 Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Ellen Vaughn, and I'm with the Environmental and Energy Study Institute, better known as EESI. Thank you so much for coming out. Great to see you. We have a wonderful panel today and a very important topic, and I would like to say some thanks for EEFA, which people call EFA, Energy Efficiency for All, is an organization that has federal, state, national partners, and really is connecting all of these important issues on energy efficiency, affordability, and health, and environmental actions. So you'll hear more about that from from our panel. And I also want to thank Chairwoman Marcy Captor for her leadership on these issues, on weatherization, assistance program, and and other issues, and her office. Thank you so much for helping us with this briefing. So I am delighted. EESI is very happy to partner with EFA, and I'm delighted to introduce our moderator today, Mariana Mostafa, and then Mariana will introduce the speakers, and what we like to do is have an hour for the presentations and then a half an hour for Q&A. So please hold on to your questions. Don't forget them, and we'll definitely save time for that. So let me just go right to it. We don't have a lot of time for each speaker. So Mariana is an independent consultant working at the nexus of affordable housing and energy efficiency. Based in Washington, D.C., she works on energy efficiency for all projects and connecting local stakeholders like community action agencies. She began consulting on EFA about three years ago, and before that was coordinator for economic opportunity studies. And also before that worked for a non-profit developer and has been involved in affordable home ownership transactions in Washington, D.C., working with public-private and non-profit financing. So Mariana, I will hand it over to you, and thank you so much. And again, thank the panel for being here today. Thank you, Ellen. Thank everyone for attending today. I really appreciate that. It's a great turnout. I also want to echo Ellen Vaughn and extend a very special thank you to our sponsor today, Marcy Kaptor and her staff. The Congresswoman has been an outstanding champion for federal low-income energy programs, and we commend her for ongoing support. I, like Ellen said, I'm mighty. I am Astafa. I am an independent consultant with the Energy Foundation working on the energy efficiency for all project. The focus of my work is to explore strategic ways to connect to local stakeholders, like community action agencies, with EFA initiatives. The EFA, sorry. Thank you. The Energy Efficiency for All project is a collaborative, coalition-driven 13-state campaign to increase energy efficiency and improve living environments within affordable multi-family housing. EFA was established in 2013 to expand efficiency investments and to tap the energy savings potential in the affordable housing multi-family sector, which in many states is often hard to reach and underserved. The project is a collaboration between the Energy Foundation, the National Housing Trust, the National Resources Defense Council, and Elevate Energy. The project brings together national, state, and local partners across sectors to access the benefits of efficiency for thousands of Americans living on low limited incomes. EFA connects, educates, and supports state holders to scale up on the ground successes. Working with a range of partners, the project blends expertise in such areas as affordable housing and energy efficiency, health, building ownership, and utility engagement in order to ensure that well-designed, cost-effective efficiency programs are available to all who seek them, residents, and building owners alike. EFA's committed to creating supportive, inclusive, and self-sustaining partnerships. The project operates on the premise that we can achieve more for low-income families working together. So this event is the fourth joint EFA EIS I briefing, and today we hope to address the question, how do communities ensure federal energy programs reach those most in need? This briefing will offer a look into state coalitions and how they're using and leveraging federal energy programs like the U.S. Department of Energy's weatherization assistance program and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services low-income home energy assistance program to help low-to-moderate income residents obtain housing that is affordable, healthy, and energy efficient. There is such great need for this work. Low-income residents tend to live in housing stock that is older and less efficient, and high-energy bills can really put a strain on families leading to difficult trade-offs between paying for energy and other necessities. The American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy, AC Triple A, recently released analyzed data from the U.S. Census Bureau's American Housing Survey to provide a national snapshot of the energy of affordability for 2017, and they found that one-fourth of all households and more than two-thirds of low-income households live with high-energy burden. In fact, low-income households experience high-energy burdens almost three times more than the average household. Reaching those in need is critical. And we are conducting this briefing to bring programs like WAP and LIHEAP to life by sharing the state and local perspectives and showing that these programs make a real difference in people's lives. These programs work, and we are really excited that we have assembled this panel of experts today who will offer you a glimpse into how these programs actually work on the ground and describe to you the delivery channels that make them work. So to get us started, we will first have Dave Reinbold. Dave will offer an overview of WAP and share how low-income efficiency funds are leveraged. He'll provide a snapshot of how WAP works in Ohio and then discuss pending reauthorization of WAPs. Dave Reinbold is currently working with clients on weatherization and bill payment assistance programs as well as consumer protection issues at the Ohio Partners for Affordable Energy. Prior to joining OPAY, he was manager of DOE's Weatherization Assistance Program. Dave has been involved in the authorization, funding and management of social service and clean energy programs for over 35 years. He holds a bachelor's of liberal studies degree from Bowling Green State University and a JD from the Columbus School of Law at the Catholic University of America. Please join me in welcoming Dave Reinbold. Thank you, Mariana, and good afternoon, everyone. It's a pleasure to be here. I'm gonna run you quickly through sort of a primer on the various programs that we stitch together to serve low-income customers. So I hope you find this interesting. This is the EESI. There we go. Yeah, that'd be mine. Any event, there we go. DOE's Weatherization Program is really the foundation of not just low-income weatherization, but all weatherization. When we started doing this work back in 1976, it was basically a bunch of caulk and plastic. It was what we did. We filled every crack we could find in a house and we put a lot of plastic up. But over the years, we provided the foundation for the development of building science as a science and really funded a lot of that research that eventually built up the techniques and the technologies that we use to weatherize homes now. Beginning in the ARA period, when it exposed some weaknesses in the program, DOE issued a framework for high-quality weatherization, the home energy, not professions, professional guidelines that include the standard work specifications. Those really define how you do weatherization. While the houses of low-income customers are off times in worse shape than the average residential structure, the techniques that you use to weatherize them are the same. So the guidelines and the standard work specifications set that process up. It's a transparent process managed by NREL and they're updated every five years. So we just finished one five-year cycle and they will be updated again. These are the typical weatherization measures and I know this print is small, but you've essentially got mechanical measures, the mechanicals in the house, the HVAC system, the water tanks, health and safety measures, carbon monoxide alarms, smoke alarms, small repairs. Those are generally funded with DOE money. The mechanical measures are often funded with utility dollars, as are the electric base load measures, which are your lighting and your refrigeration over on the far side. Building shell is really the focus of weatherization. We really use the federal dollars to focus on building shells and that's reducing air infiltration, increasing the R value of the sidewalls and the attics, and controlling how the basement relates to the rest of the structure of the house. And that's all the detail I'm going to give you, because I'm a lawyer, not a building scientist. We also came up with the training requirements associated. And again, this is an open industry consensus process that DOE just oversaw. So you've got four certifications, the installer, the crew leader, the auditor, and the QCI, which is Quality Control Inspector. This is a new aspect of the program that we added after ARA, where we have an independent third party inspector view every unit that we do before it can be final and paid for. And that just lists the skill set that you have to have for each of those trainings. The certifications are handled by a third party nonprofit, the Building Performance Institute. Let me see. So we also, you're going to require installers to be certified. You've got to make sure that the places that train them are certified as well. So the Interstate Renewable Energy Council oversees the certification of training centers. And then DOE is making a commitment to continuous improvement using the American Customer Satisfaction Index, which is a survey that's sent out to the state program managers and then to the local program managers, basically so people can bitch about how you run your program and fix it. That's the way I looked at it, and we tried to do some nice things after we got the first one. And I think we have. We dropped processing federal monitoring reports from 90 days down to 28 days. You know, that's just good management. So that's what we were trying to do. Leverage programs are really critical to weatherization. The LIHEAP program actually provides more money for weatherization in this country than weatherization assistance program because states have made policy decisions to refocus some of those dollars on permanent solutions to energy poverty, which is what weatherization really is. So in program year 2017, 423 million of that money was transferred over and used for weatherization. Utility in state programs accounted for 255 million, 28% of all funds. Both of those sources of funding are larger than the amount we get from DOE. So DOE was 253 million last year. So we brade these funds together because the DOE money is the most restricted money, and we're able to do more things that are not necessarily purely cost-effective. But when you get into somebody's house and you're doing the sidewalls and you're doing the attic and the furnace is 25, 30 years old, we'll use the gas company money to replace the furnace. So anyway, when you put these dollars together, you can really do everything in the house, and we're going to do that to over 120,000 houses this year. We have a pretty good operation in Ohio. We've spent a long time on it. We started with our own standards manual back in 1984. So we really worked hard to professionalize this over time. We use a single application approach. That way we make sure that our clients are getting all of the services that they're eligible for, be it bill payment assistance or weatherization or we do rehab programs. We do lead programs as well in our agencies. We follow the WAP technical rules because they really are the industry standard, but we use the utility funds which are managed separately by the agency network to do the kind of things that the DOE funds wouldn't be eligible for. The other reason we like to see the money managed outside of the state is that we've seen state legislators come in and swoop up utility funds before to fill budget holes. And so that's not really a way to get energy efficiency improvements in low-income housing. So if you keep the money outside of the state, it moves, it flows better, flows faster. And then the evaluations show that the synergies from adding these multiple sources of funds together really do produce higher energy savings. And 30% is our average for reduction in heating costs in Ohio. So that's a substantial chunk of dollars for our families. We're starting to pivot to deeper measures because lighting and refrigerator are going to be gone, although the rollback in the lighting regulations will make that still a viable option to some extent. But the market penetration of high-efficiency refrigerators and LED light bulbs is such that those low-hanging fruit opportunities aren't there, but the advances in heat pump technology have really made HVAC in all electric houses a much more viable source of energy savings. And we're going to be moving into that more quickly. We're also going to move into multi-families more. The underserved market, it's what EFA is all about, but they're right on this when we need to start addressing that market better. And there are challenges to it because they're multi-year projects and you got to get all those people's applications. So those are always challenges, but we can work through that. So we also do community weatherization. We do community projects in three towns in Ohio. Murray City was the first, about 90 homes. Nelsonville and Portsmouth are larger, but these are still pretty modest sized cities. We coordinate programs. We serve everything in the town, not just the low-income families. And there's the little graphic for Weather Eyes Nelsonville. They've got quite a social media presence, too. If you want to look at Weather Eyes Nelsonville or Weather Eyes Murray City, just go on YouTube, you can find them. And then Energy Plus Health, another emerging area, although weatherization has been involved in this for some time. We've known that improvements in indoor air quality lead to improved health outcomes. We know that from DOE's recent evaluation that put a dollar value on those health improvements of about $14,000 for each individual unit we weatherize in the form of lower health care costs, fewer missed days of work, that kind of thing. So we're looking to build more partnerships with the health care industry. Ideally, someday, I'd like to have doctors be able to write a prescription for weatherization. Because when you consider that an asthmatic may go three to five times to an emergency room a month, if we can cut that down to one or two, we've saved a lot of money for the health care system. So you've got to build programs, and it's no different than building other programs, but you've got to reach out to new networks, the public health network, and others such as that. So we're excited about the growth in that area. Finally, the WAP program is being reauthorized. We've got HR 2041, Mr. Tonko's bill that's gone through and been reported out of Energy and Commerce Committee. I noticed that S983 was reported out of Senate Energy and Public Works last week. So they are primarily the same. And it encourages funding authority, or increases the funding authority, establishes an innovation program that we hope to use to do more community weatherization, and it's a great reauthorization. So we encourage support for that bill. And I think with that, I will quiet down. There are some pictures of my guys floating around drilling holes and blowing insulation. It's an exciting trade. But thank you very much. Thank you, Dave, for that overview of the wonderful work that you're doing in Ohio. I'll let the folks at EFA know that we are right about multifamily. But it was also great to hear about leveraging and the emerging programs that you guys will be embarking on, as well as the advancements in technology. Next, we will have Valerie Strauss. So Valerie Strauss is with AEA in New York, and she will speak more broadly about energy efficiencies in the multifamily housing stock. Valerie is the Director of Policy and Regulatory Affairs at the Association for Energy and Affordability in New York, where she directs regulatory and policy activities in support of energy efficiency with a special emphasis on multifamily and low-to-moderate income communities. Prior to joining AEA, she led the Alliance for Clean Energy in New York and worked to pass and implement New York's first renewable portfolio standard. She has years of experience in energy and environmental policy, working for consulting firms and nonprofits in New York, Washington DC, and even Madrid, Spain. Valerie has a BA in Geography from the University of California at Berkeley, as well as an MA in Urban Planning from the University of California at LA. Please welcome Valerie Strauss. There we go. I'm always having to put the mic on the lowest level. Thank you. Thank you, Mariana. Thank you, Dave. I'm very pleased to be here today, and I really appreciate the introductions that came before me. I'm going to sort of move it. There we go. Is that better? Okay. I think Dave really set the stage for what I want to discuss today, so we can move forward having a little background on weatherization. I just want to introduce AEA, the Association for Energy Affordability. We are one of those sub-grantees in the weatherization program, so we do hands-on weatherization work. We also implement utility programs, both gas and electric efficiency programs for utilities. We provide energy technical services to housing owners and building managers, outside of programs, inside of programs, and we do serve all building types, all ownership types, but we do concentrate on multifamily and low-income affordable housing. And we're also one of those training centers that Dave mentioned, those IRAC accredited training centers. That's us also. And we do both new construction and retrofits. And we are primarily located in New York City area, going up into Westchester and also in California. We've done work in a number of other states, but our offices are New York and California. And with EFA, we're also in those state coalitions that Madiana mentioned. I'm the state lead for New York. We're also a member of the California Coalition. So housing and energy affordability. The fundamental premise that we have is those two are inextricably linked. So if you have a great energy burden, you are also housing insecure. So federal funds for energy assistance are fundamental to maintaining people's homes, making sure that the lights stay on, the heat stays on, and that they actually have a place to put their head down at night. So it's fundamentally a serious issue. We know we have a homelessness problem. We know we have housing quality problem. In New York, over 3 million households are at above what we call the affordability threshold of 30% of their income spent on housing. And over 1.5 million actually spend more than half of their income. And given everything else, families need to afford that that's considerable and it's a considerable burden. So controlling your energy costs can really help a family. And those energy costs are important for small families, single families or small multifamily buildings. But multifamily buildings, they're also important because they make up a very large percentage of operation and maintenance expenses. So if you're a provider of affordable housing, the fact that you have large utility bills means that you have to raise rents if you can. But if you can't, then it means that you're letting maintenance go elsewhere and you're creating unsafe living conditions. So we folk think it's very important. So I put this up there to show a view of energy burden in New York. I don't know how easy it is to see. It's pretty big. So 6% is usually considered the standard for energy affordability. If you spent 6% of your household income on utilities, you're okay. When you start getting above that, it becomes a concern for your overall budget. And when you look at these numbers, you can see that there's a significant population in New York State, a significant low-income population that spends considerably more than 6%. So in New York, we about two years ago, I think. Might be three now. The New York Public Service Commission had a proceeding on energy affordability and they wanted to commit to a 6% energy burden being the max for New Yorkers. We're a long way from that. So it's good we have a goal, but we're quite far from it. So we continue to work on that. Another factor to consider in New York is that we talk about electric utilities, lock, we talk about gas utilities, but a significant percentage of the population in New York actually relies on delivered fuels on oil and propane for their heating and hot water. They don't have access to a gas pipeline. So, and that just creates a number of different other issues. It certainly impacts our climate change and emissions reductions goals, but it also means that people have to have large sums of money upfront every heating season to fill that tank. So programs again to help with that make a huge difference. And the other thing I want to mention with this slide is I didn't break this down by race and I didn't put in statistics about race, but there are a number of groups that have looked at this, particularly ACEEEE. And it's quite clear that those with the most energy burden, particularly in New York, are communities of color. So it's another factor that we need to consider. So as Dave mentioned, the Energy Assistance Program's HEAP and Weatherization and Lab form the foundation of our efforts to address energy burden. And HEAP provides necessary bill payment assistance. So there are programs that give money just for delivered fuel for your utility bill to help you pay your bills. The utilities also have discount programs that provide money to help pay your bill. Weatherization actually addresses the building. And so you need both. I mean, we think we understand you need both. The concern is that you continually have to give bill assistance. Bill payment assistance, if you're not addressing the root cause, every year it's going to be the same. If you can address the root cause of the inefficient building, you'll lower the need for those payments down the road. In New York, I find it surprising, hopefully you will too, that we spend over $700 million per year on low-income energy assistance. And that's in New York state alone. More than two-thirds of that, however, is on bill payment assistance. So we're left with less than one-third to actually address the root causes. And again, I'm not criticizing that we have bill payment assistance. It's important, but we need more funding on the energy efficiency side because it's really addressing the root causes. So I think the other important thing to note here is, given the topic of today's conversation, is how do we target those who most in need? And weatherization and HEAP do that because you have to qualify based on your income. It's an income eligibility requirement. So that sets up a baseline for states like New York to use to deliver further energy assistance. So the utility discount program, for example, most utilities in New York state will say, if you've received HEAP, if you've gotten some assistance from HEAP, you are automatically enrolled in our discount program and you will get an additional discount. We also can get referrals directly to other programs that help with energy efficiency. And that's important because you're leveraging additional funds based on the programs that exist from federal funding. Weatherization also sets up the foundation, as Dave discussed, for high-quality work in a trained workforce, which we also use in New York. So it's also extremely important in that respect. So I put this in here so we can talk a little bit about why money is more than just those dollars. And I did talk a little bit already about housing security and operation and maintenance budgets. And Dave also mentioned safe and healthy homes. And that's critically important to our work. Molden-Mildew that causes asthma, structural issues that have to be addressed. Another important issue that, as EFA and as AEA, we work on quite a bit is workforce development and training. So in most of these communities that we're working in, they're low income, they're a few job opportunities. Energy efficiency jobs are local jobs, and they're good jobs. And you don't need to have a PhD. So you can train workers in local communities and do job creation alongside the work that you're doing to improve the building stock. It's also very important for us. The whole building aspect of weatherization is also critically important. And a multifamily building can qualify for the weatherization program if about 66% of the households in the building meet the income eligibility requirements. Once that's done, the entire building is eligible. And what you can do is have a cost share from the owner and provide free in-unit upgrades to the program and do common area upgrades with a cost share so that you can take a whole building approach and make sure that you provide tenant benefits directly into those units. Another thing I want to mention in terms of equity is equitable access to clean energy. So we are also trying to expand, including incorporating solar and heat pump technology as we transition away from fossil fuels. We want low income communities to also benefit from those new technologies. So we have pilots in place looking at how to include, looking at a building and its ability to transition beneficial electrification or using solar. And I would not talk about it a lot, because I'm out of time, but in California we are running some statewide programs that combine energy efficiency and boatable tax in multifamily buildings. So just to note here, I know Dave also mentioned that money comes from HEAP, not just from DOE to the weatherization program in New York State. 10% by law of HEAP money goes into the weatherization program. Another 4% goes into a state run program called Empower that addresses single family homes and one to four unit multifamily buildings, small multifamily buildings. Using the same, a similar approach as weatherization doesn't always get to the whole building piece, so we're working on that. But that 4% goes directly to NYSERDA, our state program, our state authority that runs programs. So all of these programs are helpful and important. So I put up here Clean Energy Fund, which is a surcharge on utility bills that also funds a number of New York State programs that we run including a multifamily performance program and some other clean energy programs. They build on weatherization, use that as an example for high quality workforce, taking a whole building approach. So to close, federal funding is the foundation. So we take HEAP and WAP and we build on it. I will close by mentioning, I mentioned that multifamily performance program, solar, HEAP pumps. We're also looking at geographic targeting so you can use weatherization of income-eligible households and buildings and then use additional dollars from state utility surcharge and state programs to address moderate income so that you can actually serve an entire community. The Weatherization Preservation Plus Initiative is something just starting in New York where they will use the weatherization subgrantee network but with dollars coming from other housing programs in New York State to address those structural issues that weatherization can't touch. So once again, to ensure that we have a whole building approach and this is going to start with targeting section 8 housing. So I think I'm out of time. There you go. Thank you so much, Valerie. It's nice to hear that comprehensive look at the work that you guys are doing in New York and a little in California and to hear about the geographic targeting, a little bit about the equity work and also setting goals around energy burden. Next we have Mark Jackson from CHP whose presentation will include a description of the standards for work, the accreditation training and building science around WAP. He works at CHP and CHP works to uphold WAP's benchmark for quality by providing training and technical assistance and implementation of the WAP programs. Mark joined CHP in 2009 after 20 years in business management and real estate development where he gained experience in operations, fiscal oversight and customer service. As vice president of CHP Energy Solutions he oversees all operations of the internationally renowned weatherization assistance program, research and training center and utility energy efficiency programs. Under Mark's leadership CHP has developed a delivered weatherization services to more than 40,000 income qualified families and trained over 38,000 participants in building science and energy conservation techniques across the U.S. and abroad. Please welcome Mark Jackson. Thank you. Pleasure to be here today. See that's my Ford. Excellent. So just to give you a quick background community housing partners, we're actually an affordable housing organization based out of Southwest Virginia across seven states from literally Baltimore where we just started our last big project as a city block with the Baltimore Housing Authority, John Hopkins. We're going to have a clinic down in the bottom story. It's a 20 plus story building and they were all the way down to the Florida Keys. We stretch across seven states. We do a lot of low income housing tax credit deals. We actually develop and manage low income housing. Weatherization is actually a fairly small part of our organization overall with a huge mission impact. So within, and Mariana talked a little bit about it also, within CHP Energy Solutions, which I head up, we have the International Training Center based out of Southwest Virginia. It touched about 26 states last year and three countries abroad. We've been weatherizing since weatherization started in the 70s with the energy crisis and that was really what we started with and we are digging out outhouses in rural Appalachia for folks that had no indoor plumbing and literally, you'll see in a minute, we're making, as Dave talked about, we're using plastic and caulk. We were making storm windows and sticking them on the windows in the fall and then when Mrs. Smith called back in the spring and said, can you please come take it off so I can open my window and get a fresh breeze, we go back in the spring and take it off. No longer do we do that anymore, of course. And then last, utilities, and you'll see later on my slides, utilities have really come on the scene the last 10 years in Virginia and they're growing like gangbusters. I think we're seeing that across a lot of our states right now. One thing I did want to kind of clarify and talk about for just a moment is so we talk about the DOE program and the Health and Human Services LIHEAP program. So that money comes in, especially in DOE, goes through 56 subgrantees, I'm sorry, 56 grantees, that's the states, territories, tribal organizations across the United States and then from there it's dispersed into subgrants and, again, this is just to understand that these subgrantees are local community action programs, nonprofits, like ourselves, and there's about 700 across the country. So these are trusted resources and every one of the communities that you live in across the country. So I also talk about weatherization being the foundation of the U.S. energy efficiency market. What's that mean? It means that we were green when green wasn't a cool term, right? So we believe we started energy efficiency here in this country. Like I talked about here on the left, you can kind of see we were making stormwind as back in the 70s out of plexiglass and Lexan and sticking them up on walls. You can see the right there, it's one of the first iterations of what's called the blower door. So if you have an energy auditor show up to your home, hopefully they're not using one like the one on the right, that's from the 80s, but if they come and they don't have a blower door and they're here to do an energy audit, not an assessment, but really a holistic energy audit, they're not an energy auditor or they didn't bring the right tool. Because the right tool looks like this in the upper top. There's two brands out there. I won't name the names, but they're both red, orange or yellow. And that's a blower door. So that is the main diagnostic tool our energy auditors use where they're actually measuring the air leakage in your home. So when you drill a hole to put like an electrical line up into the attic or run a cable from underneath in the cross space, you've just created a hole in your house. And guess what it leaks? The air that you heated, the air that you cooled, moisture. You ever smell your cross space if you're in a house with a cross space? Or your basement? All that air coming from an unconditioned space? Sometimes it doesn't smell so good. So energy auditors are looking for what are the biggest holes? And this actually measures the biggest holes. It's a very holistic approach. Let's see if we had a point right here. So this right here, this is what we call it the house as a system. So imagine again, I cut my finger, right? I bleed, right? I drill a hole, I'm bleeding the house of energy. Same type of concept. Everything you do has a reaction in the house. It's a holistic approach. So we fast forward to weatherization now. We also have thermal imaging. Can you tell? Guess what? If I was just looking at that house, I wouldn't know that they forgot to put insulation in that wall cavity. But with the infrared and the thermal imaging, you can see straight through it. Now, if someone told me one time, well, I could put my hand on the wall and I could feel, I said, you know, I don't know if you could feel that much temperature difference unless you're probably upstate New York, probably. So Dave talked about a little bit about 10 years ago that I could say there's 56 grantees. Well, guess how many sets of standards there were in the country? 56. Well, probably a lot more than that because utility companies had their own set of standards of what they wanted to do, how they wanted you to do it. So the Department of Energy came out with the Home Energy Professionals Project. And like Dave talked about, it set across for four core things, but standardized the work specification. So how you do what you do, right? Job task analysis for each of the different roles in weatherization, worker certification. So what's it really mean if you go to training and just get a little certificate that says, hey, I went to class, right? How do you know what you know? And then accrediting training centers. So again, pre-Recovery Act, we had 12 training centers across the country. During Recovery Act. So this is a program that got about 200 million roughly around that time from DOE funding. The Recovery Act actually added $5 billion. $5 billion for three years. That's a lot of money. Guess what? Training centers popped up out of the ground like daisies. There was 40 of them out there. So we had to credit training centers to make sure what they were training because we had training centers out there that were popping up and saying, I can train you, I can train you, but no one could pass the national credentials. So as you talked about defining the work, and I'm going to skip through a little of this to get to the really good meaty stuff, but it's really about defining what's acceptable for the outcomes. When you installed that widget, six months later did you go back and the installation fell out? How do you install it? What materials do you use? What kind of fasteners do you use? How did it have to perform when you were done? And then we talked about the four major job classifications, which was kind of cool, actually. So, and we'll see in a minute, it kind of created this career ladder, so it was really a workforce training program in many ways also. But we wanted to certify workers, and guess what? We didn't want them just to be certified so they could use the money in the public workforce with public funds because we knew at the end of our, there wasn't going to be $5 billion, but we had a new emerging green economy, and we needed to train a green workforce. So we wanted credentials that were transferable and portable between the public industry and the private industry as private industry started to uptick as more demand for energy efficiency came about. So like I talked about, it created this career ladder, and we saw a lot of folks over a 10-year time frame move from retrofit installers that started in the program 10 years ago then became crew leaders, energy auditors, and quality control inspectors. And a lot of people asked me, so what's it take to really get trained to be an energy auditor? Is I go through one class? Absolutely not. In the state of Virginia, you have nine weeks of courses over about a year to year-and-a-half time frame. If you grab a handout on the table outside, I've got a lot of stuff out there about training centers, about what we do, but actually has a matrix of what you have to do in Virginia to become trained to be an energy auditor. We talked about accrediting training centers across the country. So this is kind of where the meat is. So we talked a little bit about 8,500 jobs directly supported in the U.S. That's 8,500 jobs DOE is paying for. But guess what? Almost 90% of the materials in the U.S. that were used in weatherization are sourced where? Here in the U.S. So it has a trickle-down effect. Over 100,000 jobs are supported in the U.S. by those 8,500 jobs. Another really important thing to talk about here is, and you'll see this on the National Evaluation that was completed a few years ago, $1.72 has returned over the life of the measure for energy efficiency. Almost $3 in non-energy. We're seeing so much more in non-energy benefits from health and safety. And again, you can see this from the slide. I think there's copies outside also. You can't read obviously small print, but there's so many other co-benefits. And again, deliver through a trusted, trained, credentialed network that's in your communities already. The really cool thing in Virginia is the utilities are starting to get the joke, right? So back in 2009, there was zero funding in Virginia from utility companies. 2013, they started saying, hey, let's start piloting some programs there. So about a million dollars from a couple of utilities. Fast forward 2019, roughly $10 million a year. Still hasn't surpassed the LIHEAP and the DOE funding. But right now, what's happened is the General Assembly and the governor's office says, wait a minute. Lowest hanging fruit, highest ROI. We need to put more money into low income. So there's a bunch of bills that just passed this last two years. We're projecting about $50 million on an annual basis. And two years from now, we'll be in Virginia from utilities for low income programs. So I'm going to close with this slide. So it's kind of hard to see for everyone, but I have a question for you. Does anyone have any idea what's on those walls? You can speak up. It's okay. What? Mold. Some people will say dirt, because they just want to be real nice and everything. That's mold, right? Now, I use this picture. It's my wide picture. And you can see in the bottom right-hand corner, weatherizers.borders. That's an international initiative. I helped start with a guy in Argentina in our organizations to actually take the best-kept secret in the world, weatherization, global, and advocate for it. So this is Maria. I've seen mold like this in houses in the U.S. I hate to say it. Sometimes we have to defer those jobs until that's remediated, because weatherization doesn't remediate mold. But in the program we do in Argentina, in Campana, and this is not part of U.S. funds, of course, but in Campana, this is Maria. Maria had to go live with her grandmother. She was living with her parents. Parents had to go travel to work or anything. So Maria is living with her grandmother. Avid soccer player. Love playing soccer. One month after living with her grandmother, guess what? She's got asthma. She can't play soccer. She runs and she's out of breath. So about six months later we're in the home. We do our energy audit. And obviously we see what's going on in the walls. We actually had a secondary program which we braided together and we actually remediated that mold in the home. And guess what? Three months later, guess what Maria's doing again? She's playing soccer. So those kinds of health outcomes are the same types of things we see here in the U.S., not just mold, carbon monoxide poisons. You walk into the home and all of our folks have carbon monoxide. Can't smell it. Can't see it. And it starts beeping. So they're like, okay, we need to turn off the fossil fuel appliance, open up the windows. And then the clients start telling you, yeah, I feel like I've had the flu the last couple of months. I just feel so horrible at work. Guess what? No carbon monoxide detector in the home. So we see this over and over and over. So when we talk about this, it was built on energy efficiency because of our OPEC crisis, right? But it has turned into much, much more than that. And so there's so many other partners that depend on the DOE and the LIHEAP funding as a foundation for setting the standards for quality work, for training our workforce employees. And that's all I've got today. But that's my why. That's why I do what I do because I want to help more Marias and more of Maria's families. Thank you. Thank you, Mark. That was a beautiful story about Maria. As you can see, the weatherization program is a dynamic program. It's evolved and it was great to hear about the evolution of the program and those fundamental foundations of the program and the rationale for the changes over the years. The WAP workforce works to ensure that families receive comprehensive quality retrofits and really addresses the need of underserved communities. So last but not least, we have Ann McKibbin with Elevate Energy and as a policy director at Elevate, a non-profit organization designing and implementing programs that reduce costs, protect people and the environment. Elevate is one of our national partners and as director of policy at Elevate and develops and implements policy initiatives and advocacy efforts related to energy efficiency, community solar, energy planning, healthy housing and residential hourly electric pricing programs. So with that, let's welcome Ann McKibbin. Thank you. Is that working okay? Great. Awesome. So as Mariana mentioned, Elevate Energy, I'm Ann McKibbin and Elevate Energy designs and implements energy efficiency and other types of programs to help people manage their energy use and their water costs and we also do some lead abatement because while you're in the home, you might as well do everything you can. We work nationally, we consult nationally, we've got our headquarters throughout Illinois and we've got folks on the ground in Michigan and Oregon as well but I'll focus on Illinois where we administer programs among other things to reduce energy use in affordable apartment buildings and I like that we're leaving this picture here because we see this all the time too which is terrible but there is something we can do about it which is great. So I'll start with a little background on Illinois. There's a percentage like they do nationwide, a much higher percentage of their income for their electric and natural gas service than higher income families. In Illinois, they pay folks at about twice the poverty level pay 15% of their income just for their utilities versus 2% to 3% for folks in higher income brackets and that's a result of course because their incomes are lower but also because they're living in older, draftier housing much of the housing stock in Illinois it's older than the national average and a lot of it was built before insulation was a thing that people did. So we still have a lot, despite the climate have a lot of homes that are very poorly insulated and sometimes not insulated at all. So this question of energy burden of the percentage of your income that you're paying for your utility bills is super important and this may be sort of you know imagine this but it's been proven out by one of my colleagues as well my colleague is a sociologist and a statistician and she did a bunch of research that's about to be published she's very excited that shows that when people pay 10% or more of their income for their utilities they're one and a half to two times greater risk over the next two years of either transitioning into poverty or if they're already in poverty of staying there they can pay so much for their utilities. So spending too much on utilities really predicts future poverty and this is exactly the kind of situation that LIHEAP and weatherization assistance can disrupt right? It can disrupt that cycle and it can disrupt that slide it can help people stabilize their finances so that they can get back on their feet and it can do that especially for families who have access to LIHEAP but who also have access to weatherization and a permanent fix. In Illinois unfortunately LIHEAP budget only covers about 30% of the folks who are currently eligible but luckily in addition to the federal weatherization funds in Illinois like a number of states we have utilities that are putting money into weatherization and into energy efficiency programs for us let's see yeah so for us they're putting in about $75 million a year right now into programs that are specifically targeting low-income and environmental justice communities and our utilities right now are putting $450 million thereabouts into energy efficiency every year which is great. Employees a lot of people too just like I think some of my colleagues mentioned we've got over 80,000 people in the state of Illinois working not just on weatherization but a broad suite of energy efficiency programs and some manufacturing as well so the utilities are supplementing the federal funds and they're supplementing it by running it straight through the same agencies that are administering the federal funds they're also running their own programs that are complementary to those federal programs and they're enlisting their CAP agencies which are the community action agencies that run the weatherization program they're enlisting them to help with outreach for the utility programs so for example if a customer comes in to the CAP agency and says I don't know if I'm really qualified for weatherization assistance but I know I need something to help me with my bills and they sit down and maybe they're close to qualified but not quite the CAP agency will then give them the information they need to take part in the utility program which they wouldn't be able to take part in weatherization assistance so they're really really complementary our utilities are also running programs for affordable apartment buildings which is great our weatherization program does do a little funding for affordable apartment buildings but it's just not enough especially when the majority of our states low income customers live in apartment buildings and they're also upgrading the efficiency of non-profit buildings so folks like child care centers shelters other social service agencies serving low income communities and that helps those non-profits spend more of their money on their services as opposed to their utility bills historically though in Illinois utility efficiency programs have not been funded or operated in a way that is equitable to low income communities and communities of color they didn't ensure that people with low incomes or communities of color or environmental justice communities could access those programs so for example early on we've been doing our utilities have been doing this for about 10 or 12 years and until I'd say things have started to improve in the last four years or so but we've got a long way to go one of the easiest things for a utility to do when they're running an efficiency program is to offer rebates and rebates are great if you're buying something but if you don't have any money you're not buying anything and you cannot use that rebate it's just pointless to you so the utilities have to find other ways to serve lower income customers one of those ways is to work with apartment building owners of affordable apartment buildings to serve the whole building all at once and that way the individual tenant doesn't have to be involved but they still get the benefits so we've made a lot of progress they've dramatically increased funding for lower income customers they're giving higher rebate levels to make up for the fact that people just don't have a lot of cash and they're working with apartment buildings but throughout all of this LIHEAP and weatherization assistance have really formed the backbone the critical backbone for energy resilience for families experiencing low incomes and I think that's a real testament to the effectiveness of the weatherization assistance program that utilities are going to that program and leveraging that program in this way so looking forward we see a few additional opportunities to ensure that LIHEAP and weatherization are coordinating and coordinating with other state-based efforts and one thing we're really excited about actually Senator Tammy Duckworth of Illinois has recently introduced a bill I think last week actually called the Low Income Solar Energy Act it's S2462 to expand LIHEAP and allow a portion of that expanded funding to be invested in low cost solar energy to help families reduce their bills with clean energy in Illinois as in many places right now solar energy is cheaper than grid power so you can reduce your bill if you can get it on your roof so that's pretty exciting but LIHEAP and weatherization assistance they're a critical basis for our efficiency programs they're vital to getting low income residents out of the cycle of energy burden that can predict and exacerbate poverty and states like Illinois which have utility funded programs can leverage the weatherization assistance program to make their other programs more effective so thanks so much thank you so much Ann so now we turn to the Q&A portion hopefully you have some interesting questions for our panel of experts here I am pleased to take your questions but if you have a question please start off with your name and organization sorry and wait for the mic so we have hi there I'm Chloe I'm an intern for Senator Cantwell here and my question I guess it's pretty much for anyone who jump into answer so with weatherization how sorry let me rethink how to phrase this when you put weatherization on a rental property what is to stop like gentrification or for the homeowner to increase the rent after these services have been provided I will take a stab at that it partly depends depends on the housing type because obviously if you're doing weatherization on low income housing that is has restrictions on what they can do with rent you don't have that issue because they're not allowed to raise their rent however that obviously isn't all multi-family buildings so it's handled in different ways you do have a cost share usually so that the owner will have to provide as well one thing that we do and I don't know if every weatherization grantee does this but is that it's a sort of a caretnistic approach in order to access the funds and access more funds they need to sign that they will not be passing those charges on to their tenants so that's a stipulation that we usually have in our contracting and as I mentioned before you can also do some balancing acts with providing some free work that you may be able to cost share for tenant upgrades versus the common areas but it can be a problem and so we try to address it right up front in our contract where we think it's going to be a problem if I could address that a little bit too in Chicago we've seen you know different levels of this problem in different areas of the city we definitely have neighborhoods that are gentrifying where it is a big problem that needs to be addressed but we also have the city 70% in Chicago 70% of our affordable housing is what we call naturally affordable it just happens to be in neighborhoods that are inexpensive and in those neighborhoods landlords have difficulty charging more rent because nobody's going to pay it because there's a large there's enough housing and it's inexpensive in that neighborhood so some neighborhood targeting can help if you don't have Valerie's suggestion is the best way to deal with that but if you don't have that targeting towards those neighborhoods where the landlords just don't have a choice can be helpful I was also going to add that very similar we have a contract as a subgrantee and most of our subgrantees in our state same way there's a contract that you can't adjust the rent and then except unless it's over your adjustments can be market adjustments and that's all you're allowed like the 2% or 3% whatever the market allows and then sometimes another question I would answer before becomes a question is for sale so I weatherize my my home and then I go and sell it so we've actually pulled up on audits where folks have for sale signs out front and we walk away we basically tell them oh it was there by mistake sorry that's not what the program is for it's not to improve your home so that you can get more money for it so we try to be really careful with obviously these are public funds that we're utilizing to make sure that we're going to the right place Dave did you want to chime in or should I move on to another question okay gentlemen over here Hi there my name is Nathan Park I'm with the National Housing Conference building on the question and the answer and that you were providing I'm just wondering what does outreach look like for the variety of programs that have been talked about today specifically when it comes to reaching out to low income communities and more frontline communities yeah that's an excellent question I think outreach is just super important for building a pipeline of projects and building owners and homeowners who want to take part it's critical to the success of any program we work a lot with community organizations just a wide variety of community organizations we have a team of I think we're up to seven field organizers now that work around the city when they come on board with the alderman and then they just start meeting with everybody every congregation every block club that they can find to let them know what's going on with the programs and how it might benefit the community we are I think we have something that might be unique in Chicago I don't know but our building owners have like neighborhood little building owner associations that get together every quarter or so and they talk about what's going on and how they have you and we've been able to do a lot of outreach at those as well which is really helpful but I'd say community organizations are just the way to go it also builds trust a lot of times especially for the utilities they're coming into the neighborhood people love their utility necessarily and they may not want to take part in a utility program so you really have to have somebody that people trust talk to them about the program and that's what we're going to do in the future yeah and I guess I just add since our member agencies run both weatherization and LIHEAP generally and we use consolidated intake for those programs so when we get them to come in on LIHEAP and we'll have 250-300,000 households this year that come in through that process then our case workers and they look at what the utility bills are looking like we have arrangements with the utilities so we can see their billing system so we know what people are paying and we look for the high energy users and divert those over we look for families with elderly or disabled people in them or children those are the priorities under the federal statute that we have to serve but I would tell you that there's not much outreach because that's how you want to manage your flow of work and it does no good to put somebody on a waiting list for a year it just frustrates them so you really literally manage your waiting list by controlling your advertising so that you advert when you need more clients so just managing the flow of work I think that was an important comment to make that there really isn't enough money to go around so yes we have to do community outreach but we end up with waiting lists for the programs and I would say that the AEA, the Association for Energy Affordability is a non-profit association and our members are the other weatherization sub-grantees in the downstate New York area and most of them run other programs as well they're community based organizations that provide a lot of different services and not just energy services and so they have relationships with the community and they can direct people who come in who they feel will need the services I'll give you a quick so in our area we cover about 40% of the state of Virginia out of 18 sub-grantees we're the largest here in Virginia we cover from just over the belt right up the cross over the river here and so we're literally Alexandria, Arlington and people are like oh there's no low income go to a multi-family property there's no low income but I'll tell you in northern Virginia all the way out to Winchester if you come in and apply today next week we're doing the audit not necessarily in a multi-family but it's a one week wait list as you stretch down Shenandoah Valley central Virginia that we weatherize New River Valley is a two to three year waiting list and we don't advertise like Dave said for us it's word of mouth oh did you know such and such in the more metropolitan areas you're getting a lot more multi-family so it's very targeted and you have to go after it and do a lot of community outreach typically unless you know a portfolio owner that has other portfolio owners they actually have low income housing complexes good question Hi my name is Forrest I'm with congressman Tipton's office thank you for coming and explaining this issue to us I was just curious what percentage of people who have low income people are elderly people perhaps living off of pension or savings and that's it good question I think we serve a disproportionate number of elderly people in our program I would guess off the top of my head that probably 40% of the homes have an elderly person in them and when you combine elderly and disabled it's over 70% of the houses have either an elderly or disabled person in them that's where the targeting leads us and there's always been a bias in the program towards single family owner occupied housing because that owner occupied housing that's the asset of that family it's the only thing they got and if we can stabilize that asset it has a whole lot of other impacts on that family that are positive so that's been the traditional bias but now we're moving more into multifamily buildings because they are that's where most of the low income clients live and there you're going to see more seniors as well in fact we make a special effort to find senior buildings and go out and do them I can't give you the statistic but I don't know it's a question I have to ask you know single family and then small like two unit buildings are definitely the predominant low income housing type in upstate New York but in the downstate metropolitan New York City area that's just simply not the case I mean there are small buildings and single family homes that we do address and certainly some of them have elderly populations but it's more of the larger multifamily we also work with supportive housing providers so there you might have housing specifically for the elderly but I don't know the statistics it is the case that on the bill payment assistance side heap obviously those don't know the way the bill the assistance works is you you get there's a basic heap financial award and then they look and see if you have elderly or disabled or how many people are in the household and the utilities at least in New York now are using that same framework for looking at their programs so if they get that information from the social service agency because the utilities will not collect income data for privacy reasons but they do file matching with the social service agencies so they can provide assistance to those who are elderly and who get a higher heap benefit for that reason and they're also transitioning in the New York City utility which is and now the other utilities are starting to do the same thing they'll do a file match with the social service agency going beyond heap but to snap for nutrition assistance or Medicaid as well we're going to move on to the next question hi I'm Elizabeth scary I'm an intern with the national women's law center and I have a question concerning you mentioned the funding implications for the department of energy is there any HUD involvement that you deal with whether behind the scenes or more forward facing that has housing implications for energy as well HUD and DOE are two challenging bureaucracies that like to challenge one another how does that sound we don't use very much HUD money in our projects at all they just seem to work independently and they're even differing energy standards between HUD and DOE if you can imagine that so it is fairly frustrating we did have some cooperation in place where HUD was certifying its buildings as income eligible for weatherization but when a guy retired over there they stopped doing that so I wish we were better coordinated with HUD HUD is where the healthy homes money is coming from and we've tapped a little of that over time but I wish there was more cooperation there just isn't so I will say that as a part of EFA two of the programs that we're really concerned with are the project based rental assistance and the low income housing tax credit Ellen do you mind chiming in a little bit Ellen works she's on our project she works for the National Housing Trust and she can probably speak to this question a little bit more thanks I will say that EFA works in 13 states as Mariana explained leveraging resources for energy efficiency in affordable rental housing for low income people the fundamental to that is the housing made affordable in the first place and as Mariana said project based rental assistance from HUD underpins a lot of the affordable rental housing that we're talking about the low income housing tax credit program which is actually administered by the Treasury Department and through every state allocating agency is another fundamental way that we build and preserve affordable housing in this country HUD is involved in administering the rental assistance although not necessarily involved in administering weatherization however I will put in a shameless plug for EFA if you're looking for information about project based rental assistance or multifamily programs administered by HUD you can contact me you can talk to me after this you can go to the EFA website we have tons of information so it wasn't the specific focus of what we're talking about today but we're also looking for ways to make these programs work better as Dave mentioned to figure out HUD has information about the certification of all of the residents of their assisted housing that data is incredibly useful to those who to sub grantees that wanted administer weatherization in those properties the two agencies don't always talk together too much but we're looking strategically for ways to make that happen legislative change or from Congress giving them a little push and getting them to play better together so that's my two cents yeah hi I'm Mariani I'm with NRDC and I guess I was just wanting to know more about any work that you have done with renters or looking to do more renter protection since renters make up a good portion of the housing market and if there's any work on that or more engagement and just kind of on the way that the process works for this weatherization and if there's any ever need to relocate families during this process and if there's support for them let me see I'll re-state apropos of the earlier question you know we make the landlords agree not to raise the rent for three years and we will enforce that if need be if the client comes back and talks to us about it process wise I mean people come in they do their income eligibility determination and then we put them on the list and as soon as we can get them there we do them we under DOE's rules we are not we cannot require cost share from landlords of single family homes we can ask for cost share on multi-family homes and off times in multi-family the owner will want to do more things to the property than just the energy stuff and for example they may want to change out windows and I like to say we don't do windows because windows have like a 35 year payback but if the landlord wants to pay for windows then if we can package the project so it's overall outcome is a savings to investment ratio greater than one then we'll do that for them and they can pop for the windows or they can buy down the cost of the windows until they're actually cost effective for us to put in so we work with rental owners sometimes it's just hard to get them interested the only thing they want is to get the rent paid and we know that multi-families that have been weatherized have better payment performance from the renters so that's usually the angle that we go at them with and obviously Elevate organizes local tenant groups too to insist upon it there are other approaches that you can take I think the other thing at least in large urban areas is most of the larger multi-family buildings aren't owned they're not different owners of each building most of them are networks of investors building managers so we found that you can address and there are tenants groups that you can work with for sure both resident tenants groups and then just other non-profits that we do work with that do community engagement and we've also found that if you get a building a property manager or a building owner to do one building and then they can see the benefits so after six months or a year there are utility bills and their health and safety issues and their tenant their tenant interest and turnover and they say hey that worked and so they'll bring in more buildings the other approach that has been done we prefer the whole building approach and certainly weatherization comes in and does a number of things at once under some of the other programs the utility programs are the state run efficiency programs that might be more measure specific we've also had a process working with building owners and portfolio managers doing a single measure across a number of buildings because that's what they can afford to do that doesn't disrupt building as much and then they come back and do another measure the next year another measure the next year so you sort of over time address all the needs in a building you do it on a portfolio basis yeah so a couple so actually you had another question there too you're talking about displacement of families during the work so it's simply what you find just kind of from the process we have the intake then the audit schedule the auditor goes out typically for a single family you're in the home three to four hours and a lot of times you're outside the home not just in the home and then when the work is scheduled it can take anywhere from one to four days sometimes it could be longer depending on what's going on if it's an onion job as we call it you start doing the job you realize gosh we missed this during the work scope it doesn't happen a lot and then the quality control inspection so a lot of times the shell improvements are a lot of times done in the attic in the crawl space in the basement the sidewall is from the outside if you're doing a sidewall blow a lot of times clients are actually impacted very little unless you're inside the home putting in a fan or things like that or lighting and most clients are of course very welcoming for that so there's really not displacement like you would think if you're doing a total gut rehab I mean we're talking about spending I mean you saw average 4,700 most of single family jobs we see are 10 to 15,000 that's still not a lot of money so it's not a huge rehab project depends on if you're putting an appliance in or not so I think that's a big one for us and then the other thing I wanted to point out is just because you apply and you get approved income doesn't mean we're going to weatherize your home they're deferments so if you go to a home and the mold is that bad that you have to have someone come in and actually I mean not just clean up a tear out drywall touch that then we come back to the family later after they've had that mitigated or remediated you go in we've had situations where you have 3 feet of standing I say gray water and sewage we don't touch that home that's got to be taken care of we go in we can't replace a roof if there's a minor repair so imagine you're going to put 18 inch of insulation into an attic if you've got a little leak in the roof guess what your insulation is now all wet and your drywall is going to be wet and your insulation is going to fall in if it's a minor repair let's say it's a boot from one of your vent stacks no problem but if it says we got to replace half the roof DOE doesn't pay for that LIHEAP doesn't pay for that you've got to find emergency home repair funds that's an 8 year waiting list in my program so we defer the home unfortunately sometimes they get worse you might find a church or another social network organization that can help out with that so there's deferrals that go on also multi-family there sometimes we get a multi-family property owner they call hey I heard about this great program free stuff you go to the property you're not doing a full energy or you're kind of doing a scoping assessment there's no way this is a slum this person wants free money and I can tell you the agencies who are responsible so we submit that reimbursement to the state grantee and then them to DOE they can come back and say you know what this you should not have weatherized and that money can be taken back very careful with that and we also want to make sure that again we're weatherizing we're using the funds in a way that's going to impact the most families as possible thank you a couple of things on that yeah we've seen you know we've seen buildings that were owned by a slum lord that we've turned into the city and we've been referred to buildings by the city who are like this is a slum lord we need your help to fix it so there's a little yeah there's a lot that goes on buildings our programs as well don't usually require displacement of the tenant at all one time that I one example I have seen though the building was doing a lot of rehab it was they hadn't renovated in 15-20 years it was time to renovate the building and it was a particularly good low-income owner what they we also had a very strange heating system they had to figure that took a lot of time in the apartment to fix it in that case what they did was they set up two empty units as essentially hotel suites and they did two units at a time and they moved it was a senior building so they had movers come in move everybody's stuff into the unit they'd fix their apartment and they moved them back that was I think best practice they didn't have to leave their home other than a few floors away which was really nice yeah we've got about three more minutes so we'll take a couple more questions and then wrap up hi my name is Jeremiah from the office of Suzanne Bonamici I had a question about manufactured homes I was just wondering to what extent can manufactured homes qualify for these programs and if you guys could touch a little bit on that thank you alright take it away Dave well in Ohio manufactured housing is one of the dominant housing types for our clients and you can weatherize those houses you don't get quite the savings that you would get from a stick built single family home but you know you go under and you do belly insulation you can blow the top a little bit side wash can't do very much but you can air seal them and this is where the new HVAC technology comes into play too the air source heat pumps or mini split systems are incredibly efficient and if you're changing out electric base board or electric furnace you can save some serious energy in that home I think one of the frustrations is that we can't get the manufacturers to build the code the quality of the homes that are built manufactured homes we see are not good and they could be better I've seen demonstrations been involved in demonstration programs where by paying attention you can build a very efficient mobile home but and it won't really cost you anymore but it's it's about paying attention to the details in the air sealing and things like that and the manufacturers just don't seem to be terribly interested in it so we have plenty of work to do in that sector I would just add it's not something that AEA does work on a lot but certainly in upstate New York we have quite a bit of that type of housing and it is worked on and again it's one of those braiding and leveraging money situations because NYSERDA, New York State Energy Research and Development Authority which is our state energy authority that runs quite a few of our programs does have a special program to look at that and address it try to figure out how to make upgrades on those buildings So I want to echo off what Dave was saying so once you leave the Beltway in the northern Virginia area can you work your way out to Winchester, down Shenandoah out to New River Valley about 70% of what we work on is mobile homes, manufactured homes and like Dave said the reality is they're prone to plumbing leaks so a lot of times people cut the belly fabric and the belly fabric is kind of like a real thick tarp and it's just basically tacked up underneath and it holds the insulation all of your heating what's called the main plunum or all your distribution systems under there so people start cutting holes because they repair the leak when all the insulation is on the ground so when we go back in 5, 10, 15 years later sometimes 30 years later we repair or replace that we blow it to capacity with insulation we make sure all the duct leaks the plumbing leaks are all taken care of we blow the attics to capacity because these are not 5-foot attics these are typically like 2-3-foot attics but it's really the appliance replacements and the utilities love it so most come out of the assembly lines with electric furnaces no air conditioning the air conditioner is the three window units hanging off the side out of those windows when you come in the utilities is wait a minute you're saying that you can go in and put a heat pump in because you already have a distribution system absolutely so we go in with a heat pump system already using the existing distribution system all the window ACs go away so an electric strip furnace to a heat pump we typically see about a 40-50% energy drop just because of that appliance that's in the insulation that's huge for a utility company to utilize that as a leverage resource okay two seconds electric strip heat pump electric strip heater is essentially a toaster just so you can understand how it's electric resistance heat it's really bad but common so we've just hit 130 and I should probably wrap it up there but I do want to thank our speakers they were wonderful and I think they did a fantastic job just bringing the programs to life and showing how the different energy programs work together and they spoke about leveraging but you could also see that there is a great need and we're only scratching the surface here and we're these are programs that are modernizing and as Dave explained with reauthorization changes coming some improvements coming that will help the program along but we're definitely looking to you to be our champions here on the hill to sort of help with supporting the program and keeping it moving forward so I'll stop there and turn things over to Ellen I do have a couple of things that I want to mention but we do have a job potential soon so be on the lookout for announcements about that we've got weatherization day coming up in October so there are lots of things that will be going on and you'll be hearing more about these programs so this is a continuous conversation it won't just stop there and for those people who do have questions and weren't able to ask them today please come back and talk to our speakers after we're done great thank you so much I just wanted to add my thanks to the panel to Eva for partnering and to all of you for being here and asking very good questions and I also wanted to give a shout out to Congressman Russ Carnahan who's here thank you for coming and so yeah we as you can see we've recorded this and so it will be available on the EESI website as well as the PowerPoint presentations so if you missed anything you can go back and get those anyway thank you so much for coming and thank you again wonderful panel