 All right, we are recording. Great. Thanks, Stephanie. Okay, so welcome to retreat day two. I think the agenda is pretty self explanatory. I think our main goals here is to really talk about some ideas for projects. You know, maybe starting first with the newer members of the of the group. And then. And Jesse had suggested maybe five minutes per member with, you know, two and a half minutes or so feedback. Then I think we want to try to maybe talk about based on those discussions. What is the best way to move forward with kind of the structure of our meetings. Do we continue to do as we done, or do we kind of develop a new approach based on the work we want to do. And then, and then yeah, then we'll, then we'll close up. Jesse had suggested an item here working styles and expectations. So I was kind of hoping he would leave that discussion, but he's not on yet. I'm not sure. So I might suggest actually we just, unless, does anybody have any thoughts on that topic. Anything they'd want to add. I'm quite sure where to start with that. Okay. So maybe what I suggest is that we'll go ahead and kick it into the project priorities. And if, as you're talking about your ideas, if you have anything you want to add specifically about how you'd like to work individually with team. You know what you what your expectations are for your project in terms of in the next six months you'd be happy with your project if it was at this point. We can kind of work that into our project discussions and if Jesse joins, we can touch back on that later. That's all good. Okay, great. So with that I don't know. Stella and Laurie you're both our newest members and I want to put you on the spot but I don't know if either of you wanted to go first. I'm sorry, can I just interrupt one second just that process wise, I think we just want to point out that this is a retreat. So it's a different format than our regular meeting and so there won't be public comment accepted during this meeting today. And I think, well I guess you have to decide if we're returning to regular meetings next week or not so. Yeah, let's make sure we talk about that at the end. Because is this our regular meeting day of seven years is our extra day. No this is your extra day your regular meeting was the last retreat session that you did on the fourth, and then the 18th would be next week would be another back into your regular meeting schedule. But then you have had three meetings in a row. Okay, so we'll talk about that at the end. Okay, thanks. Okay, Laurie or Stella what either of you want to. So if you want to go first I sort of would rather wait till Jesse gets here because I suspect what I'm going to say is probably something he's also interested in. I don't know. Okay. I, I wonder if what I so what am one of my first thoughts and this maybe is also relevant to Jesse's like working, working styles and norms or whatever. I wonder if it makes sense for us to go first I wonder if it makes sense for us to go last because I wonder if it makes sense for like, as newer members like I still don't fully understand the scope of what it would make sense to take on and if it seems like it could make sense to like on board by working with with somebody else who has a better sense of processes and scope of work. So I'm happy to, I'm happy to throw out some ideas but I also think it might make sense for us to actually go last instead of first. Okay. So what are we going to do is somebody want to go first. And what are we going for what are we. So, this was what we discussed. So I think last week during our, during our retreat. We did some big picture framing and then we sort of got into a discussion on how do we prioritize and what's already in the car versus what else we would want to do and. So we did that meeting with an agreement that we would each come to this meeting with a project idea or priority that we want to work on doesn't need mean to doesn't mean everybody and some people may not have one so I shouldn't assume that everybody's working with one. But because we, we, we thought that what I was proposing was sort of rehashing what we already had in the car. And instead of doing that we would look at best use list and like our own interest and sort of identify this is what I think to, to meet the purpose of ecac. I'm most interested in working on and this is how much time. I personally, or maybe it's not even just what I'm interested in working on this is what I think ecac should work on. And this is how much time I personally would have to, to, to dedicate to that. So Steve it could be for you that just what you're already working on like it could be some, not something new. Yeah. Yes, I can, I can do that. I was just looking for them somewhere I had the matrix from the Jamboard last year. Last meeting. Let me okay. So, I want to continue working on the initiative to help improve the energy efficiency of rental units in town. One thing I've been working on with Andra and I, and with help from RMI, which used to stand for Rocky Mountain Institute now it's just RMI. And they have a coach that was helping us that has some organizational skill and there were some folks in RMI that had a great deal of skill. So our idea was to look at what some communities have done, which is electrification. And some communities are going about it to pass bylaws in their towns we prohibiting new gas hookups and new buildings and new construction and therefore requiring appliances and heating systems and cooling systems to be all electric. We decided not to go that route that's having some problems because it conflicts with the statewide building code and towns and cities aren't allowed to do that. That may change in the future but we decided to take an initiative to see if we could help building owners improve the energy efficiency. There's a way that doesn't raise the costs for tenants and hopefully saves the tenants money because typically the tenants, we think, typically tenants are paying their own utility costs the heat and cooling costs, and yeah, heat cooling costs, gas and electric. And therefore after building owners aren't paying those costs they're not to incentivize to invest anything in the buildings to help the tenants save money so that's sometimes referred to as a split incentive. The owner of the building doesn't have any incentive to improve its efficiency. So we spent some time, we had a citizens group, there was a couple of citizens that joined us and worked on this several meetings and pretty much came down to what we'd like to do is encourage. Well, let's see yes to encourage building owners to improve the efficiency we needed more data. We kind of knew what we have in town. We recognize that the rental stock in town is quite varied from brand new to 150 year old properties from single family rentals to places that I have over 100 apartments. And so to get a sense as to how we might proceed with the most effective kinds of approaches and strategies and to find the biggest bang for the buck. We started to try to figure out what the rental stock is in town so that that's an area that I've been focusing on and Amherst has the rental registration bylaw. And how much time do I have because I'm kind of rambling here. So you've been talking for two and a half minutes. Oh good I'm halfway there good. So we have this rental rental registration bylaw that probably most of you know about and that's been around for quite a few years 10 years maybe. And that requires places that rent out to register and to fill out a form that and certify that the place meets public health and safety codes there's a parking plan. And with the newer registration system they also collect a number of bedrooms and bathrooms for each rental unit. Now there's only one permit is required per parcel so a parcel might be a single family house that might be a two family house or it could be 100 units like puffed in village puffed in village actually I think lies on four parcels maybe it's five. And each parcel might have 100 units. So it gets kind of complicated so anyhow I've been working with that data with the helpless Stephanie and folks in the assessor's office to try to get a better understanding of the housing stock and figure out what the range is and then some folks tomorrow my we're going to be helping us with the data analysis. We are hoping to get some data that we get off the property cards which the town assessor's office manages that would give us the age of the building and the construction type and the insulation and the heating fuel which we don't otherwise have that's turned out to be really hard to mesh these two data sets that live in different universes. So that's been a challenge. So, I'm continuing to work on that. The town council has begun to review the rental registration bylaw, and I need to get in touch with Mandy Joe, because they are interested in having ECAC provide some feedback as they revamp this law, this registration and I think that aiming for pretty extensive revamping, we could provide some input. So, I need to talk with Mandy Joe and then back to ECAC and what can we recommend. Besides getting a good assessment of the stock. What I'm going to suggest and I'll make this more precise later but is that we start collecting data from landlords, building owners and per on energy use and that might be in the form of a building rating, which doesn't actually tell us how much energy is used but it rates the building in terms of its overall energy efficiency I think on a score of like one to 100 or one to 10. And that would be something that we have to talk about it might be something that the building owners have to pay for. If it's a single family they pay for it for the single family if it's a large rental complex they typically study one or two units and then apply that score to all the other units that are the same. So we're collecting data on energy efficiency, and then over time we might consider asking building owners to increase the energy efficiency so for those buildings that have the lowest scores, we could, the town could require them to increase the efficiency. So that's what I think the communities have done this sometimes there's camps on how much money the building owner has to spend per year on improving efficiency. We want to make sure that it doesn't cause tenants to be pushed out onto the street for any length of time while renovations are going on and it doesn't cause the rents to go up. So that in a long winded nutshell is what I have been working on. Yeah, go ahead, Lori. I just want to say thank you so for asking the older the more experienced members to go first because this is sort of what I was hoping would have happened last week, where we find out what everybody's actually doing, because I realize now that I mean what you just described Steve is what I was struggling to put together this week. I knew this and you're already doing it which I didn't know. I got bits and pieces of hints of it from the different, you know, meetings but I hadn't seen the whole picture till just now. And that's the main thing that I sort of want to be involved in I have some other little tidbits I can bring in but they're probably just tidbits compared to what you guys are but you and under have been doing. So, I, this is great let's keep hearing what everybody has been doing because I think that will really help figure out where we fit in. Any questions on what we're been doing. Well, do you have anything to add. Yeah, yeah, let's let's keep going. I'll follow up on, you know what, what Steve described is our efforts to influence their rental housing primarily that that's his, you know, that's the focus that the group that worked with RMI has has chosen. But I am particularly interested in the single family homes and homeowners, and how we prepare homeowners to be ready for the conversion of their homes, which is not a one time thing. It's many different steps, and it takes a lot of forethought. And it's something, you know, I've worked on in, in other settings, and, you know, it's sort of the thing I am most familiar with from my work on energy efficiency and being a bridge between customers and mass save. So that that's another piece of the same, you know, building retrofit the existing buildings have you know, taken on our existing buildings piece. And then we talked last week also about the commercial property, which some of which is rentals some of which is businesses. And, and so, you know that there may be three different working groups for for buildings. So I could say more about what I imagine might might be useful in the conversion discussions but I have a feeling as we talk about what people's interests are that it'll come out. Sorry. I just wanted to ask a question when you say you were a bridge between mass saves and customers what exactly does that mean. Well, I worked for an organization called energy save, which is, you might have heard about the Grinspoon Foundation paid for a car equipped with infrared equipment to go around like all of these town streets in, you know, 10 different 20 different towns and chose, you know, to work with 10 of them and I was a part of that project in the early years. And so I was sort of the customer service person. So I heard the problems that people had in getting to in working with massive contractors. You know, their hopes, their disappointments. So, were you actually working for mass saves or for independent organization that was just working for this independent organization as a sort of an independent organization trying to motivate people to use the mass save program. Cool. All right, this is great. I'm just trying to get a feel for how all of this work. What communities are and it's really nice to know things like that. And Amherst was one of the communities that participated in that. A long ago was that it started. What year is it, I think it started in 2017. It sort of kept going for about three years in that form. Now, the organization still is working on community wide energizing around efficiency, but more through schools. Yeah, just to circle back really quickly to Steve, I think one question I have that I will have for everybody is, what do you need. And if anything in the next six months to move this forward, is it just time to do the work you're doing. Do you need support from someone on this committee or the council or Stephanie. If you can no longer run, what do you envision needing I think you kind of touched on that like we probably would be some kind of by law or something to do an energy scorecard or something but I don't know if you have thoughts on either of those two questions. That's a good question. That's a good thing to ask. I think in the immediate future it's time to connect with Mandy Joe, and to look at the data that we have on the housing stock and come to some kind of conclusions. I'm hoping the town council will be kind of interested in that. And then maybe if there's more data that we want to get from the town. Maybe the town council asks they might get some more help. Maybe the next thing, and then I'm not sure if if Andre and I would want to try to continue working with Cora, who's our helper from RMI, or if we, I start working with one of you. I'm sorry, perhaps, and we come up with an outline of a plan and we'll bring that back to ECAC for discussion and potential recommendations to town council. So those are the next steps, working on the data, coming up with an outline of a plan that how we might take advantage of the fact that the town council is revising the rental registration bylaw, and what we might want to see in it. Can I ask a question? I'll do my thing later. But on that, which you have a great start on that and great work on that. I am wondering at what point it would make sense, unless you already have to reach out to the property owner community, which, you know, there are probably some, I suspect there's some major ones and there's lots of smaller ones, but some maybe representation to potentially, you know, even form an advisory or a group to, so it's not like a surprise that all of a sudden there's something in front of the town council but that there is some opportunity for them to actually advise, maybe provide some of the data you're looking for, but also to, you know, bring forward some of their interests, but also challenges that we can, that you can bring back, you can cogitate about but also bring back to us that we can help think through. Yeah, that's a great question and I do look forward to that to engaging with building owners and managers. I'll have to see I think if the town council is taking the lead on this and we are making some suggestions. I suspect town council will bring in the building owners to review and provide feedback on their ideas. If we were doing this ourselves outside of town council then I think we would want to do that ourselves but I will ask Mandy Joe what if they have plans for bringing in both renters and building owners as part of the review process. The legislation bylaw was created the town manager created a team of 15 or 16 or 18 people that included building owners and some renters, quite a few staff people, and a few others that kind of work together to come up with a best possible plan. So they may be thinking of that already, but definitely want to get their feedback. Right, and it but to your point it doesn't make sense to have two committees if, or to do convenings of this the same right group yeah right. Great. Okay, so under I don't know if that was your, if you wanted to expand on that idea or if that was just kind of a response to Steve's idea. But this is the other piece of work that you know I'd be interested in moving into adding to our. Okay, building focus. Um, okay great so then I guess I would throw the same question to you that I threw to Steve like, if we wanted to move. What do you need to move forward over the next six months, it sounds like. And maybe also could speak to some. I mean I think you gave us a great overview of the general idea but under like specific kind of steps that we need to take. Um, I think that some of it is is similar to what both Jesse and boss who have talked about in terms of educating and motivating. And so that that it might be a schedule of events that are geared to homeowners who need to understand what's a heat pump. Why the three contractors in a row say I can't do it in my house and you know learn about battery stores look just sort of get the lay of the land. It could also be work on arranging starting piggybacking on energy. The efficiency coaches that an idea that's taking shape in other communities and we could copy or or maybe even use the services that are already being offered. And I also think this may not seem directly related but I think we have to tackle the contractor issue and and talk with our local contractors about how they're going to make the transition from whatever their business is now to exclusively providing services to electrifying convert buildings so that we can meet our chemicals. They're already starting a lot of the oil distribution companies are already providing their their customers with heat pumps and yet clearly they're not fully informed. So, I think there have to be some forums with them for them. And, and really, you know, kind of mobilize them to be on board with our chemicals. So those are the three things that I think of primarily. For first, great. Any other questions for Andra in terms of you know what would be needed I think that this probably should be a sort of inside and outside working group, people who are interested in the community, and maybe one or two others. I would just offer that the challenges are high. But in terms of materials, and I think the idea of sort of some events where there's opportunity for people to come in and learn learn about electrification. And, and maybe it's even a bit of a fair where the contractors are there as well. But I'm thinking in terms of materials that would be helpful for people to have access to and even even take away. And I wouldn't do the, to some extent we may need to make them sort of specific to Amherst but there, hopefully, I know mass CC had materials out there on clean heat and so forth. That are that we should make take advantage of. They may not be perfect. They may be, they continuously need to be updated I guess, but at least in terms of the heavy lift of materials that are approachable to, to, you know, homeowners as sort of background materials and information materials. We should probably take, you know, search around and find find stuff that we can that we would find helpful that we don't have to create ourselves. Just follow up on that I did mention a few weeks ago I think when Andre brought up something about something similar that I have used the mass CC or mass saves websites. They have some great video webinars there and some of them they record now I was at a live webinar, and I could not find a link to the recording of it I think I told you I would get back to you but I looked and couldn't find it it was on different types of heat pumps. For the homeowner. And it was extremely informative I watched it when I first got started trying to figure out how to convert my home. They do provide this stuff but it's hard to find it on the other hand they're very easy to get on the phone. And I haven't tried calling them to ask for those links but I have a feeling they would provide them so that might be something that you just talk to someone there about. They do have a lot of things online already. And I can probably find a page full of stuff but it wasn't exactly what I promised I would send you. Okay, great. Somebody want to jump in next. Yeah, I'm happy to talk about what I've been thinking about which is more on the renewable energy development side, which is mainly solar for for the town. There will be representing ecac in the zoning bylaw working group or for committee. When that gets fully formed. It's still I think work in progress so we haven't, we haven't met at all yet. But between that and the solar consultant that Stephanie is hiring. The focus on is, you know this issue which I think will take the year to work through with the town and with the constituents in the town with regard to solar planning solar visioning and thinking and planning for the town. And the solar aiming towards the solar bylaw will be part of that. But also, I'm very keen on working closely with the as closely as Stephanie will will permit I guess, with the with the consultant on the solar solar assessment. For the town and to some extent filling in some gaps that I think might or might not be remain with regard to that assessment. And what I'd like to help lead I guess for for ecac is and Steve and I both did some analysis, probably a couple years ago on sort of a rough estimate of what capacity of solar megawatts of solar capacity it would take for the town of Amherst with and without but we're particularly looking at universities. What it would take to produce generate enough electricity for the needs of Amherst itself the full town. I'd like to do a little bit deeper dive on that to come out with some numbers that we can present and defend, as well as projections that would look at where we may be at in 2030 years with substantial electrification. And with those with those numbers and with this assessment that this that the solar come solar consultants are working are going to be working on in parallel. What I'm keen on doing is is trying to use that assessment use our evaluation of what Amherst needs to meet its own needs to create a couple different scenarios of how the town. Might site sufficient solar within the town to meet its needs under a couple different scenarios one being meeting its current electric needs second being meeting its needs in 30 years with electrification. And potentially a third scenario where we're not simply meeting our own needs but really working more at a Commonwealth level and meeting meeting, providing a fair share of our of solar generation within our town for for the Commonwealth. And that fair share may be based on land area, but it could be based on other things so we can can toy around with some ideas there and come out with some scenarios, and then using the mapping of where where citing might make sense. And then and some some good analysis of you know this is the amount of solar that would be technically or economically feasible to site on rooftops on parking lot canopies on on on the projects we already have in the landfill and the, the Hickory Ridge and the, or will have in Hickory Ridge and, and, and the other projects we already have in Amherst. Here's some here's some scenarios of a combination of sites rooftops disturbed land as well as the potential need to go into undisturbed lands that can satisfy the scenarios. Of how much we do want to site and generate ourselves in the town. And, and to some extent, also, I think it's important to bring in some some cost into that as well. I think we can get some information and maybe maybe add that to the scope of work of the solar solar solar consultants but it but if not then I can work on this is sort of some sense, some reasonable sense at a high level of what what the differential costs are for putting it on parking parking lot or, or rooftop or open land or landfill and coming out in those scenarios coming out with sort of what the costs associated with that. Those different scenarios are as well, not to, not at all to pinpoint specific parcels where we're going to put solar, because we don't want to do that. So the types of, of, of sighting. Again, disturbed lands and developed land as well as undeveloped land that could to get a reasonable, reasonably good vision of what, what we're really talking about in Amherst with regard to providing enough solar for our electric needs. And, you know, I don't, obviously, there may be some other renewable energy development, but I don't see, I don't see, you know, I don't I don't see much else in terms of renewable energy sources that are applicable to the town. So this can also be looking at, not not for the solar consultants but something that I could add to is, you know, bring in the concept of storage and how much storage might make sense at a high level again for the town to marry with this solar development. So that's sort of what I had in mind, working with on behalf of a VCAC and sharing that all with everybody and getting input from everybody and anybody else who wants to join me in the in the quest. To understand that that's helpful. And what I sort of heard you say in terms of what's needed is, of course, you know, figuring out the scope of the consultant work is going to be because then that will help you identify what gaps exist. Yeah. And then what I think, you know, I think the gaps are sort of what do we need to get a good. I'm just using your words back to you but we need a good vision of what a meaningful so meaningful solar strategy would look in. Amherst and then how to what information we need to have a meaningful and productive community discussion. Yes. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's a good point I think the. This is sort of the the background work that needs to be done and then and then engage with and this will probably also be part of the solar bylaw process but you know what is the community engagement with getting presenting these visions and scenarios and getting feedback and input from from a range of constituents. Yeah, so that's another place sort of wears like figuring out what the scope of the working group is going to do in terms of outreach and and seeing if there's gaps that ecac might need to fill. Great any questions for Dwayne. A lot of that was very, you know, it's a lot of technical. And I, you know, besides Steve I don't know that anyone else has that kind of background and what do you think you would need from another, you know, if another member wanted to join in what what role do you think needs to be played that would be helpful. Yeah, I appreciate that. Yeah. Well, if anybody has GIS skills again, talking pretty technical I think maybe some of you do I don't know. I do I do have a student that's going to be working with me on sort of another different project but I think I can borrow some of his skills to help on this as well but obviously most of this will a good portion of this will be done by the consultant, but to the extent that we might need to fill some gaps. Some of that GIS work might be helpful, but more so I think in terms of this group is its feedback I think on the scenarios that we lay out in terms of you know what are what are we what do we want to present as ecac I mean not just me as ecac is as you know reasonable scenarios and how do we describe those scenarios in words that that makes sense. I think would be would be good to have input on, particularly when we talk about maybe this fair share scenario. And then also, when we start marrying, you know, say we need, and I'm just making up a number 40 megawatts of solar. And then we have this, this resource assessment that says, you know, here's all the different citing options and so forth how do we map 4040 megawatts on to So there's various you know there's a innumerable ways to put 40 megawatts in Amherst, and the idea is to pick is to do to provide some scenarios of examples of how 40 megawatts they could be cited in Amherst across a different types of citing. And that's somewhat subjective, and also requires a lot of defending and as well as sort of visioning and more of a social process to large extent. And so, I think when we get to that point, which I think we're not going to be there for a while. Because we need the consultant mapping mapping stuff and some of this other technical stuff as you say, then, then I could definitely want to engage with with others that are really good at that stuff. So with the record I have a lot of GIS skills. I also have a license to UMass because I'm actually working on UMass GIS as for my PhD statement. Oh, cool. Okay. Okay, nice. Good to know. Stella, thank you. I just want to add sorry that, you know, the town does have a GIS department and our consultants do work with the GIS team here in town. If they need additional information. Yeah, but that doesn't mean there won't be a need or an opportunity for more expanded reconnaissance if you will. I might add that one area that would be really helpful would be more people more of us knew more about the Massachusetts plan the roadmap and the clean energy climate action plan. That sets out a framework and there's a lot of technical analysis in there that spells out what the current needs are what the needs will be as we phase out fossil fuels and replace that energy with electricity. And there's, it gets really detailed and you don't have to understand that all but they've made all these models these pathways of what how much solar we're going to need, according to those models and I think we need to help our community understand that in a relatively non technical way about getting into the nitty gritty details but help them understand the framework of what is required to replace fossil fuels. And so some of you wanted to study that we could have some study group sessions I've looked at it. And you might take on the goal of trying to organize some education for the community for the town citizens about this is what it will take, according to the Massachusetts plan to replace fossil fuels. Because I think that that baseline that that model is really what we, we need to understand, because it's huge, it's fast, the scale, the scale is way beyond what what I think people are thinking. And I think you're really spot on with that and how you, how you, you know, maybe understand that at the Commonwealth level and then, and then apply it to to Amherst is really is really important and I'm not sure. I mean, one of the takeaways from that roadmap that I just had students look at it and teach me because they did deeper dives into each of the, each of the subgroup detailed reports. And one takeaway was that the Commonwealth is expecting a more than doubling of our electricity needs by 2050. It was, you know, substantially above the doubling, not at all tripling but about a 1.2 or 1. times. And so, and the scale they're talking about even even the offshore wind offshore winds a big component, putting a lot of eggs in that basket as I think they should. We're so excited about these first couple projects but by 2050 those, those are, those are, we need so much more by 2050, and then the hydro from Quebec is precarious at this point and if that doesn't come in. If that doesn't come in, then the amount of solar we need is expected to go up quite a bit. And nuclear would be on the table to some extent. Yeah. Quick question you're talking about the Massachusetts 2050 decarbonization roadmap is that correct. Okay, thank you. I would be interested in digging into that. The decarbonization roadmap provides a bunch of different scenarios, and then they model all the different components of different kinds of energy and transmission lines and whatnot. And then that's going to be legislated in the clean energy climate plan the CECP, which is being worked on as a draft, and that is supposed to be finalized as a legislate, made into law. I think it's July one is that right under that. The CECP clean entry climate plan is guided by the roadmap, but the CECP will be law. It'll be what the legislature does to move towards that those goals. There's some deadline in July. Yeah, I'm not sure if it's a legislative or it's an act by EA, the secretary that has to put something in place by 20 by July. Yeah, I think it's a to basically have a roadmap that's fairly detailed to get to the intermediate targets of 2025 and 2030, I think it is. Right. That's right. Yeah, the CECP focuses on those next marks. So sort of inspired under by your comment earlier about sort of tackling the contractor issue and whether give a forum with that I think that's a really smart way to have a more scalable impact because we're not trying to reach each individual homeowner we're trying to reach a group of people that whose job is it to interact with homeowners. Maybe think, Steve, when you were just talking that maybe educating the community could start with educating our climate activists groups in the community. And if we could maybe set up a forum with them to talk about, because I think one of the challenges we have the headwinds we have with this is that I think some of our local well respected climate activists are not coming out strong on this issue, or not coming out on the other side of the issue in terms of focusing on forestation which is also very important part of climate but as Steve showed in his data, you know, we need, we really are going to need to focus on both things. And the ton of solar. So, I don't know, I think that's, that's just something that came to my mind when I was, when I was listening to you, you both talk. But the possibility is that I did that presentation for you guys back in November, and if that's something we could as a group or maybe a small group of us. Maybe we revise that. And some of us presented to in some public sessions, kind of a high level overview of the roadmap and the 2030 goals. And probably some of you are sort of better at the technological getting some of the technical jargon out of there that is second nature to me but you might be able to say hell wait a minute, make it simpler. So I'd be happy to work on that. For those of you that didn't see it there it is recorded and somewhere I have a link Stephanie can provide the link if you want to sit down and watch that was like a half an hour long presentation. And then we could talk about whether we want to sort of take that on the road out to the public or invite specific groups like you're saying some of the activist groups. And then start maybe start small but start that as an education program I know Vasu was sort of interested in that. That would be great. Okay. You have that easily Stephanie can you find that or. Great. Thanks Stephanie. Okay. Anyone else want to jump in. I have one other thing that I'm particularly interested in. And it would involve asking the council to do a resolution. It needs to go much farther than that. We're in a really enviable place in some ways in Amherst and a couple other communities around here because we have the gas moratorium that the gas companies have imposed on us. Yet, we have no reason to think that they don't want to lift it if they could. And that they're not having back room conversations with people in town about that. And so I would really like to see Amherst come out and say, don't lift keep it. We don't want more gas, we're going off gas. So that is particularly important given the plans, you might remember that we submitted a letter to for the process that the gas companies are going through in their own decarbonization. And one of the key points that they are are putting forward, that is an industry wide ploy is to introduce regulations that would allow them to substitute some natural gas with hydrogen or renewable natural gas, which has a number of different problems. Renewable natural gas is still nothing, it's still leaks. It still causes global warming. And hydrogen has a whole set of other problems. Good for some uses. We're not being produced green in at scale yet and will be a while before there's that kind of excess green energy in order to produce hydrogen for those heavy industry and perhaps, you know, jet fuel that needs that it will, you know, that that's where we use. We're, we're on, you know, like facing the gas companies plans, possibly being approved, just represent by DPU the legislature is making moves to interfere with that possibility but I'd love for Amherst to make a statement that we, we just aren't going to continue to put gas in and and that goes for propane too, because that's what some of our new buildings have done, rather than, you know, in the hope that we might get natural gas new hookups back again. They put in propane. New buildings. Low hanging fruit. Just say no. So that's, that's a little project. Yeah, Lori. Under other particular state laws that you know about that are already being considered that we should be aware of. So, there's particular proposed regulations and counter proposed regulations that are being considered right now. If you can send out a link to those or an email about them. I would appreciate it because I like to write letters about things like that or make phone calls. Great. Anyone else want to jump in. Yeah, faster. Yeah, you know, I think community outreach and education is an entire area so you know, I'll love to partner with Andrew I know she brought it up. I think we have disparate systems and everyone's doing their own thing, you know, talking to some of the other organizations that are supporting this I think will be beneficial. So, one of the committee members of UMass Pioneer Valley Network and we were talking about sustainability. And we're going to do an event in the Hitchcock Center so I think there might be an opportunity to work with the town the bid, and then the Pioneer Valley Network as well and see how we can increase awareness. What is that. What's the network. It's UMass Pioneer Valley Network. It's an alumni network. Sorry I didn't hear that a what network. It's UMass Pioneer Valley Network, alumni network. Yeah. Yeah. So we base, we plan events and usually it's around wine and cheese, but this year we were talking about sustainability and do something give something back to the community. Yeah, it sounds like there has been quite a few ideas around outreach and education that have been thrown out already that I think we could run with to kind of pull the different projects together. Dawn, Stella, Lori. Sure. Yeah, I, I see the in like this is spreadsheet, the transition to zero emission vehicles and road stuff as a big piece that's adjacent to what a lot of people are taking up, but also not doesn't seem to have a dedicated person on it right now, correct me if I'm wrong. I could see potentially working with Steve because it seems like the offering zoning and permitting incentives to developers to include charging stations, for example. That could go along with a rental unit situation. It also, it also gets into kind of a personal situation where I keep getting yelled at or almost killed on a bike in town. Because like biking is so scary, and like I guarantee you so many more people would be biking if it were like less scary, which is a little bit adjacent to the transitioning to like zero emission vehicles. But I think if we're talking about road infrastructure we're talking about road infrastructure to a degree, and maybe that also gets to education and like changing norms. It also gets to like under the equity piece in the spreadsheet involving student groups because I know a lot of students complain about the, the biking and pedestrian danger situation. So, yeah, and I also would be a kind of under that interested in hearing what would be needed and wanted for the five year plan for the municipal fleet policy. And then changing that over over to electric. And taking that on. And that also to me seems like it would also get into kind of talking to contractors, because again I'm like a, I'm a CDL driver and I kind of have a sense of trucks, and would be willing and open to chat with maybe contractors on that front. And that's a personal opinion based on my own work that a lot of people are driving bigger trucks than they need to be in addition to driving gas trucks when they might not be needing to be. Yeah, there was just a study that came out yesterday or the day before that like 80% of medium sized trucks and 60% or 60 and 40% some percentage of medium and large trucks don't travel far enough that they would need. That they need gas like no on a day to day basis. Which is like a one of the. I feel like myths about the challenge of decarbonizing decarbonizing the transit industry is that they travel these long distances all the time and therefore they need, they can't possibly run on electricity right. Well, or like idling because I feel like I have a little bit of insight into idling which really the issue with idling is a public space issue because which is then kind of a town issue because you can't like eat lunch outside when it's you're sitting in your truck with the truck on. And like I've done this like not proud of it but there's no alternative. If it's not acceptable from these companies to have people seeking out some type of like indoor space for breaks. And if there's no indoor public space available. I mean, especially in a pandemic the pandemic adds a whole nother level to this. But yeah so I would definitely be interested in taking up, perhaps in in collaboration with with Steve or pursue or under wherever it seems to kind of make sense. Some of the vehicle vehicle and roadway stuff. So I just wanted to say I agree with you wholeheartedly on the bicycle issue. This is a pet peeve of mine my my bicycle every time they repave Pelham Road it gets less and less usable by bicycles because the edge of the road gets worse and worse they pave the middle but not the edges and personal my personal safety devices a giant pool noodle which I use crosswise across my bike to keep the cars away from me and I have an extra one if you'd like to use one. I was doing tree inventory you mess and just biking back and somebody was like yell at the window like sidewalk. Like yesterday, I was trying to cross the crosswalk downtown, like with my two year old, and a driving instructor from the driving school didn't stop at the crosswalk. I mean the norms are just not there. I just want to say I'm so impressed with all of your hidden talents that are coming out today. Great Don did you want to throw anything out. Sorry, before you go down real quick on what I had to say, I, you know, I, I'm also interested in the transportation sector. I know I mentioned our region community but that's another area of my interest as well. So willing to work with Stella on that. Thanks with respect to the follow up question you've been asking Laura again because I'm so new what I would like appreciate from people as kind of where, where to focus and who to work with. Again I would also be happy to work on on GIS stuff. One, one particular thing about transportation is that there is a transportation committee that has expertise and probably has discussed bike lanes a lot. So, the whole street concept has definitely been thrown around in that committee. So I'm wondering there is maybe would it maybe be useful to this committee if I talked to them to figure out what parts of the carp they're taking up and what parts they prefer stayed in ecac. Yeah, I think with that maybe be a helpful first thing to do. Yeah, I would agree with that. I mean we haven't even met with them to present the carp to them. So that could be a first step. I guess you did. Who me. No, yes, no. Finish your thought and then I don't believe that I thought you're jumping in to be like I did that already. I completely forgot. So, so yeah I think and we've talked in the past about maybe having some type of liaison to tack I know when Darcy was on the committee she was attack liaison so that did a little bit of that but maybe it would be worth starting like asking to get on their agenda to present some of the carp elements and have a conversation and see where it goes from there. I was just going to add that I see linkages here between what probably even you and Steve on the on the sort of the rental units but also under on the homeowner. You know I think if we if we do have and basu on sort of the educational venues. So if we do have the opportunity to, you know, have an educational program, say the homeowners about electrifying their, their homes. It would be, it seems like it would be a great opportunity to not to maybe focus on heat pumps, but also bring forward the opportunities for an electric vehicle. And for that matter, solar on their roof it's if it's appropriate for their roof and sort of tie these all together we got you know homeowners coming to an event. And we don't have too many wax bites at the apple might as well talk to them about sort of the full decarbonization opportunities in front of them. I think leading with the with the, the heating of their homes because that's the big one, but then also their their transportation, primarily with electric vehicles but also with with public transportation bicycles, and then solar on their roof if it's if it's if it's something so just that thought came up to me came into my head as the transportation topic was going on. Okay, great. Thank you so much for Stella sorry Stella I sort of jumped ahead there. I saw Don took his mute off and I forgot to ask you the follow up question so thanks for doing my job for me. Oh yeah, no. I'm also like super interested in everything having to do with Hickory Ridge and plans. Now, now. I'm actually I did want to throw in a little bit in response to what you said Stella having somebody who used to bike a lot. And in fact, rode my bicycle across the country when I turned 50. I think we could use some education for bicyclists to not just. I've seen so many bicyclists be pedestrians when they wanted to be pedestrians and and bicyclists and on the road when they wanted to be on the road. I can't really share how how scary it can be, you know, riding a bicycle with a lot of traffic. And I think there needs to be just kind of general education on all the way around with with respect to that. And the driver, even though I was a, even though I did a lot of bicycling at one time, can find myself getting upset, sometimes at bicyclists and and and how they behave, not serious ones. But, you know, there are, there are, there are, and I like to see the town, you know, kind of emphasizing bicycles and and I love to see the new stands that come up and the, and the, and the availability of being able to take a bicycle and and ride it and bring it to the next place. So, I don't want you to misunderstand me. I'm serious about bicycling. But in response to I for myself I'd be interested in following up on what we talked about last week on that on the pace program and, and that would dovetail into what you were talking about Steve since I think we will find a lot. And not that many flat commercial buildings in in Amherst. There are a lot more buildings that are rental units that would fall within the rubric of what that program will be like so it would be a really nice dovetail of those two things and I'm happy to work with anybody who wants to work on that. I also think I just I just because I'm new at this, Andre, I have a question on, on the issue of right now, you know, causing new construction to be. Is there a big cost differential on right now, given, given what's going on right now to, you know, to energize to provide energy to a building, you know, heat and otherwise using electricity as opposed to propane. For example, know the numbers compared to propane. I've been wanting to look at that propane is crazy expensive. It was this year. It was absolutely crazy expensive. Yeah. So, but the, the studies of, you know, hooked up gas versus electrifying from the start. It's, it's pretty much equivalent. So, there's no, there's no real kind of cost issue in with respect to that particular program. That's good to know. The entire upfront cost. Yeah, so I think that there was a, there was a forum or whatever on the hill recently where a lot of experts. have testified that they're seeing construction costs of a new build that's all electric versus a new build that's fossil based as being 1% increase. So pretty much at the margins at this point right. Five or 10 years ago, five or eight years ago that was like 8% to 10%. So it's going in the right direction. Good. Yeah, I was especially more for existing buildings. Sorry. The existing buildings I think that's something we could. That may be an interesting discussion to have with the commercial heating company forum. I mean, because of the current, I can only speak to my personal experience but because of the current massive rebates. It was cheaper for me to get he pumps them to replace my oil furnace. This year in January it wasn't cheaper in December. I'm all for education though. Like you Laurie, my wife and I are looking into how do we get rid of our propane. You know, with our existing system which is that which is a hot water system with baseboard hot water. And my head spins as I as I try to figure out the various possibilities. Yeah, so it's. Yeah, that's why I've got a note here about somebody coming to look at geothermal at our house. I think you might bring that one in because I wanted to also invite everybody to the local energy advocates session next Tuesday at seven, we're going to have been while. We're going to be mass trains. Holly, talk about geothermal ground source heat and just how it works and what are the economics of it. 101. So, I'll send that to. No, we send, I sent the link earlier. And when I was looking, there's a, there's a 26% federal tax credit on geothermal this year. Yeah, the problem is you have to have. Yeah, I know. Yeah, there's a lot of upfront costs. Yeah. 20,000, you know, down for 50,000 but yeah. No, right, but it's still. Right, you're right. You need to have the tax liability to have a tax credit. That's true. But you also need to have a property that they can get a giant rig on to do well. That's true too. Okay, so this has been, this has been great. Is anybody not gone, I think everybody's gone. Oh, Laura, you have a gun. Okay, sorry, I thought you had chimed in but go for it. Oh, you're on mute. Sorry. Yeah, I chimed in but I did have a couple of thoughts I wanted to throw out there so I am I think most interested in working with Steve. You know, if there's room there on converting rental buildings and also doing outreach to talk both to the renters and the, and the rent ease. I think we need to, you know, do that in parallel somehow. I noticed that in thinking about this this week I noticed a couple of interesting things one is that there's quite a lot of information out there from people who have already written down how you do this. And not only Rocky Mountain but there's also things like, let's see. I forgot what the ACEEE forget what that stands for. In New York, I think it's located in New York, they have a guide for improving rental housing efficiency which goes through all these steps of doing the outreach and getting the database of where the renters are. And so database is also something I have a lot of experience with some programming I don't have GIS skills specifically, but I have played with databases and I, I'm pretty good at programming in different languages and I know enough about it to be dangerous I can do it. I'm certainly not a programmer but I do a lot of analysis and database work using using either MATLAB or Python or different tools that are out there Tableau. I can probably pick up anything I need to if there's a particular language that people are speaking. So if there's a way I heard you mentioned something about databases that need to be merged for rental units where the where the information is about how they are heated where the information is about you know everything else. That's the sort of thing I've done before, and could conceivably do again. And if there are specific outreach, you know, if there's specific things that need work, I mean this is something I suppose we should we should talk about. I don't know how much of this we can do offline when we're doing work but if we're two of us are working together on a project. And you know maybe there's some room for us to be able to talk about that. How to go about that. So we don't have to do it here in the, in the main meeting. I don't know if there's room for that or not but anyway we can talk about that too. The other thing I noticed is that there's a conference coming up on this topic. And of course I put in Google search for all these different things and there is a I don't know if this is interesting to anybody or not. But where is it. I wrote it down. It's coming from DOE is holding a conference on. Let's see. There's also a California plan on how to do this. And that spells all of this out. Here it is energy center building better solution center that energy dot gov slash summit. So anyone know about this this is happening next week in DC and there's actually a they're encouraging people who are working with local governments that's one of the set of sessions is aimed at local governments. I can I can send that's that to everyone if anyone's interested if you happen to be in DC next week it does cost to attend and it's live only and not via zoom or I would have signed up, regardless of the cost, but it's not that expensive on the scale of of summits like this. Anyway, I don't know if that's interesting or not, but there's a lot out there that people have already written on this and it might be worthwhile going through one of two of those documents that deals with all the different stuff from gathering the information to outreach. And Andra. Yeah, this is also, you know, to the extent that there's outreach and to do and, you know, specific, specific information that we can transmit that we can learn so we can transmit it so that we can talk to people. I'm really happy to do all of that to do outreach or to do data stuff. The things that I did not mention was the outreach that we have started which is to connect with renters Stephanie can you do an off the cuff summary of the, is it the empower grant. Yeah, which we're not supposed to name yet still know why I know I yeah I we're still under embargo for that for some reason. Anyway, it's through mass CC. We have a grant to work with a community partner family outreach of Amherst and we're creating a survey for the rental community that family outreach is mainly going to be doing the development and and distribution of the survey to the rental community. It's going to be people that they already work with, and they have some folks identified as outreach captains, if you will, which is sort of similar to what Andrew was talking about so there will be people identified for complexes and this one person. Originally we were going to secure it intern but we're going to have one community member who's actually going to organize all of the captains and kind of lead that effort. We're going to be putting together the survey gathering information, and then we'll compile that information and submit it to the town and basically the town will have to sort of put together a report on the, on the effort, and that the questions are geared towards and specifically about, you know, questions related to building efficiency, you know, comfort level, you know things they need or want or, you know, might also include questions about whether they pay their utilities or not those kinds of things so we're really slow this is probably the slowest effort I've ever been involved in in terms of getting it launched because we're having real questions about the contract just in terms of the fact of that you could just sort of pay people stipends and, you know, it was kind of an easy process but we're having all of, you know, there are now these sort of audits that have been happening, so that when you hire these people their employees and no one the town and the agency neither want to sort of be in that role of having to be the administrators but we've kind of worked it out so I think we're going to be paying family outreach to administer that program so they'll technically be the administrators, but you know there's going to be translated materials and translation that's going to be part of that and so that we can really reach a broad swath of the community with this outreach effort. Okay, I had to throw baseball pants down the stairs. Um, okay. So, so great so I've taken some notes here and I think I have a pretty like good vision of some ideas to move us forward, I can maybe, and we're sort of right on time here so maybe I'll go ahead and go and give my project ideal spiel and then we can go into the summary of what we talked about and how we might want to organize our meetings moving forward to best facilitate progress. Um, so something that I am kind of a big picture strategy thinker person so something that I keep coming back to is, you know, what's the what's the goal of ecac and and are we best equipped to meet meet that goal. And you know, as I talked about last time from our charge you know our purpose is really to guide the town and meeting climate mitigation and resiliency goals. And I was thinking reflecting a little bit on what I do in my day job which is, you know, try, you know, pushing companies to do more on climate action. It used to be that setting goals was what we focused on getting companies to set goals. And now it's, you know, goals aren't enough anymore goals are foundational but, you know, we don't have enough time to only be setting goals, what's the actual plan, how are you meeting your goal. And in some ways we've done both of those things right we set our goal, we have a decarbonization strategy. But when we talk to companies about it we we talk about, you know, not only just your decarbonization strategy but what is your, you know, how are you leveraging. What is your governance, what is your business strategy how do you make sure that if your CEO leaves tomorrow, your climate goals and all the work you're doing around climate is actually still going to go forward. You know, how is that built into your board governance. How are you, you know, adjusting your business strategy, like your funding models, you know, fundamentally changing how your business operates in the future because we're looking at a fundamentally different future. How are you thinking about the just an inclusive pieces of your transition and making sure that you're not coming up with the carbonization strategies that just continue to rely on the same systems that have created all the inequality that we already have. And then how are you engaging on policy how are you being active in policy because if you're not actually going out and shouting to the rooftops what policies you need to meet your goals, you're not going to meet them no matter how great your internal strategies are so that's what we've been telling companies to do so I thought okay well how would I apply that back to Amherst and where we are. And I think we've got solid bowls, we've got a solid sort of decarbonization plan, and maybe where we could use a little bit more support, or maybe where we haven't thought as much about is sort of on the governance side of things on the benchmarking side of things being able to prove ourselves which we know I know came up quite a bit last week. And then on sort of the policy lever pieces so when I thought through how that would look for for ecac and for the town. A couple of like specific ideas that came to mind would be, you know having clearer processes for which ecac gets involved in certain things like, I would love to see that there's a clear process in that process where at some point during the budgeting process ecac gets a chance to look at the budget and confirm that it is aligned with meeting our goals or at least it's not supporting funding things that are going against our goals of going against our climate goals. So I would love to figure out a way to like build that into the system, recognizing of course that Stephanie already and her, her colleagues already are building climate into the lens that they're applying to their budgets. And if that all works as planned our review would just sort of be superficial because hopefully at that point it would be yes, everything's going well but I think even just having that process in place, sort of provides more or it just sort of helps to solidify that this is something Amherst cares about we care that our budget is aligned with our climate goals. I think another, another idea is establishing a clear process by which, if the councils is proposing a reviewing policy related to kind of climate then ecac also gets to review it in some way and it's built into the process. And we're sort of seeing that happen already. You know this happening with the solar solar work it's happening with a rental agreement work. And I wonder if there's not a formal formalized process, we would put into place there to make sure that that continue continues in that way and maybe that's the role of Anna as our liaison to bring that to us as well so there could be different ways to approach that. And then I also thought it might be helpful to have and this gets to the policy, another angle of the policy piece, which is like, is there a way that ecac, or the town or the council or all three of us have a regular meeting with our state officials to really discuss what state level levers we need to help us meet our goals. And then maybe in, and like the three ideas I have. One of them, we talked about already which of course the state level support for building electrification electrification we need new laws to be able to pass our own laws around electrification. But the other two places is state level support for benchmarking and inventories. Like I can only imagine how inefficient it is at each community is left with trying to figure out its own carbon footprint. And with very little data or consistency in the data, without enough staff support to actually do it. Like is there a way the state could come in and just help us. We all need to be collect, we all need to be collecting that data they need to know it to show their results so I just wonder if there's something that they couldn't do there. I also think state level support for alternative funding mechanisms is key like maybe, you know, maybe it's giving money directly to the town to support the things that the community actually needs to address climate. And that's helping us understand how moving from owned fleets to lease fleets or moving from, you know, moving towards a green bond scenario or moving to figuring out a way to, or at the state level, you know, updating the funding mechanisms they have for the libraries and the schools and everything else so that it's not penalizing folks that want to do climate. So that's the word development so those are kind of my, my ideas how I'd actually do it. I mean, maybe it's for option one about the budget, or idea one around just having ecac have a review of the budget. You know that might just be in guest meeting with Lynn and Anna to discuss if that's a possibility to build into the calendar. And then, on the state level, I mean maybe there's already ways that Stephanie you guys engage with the state officials, I know the earth, but that would be something to look into. It's like what are the what are the mechanisms by which the town council on the town already communicates with Mindy and Joe and whether or not there's a way to feed into that process to bring like a climate specific discussion to that. All right, any questions for me. I'm just really smart and well thought through. Yeah, it's exciting. What do you see as, you know, is it an ongoing working group, or is it project by project sort of. You mean with like the state reps. Well, you mentioned a lot of different aspects of it. Is, is the need for there to be, you know, two people on the committee who are thinking about that in an ongoing way together. Yeah, that's a good point. I mean, you know we have, we have only council liaison, and I know that we've gone to council meetings in the past when it's been a topic of interest to us but I don't think we should be on this committee, unless I'm misspeaking follows the council work closely enough to know when something's coming up that may or may not have a climate impact so. So maybe it's worth. But I don't think we should. I don't necessarily think unless somebody really wants to do that that's the best way to do it maybe it's there's somebody on this committee whose job is it is to connect with Anna. Every two weeks or something and just get a sense of what's going on and if there's something that we should be aware of. In terms of the budget in terms of the budget process. Maybe that maybe there needs to be a, I think it needs to start with a discussion with Lynn, maybe Andy who I think is the chair of that committee. And just see what what we could potentially do there. I think it's we need a liaison, I mean we've talked in the past about having certain members of our group be liaisons and key places. And so, but the problem is that that stretches us then but maybe the finance committee is one place where we do need to be engaged a little bit more. So I think the next steps it would be talking to Lynn and Anna and potentially Andy about the budget review idea. And, and potentially sort of the council, you know, and making sure that everyone on the council is aware that I think some council members think that there is a rule in place that like anything that goes through the council that's climate related comes to that's not the case. So, you know, talking about those two issues with Anna and Lynn to start and bringing that back to you all about that conversation. And then, yeah, I guess maybe Stephanie if you have any insights on like state rep engagement or. That would be another question for that group so maybe the very first step is to meet with Anna and just explain these three things and see what their thoughts are. Yes, I respond to a few of these things. So again, sort of structurally how this is set up and I need to sort of remind you all that you are a town manager appointed committee, you are not a committee of the council. So you really need to be engaging Paul Blackelman more, and you need to be going through him more. And if you want to have these conversations then, you know, I mean, I think it's fine to try to schedule a meeting with Lynn. I think it's even honestly might even be a little bit problematic to be even though Anna is the liaison to this committee she's a liaison and technically her role is to just listen and report back. That's officially what the liaisons are supposed to be doing not engaging quite so much. It's supposed to be reporting back to the council. And so communication does need to go through the town manager and you need to sort of include him more. And I'm, you know, I know that's not, you know, it doesn't make it easier, I just but that is really the pathway, you know, that we need to be following so we do need to include Paul in those conversations. So that's one thing. The second thing I wanted to bring up that sort of came about in my mind as you were all talking as I want to also remind you that you don't want to make your project work. You want to have official subcommittees you want to keep it to, you're kind of working on some stuff on the sidelines that you're going to bring back, maybe one person brings back to the committee and like, maybe one person is kind of the point person for the for the work and the other is kind of helping, if you will, because once you're, once you sort of assign people to go off and work as a pair on these projects, you become a subcommittee and then the meetings need to be posted. I'm just here to keep you all above board, and to make sure that we don't get in violation of open meeting law, because it does happen, and people do call the town out if it's something that somebody has an issue with that you're working on and they don't like, they will call you out on open meeting law violations. So I really want to make sure that we're clear about about all that. So that's all I'm. As far as the insights about meeting with our state reps. I, you know, there's no clear process I think that's a matter of. I think this is a great I love the idea. And I think it's a great idea to propose to Paul. It's more appropriate to propose it to Paul than to propose it to Lynn. Okay, so then I think we would need to meet with Paul. So we tried to do that earlier this year and we never did it. So is there a special sauce to doing that meeting Stephanie. No, just, you know, just, you can reach out and let him know that you'd like to schedule a meeting with him, that you have some AC AC business that you want to, and ideas and some regular meetings and I, you know that you'd like to share with him, and that you'd like to set up. Okay, that sounds good. Okay, so then in terms of sort of what I've, I've tried to bucket some of the ideas we've talked about into kind of three different, three different buckets here. So sort of short term. And so there's there's a one bucket that's related to like education and outreach, short term and longer term, and then there's a bucket related to ongoing research projects with the potential for future outreach. So in terms of the short term outreach, meeting with Paul, meeting with tack. So, so I can spearhead meeting with Paul, Stella, if you maybe want to spearhead meeting with tack and if you need help connecting with the right person to do that with you could reach out to Stephanie and me and we can connect you. And potentially I think something we could do in the shorter term was Steve's, Steve's idea around having a sort of educating ourselves on the roadmap and some of the sort of getting priming the pump in terms of what we need to do for climate and either having that communication directly with residents or potentially also with a group of local climate activists that are going out there and, you know, make getting their message out there I think also an easy short term thing we can do is that, if ever we are involved in an outreach event. You know, we're sort of making sure these messages of our of the Amherst climate goals are getting getting included. So that could be best to with you know, an alumni event with UMass or on job with any events that your group is hosting. So that seems like some short term things we could do a little bit longer term I think would be like maybe the four I really like the idea of the forum forum with the commercial heating providers forum with commercial truck like group, you know, organic or downtown that have a lot of truck fleet like have fleets of trucks, I think could be another interesting forum to have. I think as we talked about last week, you know we may not be exactly the right people to run those forums. It would require pay probably some education our own part or bringing in partners. And it sounds like to do either of those things maybe a first step would be to connect with the bid. If somebody wants to take a lead on sort of connecting with the bid and explaining some of our ideas of bringing together different groups of commercial folks and seeing if they have thoughts on how to do that if they have connections with these types of groups or not. I don't see any immediate take or try. Yeah, I'm happy. At least reach out preliminarily. Yeah. Great. And then in terms of these kind of, there's, there were sort of two main buckets of kind of ongoing work. One being the rental housing project that Steve Steve mentioned. Well, we, we added some interesting, we had some interesting discussion of add ons to that like maybe we need to be adding on charging stations and biking infrastructure and, you know, for new builds like placement with transit. And then we added some new builds. So there is sort of like a, we're starting with efficiency, but there may be opportunities to expand to other, other issues. And we're starting with data collection. But we can, you know, learn from that, as well as from the program with the family outreach at Amherst. So once we've sort of learned a little bit from both of those efforts, you know, figure out whether we want to bring people together. You know, do it and what the, and what the town councils doing to Steve's point if they're already bringing people together and maybe we don't need to bring people together or maybe we bring people together. So it sounds like immediate next steps with that is just to continue to get updates from Steve on the data collection and Steven Lori, as Lori's interest on the data collection process. And Stephanie on the program with family outreach. And then kind of reassess in a few months what our next steps were are based on both of the progress on both of those places. And then the solar project is the other big one right I think Dwayne you mentioned a lot of, you made a lot of good points around the gaps that ECAC may need to fill and we sort of have to wait and see what the scope of the consultant work and the working group is going to end up being to figure out what gaps we do need to fill. Although I do think we could potentially start having discussions and maybe we could put this as an agenda item for next time. And I know Steve you circulated something to this point but we maybe we should start having our own discussions about what we think the scenarios should be, and how we might want to acclimate those ideas with folks in town and that could even feed into this potential forum we have with Climate Act with like some of the climate activists. I mean I think in my mind an ideal situation is that, is that, you know, ECAC mothers out front sunrise all these groups are really recognizing we may have some slight differences but we all agree that like these three scenarios are going to give us some answers that we need to be able to figure out what our path forward is for solar and Amherst. Did I miss anything so just to recap some short term programming ideas and meetings, some longer term ideas for which Dawn is going to reach out to bid and start maybe seeing if that's an avenue to take, and then these two kind of big projects related to rental housing and the solar. I'm not sure which bucket the homeowners outreach fits into. It's not just education. It's also, you know, actually helping people to make home conversions. Yeah, so we should. Okay, so I was, I was fitting that in both under the sort of forum with the commercial heating and sort of under the kind of learning that we're going to get from Stephanie the project Stephanie described because that does sound like it's a type of coaching. If I understand that Stephanie. Sorry, it's not so much a coaching is gathering information at the, they're, they're being called sort of coaches but they're basically just the people that are going to serve as a lead to gather the survey information from people in their building complexes. Okay, so yeah so under maybe sit back to you then what, what are you, I mean, we're not going to be the ones doing the thing so like putting in the heat pumps. So, do you have a beyond working with the community, I guess I'm wondering what the like action I would be there. Well, I should answer she. Yeah, I might be thinking the same thing it's, you know, we're learning about block power and other companies that do this for municipalities and we should be looking into it. I was going to point out that's the thing we've left out of all of this is I think as part of the work to try to figure out how to convert rental units for example it's fine to learn about what Massachusetts offers and reaching out to people and getting them involved in an early stage so they don't feel like they're being blindsided, but I think what we really need to be doing is bringing in some sort of a consulting group to or to actually do the transition to tell people okay you know go into the building. Here's what we can do and that has to be set up so that it's easy for people to do. Right, it has to be, we have to be that matchmaker I think that finds the service that's going to actually make this happen that's the sort of how I see us because we can do all the research in the world and figure out you know where everybody is but if we don't take that next step we're not going to get anything done and and we can't do it and hooking people up one at a time with contractors is also a non winning situation it's it's too. It's too time intensive for everybody and we're not equipped to do that correctly. Right, but there are companies that are and I think it's not just block power I think there are others out there too I've been trying to figure this out. Yeah. So yeah maybe I'll put that on as another sort of ongoing place for research and I'll put Lori and Andrew down as potential researchers there. Because that feels like a place where. Like I really enjoyed the block power presentation and what they can provide and my immediate, then my immediate lead into how would we actually actualize that an Amherst, and then I stopped. Yeah, thinking of a good idea. I have a question of Stephanie so to the extent that what we're doing is research trying to figure things out trying to work through documents together to understand them. Is that stuff we can do outside of an open meeting as a few of us getting together and talking over the Massachusetts 2050 plan for example, like I said if one of two if one of you is sort of like the point person. Okay, and they want to say. I don't have any feedback on this. But when you start gathering a few of you, like three of you, and you have a meeting all together. It's one thing if Steve wanted to go to you talk with you or then Steve meets with you with Andra talks to Andra but if the three of you get together to have this big discussion about working through something that you're kind of developing a plan that sort of serves the work that you do that you've been charged with. Just to do the research not to develop a plan but just to understand something like like this 2050 Massachusetts plan. Right. So again, you know they're fuzzy lines. I just, you know you have to be careful because you can't even have the sort of perception of somehow colluding. You know, so it's it is, I mean I know it's it's challenging. Everybody gets irritated with open meaning law, but at the same time it's to keep transparency so people know what the town's doing. So, again, you know if there's a way that you can do it through, you know, Steve could maybe have some information and share it and say what do you think about this, you know, to both of you and then you both could respond to Steve, but you're not necessarily all three having a dialogue about it. That's, that's a way that you can do that and that's totally acceptable. The only other thing I would ask is we don't forget to discuss we need to figure out whether or not we're having a meeting next week or not. That's important. Okay, so in terms of. The structure of our meeting so the way they've been going recently is we've done ecac member updates would sort of turn into updates on, you know, Steve usually will give an update on the on the residential or the rental housing electrification project for example so kind of morphs into and and I think as we're moving forward I think Steve, you know as you have a more defined role, working with me and the Joe and you would want to bring stuff back to ecac and Dwayne as you as well you're going to be on these teams and bringing things back to ecac. It may make sense to move some of the project based work. So I guess so I can see it going one or two, one or two ways. One is we just sort of our agenda is ecac member updates and anything else topical, and we spend the ecac member updates having each of us given update on the things we're working on. That's probably the easiest way to do it. The other way to do it would be to have sort of standing agenda items on each of these kind of buckets of items. Short term outreach, longer or outreach maybe including short and long term and then these three buckets of projects, rental housing, solar project and residential heating to start. Does anybody have any like strong feelings either way. It makes sense to organize it by our projects. So there's sort of more focus and opportunity, and to some extent responsibility for each of us to, to, you know make some progress and present it. What I'm working with is that this is, this is also the only time that we can work together, because otherwise it's very cumbersome to create a whole nother meeting on the books or whatever for three of us to get together to actually work together on a topic. I wonder whether there's structure to be had in the meeting. You know, ideally, you get, you know what Lori was saying you get together and you spend an hour an hour and a half together and we don't have that sort of time and in these in these, you know, in our ecac meetings, but is there some structure in these meetings where some actual collaboration collaborative work can get done because in nuggets at least to move things forward, because otherwise it's really hard to work, you know, I think it, I think what we're identifying here is there's the lead and the leads kind of responsible for moving things forward week by week but I think we really want to work together on some of these areas and so is there room in the agenda in a condensed way to, you know, carve out for each topic here's an update and here's, you know, here's 10 minutes to do something collaboratively to do what discuss or reach some decisions. Yeah, so that's a good point to join so instead of making every meeting be an update on everything maybe it's, we folks need to be. Oh, I guess we could. This would require more upfront planning from you all but like, you know, making sure that we have an agenda, you know, it maybe would do it we sometimes good and sometimes not good at planning the agenda for the next meeting during the meeting. I think it would be great if we knew okay this next meeting Dwayne's going to take a deep dive on the solar stuff for us so we have that planned ahead and then if you want to get on the queue you get on the queue for the next meeting. Yeah, Steve. Yeah, I like that I think it might be nice though to have at least brief reports from all of the projects, but then plan to have one or two projects go into those deeper dives. Each project gives a brief update, and then hopefully one or two as it leads a discussion or ask questions that they'd like feedback from other members or gets into the nitty gritty. Yeah, I also want us to not feel it's not that cumbersome to have, you know, a public meeting, you just have to have it posted. That's all. All the time you post, you know, Stephanie will post it, and, and then, you know, you can have attendees, and they can ask questions and, you know, we have nothing to hide. So, I encourage groups of three to join together ask Stephanie to post a meeting and just do it. And I remind you that right now there's a meeting so they all have to be coordinated and I'd have to host them all right now. And you do. Because the town has to host them you can't host your own meeting. Oh, I see. Remind me how long in advance you have to post it. 48 hours. Okay. So it's not impossible, but we do, but we do have to get it into the clerk's office a little bit in advance of that so I'd want to, you know, if you were going to plan a meeting. And you wanted to post it publicly I'd want to have at least a like a four day lead time minimum really. Because we'd need to post the agenda and post it publicly and posted on the ECAC page. And I think the thing is, you know, again, you can have conversations with one another. It's not like you can't. You know, if you're trying to get like if say Steve is lead, and he wants to get, you know, Andrew, what do you think about this and get your input, you can do that. You know, he can get input from you. And that's fine. Okay, so it sounds like it's not impossible. There are some hoops to jump through. And so I think the other thing we should probably bring into our meetings is if we're starting to have a discussion and we feel like it would be better suited to have a two person discussion to bring back to the group or a larger meeting, then we should be bringing those up as options to make sure we to the extent that they're helping to move our work forward. We have two minutes left so let's talk about. Oh yes Steve quick. I just wanted to talk about the next meeting and note that Dwayne and I prepared sort of some discussion points for ECAC to provide recommendations on the kinds of questions, some of the questions that the town funded solar assessment might study. And I would love to meet next week to have that conversation. Yeah, I mean I'm on this. I'm, I'm, I kind of agree just in the sense that we have these meetings already in our calendars for every two weeks and so to then change them to be the every other two weeks might be. So we may want to power through with one more meeting next week, and then get back on our regular schedule. And if somebody can't make it, you know, it's recorded and we can go back to it does that. Is it, is there anybody, but we need a quorum so is there anybody that definitely can't make it next week again next week. Okay, not seeing anything so let us know if you, if something comes up but otherwise let's plan on meeting next week and I think, yes Steve, sort of doing, doing a work, having that be our main agenda item sounds like a good, good plan. Is there anything, any other agenda item. So, so we can continue to do our ecac member updates which is where, you know, dawn if you for example had a chance to reach out to the bid you could give an update there, and then go from there into a deep dive on the solar stuff. Is there anything else people want someone wants to add to the agenda before we close. It looks like tack is having a meeting on Tuesday. It's hard to tell because it says the next meeting is Thursday May 17, 2022, but I think the 17th is a Tuesday. Right. Yeah, they normally do meet on Thursdays. So maybe they did it. Who's who the chair is. But I was going to say I could go and just kind of raise this question of what they're taking on and what, what it might make sense for ecac to take on and kind of just chat about that but and then report back but if it's on Thursday, if it's actually Thursday. If it's Thursday, the 19th, and maybe that's something for the next meeting. Okay. You say it's normally Thursday is normally Thursday. Yeah. Okay, then I'll assume it's the 19th. Okay. You might want to double check. Okay, because sometimes they do depending on if they, for some reason, people couldn't meet and so they decide to meet on the Tuesday. So I wouldn't assume that the posting is wrong. Okay. So you might want to reach out if there's a staff liaison you might want to reach out to the staff liaison. Okay, that sounds good. Yeah, and probably reach out anyway just to get they may not have room on their next agenda so it may be a couple of weeks before you can get on the agenda. Great. Well thanks all this is a really productive conversation I think we have a good path forward and some great ideas on the books here. So yeah, we'll leave it there. Thank you. Thank you.