighted negatively just the way that I read it

29:08 and I'm just putting that out there as as that's something that I felt uh again and again I kept feeling oh gosh you know return to service costs 250 million dollars and here's a bunch of bad things about return service for me to turn to service is something that if it could happen would be my best case scenario a lot of reasons one it maintains the things up the river to it gives us it gives us power generation that is uh that is carbon free three it gets water to the Fish Hatchery if you look at those up there there's a lot of zeros and the only the only thing that's really red red in in

29:55 full return service is the cost over take that cost and say yeah we're going forward you know this license in the next yeah but if you also say we're going back 90 years of that costs go down a little bit but the the economic and the social and the things that we've gotten out of that that thing over that time had their you know there's there's slides later on that talk about a sinking fund right if there'd been a 90 year old thinking fund attributed to this those fives would be three right it's just that we didn't have that so

30:41 you know that's some of my things that I do have questions about well if it goes back to taking the day I'm out what does that mean as far as water rights for uh for us I mean water rights what does that mean for you know is it better for the native salmon upriver or is it or are we getting Hatchery salmon all the way up to Cougar now because we don't have a damage these are these are some questions that I'm kind of thinking around why not want to hear commissioner so that's my initial take so I have a question and a comment too about uh

31:27 um are we worried I mean uh if an environmental group decided to take the Warm Springs case and apply it to us we got a strong legal opinion on that because if we go down any of the SE roads and start spending all this money and then we get that we lost our water right because it wasn't five consecutive years pretty little art form the board start the Detroit question remind us what that is yeah in the case of the the Springs case there was a I'll say a pseudohydo hydro project that really never came to fruition the Supreme Court ruled that um because that water right was the

32:12 original purpose was for hydrogeneration at some point you have to generate Hydro where you lose the water right and they they picked a five-year uh shot clock that said if you don't operate this facilities if you have a hydro based water break and you don't operate for five years you lose that water right and that's that's what the Supreme Court of Oregon decided now our remedy is to um and Jason will talk about this in his recommendations I think he already launched that last month our remedy is to pursue a change to the law to cover to identify a difference between if you're operating under an existing Hydro license versus just this knob so

33:01 um we we will know um within the next year whether that's that's going to and we're getting a lot of support and it will be introduced likely in the house this year and that'll prove but that'll get us around this five-year shot clock I know you're in the middle of your questions so for us to live go ahead I was just gonna say it's a hydroelectric water right that we have so if you decommission under the with this new Supply in place um you would moves I bought that hydroelectric water line is gone um but we are getting good Jason's doing a great job collaborating the General Electric Pacific or as well as water watch who

33:48 was the sponsor for that um legislation to to protect against zombie projects that Frank was describing which have a lot right speculating on and not ever and so um we have we're a different category and and I think uh what our watch uh intended that with that legislation so the pretty pretty favorable responses so far about our ability to put an exemption from the shot clock for our type of situation the answer is Mindy's question if if we were to lose

34:34 the water right what would be our process to reinstate a water break okay you need to reapply for a hydroelectric water rate and you know from Ground Zero people want to risk and probably being able to establish that water we decommissioned through the fourth and we have water right you know yeah but I guess what I'm saying is is there if if we decommissioned is there any drawback to not having a water raid no because we don't that's water watches point they were

35:20 upset with a project that got decommissioned that Kevin um opening to the Resurrected so no that's cool and the only other thing I wanted to do is just from a historical perspective I think since I've been on this board we have divested of three renewable resources here we didn't we we invested a coach in up in Columbia County we diagnosted of a wind project in Wyoming and we divested a hydro project in Idaho yes I can't remember the names but we've already sold them because they made no economic sense that we got out of it it's not just somewhere to this same process so there's you know there's been precedent

36:06 established knowing that this is what four percent of the portfolio you know that that's one thing I think just to keep in mind I too want to keep things green but I just want to remind people that this is not the first time that eweb has considered stepping away from renewable resource because there's a point that they make no economic sense and I think I think the the one in Idaho or the one in Wyoming which one of them the retooling of the win form was really upside down and I think Idaho was just something that we thought of our neighborhood I can't remember why we divested that but just wanted to just let you know that I'm going to visit the first time that we give people around that relief

36:58 your turn and I just apologize for the free association nature of my questioning tonight I have so many questions and I feel like I'm bouncing around a little bit but um my question is about the decommissioned to stormwater conveyance so if we were to choose that path and we are still on the hook for maintaining those canals and purpose really got one Adam and capital investment and even though we think that we have way much we have much better methods now for constructing canals and everything state-of-the-art could find ourselves in a similar Earth little planet or some of those similar situation 50 75 years from now

37:48 if they were converted to storm water function and not hydroelectric it's a different regulatory environment that you're in so right now it's perk regulated because of the hydro generation power the regulation would shift over the Oregon water resources board um a different animal this is kind of run of the river I've heard several people say I got a lot of questions get them out there Sonia I'm curious so as I look at this a lot of the social costs

38:33 going to impact the people who are most associated with that region which are up with our residents the only one that seems to be the lowest on that is the one that maybe face the dam which is the the full return to service I'm curious and I was trying to look in the the cost here you don't have an option where we get rid of the canals but keep the dam is there a reason for that and how much of the cost is associated with just property of the dam itself because I'm wondering if there's Middle Ground where a lot of the you know Recreation and the property values and some of those things are really key to that area up there um I mean to me are related to just the damn being there in itself but not the

39:19 operation of the generation which has a very high cost I'm assuming because we have to actually build a full plant that sort of thing so if you could maybe tease out the dam separately from the rest of it I would love to hear more about that Holly could you move forward many flights I can't remember which slide it's on thank you share um also that other slide it does have a typo 91 is negative ly so it's going to be in the back calling um there was a table in the work stop memo but it wrote down the npv by a major category

40:05 um structure removal is important that I have just a word table Then There It Is okay so before we get into the numbers just let me real quickly say the reason why we assumed dam removal in the decommissioning scenario is really that there is that is that sort of the precedent that's out there for decommissioning any Hydro project that's that's generally what um ferc requires and not only for with the Regulatory Agencies would want and require that said lieberg is a very different type of hydro project than most of the hydro projects that have been decommissioned um with its length of canal and the fact

40:51 that it's not a storage Reservoir it's just a very very different set up very differently and there's no precedent out there for a project like ours but we made some assumptions in part because we wanted you to understand what sort of your worst case cost scenario would be I was just gonna just one other uh on it they um as Lisa pointed out it's a negotiated it's like a new license is a negotiated um and with a lot of stakeholders involved so is decommissioning and so we could certainly body for an outcome that we desire but all those stakeholders that come to the table there's some powerful ones that might not support them being there

41:37 because of the higher generation so it's not really necessarily enough control like Lisa was saying before tend to go with what the settlement parties are accepting but yeah this uh table that's on the screen now you have a couple of line items related to the dam removal but um structure removal and fish screens tail race barriers that's the seventh down then related to the original the structure is going to be the restoration of the first

42:24 item deals with that restoration and then the other thing to point out on this is that these are the direct construction costs only later down at the table I think on the next page you'll see some additional line items that basically Factor up to give you this whole wall across there's a second one item down contingencies organization design and um we're using a dam there's decline costs associated with correct construction documents that the permitting device and saying all those kind of add-on -based construction costs that are at the top of the table

43:09 following best guess I mean if we were able to keep the Dan do not have generation I understand what you were saying was not being able to do that um and I mean we've had up there before there it's it's an it's embedded in a number of different categories so it's hard to kind of piece that one out for me it is it is it's like 7.5 million in one and yes 31 million 31 32 million 31 to 32 that's counting design licensing feasibility construction management so all in costs construction it's just that's just construction correct and then and then there's o m of that for the NPD for the

43:54 duration of the ownership of the van all right we actually have the sensitivity we'll see within the next uh a couple of few weeks here we have run you know we have run an npv and then Alicia has and we're calling that alternative foray which is essentially alternative for while maintaining the Dam bridge Etc that you know or alternative three with without a Powerhouse would be another comparable way to look at it as well so so that is something we're looking at and the uncertainty must be known that we will be at the mercy of work and other Regulatory Agencies to allow us communicating our wheel barrier down that we're not generating in the future

44:39 if your intuition is correct then if you could it's a pretty dramatic Capital cost savings after and uh ongoing o m doesn't offset that um I'm trying to balance the you know the folks that are really impacted upriver by taking that I mean that's that's a very large portion of the economic the you know the property values the businesses that rely on that that piece but on the flip side of that everybody is paying for this massive cost with the only one as a return to full service that's the only one right now that has the associated Dam with it so I'm just trying to look at those two alternative three as well has the dam and maintains

45:26 the cabin Lake as well so both of our Our Generation options both to maintain the Dam bridge Lake and the portion of the canal and additional versions of stormwater Canal would also likely have some recreational value there as well okay that's interesting because before our last meeting that's what I thought was the case but then at our last meeting you all told me that that was not the case that the dam was the only one that was staying is being full return to service so okay so it is in both people return in partial okay thank you John B what you just said I think you think have we talked to the settlement

46:11 partners and what are they what are their views I mean if if we're saying all of this depends on what we can negotiate with the settlement Partners either on decommissioning or re-licensing have we had those conversations because if we pick an option and the settlement Partners say no I'm sorry that doesn't work for me you know I mean obviously there has to have been some interaction with those parties and it would be helpful for me to know what where they're Landing depends on which partner you're talking about and with so um we would make an assumption that we would have sort of the same Suite of settlement partners that we have with

46:56 our Carmen Smith license which include state and federal fish and environmental agencies but also the parks tribes other non-profits I will tell you and and in non-profits including Recreation users and others they don't all agree um we can make some assumptions that the the federal federal fish agencies generally favor spam removal um how they would land even in this case where it's a barrier that keeps the the key I mean we've we've heard from people in this room that the Fisheries people actually some of them like having the barrier there to separate out the natives yeah it's it's convoluted it depends on who

47:43 you're talking to right and um whether folks favor managing wild Fisheries through of reducing Hatchery fish and so that would that would be a different outcome or um maintaining a hatchery fishery and how you manage the victory depends on which option you're choosing there so you're going to get a different opinion depending on which Fisheries perspective your agency how do you meet with all these different partners do you go to them individually and say this is what you're thinking or do you get everybody together in a room or a workshop and people talk to them

48:28 We Do It generally as a group and um so how it's worked in our previous licenses is we'd have a whole bunch of different groups so there would be a Fisheries working group that would be all the stakeholders that are interested in the Fisheries component you would have a recreation Aesthetics and historic working group in the different parse them out in different ways but we generally work through these negotiated settlements together as a group with a facilitator and take quite a long time and it's all it always happens where we come with the idea and go from there versus getting everybody together and saying we're trying to figure

49:14 so we initiate some sort of action that then folks have an opportunity to sign on a settlement party if they if they want to so there's an action that's that's initiated then we then we start working through the process of working together in my experience of doing this for the last 15 years um the settlement parties tend to like a proposal that they can respond to as opposed to uh brainstorming sessions but there's multiple ways to do it are there other large lever I mean are there people that would say I've got a veto on this right I mean they're you know if there's somebody that says yeah I like a park and I like picnic benches that's one that's one stakeholder right but if there's federal agencies or tribal agencies or something

49:59 like that that can just say no have we reached out to any of those large lever stakeholders we worked very closely with those large levels lever stakeholders on our other projects they have been involved in engaging labor Walterville during the course of this license they haven't particularly weighed in specifically on this but you're you're right in that there are some agencies that have mandatory conditioning Authority and so they do affect veto that might come um via their authorization under the Clean Water Act or The Endangered Species Act or you know this is not on Forest Service land but if the force Forest Service land like we have at Carmen they also have some conditioning authorities so it depends on the nature

50:44 have we reached out to those people um to ask them that what their opinion is on this question um not specifically to ask them what they would like us to do at Liebert now yeah uh I think one of those and one of those that I think we one of the partners that we should be paying close attention to is tribal governments and I know you know I know we've done we've done some Outreach my understanding is that we haven't had a lot of feedback on this project at this point and you can share some of the reasons why you think that is but I would propose that um we ask staff to do a or um focused uh interact interaction Reach Out specifically to the tribal

51:29 governments that are interested here and see what their opinions are about a variety of options to the extent that's possible I would really value in this area if you look at the list there's a sidebar if you look at the list of the stakeholders when we re-licensed the comment there's 28 I mean from the corporate whales to uh Rocky Mountain Health Foundation there's every organization you can think imagine that it's got a seat at the table and uh it's it's not only trial because the tribal came up with the Lamprey and and things such as that and then have meetings with them but there are a ton of them and I think that single out one you know I'd like to we're going to do it let's do it

52:15 with all of them because I don't think it'll be appropriate to not think about something to the table so I did yeah well I I guess I'll respectfully disagree that I feel like the voice of the tribe in this area have from my perspective at carry a a bigger weekly the the one variety of special of interests you know not that we're not listening to all the interests but perspective that's one I wouldn't be being special I got a comment or two I I actually have a question on the fish maybe John about your you know sorting the fish the only reason they have to sort them is because they plant them and they they have baby fish and Hatchery fish and since the Hatchery hasn't had any water in it for three years the salmon they dumped four

53:01 years ago are coming up to come up to the Hatchery on Greenwood Drive they don't know where to go so they swim up the river and we're getting all these Hatchery fish mixing with the native fish if we didn't plant Hatchery fish in there we would have that problem um you know they still have to get over that impediment but they don't have to sort them because there wouldn't be any Hatchery fish and as a fisherman and I know that I'm going to probably get some rock thrown at me for saying this it pains me to see when fishing season happens the native fish come up usually earlier than the Hatchery fish and everybody's out fishing for them they hook a native goes right down to their stomach and then they have to release it they either cut the line and leave the hook and everything in them or then I've seen so many Native fish floating because they've been hooked uh because you don't know what you're what's biting the line you hook up salmon you bring it in you stress it out oh by the way it's

53:47 a Navy recent and some of them die and um so I first we didn't have Hatchery fish on the McKenzie I'm not so sure I'd shed a tear as much as I fished for him but uh um I'm getting older and more wiser about protecting the native fish habitat so I do know that the Corps of Engineers has a mandate to to supply and I don't know if the Lieber cat tree can um accommodate both trout and salmon if they elect to do it or not I mean if somebody just said get rid of the electrical Creed Cattery and uh use it and we did storm water option four and kept the dam that would check a lot of

54:32 boxes for me used to be getting out there Matt uh yeah follow up on your comment um I have a similar concern about the better desire I guess to protect the native fishery um my understanding though is that the habitat Upstream of Lieber is degraded enough or limited enough at this point that it would be hard for a native fishery to sustain itself without a hatchery fish is that they don't let natural fish go over them well no I understand but if we go through the process okay so we remove the dam and we stop providing Hatchery fish as you just proposed right my understanding is that there's not actually enough for Habitat spawning

55:18 habitat and etc upriver for that population of Native fish to sustain itself but but I'm not sure what your no means um there's the McKenzie actually has exceptional spawning habitat there is some there are some habitat projects that are underway that will even increase that more but from a native fish perspective if you're talking about Springfield salmon which are listed in an endangered species actually Mackenzie has gorgeous habitat kind of enough of my understanding was that the Army Corps dance were providing a barrier to a fair amount of the habitat that would historically been there they are cougar and Blue River do provide a barrier um that said cougar uh there is fish passage at cougar yeah and uh so I personally as a former

56:05 former fish biologist I'm not at all concerned about um the ability for the Mackenzie to sustain um a healthy wild population um I'm going to ask questions so one is about the fish um and maybe this is in the background and I just can't remember but why are fish hatcheries listed under social experimental why did you separate those things out it's a good question so the fish hatcheries really did show up and another commissioner brought this up during the waiting exercise they show up but it probably should have parsed it out into both to make it a little bit more clear there are social components to having the fish hatchery there namely uh fishing opportunities local jobs

56:53 those sorts of things that we considered more of us of a social issue as opposed to an environmental issue could also put fish hatcheries in the Aquatic resources portion of the the TBL that said I you know if you depending on who you talk to from a Fisheries perspective you're going to get a different opinion on hatcheries and so it's whether they're helpful or harmful and so even that is is a split um judgment so it's it's hard to parse it out there my personal opinion is you know I tend to agree with commissioner Brown on the Hatchery from an environmental perspective that

57:38 said don't want to negate the the social benefits that having a hatchery in the area does provide the other question is when do we get to hear from people yeah we're or did you do a staff waiting where you can be like staff a staff B7 are are sort of full conglomeration and recommendations to the board and with the logic behind our thinking is this is it mid-november third week in November third week in November document that'll come back to the board describing how we view all of these these issues that that

58:25 you're bringing up everything from fish to economics to social how we await that what we think can be negotiated or mitigated but we in cancer the pros and cons of if you want to keep a dam for a bridge or not you know things things like that so um we're going to go through our own process of of debate and and consolidation and that'll be part of what comes back to the board and it it will likely come back with some conditions and some contingencies that I don't don't expect us to come back and say we vote for option x i I think it's going to be a lot more nuanced than that

59:12 which I think is part of what we're hearing from the board too is that there's there's assumptions you need to be able to to verify those assumptions understand the risks with those assumptions whether that be the the 28 settlement parties and you know the pros and cons of that process for tribes you know there's there's just a lot that um that will start through but we're not we're not we we wanted to hear your perspectives today and knowing that we didn't expect the same we didn't expect a recommendation from the board either this this was meant to facilitate where you kind of feel similar you know things that you

59:57 might you know one person might say this is really important to me and someone else says no that's not important to me um so trying to understand a little bit more about where your the variance and the commonality between the commissioners hello can I say one more thing about the first settlement process so it's it's one of the pieces and this is this is a drastic change in ferc in the last 20 years it didn't used to have a settlement party process um it was just a direct interview and what happened was people who were not invited to that table started filing lawsuits and so part of the reason you go through a settlement process and the

1:00:42 reason that there are these stakeholders and whether they're small or large if you get to the point where you are actually filing a license uh ferc wants to see as broad of a settlement agreement as possible to avoid the future litigation so it whether it's tribes whether it's an environmental Aid organization whether it's a direct Action Agency first one that's what ferc wants to see a broad settlement agreement is it just reduces the risk of future litigation so that's that's last 20 years or so has been that's why when we talk about settlement parties and the sort of the vastness of them why it's important to be inclusive in that process is that if someone wants a

1:01:28 picnic table we don't put in a picnic table they they can say oh no settled I'm not settling uh by the way you might see me later kind of thing so in in the numbers that we're running re-licensing or decommissioning part of that is the settlement agreement are there ballots for mitigation in those numbers I mean because you had mitigation I mean Deer Creek has been a creation for for Carmen that was millions of dollars are those in that number or not so if I do if I do

1:02:14 forward certain service and the license needs to be done and there's a mitigation of that is that part of the 250 or is that on top of it our intent is for it to be part of that 250. okay and across the board I'm decommissioning as well okay except Walter Bill's not included in that which will be included by the time you get the information thank you yeah procedural collection with others initially I said we're just going to eat over you know we're all on camera there's a lot of people watching us sometimes it's not the most graceful thing in the world we want somebody to cheat let's try to break for 10 minutes and you get the initial food down I mean we're 45 in I think we've got some good everybody's okay with that okay

1:03:00 Frank we're just gonna adjourn I'm going to turn this for no more than 15 minutes to see how fast we can eat

1:17:24 I like the thumbs up thank you I'll reconvene the uh October 22nd or 25th 2022 work session of the utg-1 Electric Board and go back to open discussion anybody have want to raise your hand first or I have a question I'm going to jump in then so um we talked about a hybrid somehow with uh Dan was replaced you would put a bridge in has anybody gone to ODOT because that's probably one of the most dangerous intersections now I've ever seen and without even allow us to put a bridge in there and we even asked the question because that's a pretty there's no refuge Lane there's no acceleration deceleration and uh people coming down the hill if they want to cross that

1:18:09 that's very very dangerous so we even approached that question we have not asked ODOT but we would just have to live by the Oregon standard specifications for that and my assumption is we would have to straighten that out a little bit put a new approach Span in on a bridge I don't think an acceleration Lane going up we'd probably have to fill part of the lake and wouldn't that require I mean I'm just thinking about permitting and doing all those things and so I'm just playing that seed about because I know you have an option there about a and uh I want to make sure that that option is equal to so we'll put that up thank you other questions and comments Matt you remember yeah take a quick question and this is going to probably

1:18:54 and one speculation but I guess that's why I'm asking um we've talked about once we've made a decision and we're looking colored the project that will certainly pursue other sources of funding besides equipayers to help offset the costs there any reason to think that we would be more likely to get funds to be licensed or decommission a little bit of research I've been doing on this different grant funding is actually there's some Dam safety in the infrastructure bill I think it's the 247 pot of money also allows for dam removal

1:19:40 so it's for both goes both ways so there's even decommissioning funds for that as well you know for removing it down so and then there'd be other new commissioning avenues that would be more dollars from environmental science you know from their perspectives and lots of money that looking for you know restoring a river Etc that some pots of money available so I think it's pretty competitive both ways to to get to get dollars however we wouldn't be able to fund how the project in its entirety these volatiles a little little bits but every every little bit does help yeah yeah

1:20:27 so where where we do so I would agree there's opportunities on the the safety side I think those are fairly limited sort of the environmental recovery piece which would be if you're returning to its natural state There's an opportunity there there's probably very little opportunity just simply the PowerHouse piece of this we're not adding capacity we're nodding we're not adding new carbon free resource this is considered existing and so um there may be opportunities of sub segments but others probably not so it doesn't really answer your question I mean we tried to give you a little bit of feel for every 20 million and how it affects rates and we'll pursue all the

1:21:12 options but it seems like the environmental recovery piece and the safety piece are the ones with the most opportunity thanks outside the real mini question about the impact on rates and I don't know if this is at what point do we anticipate that it um imposes hardship on people I know that's a very very broad question but I think my my question is more like um if we look at how many people receive some kind of bill assistance or something like that do we have any idea like if we raise rates this amount of money then we anticipate that it's going

1:21:58 to create more hardship for X percentage of people and and like how do how do we track that or how do we know how impactful those um now look at me the whole panel looked at me um what we would um typically do to answer that question I don't know that we have a direct number of our customers but we have percentages from Lane County that fall into certain income brackets and we also know that the state categorizes um energy challenged at what you get to roughly six percent of someone's income there they're now in a in a category of

1:22:43 of okay I'll just say energy or energy burden that's the thank you commissioner um we are not close to that at the moment we're you know around the three to four percent range um and so the more you add over time um the more that you're going to push up against that one of the comments that commissioner Carlson made earlier about sort of this trade-offs where programs fall because great for not only an economic but you could also put put those in the social peace which which I agree with and and energy and water well I'll say utility rates tend

1:23:28 to be very regressive um when you start to look at at other forms of sort of income or different kinds of government entities so we we think rates are incredibly important I guess to to put it that way because they do tend to be regressive and we can check we can double check the accounting numbers and see what degree of Headroom we might have there relative to our programs and and where we would push up I think that's a that's a good thing for us to follow up on uh Rachel Chilton made a comment about the public survey that went out there and I seem to recall she said that the United States gums not very big and sensitive most incomes actually not very

1:24:15 very sensitive because they get some assistance it's those folks that aren't quite well enough to qualified that really could hit ours yeah and I I think that's that's fair we we target a certain percentage too we try to cover the basically the fixed costs of our customers for for a certain number of customers and so but I want to I think the question is valid at what point do you start pushing up into into that next group um because if if we're looking at this as also a limited income um if we want to supplement with that with limited income there's another piece to this project that you start to push up against and um

1:25:01 we'll have to just determine if that's significant or not I think which is the basis for the question no questions or comments John B yeah piggyback on that um it's it's not just the for me and I reached out to somebody earlier a staff member that I interact with at a different committee kimchi you know we've got low income and small big payers we also have large rate payers and I'm wondering I I would like to reach out to them I mean you know there's there's certain industrial ones that are going to be you know it's an easy thing for them to say rates are very important and what you do

1:25:47 up River doesn't matter to me keep my rates as low as you can because they're just writing the check and paying it but some of our other larger users do have social and economic and University of Oregon City of Eugene Wayne County some of our big big people that write Us big checks they look at it not just as keep my check as small as I can so I I would I would like to get some sort of a feel from the people that are that are writing the biggest checks as well as the people that are writing the smallest checks on what they feel the attributes of this project are

1:26:34 um and it goes to Economic Development you know if you say that we're more you know on the residential side if we're at three to four and cross burden is is six okay on the industrial side are we going to be pushing ourselves with not only with this rate increase but with the other rate increases are we going to be pushing ourselves into an economic negative as far as bringing economic prosperity to us in in developing new businesses to come in here I mean that's one of the things that they look at if you're building a if you're building a chip or you're opening a chip plant where heinx is what are the things that

1:27:19 they're going to look at is how much is it going to cost me to run that building and and not just today how much is it going to cost me to run it there so some of those numbers and some input from some of those type of users would be helpful to me because on the other hand somebody's putting a chip plant in heinek's let's say or whatever we're calling it today they may look at the the amenity that is up River McKenzie that's something that they can use to attract Workforce so they may not just be looking at the at the bottom line so for the bigger lever pullers as far as our ratepayers

1:28:06 would be as valuable to me as as some of the ones that again that we haven't heard from as much on this issue in in town users can I ask you a question about clarifying it is about the amenity are you just talked about the lake because I don't see where this affects I don't I don't know I mean we've we've heard that they that you've heard it referred to as Humanity from from the people that live up River the lake the Fisheries all of those things

1:28:51 I don't know what it'll look like because like below the dab with MacKenzie River looked like and above the dam I mean is it just going to be the river and that's that and that's beautiful and that's an old Manatee as it is so I got a quick question on just what you calculated in your costs of uh one and four uh with family removal if you calculate the cost of replacing the habitat for the salmon and the uh right and also the product of putting water back into labor cat tree I think it or I don't think pumping it is an option we've only costed out the leg restoration River restoration but not the habitat restoration well

1:29:37 um and yeah so the habitat we would restore the this yeah you get rid of it and all that there's a there's it's my understanding there's a pretty good habitat in there to protect the small salmon oils um in the lake and I just wondering if it's really important to the Native uh population I'm just wondering if we calculated the quantum replacing that environmental if we recovered we did not include mitigation to um to replace lost habitat from Lieber Lake for either rearing juvenile thumb on its or for Lamprey that said there's

1:30:22 some assumptions that go in there um one is of course that we you know there's a large population of lamprey in Liebert Lake presumably they would redistribute themselves and I'm not sure that there's uh a limited amount of habitat available but there's certainly a mobilization of those that would occur that they need to find another place to go I would say the same cell monitoring habitat that said that doesn't mean that through a negotiated settlement there wouldn't be some requirement to mitigate for that in some form or fashion thank you that's good I'm going to your point um on about the increased cost and some of

1:31:08 our larger customers it seems to me when whatever we do we're going to be dealing with the very FD cost here and Associated increasing rates and really what we're talking about is the difference do we do the lower cost version that increases rates by 10 percent and I'm using just course numbers here but or do the higher cost versions that cost 14 or 15 right but we're really talking about the differential is a four or five percent increase we're on the hook for 10 increase whatever we do so at least from my perspective it's consequential and we have to think about it but it's not as if we have an option here but we're not bumping up the rates by 10 that just isn't so I don't know

1:31:54 from my perspective the the costs are important but it doesn't tip the balance like categorically um for me anyway and the other thing I would say in terms of the um I had proposed that perhaps there are some some scenarios that we all might agree to work or not or less interested in and I would just put out that um from my perspective if we were to decommission I would be opposed A proponent of a full decommissioning in that it seems to me continuing to operate canals upriver indefinitely with no real benefit to equip customers is in the long term feels like a losing

1:32:40 proposition like I don't I know it cost us extra to fully decommission but then we are to be done with the project and you know have unknown long-term ongoing costs and that's the way I think about that option I think I agree with that which is not to say that I'm leaning towards decommissioning because I haven't decided but if we were to go the decommissioning route I think that I would lean more towards not having to maintain those canals you can hear that we have to maintain them to a lesser standard it won't be as odorous as we have now but it just seems like if we were going to decommission it we may as well turn the river to

1:33:26 what it was and not have that that forever burden of those canals again I'm not saying that I'm leaning towards decommissioning I'm just saying given given all of our options if if that was the direction that we ended up going that's that's how I'm feeling at this point I got a question of Staff but by many of the department so when Enron hit in Pete Webb had almost would weigh because of financial challenges didn't we have to raise rates 40 percent I don't remember the exact number I'd have to go back and research that time period I I know that between 2009 and 2015 on the electric side it was roughly 70 over those number of

1:34:12 years yeah because I mean you didn't just put it I mean that was a huge thing and that and that was all because of a manipulation of the market and things such as that so we've been through this I'm not trying to downplay rate increases because to me once we find out this compounding I I just want to put that out for a historical perspective that people sitting around this table have had to deal with questions like this before that they didn't have an option they just had to say okay we're going to raise your rates 60 70 because we don't we're out of business and that's not the case here but I would hope that in the future you set up a sinking fund because you know someday

1:34:57 the future you know we're realizing the benefit of this and we're not being basically funding depreciation and so we've what John said we built a community on this for 90 years we just put a penny in the bank deal with this I'm amazed at first reissued the license recently and and knew that this situation existed I mean really this was it was just as bad then as it is now and they reissued a license and now we're stuck with you know a quarter of a billion dollar decision which is just it's challenging for me to accept that but it's a it's a fact that they issued a license so um you know if I'm wrong correctly for the record

1:35:45 okay I think um Chief driver for a lot of our expenses through the change in the seismic Hazard and that was not understood the way it's understood today back in 2000. a lot of our dollars are driven by trying to make the embankments uh reliable in a Cascadian event versus very expensive it wasn't fully understood that I'm realizes it and so for those that are blocking it and so we're required to construct this to a one in a million year one of the buildings in here obviously about it ten thousand years Ten Thousand Years

1:36:38 eight plus yeah I think the most critical infrastructure maybe more else yeah it's three three times thank you sorry um I just wanted to comment on the economic aspect of it know that you know a couple of the options are very close in costs but the others are much higher and a lot of the people who are in my boards you live paycheck to paycheck and you know it doesn't seem like much maybe to the people that make a lot more money but ten dollars can be the difference between eating for a few days and making your rent or having heat and that's a monthly consideration for every single

1:37:23 one of those people that lives on the margin so for me I've rated those very high because those are very real impacts so we have people out on the street because of a few dollars and that is very important to me um I don't think it's something that any of us do take lightly but it is something that weighs very heavily enough going up without and I know what it's like when you're struggling to get out hey are we gonna pay heat are we gonna put food on the table what what are what choices are here we don't have any good choices here all of these have major cost implications and it's going to be painful so

1:38:09 for me I I am waiting the ones that have lower dollars more heavily in my favor for those people out there that don't have the same options no comments or questions I mean that's we're going to send them off with a ton of questions now but the more we can get out now I guarantee when you leave here you'll have more questions and this is squeezing a balloon if you know but um back to the Fisheries thing um yeah it's super confusing how are we supposed to make sense of it because what I'm hearing is that there are some countries people who think that we

1:38:56 absolutely need the dam because we need to Hatchery fish and we need to selected them and really really important and then there's other people that think we need to get rid of that damn get rid of the Hatchery fish and I think but the native population kind of take over and do its thing so some of us might be Fisheries experts here on this board but um some of us are not myself included and how are we supposed to make sense of this issue I guess really good question and I'm sorry I don't have a good answer because um because it's you know it's split within the the leaders Community even where we get at what the best outcome is again is through that settlement negotiated settlement where you have multiple stakeholders at the table trying to get

1:39:43 to come to the best compromise just one note it's probably not a popular comment but I'll make it anyway so there are fisheries management agencies out there for a reason we are a utility and we do have a presence on the river and we need to be very responsible with how we operate our facilities but there are other ways to manage Fisheries um through those agencies and through other components aside from e-web taking a major role in fisheries management if you will

1:40:28 you're going to discuss about our next steps about where we're going we haven't Rank and send a comment and it relates to the Fisheries it also means to commissioner Carlson's comments on the economics um commissioner mcrae's comments about returning to a natural state from environmental perspective I think that looking at all of these issues across the board that there are a number of complexities to it and we're trying to approach it from a stewardship perspective recognizing that all of these we have both sort of reaps the benefits of this project for a hundred years and have an obligation to set this up

1:41:13 for another you know maybe indefinite period of time um in the most prudent way possible so when I think about the economics um it may not be a distinct option A versus option D it might be option D with a certain mitigation to make sure that those funds that we're using for those purposes we're using the most effectively that we can um the same with some of the Fisheries issues the trend across the Northwest as probably a lot of you have heard is that dam removal is is considered by a number of of those agencies that the best

1:42:00 option from from a long-term Fisheries perspective um that doesn't mean there isn't competing science even with within that but I think what we're looking at sort of all three pillars of the TBL for recognizing that within those there's things that we need to do to be good stewards in whatever decision we make and like it's oh and discrete we're going this way or we're going that way and I I think it's going to be we're going to head this way but we think there's things that we need to do to be good and keywords in that process and part of the value for us is to understand what the where those areas are and I I appreciate if you look at I

1:42:45 don't know what the spider diagram one of those was skewed a bit I think it was commissioner C I don't know who commissioner C is that one actually didn't make a difference in the in the overall outcome it was one of the other ones that was embedded in there that went very strong social tugged on the social stream the most that actually changed the overall ranking so and it just it it goes to show to the earlier comments some of these are very similar across the board independent of what we do and then some of them have more drastic differences and so I just I just think in this discussion and where were you know how we're approaching this going forward is to recognize that that

1:43:30 the stewardship component of this in all of those categories is ultimately going to matter we can't just ignore one and go go all the other it's yeah so this discussion I think is helping us to look at where the balance of some of the concerns and interests are of the commissioners thank you for that um I guess we'll be God a little bit there were some questions that were put forward in our packet that are those ones that staff would like us to weigh in on they're on page designs like first one is is the addition of an economic risk ownership attributed desirable to commissioners

1:44:21 there are six bullet points that were questions the yeah we put those in there as a decrease as a way to to prompt some discussion we do have them on some slides if you would like to look at them um there's those two um first questions around some of the rankings I think would be helpful for staff to get some going forward if you're you want to talk about that in that question for example the area of risk it's really to prompt we want to own the generation well as part of that but do you how much weight how much consideration should we put on the fact that there's

1:45:07 different degrees of risk between these options and one might buy a buy a nose outweigh another one but one of those may have a very different risk profile and does that matter you know how does that matter to the board I mean that's some of these we've used in a TBL context but I could almost go down the list and say does this matter to the board and intend to what degree yeah and I guess my question on that would be it's a broad statement economic risk of ownership I think that that would need to be parsed out a little bit more maybe well that comes up but um later on because if you just say risk it's like I mean that the dam is going to fail or that the you know or is it is

1:45:52 it economic risk that the power the power generation doesn't hit our targets what does risk and you are in this bullet point mean to to you guys because that could be the risk of generation it could also be the risk of owning a dam you know in an extended period someone mentioned the canals the risk of owning the and trying to have to maintain so ownership can be several there can be several components of ownership so do we want so you get what you have on uh on that first bullet point me too because there's six of them um can we stick with these just real quickly so the economic risk of ownership this is something that the the

1:46:37 project team has been um thinking about as well so the commissioner who put this in there um was kind of reading our minds it felt like there was something missing a bit from the the attribute table that really gets at sort of that long-term liability of the various options and so uh I was seeing head knots around the room but I think that sounds like that's something that would be we got a little bit more specific like um exposure to regulatory um change natural hazards you know the flood and the quake uh acquire those types of things that

1:47:22 are opening a facility number six I'm sorry the vote number six kind of weigh into that because you you talk about is kind of the point I brought up about if the water keeps declining and the fish are going to win uh and we make a court all this money investing in a new generation and then that generation just sits idle we can't we can't generate power with people in fact describe it that to me is economic risk you know that changing the regular increase yeah tomorrow we're done you know return to service and then Thursday they decide that salmon can't get up the river anymore but without like you know another 80 million dollars into

1:48:07 something that you know generally about makes me think of like Sonia's points about how I mean the cost is like one of the foremost things that you're considering um they're all considering but if there's like a huge risk associated with it and we're looking at the cost component like it might make me think differently about how technically it's one cost over another if that makes sense is not so much quantitative but but to me it'd be really important I wouldn't want to maybe necessarily go for the least expensive option knowing that it's the riskiest

1:48:56 well into that same blaming when we look at the numbers and the some of the amount cost is offset offset by generation just I think that it's going to be very hard for us to generate as much for all at some point in the future we're experiencing more droughts more fires we're not getting the kind of water that in the you know short term here but in the long term I mean all of these are based on long-term paybacks I have no idea what we're going to be going into some of the projections that they said of things that would happen due to climate change that would happen 30

1:49:41 years in the future or happening now I I appreciate what I think you all have put into the you know the numbers and you know it's the best yes that I still think it's probably we tend to be as a utility very conservative in what we you know what you put out there and I still think it's probably not extreme enough to really capture what level of risk there is on the generation capabilities so I'm you know I'm leading towards you know I don't think we'll be able to recover as much on the projects comment on that too I don't think we've experienced you know I'm old enough to remember when they built cougar now they

1:50:27 pulled the plug on it they're not going to put on water anymore unless because they'd say generation links knowing value fence so it was around the river um and so we don't Alpha 50 year history of what that's going to do to flow regimens we thought that did the Corps of Engineers being able to dictate how much water comes out of that impoundment because it's going to be whatever's there and they don't have that water during flood season and runoff season um we know that to Sonya's Point what's going to happen the court did provide us with their revised rule career environmental um litigation that's being required of them

1:51:13 and so we did our best to translate that into a future flow regime which is different than both experienced historically and so our Baseline is based on our understanding based on what more informed us of of what that means for Bieber so that is our Baseline now is that I think Sonia's point is that the end of the story or are we you know what's the future really look like do they give you those updates regularly or is this something that we asked for and they gave us special for this consideration no we're fortunate that they do think of us um when they're changing their operation so we are regular participants in their water supply updates where that this

1:51:59 type of information comes up they make sure that we're aware of changes on their Horizon and how often have they changed it and reduced it in the last 15 years the recent changes that are fairly dramatic came from a court order um so it's a it's a pretty dramatic and substantial change unlike anything they've seen in the past and and is expected to continue that way in the future although that is still needs to worked out through a regulatory process another question anybody else want to I just okay one more thing on the flow so um to commissioner Carlson's point that we we tend to be relatively conservative

1:52:45 we did model uh flows assuming that our minimum in stream flows would increase by 500 so up to 1500 but we are also modeling at this point on the 2000 minimum in Stream flow based on some feedback we've gotten from some of the Fisheries communities some of the environmental Community around wanting a higher minimum in Stream flow or would they would be advocating for that if we were to return to service so more to come on that I think in our final report does that change the economics much the summertime generation gets affected uh high flow periods can't use all the water anyway right get into the late summer yeah right water availability

1:53:33 that's that's where it does affect you so there's a few months out of the year when power prices are highest so if we were and that 2000 minimum in stream my understanding is that that's something that we probably see um at least pushing for right if you widely see I think it seems like that would be an assumption about a big end yeah starting up so that that is why we ran that 1500 CFS uh sensitivity so that's already in the documents and then we'll also add a 2000 CFS so you'll be able to see those incremental effects so you're doubling the flow in the river that currently exists

1:54:18 because I know we've bought it together from a thousand to Eleven Hundred and now you're going from 1100 to 2000 but your financial models are based on 1500. in the main river level sensitivity so our Baseline is a thousand we have a sensitivity of 1500 and we'll have an additional sensitivity of 2000 so we can see so the cross numbers we see with the revenue offset to return to service and partial return to service are based upon what flow regiment our current forward edge of my thousands and I think the Cooper regime as well Associates have reduced uh 408 parts of the Year okay and I think you could also observe that

1:55:04 you know alternative two is more vulnerable to um because it has a greater environmental I think um diverse alarm for longer period of time so that your ability to argue out of it s industry flow further relative to the alternative three which is a shorter reach that you know a little bit different odds probably depending on the Trump service scenario you're talking about yeah that's more complexity please can I just one more point on the flow so generally when you go through a settlement um negotiation and you're trying to

1:55:49 figure out what appropriate minimum in stream flows are there's a lot of modeling that's done River modeling that's done it's it so there's information that we and the other parties would need that we don't have at this point in time to say what the appropriate minimum industry flows would be we're taking some guesses and bottling some some different regimes just so we have a sense of what that range might look like I asked you a question about how confident you are about the reliability of this modeling because I think historically we've never been through climate change like we're experiencing and I want to sell his point I mean this thing is accelerating a whole lot quicker than people thought and if we're going to do modeling based upon the history

1:56:34 never had the conditions we're experiencing and seeing on this model for me I think that the hardest thing to capture is the effects of climate change and so um I wouldn't say and I put this to the panel to say that you know I don't know that we've we've captured that um we've looked at different flows but it's uncertain I think what the modeling would do is tell you what the incremental impact is what you're saying is what the Baseline changes even if your incremental impact is small is that going to be tolerable and mature

1:57:24 I mean some of the anecdotal information around climate change points to the fact that there won't be less water there will be less snowpack there will be tend to be higher in-stream flows in the winter and in the spring Less in the summer under under most of the of the region but that does for a generating resource like lieberg which is a run of the river there's no storage is it pushes probably more generation into the spring and has more risk that's part of the reason of the the economic risk question puts more risk into the summer the spring is the cheapest time of year in the Northwest for power because

1:58:11 everybody else is in the same situation you have you have a lot of generating Resource as opposed to the summer which is and it will continue to become more expensive as we also get hotter and drier Summers less resource more demand so we can anecdotally start to put some information and some feelings around that um which is which is the basis for the risk question you can say oh I see this million this 19 million dollar number great um how vulnerable is that number so we're going to run sensitivities and part of the question for the board is and and most I'll say Municipal utility boards are pretty conservative that that

1:58:56 when it comes to risk so um we would rather have a number that's that's a little worse off and certain than a little better and a lot more risky it's the way that that most utility boards tend to operate that work with that but that's the that's the basis of the question of how much risk do you want to take yes I kind of lost to Q I did I have somebody over here I know bug up Matt but John B and then like that it's for me that the alternative if we're talking about generating generation having generation Source there's you know there's this project compared to what alternative right there's a whole host of things that we could be relying on for this

1:59:43 same four percent of our power that have a lot less associated with ownership right I mean there's just a there are different I guess that's all I got to me it's it's not do we have Liebert or do we not it's do we have lieberg and if we don't what are we going to replace it with what is what are the attributes of that like to me that's conversation I mean in my head there's several of us but we are going to approach so if if the board decides that Liebert will no longer be a generating resource um there's a mechanism to approach BPA right now it's considered a load serving resource that we can go through a process with BPA that will provide

2:00:30 replacement power access through Bonneville at the tier one level and that's a process that we've given them a heads up on but we don't have a direction yet so we've just approach the subject there's a there's a formal mechanism to replace that and also under the future conditions to your point what are the other Alternatives that the IRP might point us to and what are the the risks and benefits of those right right if the attributes of low carbon power and ownership and control of some of that power are important because we still we have a tool to address that if if we decided ultimately with this project it's a continuing sense

2:01:22 fully commissioning wasn't really in my mind now I have to have asked questions about it thank you you're welcome so if we do full decommissioning that pulls a lot of the ferc regulations away so talk to me about what what are the regulations on on the feeder creeps on Cogswell on Johnson that's through the state and what agency at the state and what kind of requirements are we getting do we have to build those to a 500 year flood

2:02:07 we have to build those two uh about 10 000 year I mean what are what are we looking at so give me give me the what do you think Bill Johnson Creek to because that's going to be the biggest one it's gonna have to go onto the freeway and go through somebody's property it's going to go back to the river right we're not in full decommissioned it's going back to as as close to what it was originally right so talk to me about what you how you see Johnson Creek being done under a faulty full decommissioned it's like uh yeah I was gonna say uh comes a rulemaker there's a few I mean just like any permitting process you know during the

2:02:53 construction you're going to have Army you're gonna have a jbh on your permit application to deal with DEQ various uh you know they want to claim that to be a navigable screening perhaps and that's the the course involved they'll always be involved the the primary constraint there would be the the sizing of the equivalent bridge to to get that through and then the constraints on Whose property we may need to get a permanent easement on to have setbacks for folks to buy out any properties that would then be in a flood plain that we may recreate that did not exist prior to the canal intercepting the stream but the largest Catalyst and that would be the sizing of the bridge

2:03:38 of the Culvert to to get the stream past under 126. and then properties that are in a floodplain typically an ODOT design criteria would be probably not in excessive of a 500 year minimum 500 year flood right that'd be the the that's the going standard right now and so when we look at that in the slide number whatever the npv result breakdowns so that would be 21 million dollars for stormwater outfalls and not the 38 million dollar for Canal removal that's that's it that's taking

2:04:24 the berm out basically and they all go together they all overlap all that we we both those cost out as just a little bit of a way to itemize but keep in mind that they're all kind of big together in some way shape or form we had a canal outfalls and restoring Creeks back to the creek are generally captured in that outfall and property Acquisitions are in there as well they're at the very bottom as a sub item correct Julia thank you depends on the environment Al side the building commissioning really the only distinguisher between um the carbon impact is really the only

2:05:09 distinguisher between that one and the storm water conveyance that because of the truck rolls and such to remove the canal is that the the reasoning behind that or on the carbon footprint yeah so right our our internal analyst did a really good job on that and we looked at that pretty close the majority of the majority of uh the carbon footprint involved in either restoring or removing the construction is going to be the the cost of the materials so the concrete the polymers if we were to line the canal um are huge and then the cost of the fuel for uh the diesel and and fuel for

2:05:57 construction activities those are the primary drivers of the the carbon to the more earthquake you're doing the more and more the more translates into more carbon but that's still waited a little less and manufactured materials so any of the Alternatives that have manufactured materials in them concrete bno large carbon footprint construction material has a heavier the heavier total than it so why would the so on here if we're full decommissioning it could be a lot of concrete almost materials in the moving all back to its natural state so in here the it's negative for the

2:06:44 carbon filtering for full decommissioning it's only a negative one for the storm water conveyance that was just it's just confusing yeah that's just and and they're also prorated by cost so to explain that that analysis was was put together as basically put in an inflated construction cost and and everything kind of is calculated from that so the cost is a major driver but you do slice in you you know you do weigh in the cost of the construction materials and the quantities of them it's cost not the actual footprint because it says it's carpet footprint which to me I would look at okay this one has a bigger

2:07:30 carbon footprint this one has a smaller carbon footprint and that's how I would weigh that category I would not do it on the cost of that because the cost is factored into other areas in the analysis what you're saying is it's based on cost for that yeah of the overarching analysis on carbon footprint calculations it starts with the cost because generally the more construction projects cost yeah generally the the more a project costs the more the more carbon foot the more carbon impacts that it has just based on the sheer volume of earth moving concrete or uh steel that's you know put into the project I have a question about that that's confusing to me and also

2:08:16 I guess my question is what about like the ongoing carbon footprint then of whatever it is that we choose right like that I was a little confused with that because even though we have it's a clean source of electricity there must be some carbon footprint associated with it if we run that down versus if we didn't this category is a little confusing it is and and we want to clarify some of that on the next on the next iteration but we we remain silent on the operational aspect of a hydro facility because it's generally considered really low to not quite zero carbon footprint because there's you know some some fuel in pickup trucks and things like that it just that happened

2:09:02 but generally it's not like running a cold plant or any other industrial facility so that we remain silent on that and I think that's just the my understanding talking with the analysts that is kind of the status quo on how you would uh you know analyze Hydro facilities operations it's pretty much no carbon footage the assumption it's so small it's hard to measure welcome to the large construction aspect of it just for clarity we should probably break out this as instruction carbon footprint I think part of the hypothesis around what you just mentioned about around Hydro

2:09:48 and to commissioner mcrae's Point even if we decide to replace that generation we have a mandate from the board to replace it with carbon pre-generation so the fact that we're generating run-of-the-river Hydro in this versus something else there would be a it would be all all the same whether those scenarios it's just a matter of the type of resources that we would see so sometimes you would go to market or we would go to Wyoming and buy a coal plant instead of um having labored so probably specifying on in this case that this is Construction Construction

2:10:38 let's go to bed pretty much the volume of earthwork that you're doing and if you're going to completely return to construction condition you just move it a lot more dirt you know we measured the gallons of fuel based on construction dollars that there's there's some I can't recall exactly where we gathered that data but there's a database on there that basically has a appointment for construction dollars per fuel for types of construction so there's all these categories that you would select and one thing to caveat on alternative three the partial return to Service uh that got weighted a little heavier even though the cost is lower

2:11:23 because it it's in the industrial realm so just there's no category to choose it's not earthwork it's not civil it's not heavy civil just because it's building a a hydro plant that triggered it to be into the industrial category and that has a different reading so that even though it's a little bit lower cost it still has a component of that project had a heavy weighting on the construction uh carbon waiting for that aspect it doesn't really appear that way here um just based on the dollars but there was a part of that project that drilled that alternative a little higher than it

2:12:08 probably should be but there's just no other uh selector type of building that made more sense than going with Industrial yeah there's discharge correct so so they use so you know if you're looking out into the future for a certain amount of time once if we did decommission this you set yourselves the likelihood of another project going back up there and again it's nice to know um but if we do one of the other options we're going to have maintenance there for many many decades how long out do these kind of models look in the future for those kind of costs and impacts I I

2:12:54 only ask this because the environmental category to me because it only has so few resource you know so few line items in there it just it doesn't have a big impact overhaul and it was and because so many of them are just like not working very much from one another um you know like like you were saying you know the the commissioner C that went in there and heavily waited it it didn't tip the scales at all which I was very surprised by because when you think about dam removal on big scale you think about all the environmental communities coming together and you know for different reasons being involved in the decision on it and it's surprising to me that there's so little

2:13:40 yes because it's a low impact Hydro project definitely a totally different story if you're talking about it I am on the Columbia High Impact environmental impact this is a really low impact we also did a top three analysis which kind of gets away from the fact that some of them are blue dispersed than others we just look at the waiting comparison of the top three that you each picked in the different categories so we tried to look at that um I would encourage us on the on the carbon one carbon foot one it's very confusing to try that to cost

2:14:25 I think when we when we look at that we should tie that to the amount of materials the type of construction uh and the amount of Earth moved and be pretty now if there's indexes that we use to get to that point great but it it comes across as very confusing when we say oh it's this is related to the cost of the construction because then it's that just seems confusing to me just need to make sure we're clear about its materials type of materials and type of construction that's driving the construction carbon the thing that um no there is a table that breaks down the the metric tons of emissions for construction vehicles versus materials

2:15:12 that was in the October earlier October memo on page 16 so that will show and that the weightings are associated they're just sequence reporting to the lowest to the highest based on that we will get more information on how that analysis was done that is is there a carbon footprint associated with the ongoing maintenance of the facilities that might differ so if we have no obligation versus we have to continue to patrol and do maintenance there's a carbon footprint associated with the maintenance that would not be there if we are able to basically walk away before we go much further let's schedule wise at 6 10 we had a five minute break for scheduled full of functions for the

2:15:59 group how long are we gonna go to me I kind of perceive we're not going to use the full four hours and uh and many reasons we've hit them with a tunnel and they're going to have a little work cut out for them before we do this again so if you guys want to keep going you know the big five minute break okay we'll keep going um two questions uh has anything surprised you so far right with our leading the video or the questions that we've asked or patients come up because there's anything that's surprised you

2:16:46 good uh I would say I've appreciated all the questions because you you really provoked some thoughts from us and you know our intent in this whole process is to try to provide you with the full Suite of issues how complicated they may be right so that you can consider the trade-offs for our customers and and so that's been helpful I wouldn't I haven't been surprised by your questions or comments but you have daylighted some things I didn't think about working great question Eddie thank you I guess one other one is I know you're doing a great job of other things that we're not asking about that we should be asking about or

2:17:32 something that you're thinking like huh they haven't brought up this surprise or I wish yeah I don't know I would say not from a technical perspective and then maybe Frankie can answer as well but there are some um you know the discussions around trade-offs for the customers that I think is is really imperative to this this decision for all of you and for us and some of the questions we put in the memo were an attempt to start teasing those out where you have similarities amongst yourselves and where there are differences and then how you might go about reconciling that question

2:18:22 are there certain things that one of the things some of the questions that we're asking internally I think kind of fall into three categories um one is uh to generate or not generate so with around that decision the other one is is to Canal or not to Canal uh whether you return to service a return to original state and the third one is to to damn or not to damn right so those are really big and and some of those are tied together through ferc maybe some of them we might be able to lobby for a different answer but you know we're trying to to kind of look at it from from those to do or not to do in some of those things we've asked ourselves for example what's the value of the the

2:19:07 lieberg generating location for example how do you determine the risk so if you replace it with something that somewhere else you introduce a new kind of risk probably a transmission risk for example versus a local control risk so we're we're trying to look at sort of those three big categories to this or to this and you know the question around a bridge and is that the right place do are we legally obligated if we take out a dam to provide a bridge that's a that's a valid question given that there could be another option at the other end um relative to the Improvement of a road that uses an existing Bridge as opposed to replacing that bridge so we're we're looking at those three main categories

2:19:53 and asking a whole additional series of questions around what are the implications of to do this or not to do this so we're getting some internal you know she mentioned Lisa mentioned the the additional requirement of 2000 CFS and the bypass reach you know but if it goes to 2500 or 3 000 I mean the um the regulatory environment is not getting easier and it's not getting less stringent so we're asking we're starting to ask ourselves on all of these things what if it goes beyond where we think and that it gets best to the risk question so yeah I think we're those are just some of the areas I think

2:20:39 I would look at as as pushing on the risk equation and the sensitivities a lot more I'm gonna can I jump in the queue I'll get you so two questions one is on the flow regimen because you know I've been barking about that for a couple of years now um so um when we have 3 500 CFS coming down the river and we divert 2500 but now we're gonna keep two thousand in there the productivity of that I've been told that you know when you go out incrementally that the efficiency of the turbines drops proportionately so if we're going to have a minimum flow on the river there's only 3500 coming down can you run the generators at a thousand or 1200 CFS in

2:21:24 the canal so that'll be reflected in our sensitivity we are in the 1500 CFS we did reflect that there are months of the year I think it's October where they're not degeneration expected at the main plant so what's the minimum flow in the canal to generate um I think we're in the 600. so the I'll I'll just you know another Nuance a different answer on the partial return to service because you would have an opportunity we have fixed units essentially the same size existing plant knowing that you would have variability in the future you probably wouldn't do that at the other place like have a small unit so you'd be less

2:22:09 vulnerable to having to go offline second questions related uh maybe Deborah can answer yourself is this project if you're going out to the bond market and seen that this is even possible because I mean if this to me you're asking me to invest in bonds okay two or three of these options don't make any economic sense and you're funding you know um can we sell bonds and at five percent because this isn't like a you know cougar or a apartment or anything else or uh is this even a wonderful project because so much of it is financially feasible but

2:22:57 that's a very fair question typically we say we don't like to bond for something that is not creating a an asset for us uh but we did have discussions we've had numerous discussions with our financial advisors we do issue revenue bonds and this is something that we could issue bonds for Bond right but we're just committing the revenue and based on that's a money won't care the health of the organization at large as opposed to titosis which is a little different um and so if we were to go to

2:23:47 what would the impact of the mitigation that we have agreed to in the current license you're saying in a decommissioning scenario what happens to the investment that we've already mitigated well no I mean I think there's ongoing mitigation you know we have to do Lloyd docks Park as one of our mitigation things uh you know so a lot of them have been done but there's been mitigations that we've committed to under the old license are we still if we abandon that license do we abandon our responsibilities for that those mitigations that were under that license all of our major projects under the Libra Walter Bill license are complete we do have some ongoing things but our our last mitigation effort was

2:24:32 putting into a funds here in the audience think we have one year or maybe two years left on that three years left on that and then that's complete so again presumably that would be part of a negotiated settlement or a poor decommissioning scenario I wouldn't say they're lost there's lost benefit from those so we've done those things and benefit has been gained from that another question in the comments wrap-up time yeah one more question on on Outreach I know um well one our team's done a really remarkable job of seeking feedback and collecting feedback and

2:25:17 organic receive some of that shortly my understanding or at least maybe it's my observation I guess is that um when we look at the school of great pairs in Eugene we haven't seen as much engagement conversation that you know it's just the project is far enough away people aren't really thinking about it or most likely to engage in it and I wonder if there are any tools left um that we haven't tried yet to engage more of our local customers in this question that we're wrestling with I think that would be valuable I've valued the conversations that we've had in this room with um with folks from you know from the Eugene area who are trying to wrestle

2:26:02 this with us and if there's more of that that I think that would be helpful especially as we think about the rate impacts um and then yeah the other one is I guess I would I would ask my fellow Commissioners as I did earlier I I feel like um targeted engagement with the tribal governments in this area that have an interest in this project can be really valuable so I guess I I guess I would move that we ask staff to um put together a program of more targeting engagement or maybe that's just head nods um presumably um I think that we're gonna I think December decision is Way Big

2:26:49 Time aggressive in my personal opinion I always have this philosophy a better late than wrong and given the fact that we have 88 000 customers how many we heard from and this is not a variable commodity this is a required commodity to live in this particular geographic area I think you're probably going to do some more Outreach and I I'm seeing a headnot over there I'd like to see us reach out to the the people that are going to come to the settlement agreements maybe not just and the right payers too and the rate payers yeah absolutely I mean for me repairs don't come until you make a boat and it impacts them into a very significant way there's very few people

2:27:35 who are special that pay attention that no but by and large you're not going to get the thing unless we do something more aggressive to get people here well you know the majority of this board has not experienced even a rate hike that we we Scott has done such a great job that we haven't raised rates in what many many years and I've yeah but you feel electricity is you know five times your water bill but you you know I I got it finally when I saw people come to the podium and say three bucks a month makes a huge difference to me and I couldn't relate to that and I don't mean to be arrogant that I couldn't relate to that until I saw people truly emotional when they came to

2:28:20 the podium and said this makes a big difference you don't have to do this they were compassionate they were mad there's a whole range of emotions that come to the public when this happened so I I want to make sure that we do this right and that we listen to everybody because like I say we we've got 88 000 customers we have 250 000 people that serve and so do that many um I agree with you that I think December is um aggressive and optimistic and I know the reason that we had targeted December is because we just didn't know what the makeup of the board would be if there would be any changes but I

2:29:07 for the next several years um and there's we have so many unanswered questions and um so many unknowns that I hope that we would not drag this out forever but at least take the time that we need I mean I know that we have scheduled that we were going to go and talk to Neighborhood I mean at the very least I think that we should go through that process to get people here and we had that scheduled at the beginning of the next year and let's go through that process at the very very least to get Outreach into the community you want to go first yeah can I just make a quick comment on the on the public Outreach so we do have the um the survey or the comment form that was specific to the lieberg project we also

2:29:52 have our more recent um broader customer survey that we can glean some insights that will inform um some of the the values of our broader customer base that did not respond specifically to the Liebert survey if we were going to go out to solicit more input I it would be helpful for us to know um what questions you really need answered and might change your opinion or change the course of your thinking yeah I was just going to uh leverage a little bit about what commissioner Falls you said and and potentially propose um something that Bonneville uses

2:30:38 regularly and the the comment that Mr Carlson made was until you make a decision you don't get any feedback one of the approaches that we could that we could do is we could go through this process as we are now um what we are hearing is more direct Outreach to certain groups whether that's people who are involved in in settlement decisions or the commercial World also move into the in-house people we could come up with what we might refer to as a preliminary record of decision or preliminary recommendation which would be here's what we think the direction should be now instead of saying that oh that's the final Direction

2:31:23 use that as a mechanism to go out to the world to say what do you what do you think of this and if you just go out and say what do you think about leiberg you're going to get a lot of blood you know what's you're going to get more questions back than you get answers until you actually take something out there that is tangible so what I might recommend is that potentially by the end of this year instead of saying this is the decision we say that this is what we think it should we would recommend but then provide some comment period or customer feedback period where we can shop that around and get additional feedback whether that's from commercial other settlement parties so it's a little bit of a

2:32:08 um you know not just the open question but here's here's what we think it should be and we can provide that as as a staff recommendation we can then you know Commissioners can say we love it we hate it go back to the drawing board or hey this is something I think we can take out and actually get some meaningful feedback from because I I do fear that if you don't have something that we're taking out that is is sort of a proposal then we're we're not we're just gonna that that Loop is just gonna Spin and so that's that's what I would recommend is maybe modify it to by the end of this year we have something that we can take out to the public as a potential solution as a potential solution that we

2:32:55 that we solicit feedback on and and that makes sense to me and that's kind of the road that I thought we were going to be going down in the first place I didn't think we were going to say this is a record of decision and we're going that direction I I felt that we were going to give staff a path to go down and start really digging in and saying okay this is the path we're going down and start running your scenarios and doing this and see if something really jumps up that says whoa this was the wrong path right you know because that until you really get into digging into it and saying we're going decommissioned and this is what it's going to be boom boom

2:33:40 boom boom settlement parties can look at it and say no I I will never sign on to that okay well we've gotta we've got an issue there or you know it has to be a you know ODOT says no we want a millionaire flood things like that then then we can come back and do it again I I kind of like what you said getting to that getting to that point by December I I still think is maybe a little bit aggressive I think there is some Outreach that we can do uh to our customers and to help me make the decision I mean I uh something that that some

2:34:28 staff could come to the Chamber of Commerce and and tell their local government Affair committee where we are in this in this reactions so that they can hear that that voice and whatever else ones that we can get out to but I I do feel that there's a need to take something it's at some point it may not have been December but I would say I don't I'll just I'll speak on behalf of the entire team here if if we think there's major missing components by the time December rolls around we're going to say there's some missing components and we need to fill those gaps

2:35:14 the better right what what's your phrase again thanks we want everybody including the Commissioners to feel comfortable and be proud of this work and it's it's incredibly complicated and intertwined work if we don't think it's ready we won't we won't present it as ready we might say that here's the things we're comfortable with and here's the things we're not um but we I think we still want to shoot for as much as we can by by December and fill in as many blanks as we can there might be some things that we still need to take a deeper dive on and that's that's okay

2:36:02 so for me I don't know that we will get more from the public that you know may change our minds or you know make us think about things in a different way but more I want the public to understand what we are grappling with and I feel like that's going to take effort for us individually going out and meeting people where they're at I know that you know we've done a river a lot we've had meetings here but that's not where people are it's us going to individual meetings rotary you know what are whatever those groups are the neighborhood associations and going to where they normally go and being a part of that process that's the piece that I feel is mistaken and you know to the extent that we can

2:36:52 boil this down more in the next few months but maybe not pick something but for me I think I just I want people to understand that you know we went through this whole process look at all of the different types of considerations we have to take into account as we're making this decision it's not an easy one there's you know there aren't a lot of winners and when we have to vote and every single one of these has a very big cost and that big cost is going to be borne by the entire you know customer base that's when people are going to come but they're going to come no matter what I mean no matter what we do they're going they're going to be a negative impacts that people are going to be

2:37:37 you know we're going to face but I just I want people to understand what we had to do to get to this place because that's the way that they you know we build trust with them they understand why we did it I mean we're a public utility we're not a private utility we don't just care about the costs but we do care about the cost because it's not that we're trying to make profit it's that we're trying to protect our customers so you know those are the things that when we have to make this vote I want people to understand that that's how we arrived at whatever decision we arrive at so I you know I think if we could brainstorm the list of the groups and then really go out and and each of us set up those appointments and do

2:38:23 presentations and have these real conversations with them we're going to have a much better situation when it does come time to vote anything for me the big piece that's missing is whether or not work with that is re-licensed I know we've talked about that we won't know about that for a while but is there any any chance that we could reach out and get some indication because I feel like for me it would it would maybe for some of us it would inform a lot if we're to say like actually we're not going to be able we're not going to wrap in your the re-licensing project you have to do this with the current license that you have are you talking about whether if we

2:39:09 started this process we could extend amend the license to um yeah and that is just such a huge piece of this that I'm I'm not sure that I would be able to make it a fully informed decision without knowing that I also understand that you know you can't just call up for email their helpline and say you know looking into this question but but it is really such a big piece of this equation for me that I don't know how I'm gonna I don't want us to like put a whole lot of effort into something it's not even a possibility I don't think we've tried anything to the board that's not a possibility do we these are all we had no reason to think

2:39:55 that there's a deal killer in any news they all have lots of uncertainty as exactly what they look like at the end of the day but we did weed out from the brainstorm session some things that we did think were had some deal Killers working in that but one of these four all in that category so like the best technology you think that if we went for any of the return to service that we would be able to extend the license and wrap Walterville there's multiple ways we could go about it I do think that there's a path forward through that I think that's part of the reason we looked at those two options as being what is it through 2070 6 as part of their scenario was that

2:40:45 to do that you actually have to extend the life long enough to get some potential return so um there's a few sub-components of of Burke's oversight but I don't have any issue with the fact that ferc is going to allow us to to go down these roads it's what are the conditions to go down what what toll do we have to pay to go down those different roads another comment so go ahead and finish it I was just gonna say my my only other comment is you know before I said that I agreed with Matt about this storm water

2:41:32 conveyance but I also want to say that like if staff came and and that was like your strongest recommendation and you laid out why I'm not set on I'm really not set on any of these and I still very much have an open mind so um something I'm really looking forward to is when staff do weigh in know what you're thinking right I kind of get the sense that people are feeling like they're driving off a cliff here so I feel like we're just kind of like more more like going around a Bend but um can you kind of remind us of the process so for each option what happens next

2:42:17 in terms of if we were to choose alternative what would happen after that yeah because I think each one of the options lay out the next you know in 10 years it's going to be like this but in the next couple years things will happen what's going to be different what's going to be the same what's our opportunity to adjust into any of the options have more opportunity to adjust you know some of those kind of what it might look like if we decide in December what's going to happen in January you know yeah so I'm gonna flip to the panel to please interject if you have a different opinion because there's no prescribed necessarily prescribed forward but with whatever alternative we choose um I would say that starting next year then we would need to start answering

2:43:03 the question around uh any of y'all so just back up any of the Alternatives will require some sort of action with ferc that will either amend or Surrender the license because the license is a combined license between lieberg and Walter bill when we take any sort of action we also need to have a sense of where we would want to go with Walter bill so the way I had this in my mind was that we would be deciding on a path forward a likely path board for Liebert and then we would start thinking about Walterville so that when we actually go to take action with ferc we have some sort of proposal to start working through with us with um presumably a suite of settlement parties all of that stuff is going to take I remember many many years quite

2:43:48 honestly um so we do have there's feasibility assessments that need to be done so we do have some time nothing changes on the ground in the very short term short term being 10 years ish um with the exception of us doing some near-term risk reduction measures to ensure the safety of the canal to convince storm water in the short term I want to pass it to Market yeah I think so too I think one I do know we want to talk for DC test and we want to do that I think as soon as we're getting an indication from the board we want to be licensed when the board actually wants to decommission so you're

2:44:33 getting your feedback was a really important piece of uh so I'd be able to go to DC and say Here's what our utility is thinking there's you know keeping them all right understanding of what we'd like to do and then get their feedback on future role even people you know necessarily for sure what we're doing with Walterville we would want to get there and be back so that we started uh thank you Chad um when it comes to uh just a small piece

2:45:20 of uh if we could fill uh the labor of the Bonneville tier one hour that process is something that would probably take us to adhere reform and uh we would need to probably know about around 23. so um and and what what the criteria that Bonneville has with the statute is is that um not be able to generate from this site so that's the decision so I'd like a chime in about me I agree

2:46:05 with many people I couldn't decision let me turn this service but uh you said 50 to 100 million bucks I mean we're spending other people's money let me saying I can't make that decision on the services you have that very I appreciate your cost tests from everything in the timelines I've just heard 60 of this board turns over and can you imagine if there's a didn't have this background having to Grapple them you having to deal with this and you know if we make this decision we put down that say okay we go to one of these options and then you start vetting it and pushing it out for negotiating and

2:46:50 talking and everything and it goes sideways you got to start over and um and remember that lay people have no idea what level of expertise that they're going to replace this group of people if they replace it but then it's happened before I think we all have to keep that in mind that uh this group of people may change age of 24 months that's that's great different priorities in different directions and different understanding so how long it takes just to learn the acronyms

2:47:35 service until I know some of the economic parameters of what those you know strength whether you define it and Define it from the alternate another 50 million bucks on any regular service option okay so any return to service option 100 million dollar variable of the numbers we have the funds that's my problem I can't make a decision with 100 million dollars get down there and how you get us there or at least get me there I don't know but I don't know I got an idea where would you like to go

2:48:21 you know why I voted for myself today I really regret it I I think that that like the first want to come to the board we're gonna we're gonna ask you some commitment for some investment over a period beyond what you gonna come and say we would we would like to spend things we're going to have to spend 250 million dollars at present value to accomplish and set a direction and do something yeah we know that in order for the board to feel comfortable with whatever we're

2:49:06 asking for that we need to cross our T's dot our eyes remove the variables so that this board is comfortable with saying yeah I'm comfortable in that direction knowing very well that the reality of oversight of a public utility is that there is there's different governance I think that as a as a management group and as a team we want to be able to come to the board and say this this is what we've been through the best Direction and that challenged and understood and there are areas where we think there's the variables are too wide we

2:49:51 dude we need to own that before we come back so in fact we were talking about Walter Bill the other day and we understand there's a 50 million dollar option and 100 million dollar option and that just isn't that hasn't been prevented yet so we're hoping that we can come back to the board with enough detail that there might be some public pieces of this that need to be tested if that's okay but we want to be able to bring our expertise to the board and say this is what we think should happen and and then um have a process that allows good vetting with that

2:50:41 so Professor Brown wanted to the cost of Walter bill under re-licensing we know what the cost would be if we Just Surrender both licenses well if we were to surrender the license in and it's time in its entirety commissioning both um and there might be an option out there that somebody could purchase them but I'm um I don't know how likely that would be so they'll have to go through that process of is there anyone else who wants them and the answer is probably no yeah the question for me is and and it's been it's been alluded to in the past that

2:51:27 that decommissioning Walterville is a easier process because the it's not as as high of a canal it doesn't it does across roads so I mean it's less costly or do we know what the cost is to to decommission so you'll see that next in the next few weeks but essentially it was about a 50 million dollars to take commission at about 100 million for new license okay so Walter bill is cheaper across the board for either uh you know licensing or decommissioning then Walterville is because it's got

2:52:12 different variables yeah excuse me to bring the labor I do want to caveat that where we did not have a good Consultant Group drill down on those numbers exactly we were using their good work to make some interpolations it's close and it'll get us a good decision Point uh when we start to look at that closer we will refine the numbers that we provide you in the next Generation that you'll see so I guess time frame that we're talking 10 to 15 years license expires in 2020 so

2:53:01 theoretically we'd be able to keep running Walterville for a better part of the existing license then so um only if we don't return leave a service we return Lieber to service we have to get the license many of the all four of the options require some sort of license and if we return to your disservice or full service there's multiple ways we could go a couple of them try to look at two separate licenses

2:53:46 there's probably I think where you're going with this is under under scenarios and probably almost any scenario if if you start messing with the license you're going to impose new requirements on Walterville I think that's where you were going that's true if we do anything to generate electricity on Libre you have to get a new license and we get a new license then any of the things require any of the options require a licensed Amendment because they're licensed together that would also be the Walterville license and to Frank's point and potentially some additional regulatory requirements

2:54:33 um something that I hope happens whichever decision would be okay to discuss ion I hope that we can some of these decisions obviously impact them with more than others but getting one of these impacts them up there essentially the construction the noise oh okay get rid of the damn the power station so I just hope that we need to have some kind of plan but keep working with them it's about this decision that we're making there'll be plenty of people really paying attention but

2:55:18 it's a river this was in there our front yard so thank you to um foreign looking at that kind of the option um I'm curious to see if there is any interest or ability or precedent for you've done a Army Corps of Engineers having interest in taking the dam and keeping it for

2:56:04 water errors from use in the community I don't know what their entire charge is so I don't know if that's something that's under their purview but I really love to find out more about if that's going to be approached based on my personal experience working at the county and other agencies and things along the way every agencies pass away assets that they have to maintain so I would be highly doubtful that anyone the park service or anyone in the state would want to come in and and own that and operate that for the pleasure of others for low fees or or no fees for boating or what have you or in the core that I don't believe goes into their

2:56:49 missions the course for primary mission in terms of their jams is flood control River does not operate as a flood control facility so I think where commissioner Carlson is going and I I agree with her on this is that we start to look into this to damn or no damn or Canal or no Canal some of these are not necessarily as discreet as leave it or tear it down that we have to explore sort of other long-term options which could could include third parties it could change of ownership and the the core may not be the best example since it's not a flood control facility but we

2:57:34 also have to understand the use of the use of that asset and if you take that asset out all those uses go away and that that we also need to look at this from are we replacing the uses and how are we going to replace the uses and that so for example it acts as a bridge at the moment for transportation so we can't just look at this oh it's a dam in essence it's a transportation asset so we have to look at it from a use perspective not just a what his name is um that we might have to get creative in our exploration other than John so when I look at the you know the three big buckets um

2:58:19 environmental we can have covered it's a very low impact project in general so I'm surprised that taking out isn't that that you're raising um so that one kind of you know falls down for me which means you know we could have the dam or not okay so then when I look at today I'm or not to Dan in terms of the social aspect that's the one that has the biggest impact on the social perspective other than you know the I mean well it is coupled with it because if you take the dam out you lose the Wildfire response you have a higher cost you have um it looks like there's more um well and

2:59:04 you have the your if you if you choose to not have the canals that kind of handles more of the public safety aspect because either way we have to short the canals um but the and then there's the recreation piece and the Fish Hatchery so those are the biggest kind of categories under that that social piece it seems like if we kept the dam and there was a way to make that happen again I don't know start to peace out so I'm really looking forward to having that next piece of how it parses out um into the cost but if we were looking at between a partial return to service and cost and the storm water conveyance but we could keep the dam

2:59:49 maybe there's the ability to find some you know find a middle ground there that kind of helps the upriver community the environmental aspect is kind of a lower field and it's the lowest cost one um rather than all of them maybe even if we add the dam back in so it seems like that might kind of be the best of all worlds depending on what the cost is there so I'm just trying to think about is there a path forward that's maybe the least worse for all of those different categories and that's what I see you've helped me clarify that so I understood it so I heard partial return to service no I said so if you you look at if you

3:00:35 look at the scores stormwater conveyance yeah storm water like storm water Finance yeah there'd be no generation the lowest cost which is the biggest you know economic piece of it for us um but the biggest social impact is really the impacts from taking out the dam and the environmental one is unhandled among them because it of them are really that big of an impact anyway so one of my questions would be we've got to put all this money into this thing at some point right so if we

3:01:20 and we're looking at let me let me do return to service scenario we're looking at return to service either one of those you have to put a butt load of money in you can do storm water prevents we have to put money in if we do full decommission we have to put a lot of money in if we did either one of the return to services and got the license in our numbers we're looking at the power generation that we could get from that the npv how much power are we going to do is there another way to look at that that

3:02:05 minimizes our risks that okay we've got to put a bunch of money into this we're going to put a bunch of money into this and make it licensed through 2076. is it a salable asset at that point rather than a power generation return on investment which takes away some of our risks where we say okay we got to put all this money in there one way or another it's going to cost us this we're the power we're going to generate from back from it is going to be 80 million dollars you could sell those water rights and the generation of a new generation facility or 50 million dollars and walk away

3:02:51 is there somebody are there people out there that would be looking for carbon free generation and the wrecks that are involved in a sales first of all it's because it's Legacy Andrew it doesn't have Rex it is carbon free so just to just clarification um Walterville and Leaburg the the profile of their cost versus output I I would almost describe it that you're wrapping money around every kilowatt hour that you sell so it's it's an it's basically a negative value Asset if you were to totally strip away and

3:03:39 just say sell it for its operating cost and if someone were to look at that we're still left with the stranded cost so we're still paying a large a large asset and they probably the only way I could see that being a viable path going forward and we'll have to look at this a little bit more as if we were to couple it with Carmen Smith but right now it would be we'll pay you to take it kind of thing um we'll build you a new plant you give us to it which which you know I I guess you would go why why would we invest the money to to pay someone else to take it right that's that's because we've got to invest the money

3:04:24 one way or another well yeah to me that's the way I'll take away our long-term risk it's the incremental investment of power generation which is it which is at issue there that's that's a very speculative statement what I just said I you know there's there is value in Carmen because of its shapeability you know um which is a little different than Walterville and lieberg um and we add up all of them it's a lot of money that's being invest in those two I we'll give it a little bit more thought

3:05:12 other questions or comments we'll circle the wagons and make final closing comments anything from staff that you you guys need okay sorry we've only got through the first couple games well we I want to follow of six but I think one of us one in six and uh so do you guys want to go through the bullets go ahead and present them so these are the only two real you know it would be nice for us to have some these are the only ones that are like what do you want us to do with these attributes the other ones were just they were prompting questions and in reality you ended up getting to the basis for those questions in the course of your discussion um I think what I'm hearing is for the economic risk of ownership which we will

3:05:59 we'll add that and then the second one is you know splitting the recreation component up into sub components and this is coming from the the public comments that we have received are split um there's a large um population particularly the upriver users who really value having the lake there as Recreation and then we started hearing more recently over the last two months from a number of groups that would value having a free-flowing river and so splitting that attribute up to just um so that it's a little bit more granular I think would be helpful for for us and it might allow you to to wait accordingly and and same for

3:06:45 Trail recreation the the recreation component just had a number of things in there and if you look at well okay it takes away Lake Recreation but it adds River Recreation you could end up um sort of evening out the scores to a neutral effect and not being able to Value those separately so that would be my proposal I think out there I would just say I mean to me Recreation is one of those categories where trying to eat one of the ones that's kind of equal because it just depends on what you'd like to do the library right some people love to be able to go boating and some people really want really want that River free flowing and so I feel like

3:07:31 there will be some recreation no matter what it is that we do it's not like we're gonna train the river so then it's not going to be anything there um so to me it doesn't really matter that much I think Recreation is important but I think that it just depends on what your values are what you like to do but it will be more so I was going to say you know it's an attempt to try to get at whether commissioners uh want to parse that out that's the end of what we've gotten most of the public comments on are around um I think the majority of them or at least many of them are around the recreation component either lake or not and so if U.S Commissioners want an ability to wait that out separately it

3:08:18 might be helpful for you if you want it all thrown together then we would adjust the scoring because when we put this original attribute scoring in we were we were waiting the impact of losing the lake um that's reflected in this scoring but the uh that potential benefit of getting gaining a free-flowing river is not necessarily reflected and so it might we would alter the scoring if we were to keep it as such that might pair well with commissioner strasberg's thought to do another round of repeating that you had mentioned before you know if he's one more attribute to a or two more attributes I'm curious I mean for me I I appreciate

3:09:06 that that's what people like to do um and that that's what people are reaching out about because that's her language is up there but for me if you're going to readjust this then it would kind of also have to impact the economic component up there because a lot of the the recreation side I think people care about the recreation side of it because that's what draws people into that area and if they spend money at the businesses and they can also ask I mean maybe I'm wrong there but I I do think that that's a lot of what and and people like you know living up there and they have vacation homes and other things up there because they like doing these things so if there's you know different types of it that really sway it so that there's no Recreation one thing that

3:09:54 um for me if you're going to adjust the scores I think if that really does sway it then I would also expect some look at the economic side to see if it changes that but if it doesn't um and then to this kind of same point about distinction between River versus Lake uh the property values it was interesting to me because I think that there's probably very different view on the property values that are surrounding the lake versus property values that are near the canal that are at risk of all kinds of other safety hazards so it's it's interesting to me to have those kind of all lumped together because one of them has a very dire consequence for safety whereas one is you know I have this beautiful Lake

3:10:40 home and if the lake goes away there's a river yes which is still nice but I can't do the same kind of things that I have forever um having that if this is split up more it might also be beneficial to split up the part we wanted to think about the diaphragmental effects or positive effects of different decisions on those areas if others agreed well we have different opinion on value just because you probably could make an argument that a Riverfront home is worth more than a lakefrontal I mean because of the the amenity I mean that's just all in the eyes of the older so again the subjectivity of that um what are we doing I mean our mission is to provide affordable reliable power

3:11:27 I'm just saying there's a difference between the canal yeah but there's a difference physically but whether or not there's a difference economically it's no different than you know I'm not saying to me it's Mission creep but you know we're going to get rid of College Hill Reservoir and a side product of that thing that we did now there's astronomy there and if we turn around and say okay we can't tear it down because we have a strong reserve on clear nights I mean we gotta to me I have to be careful I would like to just leave it in Recreation I don't know what River Recreation is I don't know how what we're doing is going to affect River Recreation somebody's gonna have to tell me would presumably increase it you wouldn't have a barrier so so you're just you're just taking that out okay and so but then the leader boat landing is becomes not functional because it's

3:12:12 no longer link for it and that's the minimum six we just put it that is this whole thing you've got the last five Rapids going down yeah we've got a lot of things taking out one impediment and you know what kind of a river condition you're going to create when you do take the dam out so I mean there's just so many uh things and and you know I I I'm focused and I'm really focusing on the cost and how this affects the people because like you say it's regressive people that make less money than others commodity costs the same per kilowatt as it does for high income as well uncommon and it affects them terribly in this you know talking about one of the biggest expenditures this utility has ever made

3:13:08 and if that's what we're getting the most amount of feedback from the community I guess I would like to see at the breakdown of it personally just to give that not to the people you want to break it into three or leave it at one I would break it out I think the resolutions break it down break it down and build one that's okay break it out oh so I I'm going to move on to process after and kind of figure out a timeline of of how this is gonna it's gonna work so it sounds to me like

3:13:54 staff's gonna provide a memo third or fourth week of November which will have a recommendation okay so we get staff recommendation end of November we have a December meeting and a work session or just a December meeting it's just planned for the December meeting so I'm going to double check that we actually have time on the regular event a regular discussion okay how much time because we're gonna be getting new information right or at

3:14:40 least updated refreshed information it seems to me so this goes back to this goes back to my own hip processing things and we all have lives beyond Eugene Water and Electric Board I have people sitting at this table so just to be able to process this information I mean we got our pack up last night at 8 45. yeah I'm sorry you know but that's that's not fair to us it's not fair to the decision-making

3:15:25 process and if we're getting a a packet the third week of November and are being asked to weigh in on a quarter of a billion dollar decision in a week or 10 days that doesn't work for me I'm sorry uh I would be able to ask a lot more questions once I see that package and say how how come you feel this way how come you feel that way but I'm there's no way that I'm going to be ready to give direction on a path forward at an early December board I'm just I'm just putting that out there um especially one of those consequence you know if it's a consent calendar thing

3:16:10 that comes you know five hours before a meeting and it's to buy a backhoe okay I can live with that type of a decision on short notes but I just I don't know what the rest of this commission is but that's I just wanted to put that out there man I said a year ago I've got an annual vacation I take thank you I'm not going to be physically present for that meeting I'm going to try and do it by well but uh you know I'm going to do what I have to I've already talked to Sonia and she's going to take a meeting if I can't do it remotely but I mean I'll be prepared but we don't get Thanksgiving in there that's 40 holiday and uh you know so I like to understand that and you've got you know I've still got a lot of questions not nothing you're going to be more questions when

3:16:56 you respond you're going to give us an answer and I'm gonna have two more questions president Brown I I would propose that we could put forth our recommendation and not haven't not have an agenda item in December for action um I think this may be something where there's there's some guidance items for a number as long as the board needs to be comfortable with it I mean if we put forth a recommendation in the board ask questions great um maybe we need another month to process it and follow up on additional questions that's that's fine and I think what we want to do is we want to get something that's useful for the board

3:17:42 that's a recommendation if if that takes a certain degree of time to process we're okay with that so I don't I don't expect in fact we'll modify the agenda it won't be an action item in December we can refer to it as guidance and discussion and then at some point the board will be comfortable with an action and so um but we would like to put forth a recommendation and then whatever processing time you need to feel comfortable looking at so I mean I earlier we said we wanted to reach out to like the we have a major country we used to have a major customer luncheon you know we're 20 to 30 of our largest customers we've talked to about Trends

3:18:27 and everything else we have done that for three or four years at least and I mean that's a good venue to talk to the big people that write the big checks but also to go to the small business offers to go to the Chamber of Commerce and people like that we do all that in 30 days that's a circulent task we can't even get on the my neighborhood meeting each quarterly and I've got three minutes on their next agenda three minutes so you're gonna have to talk fast I'm gonna have to talk fast yeah and we have a we're looking at uh several major Customer Events this spring um so that's the sprinkler right no I I think what we want to do is to provide

3:19:12 as solid of a recommendation or path as we can um to the board to be able to narrow down the questions um and the Outreach until you have something that you can go out to the public with and that's probably I don't know what you call it commissioner Carl said I've pared down version of the trade-offs there there isn't a magical line that's drawn on December 31st other than our own goals that we wanted to be a certain place for some good reasons that have changed well

3:19:57 we'll allow the board lots of leeway and understanding what needs to be done next so questions or comments before we adjourned with another cover that I would have would be the fellow Commissioners and how do you see this vote going I mean right we've all have our I'm just throwing it out there I mean is it going to be a three two four one five oh not that you know first round balance second round ballot type of thing I I

3:20:44 don't know well I guess I everybody shares their opinions you don't all agree with one another and um I think maybe the process with our partners where we hash out the agreements where you say like people kind of sit around the table until you come up with something that like sounds the the best I'm hoping that that's what happens because we all have unique perspectives and we all of our our values um but and this is so complicated I guess I just have faith that this board will be able to come up I think that we all kind of work together craft given what you

3:21:29 give us obviously but I I think that we can I'm going to remind everybody that we all four of us represent eight Geographic areas of the community defined by Wards you represent all of them plus to facto a river that I I look at my charges to reflect the values and desires of my constituency totally different than yours what we do and so we all have I mean to make sure that we reflect that and respect that especially in these times not to you know people have personal opinions and values um you know I I interjected all my personal values in this it would be totally different than what the

3:22:14 constituents Awards four and five and one so I have to keep that in mind when we do this that it's not collected values of the people that put us in this position try and reflect that and that's why I think Outreach is very very important to do that and I guarantee you that Matt's probably has a different group of constituents than I do and we we all do it you you volunteer long enough to know the uniqueness of your Gene and the differences and the geographic divides and things and so um I think we can get there I think we can get there and and don't be afraid to take issues with it I mean I I don't think anything personal go down three two four one it doesn't matter 50 would be great but um the epidemic compromised

3:23:00 what you believe your representation is and you've done your job but I think we we have a policy that says that if you're on the short end of a boat once that boat's done then you support the majority and so whatever it is where we come up with it it is but I think that's in our court policies is that we do that so we don't go out and say well this is terrible or anything else we just that's the way that's the way it works we've made a ton of decisions a ton of decisions and they've not all been 5-0 and the next day we show up and we do it and we're going to have to do that it's just going to be a much heavier lift this time so I really appreciate the way that this is working right now

3:23:45 that I think you know having been on a board that was totally dysfunctional for a while I just want to tell everybody that I appreciate not on the board with the staff uh and and the way we're reporting this we're doing the best we can and I think it's going to be tough to appease everybody regionality I know we can't we can try we can try uh and and we'll have to do the best we can and if people um take issue with it take it first let me ask you a question about okay see you some that you you know you have to take into consideration the people that you represent right and what what their interests are

3:24:30 and and I I understand that but to me that is always can only be a piece of this specificity because they don't have all of they don't have four hours sitting in a room asking every single question you know if you just say do you want a dam or duck not a damn that's the bumper sticker and you can you know that's what most of our constituents would be able to answer so yes I I give my ward two and three when I feel there values are but but it's only a piece of it oh

3:25:15 absolutely right absolutely they wouldn't have the the depth of knowledge of it but if you have represent a group of people that really strong in environment yeah but also represent people that don't have the economic resources that another group of people does I mean I'll admit it I live in a couple of words that where we have the highest per capita income and all this other stuff but uh that doesn't mean I'm just going to go on affordability do my best to reach out and talk to the greatest diversity of people I can and that that geographic area that that's part of my job I get it's it's not I'm into the weeds it's the you know the macro cost is really important to a certain group of people affordability and you weigh that in the minutiae

3:26:06 I mean when I make I mean even though it's really easy to see this constantly uh with you know little blips and bumper stickers that really raise people's hackles part that I hold on is something that I can defend I thought that time constituents and the community came out both you know because of this Factor this factor and this Factor this is how I waited it this is how I voted and I I'll vote based on what I can defend with my conscience and what I can defend with values and data and you know no matter how wonderful of a job that I know all of you are doing to forecast and predict it's gonna be wrong and I'm

3:26:53 going to lay that up for people you know we're all people they have done a tremendous job doing all the Outreach and the right things that they should do and I will defend them and the the work that they did no matter what happens afterwards because this is the point in time where we're at and I if even if I you know if we voted and I voted against something or I voted for something when we move forward it just needs to be about how we can defend it and then being respectful to one another so that's what sounds like we're there I'd like to thank everybody thank the people in the audience and staff and board members so see you in a couple

3:27:40 weeks