EWEB Board of Commissioners — November 12, 2024

0:03 all right I'm going to call to order the November 12 2024 meeting of Eugene Water and Electric Board and I'll start with an agenda check any comments changes from nope um all right items from board members and general manager John thank you several items um today I this morning I got to go to walv elementary school and present present two uh Awards to the students in a fifth grade class for our electricity um uh contest and both both the first and second place kids came from the uh from the same classroom that's pretty exciting and the kids

0:49 explained what they did and everything and it's always a fun thing to do sorry I stupped in on your but I know you could make it so uh it was that um the other thing um the uh uh took that ethics we were required to take that ethics class if you haven't done that we prepared for two and a half hours of fun times and and but there I did notice there are some things I think that and an was in the same class that we may be doing that we may need to change about like recording every vote who voted and how they voted in the minutes I think that's something that the state thinks that we're supposed to do I'm not so sure we have to do it but we'll figure that out um the next thing is uh um I had attended the coffee with

1:35 uh with um Laura up on the College Hill the other day and everything and well received and everything but there was one problem when you say coffee with Laur wouldn't that imply there'd be coffee there was no coffee and it was cold so I would assume that we're gonna have coffee at the next one just a little sidebar there but no it was yeah I think that the presentation from the the blasting people and everything it was very informative and I think people in attendance I counted 20 um it it was great and the last thing is um I'm going on my tangent again every year I I talk about getting after the the communication people and make them trim the lines because when it snows and it gets ice it drags our lines down and our repairs have to pay for cleaning up their mess and this is what third year

2:22 we've talked about it and I'm not sure anything's happening we're heading into that season again we have another ice storm quest and Pacific look lastest and all the people pcast their lines are going to take our lines down and we're going to have to pay for it and if there's anything we can do about that legislative or not I would like to to do that because it's not fair to our rate pairs to pay because those people don't want to trim the trees so that's all my complaining for now thank you are you sure no all right all right F others um I also had the opportunity to present for two of the poster scholarship or poster awards for the fifth grade it was at cus Elementary

3:07 School and Edison two of our newer Schools they're both beautiful uh it's it was fun going into the fifth grade class and trying to answer the questions that they asked I hopefully I did it well one of them was uh when a bird lands on The Wire how come it doesn't get electrocuted I think I fielded that one okay but there were there were some other interesting questions but it's a really uh it's a really fun time to interact with our fifth graders uh the posters were uh were good um you know the those two schools represented South Eugene well we had uh third fourth and fifth Walterville I think had first and

3:54 second um but it's a it's a real neat thing way to get out and energize our youth that's it right I'll just take the opportunity to I know we have an update on the uh board the eweb and City buene combined meeting I just want to thank Brown for stepping in my place I was unable to attend that and thank you barowski for helping find and I'll Brown for stepping in uh anything from you Frank and then we'll come back to commissioner Carlson does that work all right she's saying she's waving on so nothing from her yeah U Commissioners good evening um

4:41 just a couple of items um one is that we are in uh right now what we call a warm IC so if you understand incident command system um some of that is in preparation we're expecting potentially 40 50 mph winds this evening and so um as part of our preparation for situations like that we have people um ready to mobilize and so we're in in I'd call it warm or light IC at the moment um preparing for this evening um I will follow up on the communications um issue uh commissioner Brown we have looked and at some point I I I'll have to double check this whether we were actually putting storm recovery costs into some of our charges that we

5:26 that we use for mounting on poles so we are recovering some of that investment um we also have to note that um of the number of polls throughout our system we don't own all of them and in some cases we're the lease not necessarily the leas or of that um other utilities have tried direct recovery of storm expenses um to little to no uh response from the communications uh companies and so um Beyond just our calculation for attachment fees which is where this would be recovered and I believe we have U put that in our calculation um that that um a legislative solution would probably be the next option and then I'll pass along there is coffee provided

6:11 at coffee with Laura on special Milestone occasions in the project um you must have not been that special uh for Laura to do that so um I'll make sure that she knows next time that a commissioner is is in the audience and coffee will magically appear here all right that's all then we go on to the next item before we go to the next I'm going to do a quick facility and safety awareness and meeting Logistics briefing so thank you all for being here tonight uh EB management and subject matter experts are present in the room and virtually the meeting is being live streamed and recorded uh

6:56 encourage you all to speak loudly and clearly so everyone can hear you public testimony is welcome if you haven't already sign up forms are available at the back of the room visitor access is limited to the board meeting room and the rest rooms questions are located on the first floor exit through the interior door at the back of the room over here and a security officer will direct you to the location in the event of emergency please follow instructions given by staff and then I'll go to the next topic which is an update from city manager Sarah maderi on Stevie jeene fire fee um whichever you prefer either yeah up here is good

7:51 yeah that one okay cool right thank you press the green button so green that's good that's it all right well thank you for uh having us back again it's an honor to be able to come here twice especially on a a day where you have a super packed agenda so we're going to I'm joined by our assistant Finance director Neil oringer who's been working a lot on the fire Services fee and our assistant city manager Matt Rodriguez is in the audience today he has some handouts that not exactly sure what to do it but I'll reference them a little bit as we go the last time I was here didn't actually bring any slides so I'm just I'm not going to show as many as I've shown in some of the presentations that you've been at but I do want to just

8:36 pause for a minute and talk about the problem that we're trying to solve and that is really related to our general fund as you um we've been talking a lot about a fire Services fee but the city has about 35 different reporting funds the general fund is one of those and it happens to be the fund that is our discretionary fund has historically funded police and fire and libraries and parks and and all those kind of foundation city services when we when I submitted the uh 23 through 25 bial budget in addition to having about $30 million worth of cuts in it and in one of the handouts will'll actually give you some details about what those were we also had an $8 million placeholder for new Revenue we gathered uh Revenue

9:22 advisors M Browski was one of those Revenue advisers so he is one of the people that Dove deep into how were we going kind of solve this which is partly how we got to um the fire Services Fe and I think important to note that the general fund is not only it's kind of uh a fund that has problems but it's also the fund that often bails out the ambulance service fund ambulance transport fund and parking fund and any place we have other issues we have to balance at the end of the year so in a in a even more simplified term but I think it's important the in the general fund about three4 of our expenses are employees and almost all of the rest of it is the materials equipment supplies they need to do their job and every year uh that plus whatever

10:10 increases we have in our costs our rates our employee rates all of those things has to equal what our revenue is and we're we are not allowed to carry a deficit so it balances every year and so in the general fund our top three uh sources of revenue the biggest one is property taxes followed by the E web contribution L of taxes thank you very much e and then a much smaller piece just being fees for services and and all of those cases we have very limited control over what that is property taxes are capped at 3% per year um contribution of L taxes is really based on what e web's needs are for the year and then we we gained some of that but we're not able to set those rates and so um what I'm gonna show is

10:55 that you know for the last probably my entire career because my started after the property tax measures went into place I started with the city in 1996 I think almost every year of that we've been making reductions to try to accommodate that because growth is often higher than 3% especially when you're working through some of the market conditions and I think you know between last year's the 2425 that was one budget year because we're doing a banial budget now part of the reason we show this is because the the implications of that year over year is at some point you have to figure out either we're really going to go deep or we're going to need to find some new Reven strategies again I I offer a slide just because I when we show so many of these

11:40 it starts to feel like it's like numbers and arrows but there's actually Services impacted these are just three small examples of what happened last year um which are things that aren't happening so um we were going to cut a fire engine company and the council found a way to save that with using the payroll tax but it meant we didn't we weren't able to deploy a community Response Unit we reduced 12 and a half FTE in the police department and addition we assumed a 2% vacancy so they're kind of always in a little bit of a lag and we reduced in the library both in the main budget and also in the in the supplemental this slide is always pretty interesting I'm only going to show the general fund one the Citywide FTE for th000 has gone down

12:25 last number years but the general fund FTE is pretty interesting if you look at FYI 8 to now you go from 5.8 per th000 to 4.6 but if you go back even farther to 88 pre-tax we were at seven and a half so that's if you do the calculation on that it's it's essentially that we have absorbed the entire population of the city of Springfield without adding any additional FTE and the the difference in calls for service in 1988 3,000 calls for fire and EMS and now it's over which is why we um when start talking about new fees and revenues we also started to to Center on on fire and EMS because we haven't added a fire a firefighter paramedic since 19 since the 1980s we have added basic life support

13:13 we've we've innovated ways that we respond to service with lower levels and so we've added FTE but we haven't added firefighters and people in fact I think I saw my first advertisement on Facebook yesterday were from the fire Union about this topic uh we start talking about fire service fees and and utility billing and all of that which Neil's going to cover starting on the next slide um part of the reason that that fire made a lot of sense to me in particular and why I think it's made sense across the state is it's a 24hour a day 7-Day week service that you can't really shut off uh really depends on a lot of infrastructure it's vital to our community well-being our business community and I equate it somewhere in there with our Wastewater utility it feels it feels like essential City

14:00 service in that same way um and it also feels like something that doesn't feel like if you're going to have stability for the for the community to have certainty and for us to be able to grow in time it it doesn't make sense to backfill it with a short-term Levy and so that's that's really how we came to a service which um City of Medford actually smartly put into place many years ago good evening Commissioners uh and staff so I'm going to dive into the rate development process that we've been going through over the course of the last several months and I'm going to start by just uh describing to you uh the other Oregon jurisdictions that

14:45 we've we've looked at as a a model we know that this is not just a a Eugene problem this is a an Oregon problem the limitations of measure five and 50 have uh created a challenge for all Oregon jurisdiction itions um with the limitations that they place on property tax revenue um and and thus the the challenge to fund basic government services um and so many Oregon jurisdictions many of which we show on the slide here have implemented a utility service fee as a way to um in a fair and stable way help to fund uh General government services and so we've used these other organ jurisdictions as an example and a

15:30 govern as we U as we've developed our rate model over the course of the summer and so just as we have learned from these other or Oregon jurisdictions um their best practices uh these are some of the key themes and components that we've uh kept in mind that have guided our work so um starting off we we know that we've needed a rate structure that would generate roughly $10 million annually that Revenue um we have landed on square footage of developed property as the basis for the fee we know that some Oregon jurisdictions use water meter size or other metrics to um uh service basis for the fee but we have square

16:17 footage data readily available and it serves probably as the the the most logical Nexus between the demand for fire services and the the rate paid um and so is a logical basis for the fee um we also understand that there's uh whatever rate structure we need tool needs to apply in a logical way to both residential and Commercial structures residential is relatively straightforward but because of the um you know many different uh iterations and complexities associated with commercial properties uh we needed a rate structure that was simple enough to apply to to both types of properties um and that takes us to the the final through line uh with of all of our work

17:03 it it really is keep it simple we wanted a a rate process and a rate structure that uh was relatively easy to administer and simple and straightforward both for customers to understand but also um that would ultimately reduce the administrative burden to collect um and put as many dollars on the free that possible so diving a little bit deeper into some of the feed considerations um when we look at so I mentioned earlier that we would intend to use uh square footage of developed property is the basis for the fee uh we have square footage data readily available from from our lid um that would serve as the the basis for billing

17:48 uh we would then associate the square footage of developed property to eweb accounts so it would be it would tie back to storm water accounts um and we have a me mechanism already in place uh through our storm water fee to tie um developed property location to eweb account so we have those mechanisms already in place and that would be relatively straightforward for us um we Our intention would be to tie the the fire Services fee amount due back to the storm water uh bill so whoever holds and pays the storm water bill ultimately would be paying fire Services fee um Our intention we know that um any new fee has the has a would provide a

18:35 substantial burden to some members of our community and so Our intention would be to set aside 3% of uh gross revenues uh associated with the fire Services fee to a u income based assistance program Our intention would be to model it after the the EB customer care program and then finally uh we would structure this so that any revenues associated with the fire Services fee would be set aside and accounted for specifically in a special Revenue fund so we would shift $8 million of existing fire Services which are housed in the general fund currently shift those into the special Revenue fund and then any new Services uh associated with the

19:20 implementation of the fire Services fee would also be accounted for in that special Revenue fund and so now we can take a look at the the actual proposal that we have on the table for uh the rate structure so you can see uh we have uh the rate categories on the the Le hand side um Group by square footage so we would determine the total number of square feet associated with each storm water account and based on the the square feet associated with that storm water account um associate the appropriate uh monthly bill cost so when we look at where the majority of our residential accounts occur within this rate structure about

20:07 90% um can be found within the the grouping highlighted here so 750 to 3500 square feet that accounts for roughly 90% of our residential accounts um and when we look at them I should say going back to on the residential side the the median residential customer under scenario um would fall within the the 1500 to 2500 sare foot grouping and pay $10 per per month so now when we look at the commercial side and the commercial accounts within our data uh we can see that roughly 65% of total commercial accounts um can be found within this 50 to 10,000 square feet range and would

20:53 pay um somewhere between $3 and $38 uh per month per account with the median commercial customer paying that $38 per account for fund and then when we expand that out um we we can we can say that in the 50 to 30,000 square feet range um that Co that covers about 90% of our total commercial accounts so once you start to get into these um these higher square footage ranges um which logically makes sense the number of total accounts impact it decreases dramatically and so I think with that I'll turn it over to Sarah again so

21:38 um I'm GNA talk a little bit about our next steps with Council and exec team but also will include in our next steps with with eweb because all of those numbers are you know we're working towards what we hope to be the most efficient way of doing this would be working together on billing but we know that's maybe not possible and if so some of those numbers might might adjust a little bit the council started talking about this long before this fall but this is sort of our fall uh conversation next week they have a public hearing and uh that's on Monday night and then we'll turn around on Wednesday night we'll have a work session with them to see like okay there other things they might want to see we've been trying to set them up for potential action in December so that we could Implement by July that's a best case scenario there's a

22:23 lot of work that would have to happen here um to either be able to work with e web to do it or to uh find another vendor or a different way of administrating it to do that we also know that Council may make a different choice and say we're not ready to do this and in that case we'll be meeting with them starting in January on on where they want to set some of those service priorities for the next sort of $10 million plus probably worth of cuts so at the same time that we've been developing a revenue proposal we've also been working as a team to develop what are some of those reduction scenarios uh which most people want to know what they are what are you going to cut before I decide and and I've been hesitant to do that other than to show like here's where we've been taking Cuts so people

23:08 can kind of make that leap because we don't want to start a whole lot of uh too much concern in the in the organization community so we have we're here to answer questions as much as you would like and thank you thank you both questions Brown thank you I got questions and a comment um so uh just the Nexus so over 80% of the calls for the fire department are not for fire they're for medical correct for Med 83% I think is a statistic so I don't get the Nexus about if I've got a 300,000 foot building and you're charging me based upon the size of my building for a fire fee but 80% or 83% of all the calls in this community are

23:53 for medical and not for fire how do you relate that well I think um I want to double check on your number go ahead yeah I will I'm not saying you're wrong I just uh want to double check that but I think you know we're looking for a way where does it make sense and and I hear what you're saying about the numbers of calls but when you start thinking about different ways of billing whether it's a uh allocated by a water meter size or acreage or any of that it it made the most sense and and the bigger the building is the more resources we send so for example as soon as you get to five stories and higher we're sending multiple engines multiple Battalion Chiefs so the cost of service

24:39 is actually quite High when we make those calls and a lot of those places and and and a lot of those housing complexes have significant numbers of medical calls okay um so there are no sacred cows churches University of Oregon school district everybody's paying this correct that as proposed yes and including government the City of Eugene and Lane County everybody pays it no matter what okay as proposed as proposed okay and then um I'm going to have a trouble approving this for an eweb Bill we just raised our bills $30 a month on average and now we're going to raise them again for something that has nothing to do with eweb um and telling a single mother with two kids that you know we're going to shut your water and electricity off because you can't pay this eweb bill that now has three

25:25 elements that aren't related to water and electricity is is hard for me to get pasted so you're going to have to help me get there because if we could build it a different way I'd have a different perspective on it but right now until I hear more um I think this has to go through us correct because I I you know this to me is it's the same thing silt compensation of L taxes the ordinance says three% but yet we pay six and that's what happened a long time ago and and we're paying twice as much as it says in ordinance and Frank correct me if I'm wrong um doesn't the ordinance say three 3% but we're paying 6% so 6% of all our revenues go to the city and I see this as it's discretionary and so now it's so many dollars per square foot

26:12 three years from now it could be anything and we could we just down that path and I don't really want to open that up because this is a vital commodity that we provide our people and they have to have it they don't have a choice so um just help me get through this thank you yeah you know I think uh I'll say a couple of things you know the cities that have been able to do this more gracefully have been cities where they are also billing they are also providing the utility and that's not uncommon so we are we will always find ourselves I think in this place of of having to work together and and what I can say is we share your value around not wanting to shut off anybody's power for not paying this fee which is why we're looking at what is the contribution what would we include in that would go into the uh customer care

26:58 account if we do it that way and if we if we can find another way to do it if it doesn't work out we'll we'll just keep plugging away yeah others Indy well thank you for that presentation um my question is is really just about the the bill um I imagine there's probably some way we can redesign our bill or Rebrand our bill so that it doesn't just look like it's coming from eweb especially um if we add this fee and we have the storm water fees and then who knows in the future if there's other fees it's not really an eweb Bill anymore it's a eweb and City

27:43 buene so that would just be my concern was would be just how do we redesign the bill so it doesn't seem like it's all coming from we Frank I think we should say sorry call the City of Eugene bill I think we should call it the City of Springfield Bill and then we we'd all be covered that way I I think Commissioners the the direction we got previously was we needed to evaluate this uh in collaboration with the city to evaluate the efficiencies of billing separately versus billing uh sharing the billing um as I think Sarah mentioned there's a number of different U details that we

28:28 would have to work out um it's I think good news to hear that the city is looking to allocate a certain amount of this fund toward limited Income Support um you know whether that could be used to help with the sort of the disconnect order that that commissioner Brown is concerned with or not I'm not sure there's just a lot of details that we would we would have to work out um relative to the administrative handling of it but um our work with the city right now is to look at the options and look at this from a broad perspective and say is it overall more efficient for the community to do one thing or the other and what would e web's role be in that and if so what are the restrictions that that uh we would be concerned with and so I think that's

29:13 that's our role and that's that's what what they're evaluating as well on you so it sounds like we don't have an idea of what an alternative I mean we need to go out to or you would need to go out to bid to find if there was an alternative vendor and how much that would cost versus our administrative burden to to weigh those two options I mean if you're going to go forward with this either way then you know having it such that we get the biggest bang for a buck as a community is a benefit can the vendor actually provide services for those who need it um is is another question I mean we already have a customer carees program

29:58 would the vendor be able to administer a customer cares type program um is another question that I you don't really answer maybe you do yeah commissioner that's a great question and we have done some preliminary assessment of the market we've done an RFI for contracted billing just to get an initial Touch of you know is there anybody out there that could provide the service what are the ranges of services that they could provide in the rough cost we would need to do you know another an RFP and and dive deeper to really evaluate that in at more depth um but we have some initial U cost estimates there uh the at that point when during the initial RFI

30:43 the income based assistant assistance program wasn't part of that evaluation we need to evaluate that through the rmp process we've also done a similar RFI but for um the cost of implementing a software system in how if we were to instead of choosing a contracted billing solution use City staff to um essentially implement the the billing in house so we have some initial estimates of what the costs are but again they'd have to be continued continued work would need to be done to really vent that out um another question then if if the city said hey e web go do this we don't really have a choice in the matter to say

31:36 storm water is storm water is cified or storm water wastewaters codified the other this isn't codified yeah I was just going to add a little bit of context to that effect commissioner Carlson um by I can't remember if it's by by code or by Charter we're required to bill for I believe it's called something like fluid services or something like that which would handle Wastewater and storm water um there are any other billing would would be just because of its uh profile um I've made the decision that that would be a a board decision um and and yet I should point out we already buil for the city um so we build those we build those two Services I think they're well distinguished on our bill the difference between a City of Eugene portion and your electric and water

32:22 portion those are um easy to distinguish if you look at the bill I think the challenges a lot of people people don't look at the bill they just look at the the total amount at the bottom and in that case it would be it would be diluted um but we already do that we're required to do that for those services but any other service on top of that would be optional and then um two other quick questions one does the um does the ab do we would we have the ability or could we have the ability to exclude that if um from a non-paced situation you know if you don't obviously we don't want to do that but maybe we don't turn off if they haven't paid that portion is that something that we could Implement so so presently when

33:08 someone makes a partial payment or um they're in a situation where they're disconnected the partial payment is is sort U applied to all of the different portions of the bill water electric proportionally um we're actually in a in a bit of a challenging situation to answer that question commissioner because we are putting in our new our new uh customer information system building system to to have a separate um collection cycle um which is where you would disconnect for one thing and not another um might be challenging for us in this initial stage so we're we're unclear whether we could uh do that as a as a sort of bifurcated way of we're going to disconnect for one purpose and not another we're not quite sure of that

33:54 at this point okay I am very concerned about our most vulnerable in our community um I also recognize that our fire Services System is also a vital um portion it's it's what we need in this community um much like electricity and water and I and it's challenging that we have costs across the board that are raising I don't want to put people in a position where we're turning their water and electricity off because they didn't pay a fire fee that's now added on but I also want to get the biggest bang for a buck and I want to make sure that we have fire Services it's getting hotter out there it's getting drier if we don't take care and and beef that up we're going to be in a real problem when we have more fire and then when we have a

34:40 major fire that wipes out a portion of the city people are going to go why didn't you implement the fee back in such and such day so we're in a another kind of no-win situation it's if if it's more efficient for us to do it and we can protect the most vulnerable then I would bite my tongue and support it but I want to make sure that it's kind of the last option um that's where I'm out thanks thanks Browski thanks um I wish I had when the agenda chat came up I wish I had pushed you guys to the back that's usually where I end up when I have to testify in front of city council till

35:25 10:30 missed my opportunity but um so I'm going to just I've seen the presentation of few times as Sarah mentioned I was part of the revenue committee that looked at all different options to help us uh find a way to do this um but I'm going to just kind of lean into the E my eweb hat here I'm kind of with Sonia here in the fact that if the if city council decides to move forward with this there's going to be a fee and there's going to be cost to administrate that fee now now if we do it the cost will be less we know that than if it's up to them so if if we say no the cost to the to the citizens of

36:11 Eugene is going to be higher they're going to have to recover because they've got to get that $10 million so if it cost them $10 million 500,000 to administer it the fee to our constituents is going to be higher the other thing that that I look at is they're talking about giving 3% for customer care which is $300,000 a year now $300,000 a year the number of people that would do that to get $10 per month is the the logistics of that is just untenable people you know you might get some but they may use of that $300,000 they may use $50,000 to offset

36:57 that whereas if they give us $300,000 that we can put into our overall customer care we're helping a whole lot more people than would be eligible to to use it to offset their $10 and the cost to the community is less so your argument about them being turned off I understand that that our bills are going up and it's eweb at the top of the letterhead and and when they come in here and say our rates are too high we hear it our phone rings on that one but in the overall arch of this if the city council decides to move forward with this to me it makes sense for us to be the one to help the city to build this and to use the Ci's leverage to

37:45 help us help our customers more of our customers that are are challenged with paying their bills because I could see after five years that $300,000 fund could be two and half million dollars that's just sitting there not being utilized by the most vulnerable people in our community and so for that reason I would lean towards us working with them to find the fairest and most Equitable way to build this that's just my take on it as far as as the presentation and some of the issues as far as square footage and and some of the things that I've heard throughout the community I'll leave those to public hearing next

38:30 next Monday night because there are issues that I think that the city needs to hear about on those from the business Community from our rate payers and all of those types of things but as far as my duty as an e commissioner I lean into partnering with the city on this one to help our our rate payers the best we can and that's if and only if city council moves this forward we'll have another discussion once that decision's been made thank you did I hear a motion to move the rest of this to the end of the meeting no um thank you for the presentation I have um I guess similar thoughts the the justification and thinking about how to put this fee

39:16 together all makes sense to me and the way you've structured it um it does seem to me like there's a a natural opportunity to make sure that we're doing the most not only cost effective but sensible thing in terms of how people understand the fees that they're paying so I've always thought the the city fees on top of the eweb bill is a little strange but I totally understand the reasoning for it I'm supportive of that but it does feel like when we're tipping to a spot where they're actually have more City fees than we have eweb um rates on our bill that it's a good chance for us to take a closer look so from my perspective getting a clear sense of what that cost would be to have a third party would be valuable and if it's not more than you know a $100,000 more to do it separately I think there's

40:01 value there from just from our Communications standpoint because we do spend a lot of time talking with folks about rates and and and their bills and whatnot um but all things being equal I agree like we want to do this in the most cost- effective way for the people that we collectively serve John have a logistics question so you need you want to move this but forward in December we've got one more meeting this year so and this has you to be able to have the commission to do this this board has to approve it correct so the council can make a policy decision about if they want to implement it or not before you decide right but then but then it still takes appication and where do you see that coming in

40:47 timing because I think the business Community is not too supportive of this at all uh commissioner Brown I I think that um the first step it's really step by step and there's a few steps in here one is if if Council directs um city manager Mader and staff to pursue this um they have to look at their options we have to then work with the city on what the implementation would look like and cost and what the impacts to eweb would be as the next step um it it wouldn't be appropriate to bring anything back to the board until we understand that further and until we can vet that sum with the community so it's going to probably be um a number of months back and forth with the city to work out lots of details and then develop a

41:33 Communications plan around that as well and then and I think commissioner Mader you said July roughly for potential implementation we also have to look and see how that fits in with our changes to our billing and customer system so there's it it I wouldn't expect this to come back to the board for several months other comments from you or questions or comments from board thank you both you all right the next item is correspondence that's me again Commissioners so there were three items of Correspondence this evening uh thank

42:20 you city manager Mader and Matt and Stat thanks um there were three your background materials um the first one was just some additional detail I know we talked a little bit about the community table and the feedback uh relative to our uh energy planning uh there was uh some additional detail as to the the process and some of the conclusions associated with that U Jason who I know is is listening in this evening available for comment provided a little bit of update on some of the potential legislative uh Trends and potential legislation that could get teed up that's directly relevant to eweb um this is um before we

43:09 actually take a position on anything that looks like it's developing U this is just a heads up on these are a few of the categories and areas of of potential legislative work in Salem and then the third one U we did this primarily this quarter because of both agenda time um the the next few agendas are are really um packed and also the third quarter results we tend to spend the most time on the year-end results which we'll do uh early next year but just some project updates um updates relative to our our financial position which was uh definitely challenged in the early part of the year on the electric utility water utility is in is in good shape um relative to its its budget and its

43:56 projected outcomes and so those were the three items of Correspondence and we'd be happy to answer any questions that Commissioners may have on any of those or or take back comments um on any of the topics great but by the way president McCrae these these were unlike some of our correspondance items where we're ask asking for direction or uh guidance these were really provided for information only so um if you had questions about it we'd be happy to answer those yeah um yeah the the only input that I would have is on the on the first one on the community table uh sessions I went through and I read through that and I and I've been in several of those type of of focus group

44:44 you know listening sessions type of a deal and and I hope that we're we're stressing to because when you go to people and say what do you want they're always GNA want everything right I want clean power I want low rates I want reliability I want all of this and that showed up in in the charts that we saw but I just want to make sure that we emphasize to these people that are coming and spending their time with us time and and it's valuable time and a good group of people that are coming that we have to make these are tradeoffs that we need to make and we can't have it all and so making making it clear to them that yes

45:29 we're hearing what you're saying but we also have to make the the hard trade off choices and by doing that we may they may feel that we're not listening to them when we are listening but we can't say yes to everybody and everything and I just want I hope that that message goes out when we're when we're starting these lisening sessions so that it doesn't look like we're just taking a listening session and then putting it on a shelf somewhere um because that's i' I've I've been involved with those but it's hard to ask the question what do you want you almost want to say what would you like to give up would be the easier

46:16 part for for us to to hear what what would you rather not have than what do you want so I just I I read through it and I was interested because everybody said yeah I want this this and this thanks John Frank yeah um commissioner um barowski we we definitely understand the points you're making um what's um we we made a couple of we stressed a few things relative to this particular Community table one was this is a series of meetings with this group uh the first one was uh couched as sort of overarching and understand in what some of the primary drivers are uh we will take a deeper dive into what

47:02 some of those trade-offs are as some of the next steps um recognizing that that we live in the land of and we want safe and reliable and affordable and environmental and Equitable and you the list goes on um I think the other thing that that we've stressed with this group is it is not an Advisory Board in the sense that it we are looking for a consensus recommendation this is to test the extremes and to test the variety and levels of different perspectives that we get and so your point is well taken I do think it's consistent with how we're approaching this great thanks other comments right we'll move on please no it thank you okay yeah sure um all right

47:47 we'll move on to public input we have four folks here in the room with us today I'm going to start with um a quick overview to brief folks who are going to provide input um first welcome to the meeting and EB is a public not for-profit organization whose Charter is to deliver drinking water and electricity to our community although this form is not used for an open back and forth dialogue Commissioners and staff value hearing diverse perspectives and receiving Community input speakers are advised to keep their testimony relevant to eweb business and request that everyone share their comments in a productive and respectful manner should speakers or audience members but become disruptive they may be muted and or removed from the meeting at this time we have four um folks in line there's

48:33 nobody um calling in it's all in person when your name is called you'll have up to three minutes to provide your comments there is a timer on the front to help you keep track and the public input session is now open we will start with is Isaac McCoy centic followed by Dan Carroll Isaac hello thanks for the opportunity to speak I listened to one of the meetings from perhaps a month ago uh on YouTube it's a little hard little hard to see tell who's speaking at what time after a while you get to learn people's voices the discussion was about the BPA

49:20 decision coming up and then the public process that Mr barowski just mentioned one of the comments from a Comm commissioner was that it felt a little performative and I would uh urge the group to move away from that as Mr broy said um the request for the experts from ewb to not use numbers I think reiterated that sort of performative aspect I understand the desire to have a high level discussion but the number of times they mentioned it they clearly felt hamstrung I think in the conversation and it didn't feel productive listening it on YouTube anyway when the leeberg project was presented in public forums what I recall

50:07 and perhaps there was much earlier processes involving the community but you presented I think four distinct options and I would encourage you to take that approach with the BPA decision come up coming up there is deep institutional knowledge here lots of experts lots of knowledge that the community members don't have and if you present us what's possible trying to align with the values that you've heard I think it's a much more efficient process and a much more empowering process for the community knowing that you are working on all the tradeoffs firk and BPA and all this stuff that I don't have the knowledge around but uh the sort of Blue Sky you know what can we dream up feels

50:54 inefficient um you know commissioner barosi alluded an hour into that meeting that there's already been a lot of work done instituting systems that will help us in the next iteration of the BPA contract and it'd be nice to know what they are nobody wants an inefficient process we're not trying to redesign everything if you've already invested money in this then let us know what it is and what it leads us towards and if the community out has an outcry and says well no no no then I think that's an easier place to start than what do you want um you know one other another point I

51:39 just wanted to make sort of ancillary to that was the rate discussion there's a lot of talk about how many years EB held rates to zero and now we're at a double- digit increase I think for this year um I think that would have been nice in the discussions back then if knowing that we had a huge Capital project coming up you know is it easier to absorb small increases or is it harder to you know better to absorb one big one thanks for your time thank you Isaac next is Dan Carroll followed by Eric and Eric I'm not gonna pronounce your back last name because I'm gonna butcher it uh Dan Caroll hello uh I live up on charlon I appreciate the chance to be here I

52:24 wanted to share some concern about the Reservoir project um to be clear not a nimi have been very excited about uh all of the work that's been done both in uh other parts of the city and on this project been very supportive of it um but in the summer it was discovered that the new water tanks are being installed that wasn't even originally part of the project had to go further down you all ran into some impervious rock and uh because of cost issues you're going to be doing 24 days of dynamite blasting and fracking of rock in our neighborhood there's about 60 homes Among Us that are

53:09 in the 3 300t designated Blast Zone um EB was kind enough to provide pre- disaster inspections so that we can know what our homes were before blasting uh we a group of us finally got uh the team to write down exactly how the claims process would work we have two weeks after each blast day to report any claims it's not what we think is fair given potential risks that uh during rainy season and longterm changes to the site with Stream flow de designated uh in there but so be it uh wanted to come here with six suggestions humble suggestions number one as our old

53:55 homes take on systemwide risk would appreciate better Communications with the public this postcard arrived this week the only it says is this phase of the project will bring new equipment noises and work methods to the site that you may hear or experience I think more information is needed particularly for those outside the blast zone that may not know what's going on gas line inspections our gas line is connect to the foundation should be done before the blasting begins we're waiting 3 weeks now for some to come out at our own expense provision of seismic monitors were promised so far we have not gotten one um we are respectfully asking and have written again uh haven't received a response yet about perhaps a two-day

54:42 pause after the blasting begins to make sure that the expert predictions regarding the amount of seismic energy is in fact happening in the way they predicted and then lastly uh I assume this is being done but fire station Crews and Northwest Natural Crews on on standby to make sure that anything happens particularly for homeowners that are not there when something goes down so again supportive of the project but perhaps uh a little bit slower might be something to consider thank you great thank you and next is Eric followed by Mark orinn

55:35 thank you uh for the opportunity to speak and good evening to you all um my name is Eric Jura and I and I understand why it's difficult to pronounce you're not the first one all right sorry thanks um I uh am uh my family and I are in the uh near the end of a process to construct um uh three single family residences under the Eugene code that deals with the middle housing we're we're taking on that project and so uh there was an existing structure on the property and we're building two others a big part of that was electric and water uh utility installation and so uh what I wanted to say was I wanted to thank you thank actually the uh the employees of

56:22 the eweb uh and you you can do that online my behalf in whatever way you see fit uh for the excellent service the excellent communication uh everybody that I met all the people that came out to do site visits and all those sorts of things were fantastic they were they communicated very well exactly what was going to happen and we very much appreciate it uh the other thing I'll mention is that we got a free high voltage power pole out of it what does that mean uh that wasn't for me in particular but what happened was uh one of the structures it turned out after was mostly built was too close to some of the high voltage power lines and so there was a little bit of a scramble to figure out how to deal with that like halt construction or move the pole or

57:08 something along those lines and there was some fear that it was going to add cost to the project turned out that that the poll in question was scheduled for replacement anyway so they replaced it early and moved it over 10 ft and the problem was solved so I appreciate the savings so thank you all for for for the grade service thank you and thank you for your time thank you all right last is Mark reinitz okay good evening um it is not news to anybody here or anybody anywhere that the illusion of federal climate policy is about to evaporate the Environmental Protection

57:54 Agency may get broken up possibly moved out of Washington DC to force employees out uh which is of course ironic because super hurricanes and forest fires tend to impact more Republicans than Democrats how this affects eweb is a couple ways uh we might see another effort to privatize and loot EPA Congressional delegation's been against this for a long time and you're going to probably be involved in another effort to prevent the robber barons from taking it over we could have major economic shocks as incoming president musk I think that's his the real president um loots the economy he's promising a major economic shocks for us all and that makes your

58:41 economic predictions uh irrelevant how exactly that will unfold is anyone's guess but something you need to consider um in 2006 almost 20 years ago eweb helped bring Richard heinberg of postc carbon Institute to Eugene uh one of the best authors on the planet on the topic of limits to growth on a finite planet and since then very little has actually been done to implement Energy Efficiency and scaling back over consumption in Eugene OR almost anywhere else since 2006 world population has increased by almost a billion and a half

59:27 in 1859 when the first oil well was dug in Pennsylvania we had 1.2 billion it increases about a quarter million a day close to the combined population of Eugene and Springfield these are long-term trends that sustainability rhetoric ignores and finally for more specific context I watched yesterday a documentary by BBC journalist Greg palast called Vigilantes Incorporated America's new vote suppression Hitman and he did an exploration of how almost a million mostly black voters were kicked off the voting roles in Georgia to ensure the desired outcome from the

1:00:12 governor of Georgia similar suppressions of civil rights happened in other other swing States this is part of the upcoming Retreat from environmental policies a development that will harm future generations of all species so sort of Mambi pambi approach to environmentalism and sustainability has been proven to be inadequate and it's time to deepen commitments thank you thank you and comments from Commissioners staff I'll just say uh thank you all for taking the time to to be here and share your thoughts

1:00:57 much staff know I appreciate all all of the input a number of different bits and pieces I think we can take as an organization and apply and learn from where appropriately and and definitely appreciate the feedback so on a on a number of different subjects great thank you all right um we will go on to the next topic then which will be um board action items starting with consent calendar

1:01:42 aent calendar a second to approved by schlosberg second by barowski any discussion hearing none we'll vote on that support to adopt consent calendar a or approve consent calendar a say I I passes unanimously consent calendar B pulling number seven I was just I'll make a comment after commissioner sburg okay to approve consent calendar B minus item number seven all right second moved by sber second by barowski to approve consent calendar B minus item 7 any discussion say oh just as a discussion uh

1:02:29 Commissioners this included um an item that had to do with the transformation charges and more equitably um um allocating capacity within our system there were a couple of of changes really appreciate the feedback we got from the community on this and so I wanted to acknowledge that just in the comments before you what looks like a are going to approve it but I I don't want to jump jump the gun thank you all right thank you yeah uh so approval of consent calendar B minus item seven all in support say I I I passes unanimously uh item number seven Brown thank you um I've talked about this before it's a quarter million dollar contract and we have criteria set

1:03:16 that Lo our local owned companies can't bid it so we have just one bid and um and I I appreciate your explanation but it let me just ask you this so you say that they they're telling us how much they're recycling they're telling us how much cardboard and how much food waste and how much glass are we checking up on that but they're telling us what they're doing correct but there's no followup or no accountability on what they're doing I'd have to check on that I don't know the answer okay I'm just assuming there isn't because that's a criteria that we set a long long time ago on on the sustainability thing and um I would hope that we're going to revisit this I think in March that we could at least revisit this so I I I like to do

1:04:03 business with local companies all else considered equal and the fact that the local companies can't bid this because we have some criteria and we're not even checking up on that criteria we're just taking their word for it to me I would hope that we could at least revisit that next March so these the local companies could have a chance to bid the it's a pretty big contract and uh not have to send our money out of state and uh country thank just just one clarification commissioner Brown the requirement called out the reporting that is in is in board policy so and so you are correct there and we have scheduled the March meeting to review um board policy so that that part is accurate um the fact that a local company did not

1:04:49 provide a proposal was was their choice this was a reporting thing so it wasn't that we were excl excluding intentionally excluding a local organization this was they chose not to meet the criteria um of which uh the award um the intended award e Santa Pac has agreed to do the reporting and um without charge so um it wasn't I just wanted to point out it wasn't that we developed something to exclude somebody they chose not not to participate I understand it we had three three companies two of them the two local ones said we can't do this and the third one did but right I don't think we have a followup where they just tell us what

1:05:34 they're doing and we accept it okay thank you maybe we can look at this next march what would you like them to do to follow up to to check it I mean are they going to go away cardboard boxes no but I'm just curious if there's a criteria if if the other people are saying they want to do this there there's we have this rule that says or this thing that says you tell us how much recycling they're doing and they're telling us that why are we doing that for sustainability reporting purposes and how much we're actually recovering we're but we're taking their word for it well I mean there's lots of things that we take our word for why this specific one and and if there is the remedy there what do we do I mean are we going to send staff to no check on I just don't

1:06:20 know how we would check up on that if we're going to change the board policy I think it would be helpful in March to figure out what we're actually asking staff to do differently to check out we'll look into this because I would at least like to have a local company have an opportunity and set it sended cour of million dollars out of the state so proposal from March when we're looking at just see if there's something I think they they understand what I'm saying and it's you know it's not going to work right now but somehow in the future because all is considered equal I like to keep when we have a contract I don't like to send it out of state or out of country if we can have a local provider do that and if we've set the criteria to where they don't even want to bid it maybe we got to look at what we're doing yeah I think um staff understands

1:07:05 commissioner Brown's Point um I think what what we have done is we go out through our uh in a procurement and as part of that procurement we abide and adhere to board policy that we've been given um I think it's also fair to for the board to review that policy periodically and decide you know this this is actually a real world example of something that you look at in board policy that then has actual effects and here's an example of an effect that um um that was realized through a procurement process and so um I don't think the issue is as much follow up as much as it is the specification and what drove the specification and why did it exclude certain people and include

1:07:51 others and so that's that's where I think that um we all have to be careful with board policy certainly but I think this was this procurement was driven to adhere to board policy so if if you would want to change that that that's where the the point of discussion would take place okay thanks barowski thanks yeah I think that what I would hope for when we come back in and look at the board policies is if the letter of the law is is a is excluding somebody that's basically compliant with what we're trying to get to um and so that's what I would hope for is if if the a local a

1:08:38 local huler is doing what we want to do but just doesn't have the capacity to document that they're doing it if they can kind of say yes we're doing it like I said we take their word for a lot of things but we they may may not be as large of a corporation to set up the accounting measures to do it you know if that's that's something that I would hope for you know it's like like Frank said the policies are written and staff is is charged with enforcing the policies that we put forward if we find that there's a policy that is restrictive to the point that it's excluding people that could do the same job but not you know not check one box I

1:09:27 would like to look into that and see if that box actually needs to be checked for us to meet the sustainability goals that we're trying to get to thanks yeah I I think it um whenever we go through board policy there's there's value that that that that those policies create and and value both has a cost and a benefit side to it and we have to understand the requirement that was put in there why it was put in there was that for even a larger than board policy purpose was there some sort of um statutory or mandatory um or customer-driven kind of kind of benefit there so we have to look at both the benefit and the cost side and and this identifies the cost side we need to

1:10:12 understand the benefit side right thank you item number seven motion to approve consent calendar B item seven thanks move by schlosberg there second second by barosi on support of approving consent calendar B item seven say I I all right passes unanimously on to the next item uh the CV genene liazon update you want us to okay um commissioner Brown and I

1:10:58 attended a meeting was that last week I think yeah yeah last week um with the leadership of the City of Eugene it was the mayor and the council president and vice president uh and the city manager um they were uh it was a good give and take mostly they asked us some questions regarding uh grid reliability and some of the the issues that they've been hearing about uh electrification data data farms and other things that would influence the uh reliability of our our grid as it proposed to eweb um Frank gave a good

1:11:43 presentation about that and so of the concerns that we've been hearing around this table as it has to do with with increased uh number of of power that's going to be needed for the region uh some of the transmission issues that we we we see going forward um so we conveyed those to them uh some of the other questions that they had were regarding uh small grid solar rooftop solar the mayor was concerned about that to see you know where we were on those and how how we could help move those along um we there was also a question about um the road uh Hillyard street

1:12:29 that we uh dug up when we put in our new Main and and the timeline for getting that repaired and we explained to us that we our work is pretty much done and now we're on on the schedule of the city of Eugene's Paving and preservation uh thing which I'm sure will be happening in the next in the next construction season as as I recall seeing on one of my committees um we brought forward the fact about that we're working through getting the second treatment plant put in and our emergency water stations that we just opened up they were they were happy to hear about that and what else anything else letter and oh yeah uh we also uh kind of gave them a little

1:13:15 briefing about the issues that we're having at Carmen and dealing with the different regulatory bodies uh that are kind of going up against each other that we had the presentation on last year last month so it was a good give and take the the mayor was very engaged both counselors were engaged and seem to really appreciate the meeting uh and I think going forward the the uh the new leadership that will be coming in next year I think we'll it'll be again time to bring them up to speed on the the relationships that we have between between the two agencies yeah but other than that it went real well R I would just add that I

1:14:01 think um both the the city acknowledged and that we've acknowledged that um staff um between you know the the collaboration between EB staff and City staff is is really high um I think there's we're working on a lot of things together there's good Communications um there's certainly challenges but also opportunities in that and and and City staff and EB staff are working well together which is a credit both to EB and and the City of Eugene so that was reiterated um I would mention the solar comments were specific around downtown solar there's there's some some challenges to that um um over the long

1:14:46 term uh a lot of the solar challenge in the City of Eugene has to do with the return on investment um and the value of the the energy and the capacity or lack of capacity that creates and and so that is that is not an unusual uh um situation for a a West Side utility at this point at least um um unless the economics change so that was a little more specific on the solar question great thanks other updates or questions from other Commissioners all right so we move on to the next topic uh up coming year proposed budgets and prices

1:16:02 good evening president the CR and Commissioners for the record my name is Deborah Hart I'm one of the assistant general managers in the CFO with me this evening uh are Adam Ru the rates manager Aaron Balmer the interim finance manager and Alicia Vorhees the interim budget supervisor also here in the audience are Janice Lee and Daniel Davidson who are all a part of the team that along with leadership from across the utility put together uh what we're here to share this evening so with that I'm going to pass it over to Aon Balmer thank you Deborah so on the screen is an overview of the stages in the financial plan calendar we are very much in the midst

1:16:47 of the process and I hope this slide is becoming a little familiar uh last month we reviewed the updated long-term Financial plans and sought board Direction on the 2025 draft budgets this month uh we are here with a detailed draft budget document along with refined price proposals for 2025 that include impacts to each of the customer classes following Direction this evening we will incorporate any board feedback and return next month seeking board action on 2025 budgets and price proposals there are opportunities for public hearings at several points along the way one of which is on the agenda for this evening following the presentation with that I will pass to

1:17:34 Alicia to talk us through budgets you want to drop thank you thank you Erin good evening Commissioners excuse me uh the Grid on this slide is representative of the four bucket for Budget Authority board policy establishes that each utility shall have an operations and maintenance budget and a capital budget each budget is the maximum level of expenditure authorized by the board the figures here correspond to the line item totals found in attachment one of the proposed 20125 budget document included in your board packet there are no substantial changes from drafts presented last month and the

1:18:19 primary assumptions for the budgets remain the same I will note that we will have um updated 2024 reserves and as a result of uh as a result of updated year and forecast and for next month staff anticipate requesting budget amendments for current year budget the next two slides provide a little more detail on each utilities budgets and the initiatives and priorities they support the water utility operations and maintenance budget totals approximately 35 million this figure is 3 million higher as compared to the 2024 budget

1:19:05 due to the need to support new technology services and infrastructure the budget supports initiatives and Source protection as well as continued Watershed recovery efforts following the holiday Farm fire it reflects ongoing services to provide clean healthy water through operations at Haven bridge and regular maintenance on the distribution system it also supports EB's commitment to affordability through bill assistance programs such as customer care the water utility capital budget uh total is approximately 48 million and is approximately 9 million higher as compared to 2024 budget in order to provide for construction on College Hill reservoirs as well as detailed design work for the

1:19:50 wamit treatment plant this budget reports ongoing Investments to update Med technology to improve Service as well as efforts to upgrade our Legacy it systems with ewf Enterprise Solutions it also provides for the continued construction on the burlon Expansion Project which will provide a flexible adaptable space for current and future storage and operational needs next Slide the electric operations and maintenance budget total approximately 308 million this figure is approximately 6 million lower as compared to 2024 budget due to an offsetting impact of increased

1:20:35 support for new technology services and infrastructure more than offset by lower wholesale purchase power um as a result of lower market prices I will note that along with a reduction in Market purchases there's an offsetting reduction in wholesale sales revenue as well the operations and maintenance budget supports near-term risk reduction work on the leeberg project as well as dam safety work on ef's McKenzie river hydroelectric assets it furthers vegetation management work electrification Energy Efficiency and greenhouse gas reduction programs as well as supports bill assistance programs such as customer care the electric utility capital budget

1:21:20 total is approximately 98 million and is 12 million higher as compared to 24 budget increased Debt Service following this year's Bond issuance as well as capital Investments needed to meet near-term regulatory requirements and risk mitigation work contributed to this increase the electric capital budget for 2025 supports needed Investments to upgrade the carbon Smith hydroelectric project and continue substation renewal replacement work to improve reliability the budget supports land improvements necessary for future storm water conveyance along the it provides for ongoing Investments to upgrade meter technology in the McKenzie river valley territory to improve Service as well as efforts to

1:22:06 upgrade our Legacy it systems and finally the capital budget supports the Burleson Expansion Project as well and with that I will turn it over to Adam R thanks um so the next part of the presentation is taking those overall Revenue requirement increas and um showing the allocation to each respective customer class and then for the bills for the customers within each class um so this shows the overall water increase was 8% the electric increase was 7% that applied to both the basic and the volumetric charges for both utilities um a notable change for the

1:22:52 water utility was moving towards the industry standard an awwe standard of meter weighting so it disproportionately affected the the larger meter customers you'll see that in the bill impacts additional impact for the water utility was an increase in the pumping charges as weine that cost infrastructure elevations and for the electric utility we um applied a to align more closely with the cost of service analysis we increased the basic charge for residential for example $5 and the cost of service was showing by the third year um a

1:23:37 $40 basic charge so we increased at $5 to move incrementally towards a notable change to look for additionally in the backgrounder we discussed the update to Market based tra so WEA mention that the lower wholesale markets on the overall budget for for customers with distributed generation that impacts you can see on on this Slide the impact of the cost of service results um so the residential went slightly below the overall average in the general service and wholesale contracts were tend to be a bit above the overall

1:24:22 average one comment on the elevation charges the elevation charge is a component of the bill so customers that are served at elevation pay the eweb bill as well as an elevation charge um to serve at elevation so the increase here is just for that elevation component of the bill so an average customer at the respective elevation level so at the first elevation level their increase for 7K gals was um 8% and 9% at the setation um so they weren't seeing a 22% increase portion of

1:25:07 build so here's the impact of the waiting towards the larger meters um this was a similar thing that came up in the assisting development charges F of the larger meters see the majority of our residential customers this show up on the commercial class as well but for the residential customers most of them are in the less than one inch meter category over 9 but the few customers that are at the larger meters we see that percentage increase in average oh thanks um next slide shows shows four those that's those customers that are less than one inch

1:25:52 meter which is the majority of the customers just the bill impacted different usage levels um you can see the lower usage levels have lower increases and due to the tiered rates and the water utility the larger usage customers were showing larger increases the um average bill is sevenk gals and but outdoor irrigation does lead some customers to higher usage levels so some brief in the team or 20 4S on very with the next SL is there's a lot of numbers on here but just to see the general Trend as the higher basic charge um impacting the

1:26:40 um and and you can see the effect of the larger the higher increase on the larger meter customers here so this is the majority of our customers are less than one in one in or the two in the backgrounder had the full range of all the different meter customers but not to present on the slideit the majority of the custs that moved the Electric Slide here similar to the water utility we generally aligned with the cost of service results for the overall average increase by class the one exception is the street lighting customers we updated the um consumption of the street lighting as the 's been significant

1:27:25 change in LED implementation for street lights in the city since the last time that was update with that we showed a decrease in the first year but was increasing in the second and third year of the cost of service um so we just held that flat for the first year to avoid that shock going down and then up but otherwise the state would been next slide is showing the residential Bill impacts here you can see the impact of the increase of $5 on the basic charge going from 25 to $30 um there's also a increase in volumetric rate but the notable thing here is the $5 increase in the basic card um so for a

1:28:11 customer with no consumption a vacant uh house which we'll be seeing the full $5 increase or 20% Which is a hike large larger percentage as the usage goes up that percentage increase declines um but they're still seeing a higher dollar change for the general service um this is another one with a lot of information on it but um for these commercial classes the impact of the higher usage is reflected in both the vertical access showing the higher kilowatt hours and then across the line with higher demand usage um so that

1:28:57 showing the impact being disproportionately towards the or similar to the residential customers higher per proportion to the basic charge and decreases a bit with higher and finally this is just the summary of the bill comparison and affordability metrics that we track and to the board um the Char on the left of the median household income relative to e bills we um track this over time and tend to um compare relative to that 6% threshold that is used um defined by the state as energy burden so the intent of our bill assistance programs is to move

1:29:44 customers from burden to not burdened that met and the chart on the right is showing the EB's current rates um one more will show with the proposed increases um this shows where he with is relative to comparators and all these comparators are shown at their current rates um acknowledging that all of our local comparators are seeing upward rate pressure particularly um on the electric side that Bond anticipating bondal increases um even with these increases we're within um the low end of maintaining our position at the low end of the water utility and and of the middle of the pack same

1:30:29 position proposed increase for the electricity did you have something just back to you president McCrae for a public hearing and then uh we'll just sit tight and after that questions Perfect all right moving on to a public hearing on the upcoming year proposed budgets and prices um I'll just ask is there anybody here to provide testimony okay so you don't have anybody signed up I'm not going to go through the opening it closing it we're just GNA go right back to you for if that's okay with everybody do I need to open and close Okay public hearing opening public

1:31:15 hearing seeing nobody closing the public hearing all right back to you thank you so really it's to you to uh uh we're here to entertain questions answer uh any questions that you have great thank you Don thank you great presentation um just I always get questions about the water districts so give me just an example of why well Lut water went up 7% and like River Road or Oakway or whatever the other private water districts up went went up 14% why would there be such a differential yeah the this similar holds true with the street lighting as well but for some of the smaller customer

1:32:02 classes um yeah for some of the smaller classes particularly wamit water company smaller changes can um impact them differently they were closer in line to the um overall increase but a bit above this year's cost of service analysis it's kind of having to get in the weeds a little bit so I'll try to um keep it a little bit out of the weeds but there was we refined several of our assumptions on the cost of service analysis particularly the elevation charge was the most notable one um for in that review of the elevation charges um the portion coming from um from Hayden Bridge was going to ewb

1:32:48 retail customers and not to the wholesale customers so there was upward pressure and excess of the um for the wholesale water districts and wamit because they were we reviewed the allocation of the bumping charges that were coming out of Hayden bridge and and spread that dis or proportionately over all of our customers that included them so that was upward pressure their rates are still um below that of the over of the EB customers because they're um served at that wholesale rate so they're not getting all of the um the same costs as EB customers um for meter reading for example they're getting lower proportions since so wholesale versus retail so their rates are um generally

1:33:36 lower than eweb customers since they Ser wholesale but those things that were pushing pressure putting increased pressure on them were the things that went out of this year so we don't pump will Waters all the way down to Goan and C that's not our pump that's theirs no that's that's that's the charges that are going up so we we just pump to we treat their water right and we just pump it to their line and or do we do they take water out of our our main line I'm just curious about the logistics because I get the question about this about why why somebody gets 7% and the other one gets 14 yeah I think I understand I think will lit is served at elevation um about to check there that elev yeah you get back to me on that thank you Frank

1:34:22 just in a simple way commissioner Brown is both the water districts and wholesale water are driven by contracts and so while we have a lot of rate design philosophies that we put into our own um rates that we charge not all the elements are included in all of the contracts so that's why you see differences between them oh and that's a good point to clarify that the the fact that they're charged a lower amount in this cost of service there are other charges that they are directly build that are outside of the cost of service rate thing so they overall customers are paying a similar amount it's just not 100% of it's out of the cost of service some of those some of those are other items in the wholesale thank

1:35:08 you great other questions rovski thank you um so going over the budget it I I have a few questions um and one that you know when I see a a capital expenditure that for the leeber storm water in in our in our Capital um this kind of goes to another discussion is okay we're putting Capital into leeberg storm water when we made the decision on decommissioning leeberg we we said we were going to go with storm water conveyance but we also said that we were going to look to see if there was options to go directly back to the river

1:35:55 and I'm just wondering at what point are we putting enough capital in that that we are past the point of no return on that and that's not an answer that I need today but that's one when we next time we talk about leeberg and and that that would be something that would be nice to know um you want to give Frank a moment to field that yeah I I won't field all of it I will just um differentiate um between um the storm water conveyance at leeberg that is a dam safety regulated um requirement that we have versus the long-term how much of the storm water conveyance are we going to use we we figure we're going to have to use some of it um and so we'll look for

1:36:41 opportunities to leverage those right um but they're driven by in the near- term different requirements and and that's what and I understand that but I just at some point it's going to be okay we're going we're we're committed to this direction and and I just wanted to you know that's not the budget question but it when I see Capital going to leave in that slide it just made me think about that um we did get a memo um one of the concerns that I had or that or a flare that went up was the cost of uh of wages uh wages and benefits that have increased since 20 23 actuals to 2025 proposed um it's a $22 million

1:37:26 increase uh which is a 19% increase in in wages and benefits um and the the memo was clear you know that we've added more people and we're we're doing more work and costs go up but I'm just wondering is this a trend line that is going to continue at that type of of uh increase because for me if we keep expanding the organization that you know what was represented was that 25% of our budget is is wages and benefits so to me as a as a lay in accountant 25% of our

1:38:12 increases are tied to wages and benefits of our employees and might it's probably less but a $22 million increase over two years a year and a half two years is is something that I would put a flare up to um and and hope that that's not a continuing trend line that we're going towards um I know we need to have people in the job I know that we need to pay people competitive prices I know that insurance rates and everything go up but it's just a it's a red herring that I see up there um and then the last thing that that again will that I I notice in the budget and in the slides that we have in front of us is um

1:39:01 the disproportional impact that the the rise in the basic uh charge how that dis disproportionately affects the lower income people um you know $5 to somebody who's got a $100 bill is 5% $5 to somebody who's got a, bill is half a percent um and so that's something that I think when we start looking at rate design that's one of the one of the things that I you know that I pull out of a budget that will go into my my thought process when we're going into these other ones but you know you looked at the at the percentage increase you know okay well this person's paying $25 and now they're

1:39:46 paying $30 but the person who's paying $250 is paying $255 and so I'm not saying that I I have a problem with this budget or the the proposals moving forward it's just something that comes up to me when we start thinking about the questions that we want to ask ourselves when we're going onto the raid design type of thing so thank you great thanks and you can comment if you'd like or not yeah my boss raised his hand so well I was certainly going to comment on a couple of things um so um there's been a number of different pressures that we've seen um on both Water and Electric in the last few years that have have driven up the um both the content

1:40:33 of Labor and wages and also um the percent although it's still not like a university or a school district where you have 90% or even the City of Eugene where you have a very high labor content there will be some of that that continues U the part that we will continue to see upward pressure on is is probably the wages themselves um we do uh live in an environment and we have the type of labor force that we have there's a certain degree of of scarcity and speciality to that um we see that in our Union contract negotiations for example these are are skilled people who um um are part of a union and are represented and we see that cost pressures kind of across the board in

1:41:19 engineering fields and Technical fields in it Fields so that will likely increase well we have seen a a more dramatic just quantity impact the last few years which I would say is probably abnormal is in the area that increasing regulations increasing administration of projects and also just the level of capital increase that we're that we're doing at this point there's a there's a a bubble of capital work that we have planned for and staffed for so those those are sort of separate issues but but there one will I think continue maybe dampen a little bit as we as Society gets a little better grip around inflation potentially um the other maybe

1:42:04 not um the other thing I was going to mention was relative to rate design um I do think it's a fair topic although I would point out that that consumption levels and income levels are not related so in other words low consumption does not equal low income and so that's data that we have to take into account when we look at the impact of a basic charge um if you get to the point where you are consuming greater than about I want to say Adam would know this off the top of his head but somewhere around the 1,300 1250 to 1300 kilowatt hours a month um um what which would be an average above that you're not covering your fixed cost

1:42:50 and Commissioners did say they want better alignment between cost and price and so when you have a huge fixed cost the the delivery of the very first electron or the very first gallon of water is the most expensive so um we'll have to look at that in rate design we'll also have to look at that when we think about our customer care programs and and now Deborah wants to correct me on everything I just said that all right just to add and uh and recognizing your concern on cost control um we have the actuals for 2023 we tend to be conservative in our uh forecasting of vacancies and so those aren't quite Apples to Apples but yes uh

1:43:37 they certainly did rise uh they drop by 10 in our forecast next year a total FTE and then it flattens out uh so so um that doesn't speak to inflation but it does uh speak to our uh Staffing levels and then uh I did want to call out that uh our uh average usage as well as our at the 1050 and the uh 1600 which we typically view as our single family all electric uh those are right at our average increase and our customer care data actually tells us that our limited income folks are spread across the range

1:44:23 of consumption uh in almost the exact same uh rate that the rest of our population is great thank you for that clarification and yeah I understand it's just like I said on the when you see a 19% increase it's worth at least giving voice to it Sonia yeah and I had the same concern that's why I raised the question the preting questions about the the wages so I appreciate the extra context there um another piece that I wondered about is so we had we had a contract that we passed recently I didn't know if a part of that was folded into um you know these larger increases

1:45:08 so I asked the open-ended question because I didn't want to make any assumptions but that that was another part of what I was trying to get at yeah yes it was just directly and also we did and I believe right it was a year and a half ago we as part of that we did a full market assessment for both the union and the non-union groups and that was part of part of that escalation as well okay and and are there additional escalations built in then in further years because it's a multi-year contract yeah there's there's a midyear check-in where we will do another market assessment is my understanding I'm not the exact expert on this and I'm going to look at maybe some others to do this um there's a cost of living every other year and then there's a midterm check-in and in this four-year contract and so I

1:45:56 think I don't know exactly what the escalation is but is that about right that sounds about right I'd have to look it up myself so yes there's some escalation built in one is based on a reassessment just a market when we say market comparator utility checkin and then the other one would be based on a on a CPI okay and then the other um you know underlying question here is obviously there there's a lot of it that's Market based it's also inflationary based I don't deny that those um situations exist out there but again I I want to stress and I know I've stressed in the past what are we doing to help build people up so that we have a pool of people here locally that can actually take these jobs um if there are things that we can do programs that we

1:46:41 can support and partner with to ensure that we have groups of people that would come in to help support that I think that that would really be beneficial to our community locally thank you thanks other comments take just a moment um again thank you as always for distilling complex financial information to a way that I can understand it um your reports and presentations are consistently clear and so I very much appreciate that can we go back to the slide that was showing the different percentage increase in electric rates by demand yeah so uh the question I have here and this may be obvious but uh is the difference in percentage in the right column that is

1:47:27 that all driven by the fact the $5 fixed fee gets kind of diluted as we go down the rate the different categories is that we're seeing well the $5 increase wasn't the the extent of the increase there wasn't a change in the volumetric rate as well okay um so there is p packs so you can see like as we go down to the the 1050 which is our like average usage in the median household income chart the increase for those customers is $10 or 7% it's just that $ Five Doll is a higher percentage increase than the volumetric rate right there was my question was were we changing did we have a different um increase in volumetric rate for different categories

1:48:14 but we don't it's just that that fixed fee gets spread over more thank you okay that's my clarified question that's all I had thank you um so you wanted feedback from us do you want I saw there were some specific recommended things that you would like to see from us you want specific Direction at this point we're taking the direction here this evening to prepare materials to bring back to you in uh what feels like only a week with this board meeting uh the feedback I was hearing is that you want us to that it's important that we continue to contain costs uh I believe keeping an eye on labor and total costs in general and that there

1:48:59 are some of followup questions on leeberg uh that uh really probably relate more to uh getting some input from engineering on that sounds good yeah and I'm not seeing anybody suggesting to uh that we develop a budget using different assumptions that are set in here right it feels like that there's consensus the group go the right direction please kovski the only question that I have is then we talked about 7% on electric um and then another 4% when when BPA comes in so will that be a supplemental budget that will come

1:49:45 at at us in when we see that process or when when and where will we vote on that will that be in this vote that we're going to do in December so the budget associated with BPA is is all in there so when so approving this budget means approving all of what we have forecasted for expenditures for the remainder of the year we just will not begin to collect and we will only collect the actual pass through from BPA which um you all have given us a policy provision to be able to pass that through okay so won't be a separate separate uh action item yeah okay thank you Frank I would put a caveat on that

1:50:32 commissioner barovsky the the only caveat to that would be if we get something incredibly unexpected from bonab Bill either much higher or much lower um we we think we have a good enough relationship this is this Bonville has a long process in this but if there was something that was sort of out of left field we may have to come back to the board and and talk through that and and if there were things that we needed to amend we would work with the board on that great thank you all right if there's nothing else from us or from you looks like we're good thank you thank you uh I'm gonna propose we just take the break as it's scheduled here um

1:51:17 right now between now and the next um topic so we'll break for 10 minutes is ah there it is thank you uh calling back to order the November 12th meeting of the Eugene Water and Electric Board and we are on item 14 that EES go live update good evening Commissioners so for the record Travis canab Chief Information officer I'm joined by Julie M Chief customer officer officer and yeah we're going to talk a little bit about our go live we promised that we were going to be back last month and we didn't um not because we didn't want to but there's kind of a packed agenda and

1:52:03 we did a correspondence but um we are two weeks from tomorrow that um when we start our go live activities so we got pretty apt time to come in and uh chat with you about what's going on I apologize right now I do not like slides with animation but I couldn't figure out a better way to do this so we're gonna have animations today all right I'm going to start us off so we are 18 months in to season one and just can't stress enough how hard our project teams have been working we hear from people outside of eweb our contractors our partners how unusual it is to have a project of this size and scope have zero turnover and I feel like I'm G to jinx it but we're two weeks to go and we have

1:52:50 zero turnovers so just huge shout out and thank you for the team's dedication we're so appreciative of everything that they've done for the project so training began in mid- October it's classroom style training it's still underway and we are going to go all the way through the week of go live with training it's going really well we are checking in with managers and supervisors next week for their team's Readiness and we'll still have a little bit of time to make some adjustments but we're feeling good about it and last month we started adjusting our change management messaging from awareness we're getting a new system we're moving to operational Readiness so this is how we're going to operate in the system and this is how we're going to support people in the

1:53:37 system so we've gone through uh one dress rehearsal and so a dress rehearsal is practice for go live where we literally time it we start at um Mid like for example we're doing a dress rehearsal that starts tonight at midnight and the teams will work work through the evening just like they would at go live to make sure that it's a tried intrude process and and we know how to handle situations when they come up and make sure that all of the eyes are dotted and the tees are crossed so we did one dress rehearsal in October and we had really good results from it um second dress rehearsal like I said is starting tonight at midnight and we'll go through the next three to four days where we'll have checkpoints throughout the process and go no go decision

1:54:22 and really just practicing it so when it comes time for that go live it's a really a nothing burger and everybody is well versed in what's happening so lots of work there um do want to talk a little bit about risks so we've talked about risks you know as I've presented and as we' presented in the past just one of the risks that we just wanted to call out is this institutional knowledge so and it'll lead towards another bullet coming but we have to remember we have 25 and 30 years of knowing how we do things in the system knowing how to support the system knowing when the system goes down oh that's because of this it happened at six o'clock in the morning every time on

1:55:08 the first of February for the last 10 years or whatever right so we do have a lot of institutional knowledge and as of goli we're obviously going to have zero minutes of institutional knowledge with this system which is just going to drive challenges and support challenges and Julie's going to talk about that in um little bit the other thing that we know is a risk is you can't spend 18 months developing a system no matter how much out of the box you want it to be without potential for defects and bugs that go live and so we are preparing for that that's part of the the um dress rehearsals that we practice that and and look at those bugs but we do know that there's going to be things that we're going to have to adjust to an adapt to as we go live and so we'll talk a little bit about how we're going to do that within the system but then also how we're we're prepping for

1:55:54 that so we started last month with some really targeted specific customer Communications and this was really just to smaller groups whose programs they were enrolled in were impacted by some changes with EES so started small this month we're we're working broader so in addition to social media messaging and website messaging most customers should receive about five touch points of communication about the ru out so there's going to be an email there's a postcard there's a bill insert we're doing on Bill messaging and there is the current connections newsletter so what we're saying in those is that we have a new customer information and Billing System we also have upgraded our portal

1:56:39 we're going to be taking down the portal for a couple days at the end of November when we bring it back up it's going to look a little bit different we do have some enhanced security so we're going to ask you to change your password and there's also Al going to be multiactor authentication very high level broad messaging just awareness out there that when you see your portal it's going to look a little bit different and it's still ours so we will continue Communications through December after go live we'll be sharing with customers their new account number we will have proactive Communications if we do discover any bugs in the roll out that Travis was mentioning we'll be very proactive about that and what customers need to do if anything um and most like we will be addressing some longer hold

1:57:24 times for customer service so some of you were here when we rolled out the portal and we had very long hold times and so this time around we're trying to learn from that and we're doing a few things differently through a lot of hard work from the project teams we are not requiring customers to re-register or reset up their wallets that's something that caused a lot of a lot of confusion and a lot of calls for customers we've Steed we've stuffed up quite a few csas which will be help and we also have a dedicated team to provide Next Level support for customers who need a little bit of extra help in the portal and with all of that we are still expecting longer hold times and it's what Travis talked to about the institutional knowledge every single task a CSA is

1:58:10 going to do now when they answer the phone it's going to be a new procedure in a new system and it is just going to take longer so we're doing lots of expectation setting we're expectation setting with staff in the need to be patient with yourself you know the basics but it's going to take a little while longer to to do what you normally fly through we're setting customers expectations so we'll do some Communications if if and when those call times go up we'll let people know better times to call we have overtime we can use to do call backs after hours we have a number of different strategies we can employ to kind of reduce that impact and we're here tonight setting your expectations you may hear about from customers the whole time are longer the portal looks different and we want you to feel good about asking customers for

1:58:57 a little bit of patience you all have my contact information you can send them to me we'll get people call backs uh but we are expecting hold times and we don't want to we don't want to pretend we won't um it's really normal for a transition of this size and we're employing all the strategies that we have to to try to mitigate them so go live December 2nd um as I mentioned or as we mentioned in in our presentation a couple months ago the work starts ahead of time so two weeks from tomorrow uh or yeah two weeks from tomorrow uh the teams will start doing the cut over and it'll bleed um all the way through the Thanksgiving Day weekend um there will be on Friday afternoon or evening a point of no return

1:59:43 where everything's gone well everything's planned to go well the rest of the weekend and we're going to flip that switch and make that decision and then there's no go backs at that point and so we'll make sure that we're communicating those things with the executive team and Frank and and you all and so you'll kind of know where we're at and when we hit that that positive step the other thing here is um I have IC and hyperare Command Center so the project has a hyperare command center that they're going to be going through we're also going to stand up a soft IC at that time so we have dedicated folks being that LE on in that that leadership between what else is happening at the utility and the project so as an example Frank mentioned earlier we're in soft ICS

2:00:29 today because of the potential Windstorm that would be something that our IC Commander would be coordinating with um Tyler and his group and making sure that everything is still okay to move forward with and we don't have something that would would stop us from moving our go life um from the hyperare command center perspective as Julie said people are going to be doing work that they've never done in this system before other than in training but never in production so we have there's things happening like floor Walkers so we'll have somebody walking around the floor up with the csas and they can raise their hand and say they need help while they're on phone um with a customer and we'll we'll have somebody there that can help them and if there's a bug or something that comes up that's beyond that support um

2:01:14 that's what the command center is and so this room will act as the command center we'll have people from the project the leads um our developers the Lo Consultants will be here and we'll use this as a command center to to solve any of the problems that come up and help with decision making the last bullet um I'm going to share is a little bit about future and what happens kind of post go live and we've talked a little bit about this in our previous presentations and normally these things because it's going to be some board action we would do on consent item but we've been talking a lot about this project it's a big project and so we just want it to be very transpar and and talk to you guys or talk you through these two things so beyond go live we do have some action that um we're going to

2:01:59 ask for today and we'll talk about that next so the first one is abent consultings so back in this box on the left is just a um rinse and reuse of a a previous slide that I shared we got approval from the board in 2023 to sign a um a contract with Avent Consulting for five million over five years all of that was in the budget everything that I'm going to talk about today too I'm going to back up a slide I don't want you thinking about this I forgot to mention this everything we're talking about today is all in the budget it's all in the long-term financial plan it's in the budget for 2025 26 and Beyond it's all part of the es um planning so really the the action we're looking for is just the mechanism for um signing the

2:02:44 contracts so now I'll start over so Advent Advent Consulting we signed that contract with them in 2023 they provided services like a program director project manager QA business analyst we want to expand that um and so what you see in the middle here is what we shared in August as well is that we're going to do stabilization and continuous Improvement and then prepping for future seasons in 2025 as opposed to jumping into an implementation that's still going to take a lot of work it's going to take Direction it's going to take developers and so Evan has been such a solid partner with us they've been so strong and really instrumental and helping us move this far into the project and helping with the success of it that we'd like to continue that relationship with them and so we'd like to increase that

2:03:29 spend to 10 million over the five years from um the existing five and again all in the budget all um all plan for the other one is scw and so again back to uh looking back at the history here in 2021 gave a presentation and we talked about why a product like sap and if you just focus in on this green bar right below that says that an um an Erp an enterprise resource planning system is defined as the ability to deliver on deliver an integrated Suite of business applications and so that's what we've done with sap and what we'll continue to build on and so that's why in the center here you see sap is the foundation is what we're trying to depict here and

2:04:14 then we've built some of the portal modules and program management and notifications and enterprise portal which is for our um commercial customers or larger customers we want to continue to build on that in 2025 and sew is the developer of the product it's purchased off the sap price list and it's this you know all built to to really be that Suite of integrated products and it's just one of those pieces and so we've decided that in 2025 as we look at the enhancements and that continuous Improvement we really want to focus time a lot of our energy and time on customer facing capabilities so we want to add to the portal and and add

2:04:59 that digital connection with the with our customers and focus on that customer experience and sews the the mechanism to make that happen and so again already in the budget we're a little bit ahead of schedule we thought we'd be doing some rfps potentially and and we don't need to and so really just looking for that approval to to sign this contract with W to help us do that development in the future years and so to summarize definitely want to open up for questions as well um but the two actions that we're asking for is with one abant to to increase that threshold and then approval with the sew

2:05:44 contract that is it all right so president McCrae will hand it back to you great thank you questions Sonia want to start yeah I do have a few questions um well one thank you you I'm really excited that this is going to go forward this has been something I've talked about the entire time I've been on this board so it's exciting that's really happen um just a couple of um quick questions about um communication uh to customers so there were five different touch points with customers do you have the um like any of the data on the open rates of those emails that went out I I just open the current connections which you know I always appreciate I think it's beautiful but I had to swipe eight times on my phone to get down to the place where it actually talks about this because it's not up at the top the title

2:06:30 of the you know the email is EB's current connections newsletter which I got to tell you I mean I'm EB nerd so I read them but a lot of people are like okay newsletter that's nice so do you have any sense of like how many people are actually opening them and might actually know about the thing because I have a concern that that people don't know at all and it's going to be a surprise yeah I would say broadly it's why we're employing at least five right so we have social media we have our website and then we have five different methods of communication because there most people are you know have their favorite method if at all right that they that they use so if we can get to them through one method that's going to

2:07:17 be a win I don't have the open rates I don't actually know that the email has gone out yet um so we can definitely check back on that and so there are more there are more emails that that's coming out and will they be one that it's like only on this so there's not 15 other um important things that are I think the current connections newsletter and probably the bill insert are only the only two that have multiple topics on them the rest of them will be very focused just on on this changes coming to the customer portal and so if you're signed up to get electronic billing you only get that kind of standard valued eweb customer um is there any way to put a message on that to people who get their bills

2:08:03 electronically that will not get the insert I don't I don't personally get it I mean I think a lot of people don't actually get a physical copy in the mail um but I definitely open this one up because it's got my my bill number on it I believe the bill insert on those is at the bottom of the when you get the your bill is ready you might have to go to your bill and then you scroll and the attachments are yeah there's not there's not attachment on the most recent one okay anyway that was on November 4th I'm voting a friend with Jen in the back yeah Julie's correct um to get the if you're on ebilling in order to see the bill bill insert you do have to click into the bill and it's a PDF Bill and then the PDF is there with

2:08:48 the bill insert um and I would just reiterate we will be able to um give you data on open rates and click rates for the email specific about the portal go live and in addition if customers miss the bill insert the emails the social media the postcards that are being mailed to their house and they they just miss all of that and then they log into the portal after go live and they're like whoa what's going on this looks different we'll have um ready messaging uh like point of service messaging available to them that says yes this is the UF portal it does look different click here to learn more um two more question on can we get

2:09:34 our bill history will we have any Bill history for certain amount of time or do people need to download it if they want it out of the portal now there will be Bill history yeah how I do not know how far the PDFs are going back but so you would have a year plus one well we're getting 13 months of billing history into the new system but I don't know what PDFs are going to be available it might be more than that we can check that that's yeah so if people want that they might that might be something to think about um and then this is this is a a point of um you know risk when you switch systems now we're opening ourselves up for a security you know challenge because

2:10:19 people are you know they they like to jump on those things so what are the kind of things we're doing to the extent that you can share just let me know that you're you've thought about it there plans in place the messaging actually shows people what it should look like what kind of security measures do um customers know that hey when I when I log into this and it looks different than I expect I know I'm still logging into the eweb website not some other random thing that was emailed to me I would say that for one it's it's not going to look dramatically different I mean we're still using all of our branding the buttons are going to look similar I mean from a look and feel Jen correct me where I'm wrong too but um from a look and feel it's certainly going to be an

2:11:04 upgraded experience but it's not like a departure from something massive um we're requiring people to um like Julie said earlier change their password and we're doing multiactor authentication now which means you got to know something about you to to move forward and so typically and I don't know how they're doing the security specifically on this but typically would require them to receive an email with what email address that we have about those so we're going to send something to your email address that only you could use to then register and then I can tell you the base system itself that we have spent a tremendous

2:11:49 amount of time working on security what what does it be separation of Duties to encryption and DPN tunnels I mean we can nerd out all you want F that okay all right well um thank you for that and then um the the contract so there's an interest in increasing the contract I I didn't see that necessarily in the said information only so is this something we're actually would approve now or is this something that back for we're just doing Direction now no this I would like we're looking for Action today that that and like I said we could have done consent item but we just wanted to talk to you all about it and be able to answer any questions that

2:12:34 you had about them so that's what I'm curious about what exactly we're getting for the five um you alerted to some of the kind of enhanced customer I'm curious if we you know I mean obviously we're working with this company so and it's been going really well and ahead of schedule and so there's benefits there and I'm assuming that it makes we can do that under Contracting laws and all that but yes yep so specifically we're getting developers we're getting business analysts that understand the sap landscape while we're learning it and these are things that will then um go down as as our teams

2:13:21 start becoming more proficient in the system and and we have that expertise it's so it's training of staff to I wouldn't call it training per se I would say so the two separate contracts so if we look at Avant first one we continue to lean into them for project managers business analysts um business process exception management so um and then developers and so as we look at as I if I use it as an example the fees that we talked about with the City of Eugene if we go to implement those things and there's custom development that needs to happen in that our teams don't know how to do that custom development right now and so we need to lean into consulting company to help us

2:14:08 with that and actually way back in the time machine that was one of the benefits of of purchasing a product like sap was we could lean it to Consultants so staff could run the day-to-day business and as we come up with projects and efforts we could lean into Consultants to help us with some of this work we just know we have a massive amount of work in 2025 that we're going to have to to work through Frank yeah I think really valid comments uh commissioner Carlson I would describe the contract piece of this um as something where we started with uh the basics with these two organizations we were in season one we wanted to to understand the value that they brought

2:14:53 to this kind of process we're now looking at if you and if you want to think of it as an additional task order you know we're moving from what we have now um we're think you know we're going to add in season two and season three additional functionality and we need uh the kinds of services that they' provided in season one to extend to those and and we're we're talking about things related to new rates um and and other things that we may add along Ong the way so I would think of it as almost a task order extension of of contracts um the other thing that you brought up commissioner Carlson I think is relative to security I think is a really good thing for us to be aware of and that's that whenever you have a pretty massive change as an

2:15:39 organization there's the opportunity for people to ghost as eweb and I think that's really what they're talking about it's not just a systems issue but people can take advantage of the opportunity to say oh eweb is doing this hey click here and I'll solve your well clicking there might take you to someplace um not not so pleasant so I think as both cyber security as well as just our our our communication staff and and our um customer service agents and anybody who's engaged with customers needs to be on the outlook for for signs that people may be impersonating eweb um in in situations like this so it's not necessarily a systems issue we have lots

2:16:25 of security built into this it's it's beyond that and I think as an organization we need to pay attention to that brown yeah I'm confused you can maybe help me so um I too saw this as an informational item are you asking for five million or 10 million so on on the first one you approved back in 2023 5 million over five years and we're asking to increase that from five to 10 okay so that's five and then sew five million another five so you're asking for 10 million okay so um process I I too question about this we're just a week before going live and you're asking for another $10 million and I'm really worried about rates and we're we're going and I know we probably

2:17:11 don't have a choice here but I'm just thinking about process where we go through this process we get right down to going live and now we we have we have to give another $10 million so just careful I'm just trying I want to answer the question right so not asking for additional 10 million on the project these these dollars have been budgeted for from day one if they're already in the budget already in the budget so this is just like when we get a consent calendar item that says 10 million you're going to just use it's already in the budget we're just asking for the approval to sign the two contracts okay sorry it wasn't clear no that just clarifies it for me because I kind of felt backed up a little bit but now do that well thank you I appreciate it so my my other question is is then

2:17:57 the non-english-speaking customers get really intimidated with change are we're going to have that um element of our contract of our customers covered so when they confront change change scares a lot of the people I know that don't speak English and they're afraid to engage are we going to have that covered um in Communications I am going to check I actually don't know which of our Communications are translated into into Spanish so I will definitely check on that appreciate that thank you that's all I got Frank I was just going to clarify um Travis that th this isn't something we're bringing as part of the the go live effort correct th this is not a go live this is beyond

2:18:43 go live yeah for sure it's bgl which is a new acronym beyond go live so that's that's that's the new one I I would I would Echo and I think just for for our purposes that when we we go to extend contracts we we probably need to go through a little bit more of a formal process on this just going forward yeah I would um Echo that and I think if it if it doesn't mess us up on the timing I'd love to see the same standard uh memo that we get for other extensions of contracts um just to even if it was just the scope of work you know spelled out for those that take it in in writing you know differently than we than we hear it I think that'd be

2:19:29 valuable I'd propose that if again if it doesn't mess up if if we need this authorization tonight we should have that we should know that and if we don't then propose we punt that to next meeting we do not need it tonight like I said we're a little bit ahead of schedule on this and so happy to write up two consent items for next board meeting so I work for the rest of the board okay great thanks Travis Indy so I have a question for people who are not uh like they're not internet savvies people who still write checks to pay their bills will they have to update their their customer portal or can they just continue like businesses usual they

2:20:16 can absolutely continue receiving a paper bill in the mail writing out their check and mailing it in that is probably the one process that is not changing yeah nobody has to participate in the customer portal if they don't want to okay yeah they'll have to write upside down and backwards but other than that it'll be okay I just know that I mean we just think that everybody's computer savvy and some people just aren't and I um Echo Sonia's concern with just I think about my elderly dad and I'm always warning him don't click on things that you don't know what they are and um I would hate for him to get his power like and water turned off because he's afraid that it is some kind of fishing thing right right no there's definitely

2:21:02 a a path for everybody right you can drive your check into the Dropbox you can mail your check you Walmart and may there's there's non-digital ways to to interact with us and I assume that we'll be monitoring if there's some like odd drop off in people paying their bills on time for whatever reason or people aren't signing up for the portal like you have ways to monitor that like something's not going right here with customers right part of what you said is um Travis described as it's a business process exception management so it's why we bring on extra people to help us once that first that First Billing run goes out we are watching everything to see if there is anything unusual about about anything so we're going to have a lot of exceptions that we're going to be working through just to make sure

2:21:48 everything's working as it should y thank you there certain waves not everybody all at once it's right yes we build bicycle Roski thank you um couple of questions and then a comment um so you mentioned that you're going to stand up this this room with customer service people and uh person that is walking around and if you raise your hand you can do it um I'm wondering and that's that's a go live but I'm I'm concerned about two months from go live when

2:22:34 somebody didn't pay their bill because they didn't do something right are we giving the person who either raises their hand or the person that's walking around raising their hand the authority to help like extra fees and charges that are going to be incurred by by her father not figuring out the portal correctly and and missing and missing a a payment and now they've got a late charge are we empowering our employees to not have to go three rungs up to get that approval is that something we've thought about say two things so we have set down

2:23:21 the majority of the fees going into this and we will decide when we're going to turn back on the fees and so again just you know to your point we want to make sure everything's working well before we turn that back on and it's not just the floor Walkers and the and the leads who will have that all of the csas have the ability to do we things and we'll know if there's one issue with one customer there's probably going to be more so they would have the ability to do that we also it's why we have St subject matter experts on site who know the system really well so we can get to that really quickly troubleshoot it apply and fix across a group of customers if we need to okay um the second question is kind of related to these new contracts

2:24:08 the first contract we got a project manager are we going to get a project manager with the sew or is it just as needed so um the Avant group is going to be our delivery manager project manager that will will do that work all of the scw will have their own internal project managers that partner with us but okay and then the last thing this goes to the communication plan um I've been really uh encouraged by the relationship we have with our local news Medias uh and getting our word out um I see one in the back of the room there um I think it would be great if we could you know make

2:24:55 sure that we're putting press releases out and hopefully putting people in front of cameras because a lot of people like like son said she's scrolling in four things but if they see it on on K or in the Register Guard it's going to it will resonate I think a lot to a lot of people that are not techsavvy um and so if I mean obviously that you have to have willing part ERS on both sides of that but it seems to me that our Communications Department has has established a well a well organized uh relationship with our local media outlets and I think if we can tap into that as much as we can that would be great um so that's just a heads up from from things that I've seen you know

2:25:41 there's been stories on College Hill there's been stories on all kinds of things and again that's shows um the great work that our our com people are doing um and then lastly uh you know if you were in the room earlier today you heard that I was in uh a fifth grade class today at I think this one was the one at Edison and one of the people said oh I've gotta I my my dad works at eweb and do you know such and such and I said well no what what does he do and he said they said well he's in a room and he does a lot of stuff on computers and and I and I me I mentioned to him I said that person is just as important as

2:26:26 the person that's in the bucket truck going up on the line and they do a lot of work that make sure that we get our water and our power so there was a fifth grader that and a whole fifth grade class that learned how important the people that sit in an office and work on computers are so I just wanted to give you that feedback thanks John Frank did you have followup for that not the last comment but the question he are you I'm accused of being a fifth grader is that no just just a couple of things um first of all I think we recognize as we go into this that that Communications is incredibly important and and not just in one format but in in many formats and I think that's important I was also going to mention before Julie mentioned it that

2:27:11 during this process we're going to have a certain degree of Grace and amnesty that we Grant to people you know we'll turn fee fees on we're not going to assume everything's working great and so we'll we'll approach it um from a high degree of of sort of Grace and amnesty and then um part of the reason that you go into and I've heard it soft IC I've heard it warm ICS ICS light I'm not quite sure what it is I just need to Commissioners you need to get your IC training that's a plug that Rod wanted me to make but we'll be in ICS for some period of time so that we can have the ability to react on the Fly raise the flag get some help two months down the road um we'll have the processes

2:27:56 established um further to have handle this as a standard process so uh within the first month or so we're going to be in this this sort of hyperare mode and then we'll move into more of a standard process so um hopefully that the you we won't just be discovering all kinds of new things in two months but well we'll we'll be prepared either way I'm gonna take just a moment and make a couple comments and give it to you uh Julie I was thrilled to hear you say that people aren't going to have to re-register or reup their wallet so they can do payments the same way they have done thank you that is fantastic that was my first question and I was so glad that you already took care of that and I just want to say this is a big project

2:28:41 we been talking about this since I got on the board what almost four years ago and um I know it's been a lot of work to get here and so congratulations and hope you all get sleep on December 2nd no well I wish you sleep even though it's notna thanks for the thanks for the work you more Carlson oh I just um along the amnesty and kind of Grace um the the messaging around we're shutting off your power assuming that that will change or I hope that that will be kind of a hey we recently changed our systems we noticed you didn't pay not this is your first notice of getting your power shut off like there's other avenues that we will assume first

2:29:26 that it's on our end versus sending out these scary new because I think that's that's more like jerking to people I don't know the exact wording commissioner Carlson I just know that Deborah Hart really likes to be collecting her money and so I'm not sure that I'm of course I'm teasing but I I don't know the exact processor wording but I I know that we'll we'll treat it appropriately yeah there are steps that we go through as we start turning back on that collection process there's steps you need to make sure that we're hitting so we make sure you know that there aren't a large number of people that something happened to that that they

2:30:12 didn't pay their bills so you go through those assessment checks and then you decide to start turning back on the the process it's kind of a R back up some automat you know automatic things it's like oh that got sent out okay thank you great thanks if there's nothing else we'll go to the next topic thank you both uh water system development charges Frank Deborah Karen just Frank got

2:30:57 I'm glad that she cares about money actually thank you Deborah so Commissioners good evening I'll I'll um try and get us back on track and we ran a little bit over on that item I think we're still on time from an agenda perspective and so um try to take a look at s system development charges I'm just going to run through a couple of things what we're really looking for um tonight from Commissioners is your perspective on a few questions that we can use to incorporate into some policy work that we'd like to bring back to the board when we talk about policies again um and like I said earlier we've rescheduled that for March um and this would be inclusive of that that policy work and so um yes sdc's are an opportunity for

2:31:45 utilities to pay for capacity upfront it's not necessarily mandatory it is an opportunity we do see that there's an opportunity here to codify some of the work we do around sdc's part of the challenge with SDC work is you don't do it on a routine enough basis you need to find a way to capture your priorities your mechanisms your philosophies because you typically look at this every five years or every 10 years and so you want to be able to pass something along in in knowledge to to Future boards uh future management um there's a few other things and I'll I'll kind of this is this is a way of really sort of trying to capture sdc's and and really what it is doing is

2:32:31 it is recognizing that when you're building infrastructure um or you have infrastructure that has capacity there that capacity is worth something and is typically worth uh the portion of the capacity that you use to build it and that is either through a past build and what it's valued at today or there is some degree of capacity that's built into your future Capital work um it's probably reasonable to think that even if you're not doing projects that are specific for capacity that you would actually build some capacity in most of this infrastructure last for 50 60 80 100 years and you would recognize that in that process you're going to uh build

2:33:16 in some capacity into that into that Capital work and so there certain Capital work there is certain existing um infrastructure that is eligible for sdc's which means that as someone comes along and and consumes or you allocate that capacity to that developer or to that Builder or that homeowner whoever is is consuming that capacity that there is value to that and therefore for charge to that and then the question that really comes out of this that we'd like to get some guidance from the board on is is who and how is that paid for if that capacity has value then uh somebody um who is consuming that value um should

2:34:03 um U pay for that should um uh and that can be split between either sdc's these are costs that are actually incurred so if it is not captured in an SDC paid for by the developer who may pass that on to owners or tenants it's a very small group in that sense if it's not paid for by that group then it is those are real costs they're paid for and absorbed in rates and so there's a kind of who pays uh in this scenario not whether this project is done or not it's of that capacity that is realized or is eligible who is who should pay for that uh philosophically and so what we're asking for the board tonight as we think about

2:34:49 policy bringing this back to the board um there's a few sort of key questions that we would like uh you to have a discussion on it's not necessary for the board to come to um a 5 Zer consensus on any of these items we do want to understand your your varied perspectives and the first one would be uh when a project requires or consume system capacity should the SDC eligible value of that capacity be you know paid for by that project paid for in the rate base is there some splitting of that value that should occur um as sort of one question the other one uh sdc's in some

2:35:34 cases um Can are those something that should be should it be different for different classes you know is is a a home project different from a commercial project that can be a bit administratively challenging to to do um we have um in the past used grants uh under some cases to I'm not going to say wave sdc's but a grant has been used to offset sdc's for things such as affordable housing or um something that has some degree of community good um that has the mechanism that we've used in the past that's probably how we would prefer to do it in the future as opposed to having different secc's um and then the third one which

2:36:19 was part of the discussion earlier was we've tried to align um the the actual calculation of the sdc's whatever that level might be uh with things that are consistent with other development charges for example with the City of Eugene that's where the square footage came up with um it it makes it very clear for developers that they don't have to parse their work out differently for an eweb versus a City of Eugene so there's you know is their value U from the commissioner's perspective to using approaches that align with with other types of charges that developers in this case or homeowners whoever is doing the construction might might um might be um having to adhere to or or U or execute

2:37:06 on so the first one is kind of who pays the second one is is there a way or preferred method for which Commissioners would want to uh look at subsidizing certain types of development and then the third one is do you agree with the the um our approach around aligning with other types of charges associated with capacity or development so those are the big questions we'd like you to discuss and like I said consensus is not necessarily required but we'd definitely like to understand your perspectives on these three back to you great thanks questions Andy I don't know that I have any questions but I can tell you what I think about these three um questions

2:37:53 that you've posed that I think that um SDC should be paid as part of the project that um that that it should be passed on to the specific users um I do think that there should be some type of grant program for um things that are considered Community Goods so for affordable housing I support that um and then I also concur that um we should align our sdc's with the approach that the city takes so so um really appreciate you jumping in you get the do we have any eweb chocolate bars left we could we could give to many so um so thank you the sort of the flip side of of I'll say

2:38:41 um the developer pain in in the which is what you you proposed is um do we want to Foster further development by rate casing it I mean that's the tradeoff that we're looking at and so um now if you if you go back to um to this this question of who pays if you look at if you're doing development and let's say you're doing housing and the developer is paying the developer will likely pass that on to whoever's owning or managing and so those costs would be really borne by a set of tenants that's a a smaller uh part of the population as opposed to now socializing the opposite would be rate basing it and socializing it across the entire customer base now if we want

2:39:27 to I'll say actively promote certain types of development um there is value in capacity we we've said that um you you might say well let's socialize more of that as opposed to okay the beneficiary it has value to the property it has value to those people those people should bear that cost um and I think that's that's what what you proposed the flip side of that is the board could look at this as some way to promote certain types of development um that would be uh the cost of or the value of that capacity broadened out across the entire rate base I think my thoughts on that are I personally have some thoughts on what type of development should be prioritized I don't know that that's the job of this

2:40:13 board to do it I would love for that to be maybe a conversation that we have in our meeting meetings that we have with the city um because the city has Housing and Development goals and so to me that would be like a natural place where we kind of um maybe align some of our policies with the larger development goals of the city but I don't know that this board in general should really um weigh in on how to what to prioritize development wise is that kind of what you're you're asking sure and and I think the what you also said um commissioner slosberg was that okay the from a capacity value perspective

2:40:59 It's associated with the development now if there's certain kinds of development that we we think are important and have Community value the grant program would basically subsidize or offset those and that would be based on what we decide is community good which might align the city and that's kind of what I'm hearing from yeah and again I think that this is like a great a great example of ways that the the liaison that we have with the city like that that small group could really kind of hone the um the way that we do this program now give given what you said it would also probably significantly increase the cost of those sdc's if 100%

2:41:45 of that capacity is compared to where we are today it would likely drive those up which we also know that those have gone those are going to go up because we haven't looked at this as routinely as we should Brown and then perovsky thank you so question um so sdc's came in 12 years ago about that so everything built in this community before that was built as the capacity was built with rates so right now if um I tear down a restaurant on between 6th and 7th right where they merge so restaurant burn down I put in a car wash and a sea store um I get credit for the sdcs that that that was there

2:42:30 what was there that's the way it works and so you get credit for what was there not what you're putting in so if there was $100,000 in SDC credits you get them but if you only use 50,000 of them where do those SDC credits go that capacity because there's a ton of capacity that's not used you because there's no more Green Field development around here it's all going to be Brownfield we're going to redevelop properties so if you redevelop a property you tear one down you get credit for what was there on your new sdc's so you're not very few people can use them so if you had $100,000 if restaurant had $100,000 in SDC fees for water and I put in a car wash and it only uses 50 that's a real life example where does that $50,000 with a capacity go Mr Brown I'm not familiar with the

2:43:17 crediting of credit back of sdc's I'm not sure whether well that may be how the city does it I'm not as familiar with you get you get Transportation Parks sewer uh water sure and I don't know have we historically credited back to you know but W's online and he may I I don't know the answer to your question fully well I'm trying to do is just see there's a pool of credits that that's that's just getting left on the table and somehow incorporate that into this conversation I think that um some of that commissioner Brown and will go to Wy who's on the big screen in the back um the the there is some value to the

2:44:03 unused capacity that was um that was there I don't know about this crediting back if you reverse that so you can't transfer them you you got to use them on site to one we do it I'm not sure on the credit back but we do take into account if there was a previous SDC applied to that property and a a new uh development takes over that property that gets subtracted from whatever stdc they pay for right so if you had 100,000 there and you only use 50 there's 50,000 in SDC credits that can't be used any other place and that's 50,000 in capacity that's back into the system but

2:44:48 nobody gets to use it right okay so I'm not sure exactly how that I'm saying like if there's there was $50,000 paid in stc's and a new development comes in and needs 100,000 we would only charge them 50,000 that's correct but if you but if it's $100,000 yeah you know you you get credit for what was there so you tear down a restaurant it had to replace it would have been 100,000 you take 50 out there's 50 back in the system and just disappears of capacity and I'm not sure a situ ation like that I'd have to dig into that and I can get back to you on it yeah commissioner Brown we can look into that specific I think that if we approach this where sdc's really focus the SDC discussion on yet to be used

2:45:35 unused capacity we'll we'll figure out the crediting piece of it but on unused capacity going forward um how would you approach how would you want to approach unused capacity let's say it's either in there already someone is adding to it or um you know we we're we're having to add capacity for that so that's that's I I guess like to use it for like Mindy's case she said she wants to grant for low-income housing so the restaurant we tore down on Sixth and 7th or burned down had 100,000 bucks there and we could only use 50 there's 50,000 of that capacity that stayed in the system can't be used anywhere else it just disappeared why can't can't we get 50,000 credit and let her use it for her

2:46:21 low-income housing project instead of having to take it out of somebody else's spot is is my point because I my concern is that these SDC fees this last proposal you've had were off the charts and it it was a significant increase I think the the the off to chart piece would be so this is this part down here where you have X or Y and 100% M this is a zero sum game so if we don't charge an SDC that goes into future rates right so somebody is paying for or that no matter no matter what and we we have budgeted in a certain degree of SDC assumptions going forward and if

2:47:07 we back off that assumption for for whatever reason it should it could be crediting it could be that the board just decides we don't want to do sdc's that becomes rate based so there is some degree of having to draw the line and look forward as opposed to totally looking back on you know on on this issue relative to crediting so that's that's the piece that I think we're trying to wrestle through first is if there's value in capacity somebody pays for it either through sdcs or through the rate base so okay I'm I can have this conversation with later I'll use it h as an example I I think there's you

2:47:53 you brought up commissioner Brown I think some some things that we have to make sure we're covering which is there's there's some intricacies into the examples here that we when we start talking about policy we want to make sure that we're not creating some unintended consequences from it well and one of your questions was should we follow the city of Eugene's methodology for sec's for consistency right that was one of your last questions on the slide if if they're doing um some sort of ability to credit maybe that's one of the ways in which we would like to mirror the way the city of E's doing it yeah just I just think there's a lot of capacity that's left into the system that people have paid for and that they have to walk away from and they redevelop I mean what the capacity at hinx I don't know you used who's going

2:48:38 to get that all right so yeah I'm good all right peroski um yeah I think that I kind of spurred this I think this when I when I pit pissed a fit over the large increases that were being proposed and and mostly with those I was I was more worried about the methodology and the project lists and how how the project lists thought drove the methodology to get to us so that that that was what kind of do this now we're moving towards the policy side so for me

2:49:25 I see the second bullet point of a blended Blended methodology as the one that I would lean into and and the reason I say that is I don't want to pick winners and user Losers of of of economic development but I see the community as a whole winning from Economic Development and the utility winning from Economic Development you know one of the example that I can give to you is back when we were looking at uh efficiencies and well if you if somebody buys a uh heat pump water heater instead of a gas water heater the impact to to eweb is going to

2:50:13 be increased because they're using more electricity and so our we make more money from that well if if the system as a whole grows if the pie grows are the capacity is increased but part of that we we get gains from that because the community as a whole is increasing we're selling more power we're selling more water we're making we're making more more money and so to me especially in these times and it's it's so hard when you're talking about doing policies that are going forward 5 10 15 years you know we saw a policy that we put forward uh on a different issue that may be

2:50:59 not what we need today but today our our economy needs development we need housing and some of the barriers that we are seeing to housing and Business Development are system development charges so I don't think that I want to totally put it onto the onto the broader rate base but I think that our rate base and our community can afford to absorb some of that I mean and we're not talking huge numbers here it's a million or $2 million dollars a year that could be spread out amongst partially amongst the developers so that they're paying they're they're taking a bite at the Apple but our community is also getting

2:51:47 a a uh an apple pie out of this as well so that's where I land I'm not exactly sure what you're meaning when you say should we follow the city's model because that that's too vague I got to know what that means the city's model of picking the project list the city's model of of uh what items are eligible or they're uh percentage wise I I need to be a little bit clear more clear on what that means um I I can see it you know if it's square footage or that type of thing yeah I can go with that but but to put a water SDC as the

2:52:33 same as a park SDC who's using the who's using the water pipes and who's using the parks you know they're they're different so I need a little more information before I can come down on that just and thank you commissioner um just for clarification what's meant here by follow the the cities it is the pricing mechanism of which it's recovered so using the same square footage for example as your dividing lines it's what a developer would see it's not the approach that we would take to decide what's SDC eligible and and what isn't and so that is um that's not what we meant we didn't mean those internal mechanisms we meant the the pricing

2:53:19 mechanisms just so a developer doesn't have to worry about two or three different standards of which they're going to have to calculate their projects sdc's um for that that's that's really what we meant by this um certainly understand your point on economic development I think what you're saying is and and what what was the term you used you pitch to fit is that just didn't like the outcome I remember that word I just don't like this outcome um I I think what we're really we're recognizing that this project list that we have and you can like it or not or say this is capacity or this isn't there is a value that of that work that needs to be paid for by somebody and sdc's is a methodology by

2:54:06 which you can charge one group over another and you can basically pre-charge for that capacity um or if you don't do that then you charge the standard rate base and what you're saying is some degree division there to facilitate uh development is something that you would is kind of on on your list now I would say that a million dollars while it's the Baseline depending on the approach we take could go up or down and on the Water Utility roughly $400,000 represents a 1% rate increase so a million dollars is not insignificant depending on how you want to look at that going up and down so it is something that we'll have to be be cognizant of Jor so you know when I think about SDC

2:54:51 charges and and how we apply them and the percentages kind of to look back at what why did we even make stc's in the beginning and for me it appears that we wanted that cost to be you know borne by developers and I I would assume that that is a mechanism to keep growth at Bay um you know you want them to pay their the you know for the burden that they're putting on the system and I'm trying to balance that against the impact that it has on development projects and I did a little bit of you know looking at kind of the the background of it I found an Eco Northwest study that said that sdc's affect some housing more than others

2:55:36 smaller entry level homes lower cost middle housing and apartments and communities with weaker markets are disproportionately affected by sdc's highend single family detached housing is generally impacted and part of that I'm I'm guessing is that those housing projects um are are going to be lower cost in general so if you have a bigger SDC fee on it and you know you have a lower income housing project versus a higher income housing project of roughly the same size this one's going to get more disproportionately impact so for me we need housing not just because we want our customer base to increase because I think you know we've talked about our capacity um over all and when we think about our capacity to sell power and not

2:56:22 so much water but mostly power we're going to be constrained and so we do have to bring on other um you know other developments that or other um sources of energy that actually could raise rates even more so it's not growth for the sake of growth necessarily but we do have people that are homeless and we have people that are struggling to get by because there just isn't enough housing and so for me I I would balance it more on having it more rate side because we do need more of those homes and that also impacts the rates that you know people pay in the rental housing market that impacts lower income people too um so at the given the current history of where we're at I would lean more towards

2:57:09 having lower SDC charges because we need more of these housing projects to be implemented um and then uh I like the idea about having grants for Community good projects again the more of those that we can have out there and the more housing that we can have in general I think the more the better off our community will be and then um I want it to align with the city but I'm really annoyed at how the city's um process is set up so I'm torn on that one that's it thank you thanks commissioner Carlson that I I would point out one thing about the origins of stc's which they they were

2:57:55 not originally created necessarily because of their impact on development it was primarily for smaller utilities to prefunds work that they needed to do um in their system so it was a it was basically a financial mechanism for um utilities that quite honestly now don't have the financial strength that eweb has I would say 15 years ago or whenever uh um Christ m brown knows this apparently more specifically than I do when they started um e web's water utility was in a much different financial position than we are now um and so it was really born out of the ability to um put in infrastructure in

2:58:41 support of development and having a way for a utility to fund that so that's that it wasn't to discourage develop per se the other thing that I think we need to take a look at and you touched on it was when we looked at the SDC charge and I think this was in the data that that you requested because you were concerned about the impact on housing units that the larger projects actually the per unit allocation of those sdc's um was fairly low even though the SDC in in its lump seemed like a lot when you broke it down to the per unit was actually um pretty affordable um but I think I heard from you yeah I think I've heard from you is that there is an

2:59:27 importance on development and um some degree of of socialization to facilitate that development whether that be through sdc's or potentially through grants is something that that you find sort of high on your priority list is that fair I'm afraid you're G to get mixed messages uh I It's Not Unusual for me actually president McCrae but that's that's okay it's 840 they're just like they're all over the place wait till we get to the next on the ground I'm I'm more with Mindy here in terms of I feel like uh given the pressure that we have right now on rates that if this gives us a tool to relieve some of the pressure on rates and um and see those expenses picked up by the by new development I

3:00:14 think that's reasonable I you know what the split is I don't know but it seems like uh from my perspective the majority should be on the new projects um on your question number three about uh following the city of Eugene's approach I think that would be a useful way to go in terms of your question number two about should we favor sometimes of capacity consuming develops development over others for me I would want to see the different types of projects and what kind of capacity they take and and some of um what Sonia was talking about you know where where is the alignment in terms of the cost of construction compared to the SDC like those percentages and I appreciate what you're saying is that smaller projects tend to have a relatively small individual stdc for that project but I think at least

3:00:59 for me to think about whether or where we would adjust those sdc's I'd want to have a little bit deeper dive to think about that in general uh commissioner McCrae I think what what could probably be assumed is if if a developer is is developing a piece of property for some particular purpose then an SDC charge would basically be passed on to the beneficiary of that service now that's that may be a business a commercial operation if it's multif family housing it's going to be in the form of rent or tenants and so um I I think one of the considerations we have to to take is that um just because we're charging an SDC to

3:01:46 a particular entity uh entity of cause if you want to call it that it's not going to stay there it's going to be passed through to a different a different either beneficiary or create a a burden for whoever is leasing or moving into that building or or whatever and and so I think that that is something we'll have to consider when we we look at it when we were thinking about particular classes it was more residential commercial multif family sing I mean those we were talking a bit more Broad broad um and so those are just some of the things that we'll have to consider and it's by the way it's it isn't unusual that I get different perspectives from different Commissioners on on this type of thing we'll have to figure out how to navigate

3:02:31 that through and and capture it in a way that I think captures the essence of what this board thinks is important in policy and then we'll have to um sort of double check that based on some real situations such as commissioner Brown pointed out yeah I would be supportive of a CC trade program or um credit program it seems like that's kind of a fair way to manage that um my guess is actually if you drop a proposed percentage for how much should be funded by secc's versus rates we're probably not all that far away I think I think if we start with the original premise that there is some value in capacity yeah what available capacity consumed capacity that there's going to be some netting effect to that and that's probably fair if we want to

3:03:18 look at this is how we allocate those costs to customers um it it may not um be something that is historically consistent with what we've done but I think it's something we're gonna have to look at all right I think I got more than enough that to to work with this all right no I app I appreciate the dialogue it it it is helpful uh right it'll be really helpful helpful over an IPA later I do feel like maybe we should change our beverage um standards here this is very clear I'm just kidding um I am too Frank uh onto 16 board Session

3:04:04 One Mission Vision yeah Commissioners this is really a a precursor I know that when we reviewed the Strategic plan um a couple of months ago we talked about this might be an opportunity to uh look forward and as opposed to maybe tweaking what we have is to look at things um in a in a fresh way there's some pros and cons to that and um we'll we'll kind of run through those really quickly and then I'll pose a number of other questions for the board to give me six different opinion on from the five of you um and that's that's certainly a very helpful actually and so you know we created these phases the Strategic plan um started 2018 we were about halfway

3:04:49 through a little over halfway through its its Evolution we're kind of in this phase two where as Commissioners really know this more recently is we're putting a lot of puzzle pieces together whether that's Ami or the CIS project we're we're building rate design as a piece of that the bonnaville contract there's a lot of different pieces to that around resiliency and some of the priorities we also sort of stated our mission uh in the in the Strategic plan it's it's pretty common for organizations to have a separate mission and vision and values statement of which the the Strategic plan then is support of moving the mission toward the vision so it's it's okay to actually separate those um but

3:05:35 as a precursor to sort of any strategic conversation we wanted to tee up a couple of questions um related to this sort of strategic journey and this was this this was something that we're just kind of uh looking at over time um throughout the next year or so multiple touch points with the board I didn't put them all on here but really work walking through a journey that would um start to align the board align the organization around um sort of the next phases um of our Evolution as an organization um but to start with um you have to really understand what your mission is as an

3:06:20 organization and so again kind of like the last conversation not necessarily to form consensus but wanted to understand the individual Commissioners different perspectives on things that would roll into uh how we craft and sort of organize our mission um and also our vision the mission being really what we do today why we exist the Vision being this is where we want to go this is our our future State and so there's really two questions um what is e web's role in the community and there's just sort two sub questions to that um what are things that we do that we should do more of really focus on what are things that we

3:07:06 potentially should start doing uh the flip side of that is is also um some of the things that what is e web's what is not e web's role in the community and and are there things that we should do less of or are there things that we should stop doing and so um kind of use those to to tea up the different components as far as why we exist and what we do and then we'll take that and depending on the different perspectives how narrow or wide they might be and kind of craft a jump off point to um some strategic assessments we also have Tim coming on in January we want to uh integrate him into the process I'm I'm glad he's here tonight um and we'll um

3:07:54 have the opportunity to look at this as as kind of the basis for for our development work and so um really president McCrae I'm just gonna pass this back to you with these sort of 1ab and 2ab and you can take it in whatever order you want to do it um and sort of get the perspectives out there on the table all right Sonia I hear doing more of or start doing the only thing that comes to mind for me is just figuring out how we can continue to be more inclusive um I think commissioner Browns Point earlier about you know particular Community perspectives are missing in a lot of the work that we that we do and so to the extent that we can bring that community in so that they are involved

3:08:40 and I think it's going to be even more critical over the coming years um to do that um that that and and other projects and other things we're already doing so much I just want you all to be able to do that well we're we're rebuilding a lot of infrastructure the kinds of uh the focus that we've or the trajectory that we're on feels very good and we have started down those Pathways and I it just feels to me like there's a lot you know we're Midway through and we just need to keep that ball rolling um in terms of doing less of um you know for me I I just I still believe in the plan that we set out to achieve and I want to continue marching forward on

3:09:28 that thanks John things that we should start doing more of I think um we've got this program locally where we're trying to get everybody for electrification and climate change and things such that but yet we're letting Ai and all the data centers suck the life out of what little bit of renewable energy there's left and we I would like to see do take a much more active role in at least addressing that you know we've got the government subsidizing the placement of all those right now and yet we're asking all all the people and our rate payers to make these changes and make these sacrifices and and some cases spend more money for commodity I'll I'll name of climate change and renewable and I would like to see T take us a much more active role in that and just start advocating more for

3:10:14 saying okay what's more important because if we have these energy shortages in 2027 and 2028 that's just right around the corner so I'd like to see us do more of that personally on a as as an organization we're the largest one in the state so why don't we walk in with a big stick um things that we should do less of I I can't think of that uh I think we're doing doing the right thing but I I would just like to see more at C to get say if there's just so much a finite amount of power um let's get it to the people that need it not the big AI centers and all that stuff they can get their own we charge STC fees on the fact that the there's mixing of metaphors here I don't quite Three Mile Island for it I mean come on that's Bill

3:11:01 Gates some some interesting perspectives so commissioner Carlson you spoke about inclusive it's really a focus on the customer end of of this you know we're if if we're a vertically integrated organization you're saying there's an inclusive aspect that we need to pay attention to at the same time commissioner Brown you're talking about pushing Upstream so now we're you know the first two responses was things we okay now you're you're you're pushing Upstream you're pushing Downstream um both are important but they both start to to kind of highlight the fact that we are a vertically integrated organization and there are prices that come with being a vertically integrated organization and it's tough to focus on both ends that's that's a

3:11:48 piece that I think we've struggled with um overall as an organization not saying we we can't um it's it's part of our apparent you know you see it as part of our role in the community we have to pay attention to the customers we also have to ensure our the security of our supply um that's affordable and and and reliable so um I appreciate the two the two perspectives already are you ready for more I'm ready for more I all right Mindy um well I strongly agree with John Brown's um call for more of legislative advocacy I think that that is an area

3:12:35 where we could um maybe protect some of our interests a little bit more and I know that Jason works very hard and um you know we have a legislative agenda but I also think about things like with Watershed protection and things like that like we we do a lot of work and there's not a lot of like legislative protection necessarily or or laws that maybe make our work a little easier um I know that's not generally our role to go out and do a lot of that kind of advocacy that way it seems like we kind of um support things that are put out there or not support them but I think that that's an area where we could maybe be a little stronger in um and then the other thing that I think

3:13:20 maybe we should do a little more of we're already doing quite a bit but I think the resiliency piece so I know that that kind of like has its tentacles throughout the organization but I just think about these coming years I think about like scarcity of of resources or environmental pressures and I know we have our pledge to prepare we have our our new integrated Software System and all that but I do think that there's a um a way that we can help the community more in resiliency um I don't have specifics now but I think that that there's some opportunity there um in terms of what we should do less of the only thing that comes to mind is

3:14:06 um uh kind of the the performative public engagement things um I do feel like we we are really lucky in this community that we have a publicly owned utility and I think that a lot of people expect a lot of things from us but we represent a lot of different people and I just think that we have to be careful sometimes when we do kind of public processes um what we're what what people can expect from it because I think that we kind of set a trap for ourselves sometimes and then the last thing I just want to comment on is our vision I know you don't maybe don't want us to dig in deep but just reading our vision I find it kind of interesting that our vision is a local utility that inspires our customer

3:14:51 owners to invest in us and rely on us well I feel like our customer owners have no choice um so I don't know what that necessarily means to invest in us and they have to rely on us so that that just kind of jumped out at me followup question please commissioner so so thank you and I I appreciate the advocacy for our interests perspective um I would kind of want to gauge what you think our interests are so when when we think about the services that we provide um how would you characterize the services that we provide I mean it's it's um so when we we advocate for a

3:15:38 certain thing what are we advocating for um from your perspective I love the no public healings anymore that that part I I did not say oh that's what I heard no no sorry I jumped the gun there I mean okay so with water I think that we're providing clean water to our customers so there's many ways that we can do that right we can invest in treatment plants but what we've chosen to do is to protect our Watershed um so in providing clean water are there uh legislative things that can help us do that so that it's not all on us to do it um we want to provide carbon you know as much carbon free electricity as possible Renewables

3:16:24 so um uh I know that we are supportive of different bills and things that come up through the legislature but maybe there's ways that we can increase that a little bit more um same same with our I mean with our goals with resiliency things like that great yeah appreciate that thank you um who are we and what why do we exist I mean that's right here on on the shirt G Water and Electric Board we could just go back to making sure that when you plug in the the plug it it turns on and

3:17:09 the water comes out of the spig it yeah but we we go a lot further than that um we we we look to our community values as to how we do that want we want as as carbon free electricity as we can get we want as clean of water as we can get um these are things that other utilities aren't quite as vested in you know there's a lot of utilities that just I mean you can you can purify water that you wouldn't even want to put your toe in and and there's treatment plants that'll make it so you can drink it um but that's not we want to start with

3:17:54 clean water so that we don't have to do as much as that um so that's where the vertically integrated part comes into it you know we could just go to be a a Power and Water company but I think we're more than that because we're Eugene Water and Electric Board and the Eugene part of it goes to the value of our community um as far as things that we should do more of um I'm with Mindy I think that you know Sonia's Sonia's worried about the grid and and John's worried about the the grid and this and that for me I'm looking forward 10 15 20 years from now and I

3:18:40 think that water is going to be one of the Commodities of the of the Next Generation and so for me Source protection is something that I don't think we can do enough of I I know that when I say that it's we can't do enough of it because of our limited Financial capacity I would love to do as much as we can but we we have limited capacity but Source protection and making sure that our our watersheds are are valued as the the resource that they are I think is an important thing for me personally um what things should we do less

3:19:26 of five hour board meetings um are something that I would like to do less oh we're only at four we're okay um and things that we should stop doing I think that that's something that I would I mean I can't answer that I think I would like to hear that more from staff it's like hey we're doing some things that are that are we're just spinning wheels and we don't need to really do those to to accomplish our mission you know so if staff could identify some things that say you know we're doing this I've got this thing and it really isn't adding to the value of the utility or what we're

3:20:12 bringing our customers if you could bring those things to us and say do we still need to do these or do we need to do them at this extent that would be something that I would be interested in looking at um I can't really say right now of something that I would like to stop doing um one of the things that I would again like to lean into and we've we've tried it but I still want to keep trying it is figuring out a way to help make our rental stock more efficient um so that our low so that the people that are living in our in our rental units have lower utility bills and better

3:20:58 places to live now I know we've we've kicked that can two or three times to try and get something out of it but I that's something that I would still like to try and do and figure out if there's ways that we can do that um I think that's a lot a goal and something that I would like to to have on my uh things that have been things that have been done while I was commissioner so those that's kind of where I'm you all right have you gone I haven't okay and I've been thinking about these questions and I'm not sure I have any great answers yeah the only thing I want to do less of is like owning leeberg can we

3:21:45 own can we just sell that to somebody who canest just a few observations so SE several of you really talked about and I'll characterize this as um the fact that when we say delivery you know that's that's in our mission now we're delivering two essential Services one is drinking water and the other is electricity and nobody really consumes electricity if you do that's kind of dangerous I mean you don't want to be drinking electricity um but there's there's comfort that comes along with that we're we're selling the the results of that several of you mentioned the importance of ensuring our supplies um whether that be the grid whether that be drinking water source

3:22:31 protection there is some role that we have to play going forward that ensures access to these essential Services um in the future and what are we going to do to ensure that access going forward um nobody mentioned becoming less vertically integrated um nobody mentioned um fiber um we have connectivity into the homes um you thought you thought twice about it want to bring it up I don't want to do more of that do so nobody mentioned that we do when we talk about delivery that could be part of a delivery model if you wanted to focus on the custom customer

3:23:17 relationship and say let's let's treat the supply chain as something that that to to your point commissioner sosb there's things that we don't all have to take on that we could lean into Partnerships on we could focus more on the customer relationship the investments in that not necessarily ensuring the supply that's not what I heard um I heard that these are essential services and ensuring the you know the supply side the recogniz the importance of the supply side of that both water and through grid and through Watershed protection is one one of the things that this board sees as highly strategic going forward that how we get there yes that's that's important um but that's one kind of I'll say consistent

3:24:05 thing that I probably heard heard across the across the board thanks for the summary RI um I'm not gonna let you off the hook here Matt you know you've got two a couple more months here you've got four years of experience we want to know what your your feeling on this is I don't so no you can't just say no we want I want to know what your four years of experience and and what you've learned and where you want to see this utility going I don't want you to just say I'm lame duck I don't have to answer that question I'm happy to try and answer the question I mean I think you

3:24:50 know I've already I've already spoke to my interest in Watershed protection and and Source protection right and especially in uh the watersheds that we haven't invested in yet so I think that is a place where I would see us leaning in um and doing more um most of it actually I think Mindy hit it like they're just curveballs that are coming at us faster than we're going to be able to handle them so I think the more we can set ourselves up to have diverse redundant systems to the greatest degree possible without you know going broke because I know that becomes expensive the more you do that but to to the extent that we can prepare for curved balls I think that's what I would do more of I think um Kelly Hill has a really solid sense of what those things are likely to look like and where

3:25:36 we could best invest there um actually the things that I think we could do do less of um we have a couple of like n programs that are like um like carbon credits and things like that and I think they're interesting I'm not sure we're the best vendor for those and I you know I think we've tried them and I don't know that they're giving us a whole bunch of um uh benefit as an organization and I you know as as useful as they seem like they be I'm not sure that's a place where I'd keep carrying those unless you know if the staff feel like you know we're lining up to really knock it down in the next year and the year after that with those programs you know I'd be interested in that but it it felt like at least initially it wasn't gaining a

3:26:21 lot of attaction um I would like to let own less of leeberg uh for real I mean I you know I don't think we can do that but um it does feel like there are big projects that have huge potential risks associated with them for real potentially being another and I think just as we're making really big Investments we're about to make a huge investment in another water treatment plant on the wamit that we do the best we can of thinking about what could possibly make this thing become obsolete um so that we don't dump a whole bunch of money into something that becomes obsolete um I Heard secondhand

3:27:06 that Springfield the cost for them to build their new water treatment plant on the McKenzie has doubled in the last couple years and I just wondered I like does that change conversation with us I don't know but I think it'd be worth having those conversations before we make that I mean I know we're already headed down the road of another treatment plant I'm totally in support of doing that I just think as things are changing very very quickly for a bunch of different actors and partners that having those conversations as we go to make sure we're not missing an opportunity would be so I I I appreciate the input um I I think that um there's some there's some

3:27:53 things to weigh through relative to not just sort of why we exist but where that leads us to from a priorities perspective um and and how we want to navigate through some of these some of these issues going forward um there um I as as most of you know I I came came out of the private sector um in the private sector if you wanted to do something you just you'd just go do it um I would say that that one of the things that is is around efficiency and focus and this sort of tradeoff between focus and scale that that sometimes we talk about um we we operate in a slightly different

3:28:38 environment here there's 80 board policies there's 50 active resolutions there's a bunch of different statutes and a bunch of public process that goes along with it and some of that is the construct of being a public utility um but what we're hearing is we need to be inclusive as we go forward we need to look at protecting our sources the sources are the sources there's two things that I think make us really unique one are the sources that we have and the McKenzie river probably being the most unique Source both Water and Electric that we have and the other is the touch Point into every single premise in the city and those are at two opposite ends of the of the spectrum and what we do in between is delivery and so how we do that and what we focus on is

3:29:25 something that that we'll have to um discuss a little bit further but um you connecting those two is is really what we do as an organization so we need to we need to figure out within that construct what is that we focus on what can we um say maybe isn't it yeah we like it it may be important at some level but relative do the others these things how do we prioritize them and so that's the point of a strategy is to figure out what you use to prioritize your work so we'll we'll continue it so was a interesting kickoff and appreciate everybody's perspectives um I I think that you all have contributed to the strategy and where it's at now and um we'll have to see how much we think it

3:30:11 it might I I I do agree um commissioner Carlson I feel good about where we are in the strategy I also think part of being strategic is starting to think about what's beyond that and I think we have to start with that and so that's part of the intent here but um I I think I got more than what I I deserved um so thanks president McCrae and and think I'll just pass it back to you and we can move on all right yeah I would concur that the existing strategic plan I think is really solid I think you know we're starting from a really good spot yeah yeah go ah looking beyond that kind of trajectory just there's so many unknowns right now for me that it's very hard to prognosticate

3:30:58 past a few months from now even yeah and and agreed and and maybe part of the strategy is you develop enough flexibility that you can handle multiple Futures and maybe that becomes your near-term strategy and that that may be one that we have to look at so I think I'm next on the agenda um for future agendas we do have a a a packed December and a packed January we've because of that we've moved a few things um specifically the policy work um out to March um president McCrae I probably want to get some of your thoughts on those policies maybe one on-one um since you won't be with us in March you're welcome to come back and participate in that discussion um that freed up a

3:31:44 little bit of time in um December to get some some various updates on things as well as as January we have some things going on as well around goals for next year and some of the things that we want to work on there so I I'll just say we're we're continuing to tweak with the agendas just to just to make sure we're spending the right amount of time on on meaty subjects and um um you making good use of your time all great anything any questions about uh what's on the future list all right to board wrapup then final

3:32:30 comments May policies it's I think it's 80 something board policies last time I checked I don't I'm looking at an there she's probably gonna correct me I actually said something that show which is amazing you don't have memorize the the last time I looked it was maybe I exaggerate 60 to 80 board policies and then we had when we looked a couple years ago we had over 50 active resolutions in place so you're you're a highb burden group John that just have to pay attention to you I think I think I've only been involved in okay so you're one out of

3:33:16 65 think yeah board rep I'm not going to be here in December but I'd just like to thank you for your leadership from the last year and everything I'm not going to get to do if I did it you know remotely it would be so disingenuous it' be pathetic because I would be lying I just mute you so I'd really like to thank you and acknowledge that because I know it's not easy to take the gav and run it up four or five hours but that's all right I won't ever say anything about a five hour meeting but uh Matt it's been' been good and I won't see you again well I will but I'm sure we'll run into each other on the river someplace but uh thank you for your leadership and for being here for the last four years thank you that I want to acknowledge Tim Morris who's in the audience and who's been attending meetings for the better part of the last year and congratulations on

3:34:01 uh getting a seat and condolences and um I'm excited that you're going to be jumping in here soon so thanks for boning up on what's going on appreciate that so now there's multiple mle personalities involved because used to be five Commissioners and 15 personalities and how many are there going to be now I guess that we'll have to wait and see what get very awkward Frank talk to my [Laughter] therapist yeah and when when when we were talking about meter sizes that's the size of the fire hose that you're gonna be drinking out of for the next couple of months I think you're at about three inch right now it'll get down to manageable size

3:34:50 yep all right anything else all right