 Briefing, which is going to be focused on City of Burlington's new efforts to reduce fossil fuel usage in the City of Burlington in our new buildings and renovated major buildings. Before we do that, however, given the events of this weekend, I do want to start with a statement about that, and then we will start the briefing. So first, we again have a terrible incident of violence in the early morning hours, down early morning. I want to offer my condolences to the Sharif family for their loss, in which them strained during what a terrible time. I've been getting updates on the police response from Chief Murad since shortly after the incident. The Department is working extremely hard on this case as they do with all homicide cases, of course, and he has expressed confidence to me that the perpetrator of this violence will be held accountable as the BPD has done, achieved with so many past cases. As I've said before, we should never get used to the kind of violence that we've seen in Burlington, especially this year. We've taken many steps to respond to this spike in violence since it began in 2020. Even before this latest homicide, we had announced that we are very close to releasing a new state, new new round of both local actions as well as actions that we need from our partners in state government to respond to this situation. I'm sure there's some questions for me about this incident. I will answer them at the end of the briefing after we've concluded with any questions that there are about this new proposal and we can let Darren go before we start that segment of the briefing. With that, I want to welcome our general manager, Darren Springer, to this Zoom briefing. See Darren coming on. Welcome, Darren. Darren has been working hard on this proposal for years really. This is to remind everyone how we got to today's announcement. This is the result of a charter change process that the place and was voted on by Burlington voters in the spring of on town meeting day and 2021. And that was on the heels of the roadmap that was released in 2019, which laid out there this very ambitious goal for the city of Burlington to become a net zero energy city essentially from on and on a net basis to have no fossil fuels being consumed in the community for ground transportation, electric generation, or for thermal heating and cooling by 2030. The vote was supported overwhelmingly on town meeting day by Berlin Tonians. It was not immediately acted on in the legislature in 2021 but in 2022, there was a serious review of it and Darren was part of a team of that answered many questions about this proposal, as it went made its way through both chambers of the legislature and then over the governor's desk. What this new authority gives us the ability to do is quite unusual there are very few municipalities in the country that have this clear ability to regulate thermal, how buildings are heated in cool the church change lays out a process whereby if we are going to introduce any new payments fees, taxes as a result of a further change that needs to go back before the voters. So, we've been granted that authority in the spring we've been really right at the end of the session in May, we have been working steadily on a on a proposal in the months since and this evening for the first time we're going to be briefing the city council on on this proposal and asking them to start the process of reviewing it and turning it into both ordinance and a new ballot item that could go before voters, we hope this coming town meeting day in 2023. So, with that and really the briefing tonight is being grounded in this final report that that the growth election department and the department of permitting inspections have collaborated on and which is now published and you can find on the city's website on board docs Darren's going to walk us through the top elements of it I think. Next slide. Darren, I think here I'll hand it over to you and jump in further as makes sense. Thank you, Mayor, and thanks for hosting this briefing. Good afternoon everybody. I'm a manager there and sprayer with Burlington Electric, and this effort was really a product of collaboration with our colleagues at the Department of permitting and inspections in particular, director bill Ward and Patty wayman as well as my colleagues at Burlington Electric, Jennifer green and Chris burns. It will all be at the city council this evening. We had issued this first report on the proposals related to the charter change back in July. And since that time we've been working intensively with stakeholders doing outreach in the community. We've been to all the different community meetings to share thoughts and take feedback. And we've also been working with the building electrification Institute, which is a national organization that works with cities around the country on on similar policies. So we've been able to analyze and learn from what may be going on in Boston and Denver and New York and other communities as well. And so this this slide just summarizes some of the stakeholder engagement outreach that we've done. On the next slide, really important to emphasize that the city council resolution that was introduced in May, related to this effort and the work that we've been doing from the administration is focused on a few key sectors in terms of building buildings. And so we are looking at new construction where the city already has some strong policies related to requiring a primary renewable heating system, but we'd be building on that. We are looking at large existing commercial and industrial buildings, over 50,000 square feet. So we're talking really about potentially around 80 buildings in the city that are the largest buildings. And then we're also looking at municipal and city buildings opportunities for the city, of course, to lead by example. What we are not focusing on in this policy is any existing residential buildings, and that includes single family homes, multifamily homes, rentals, condos, affordable housing, any existing residential buildings are not covered under this policy existing small business buildings are not covered. And in fact, any existing building under 50,000 square feet, that's commercial industrial is not covered. So just wanted to set that context up front. So in terms of the policy recommendations. Before you go for such an important point let's just unpack that a little bit for people and understand and talk about the logic behind this and why I think this is fundamentally reasonable and workable proposal. Especially because we're making this proposal now in in 2022, a decade ago. You know, perhaps this proposal would have meant raise bigger questions for some or other key values like generating new investment in homes and in businesses in Burlington. What has happened over the last decade and that is sort of the backdrop to this whole conversation is that there has been a dramatic improvement in all the technologies. There are some more than others, but the technologies that allow us to allow builders to come forward with build and build buildings homes and businesses that are not primarily heated and fooled by by fossil fuels that, you know, you see this on the renewable grid, we are seeing it in the increasingly in the heat pumps as well. This is in many cases now new construction is very competitive to be using these alternative non fossil fuel building, burning technologies may even be the cheaper technologies in many applications. They are, they often have operational advantages. And for example heat pumps can be used to cool spaces as well as heat them. And, and they also come with local and excitingly now federal incentives for this type of construction as well so there will be real opportunity. No new building should get built without serious consideration of using these non fossil fuel building technologies across the board and that's what this proposal really does is ensure that builders are going to have to look carefully at that. And in addition, not only is Burlington acting in this space, but our neighbors in South Burlington, for example, looked at the renewable heating ordinance that Burlington adopted in 2021, and just recently adopted a similar ordinance for South Burlington for renewable heating and renewable water heating in new construction so our actions here over the past year have inspired one of our neighbors to take additional action as well. And it's absolutely true that the technology has come a long way in the last decade, particularly heat pump technology in colder climate. So we've made these recommendations with that in mind. So here we have this slide the policy recommendations for new construction. And again, this is building on the existing requirement to have a renewable heating system, primary heating system that's already in ordinance. What we're proposing in the memo is that starting in 2024 and subject to voter approval as the mayor mentioned that new construction would be required to be 100% renewable for thermal energy. That would include heating that would include water heating with with one exception that I'll touch on in a moment. That would include cooking and appliances and other thermal systems. So the idea being that you would build new buildings starting in 2024 that are consistent with the city's net zero 2030 goal. And the exception that I mentioned is that for water heating domestic water heating technology in the memo we propose that that would not kick in for multifamily buildings affordable housing until 2026. That's one area of technology in that specific space that maybe hasn't come as far as some others. There are really good domestic water heating options that are electric or renewable for single family homes and for commercial buildings. But there are some unique challenges relative to larger multifamily or rental buildings. And so we've taken stakeholder feedback into consideration there and proposed a 2026 time frame for that. Important to note that consistent with the city's existing renewable heating ordinance. The definition of what is renewable is broad and includes a number of technologies and fuels. We're talking about geothermal or ground source heat pumps. We're talking about air source heat pumps and water source heat pumps heat pump variable refrigerant flow technology advanced wood heating systems. As well as conventional systems if they have a renewable fuel supply and that can include renewable gas biodiesel renewable hydrogen or renewable district energy. And then if a building was looking at these requirements and determined that none of them were feasible or cost effective. They would be looking at an alternative compliance carbon pollution impact fee for the system that was conventional and did not use any renewable fuel so a fossil fuel system that had no renewable fuel. And the fee would look at not an annual assessment but at a time of permit assessment based on the lifetime of the system and the amount of carbon pollution that it would be putting out. So it would be a one time fee up front and the goal here would be and we have some analysis later in the deck that will demonstrate this to have someone look at that fee on top of the cost of the existing conventional system. And compare it to all the renewable options with the cost of pollution included and be able to make an economically rational decision based on that that really levels the playing field for renewable fuels and renewable technologies. That's the purpose of using carbon pricing here and that's discussed in more detail in the memo. So on this slide we're looking at what is the policy recommendation in the memo for large existing buildings and city buildings. And so again for large existing buildings we're talking about commercial industrial over 50,000 square feet of space conditioned space. Again that's about 80 roughly any buildings in the city. And then we're also talking about the municipal and city buildings. And it would be a requirement similarly starting in 2024 that if one of those buildings was to go to pull a permit to replace a water heating system or a heating system. They would be required to use renewable fuels or technologies or have the carbon pollution impact the apply as alternative compliance. Importantly this exempts residential multi family portable housing existing buildings small businesses. We also include the memo and exemption process for historic buildings if being on the National Historic Register or being eligible for that creates an insurmountable barrier to participating in the policy. There is a cap proposed for the existing building carbon pollution impact fee of 75% of the cost of a conventional system. So that's another effort to be practical and economical with the requirements and sure that their cost effective. And in addition, there's an opportunity here in the recommendations for a building owner to take action if they choose to reducing emissions that are outside the scope of the policy. Such as looking at renewable systems elsewhere beyond the heating water systems within their building or buildings as the case may be. And to get credit for actions they might take to reduce fossil fuels against future compliance costs. So we think about large existing buildings. There are a number of institutions in the city that may have multiple buildings as part of a portfolio. Some of them might be covered by the policy some might not be covered by this existing policy and existing building policy. And this really gives an incentive for them to take action across the portfolio of buildings to reduce fossil fuel use and emissions and gives them a credit from a regulatory standpoint in the proposal if they were to act on those other systems. So one question is what would the recommended use of the revenue be from the fee if there are proceeds to the city and in the report we recommended three possible uses. One would be to continue to support capital needs for the city to electrify its own vehicles and fleet. I know there's been significant progress that the mayor and the council have made on this effort on with our colleagues at the Department of Public Works and those who manage the fleet in the city. This would be a potential revenue source to accelerate that effort to electrify our city's vehicles and lawn care equipment, other opportunities there. In addition, there was an advisory question on town meeting day in 2021 advisory question seven that spoke to the need to have some of the benefits from this policy flow to low income Burlingtonians. And we're proposing creating a new city fund that would support installation of clean heating technologies for low income households and renters as another possible use of the proceeds from the carbon pollution impact fee. And then lastly, this would apply only to existing buildings that would pay the fee, not to new construction for fee payers with existing buildings providing an opportunity to have a substantial portion available back to that fee payer. If they produce a plan to reduce emissions at their building or facility with the proceeds, including electrification work energy efficiency work or other work. And this was an idea that really came from the stakeholder engagement process. This is something that stakeholders said would be meaningful to them and helping to reduce emissions in their facilities or buildings. Great there and thanks for laying it out there I think that puts the basic idea out there for for everyone understand in a moment I'll hit it back to you to kind of walk through a couple case studies that will give people kind of a sense of how this new fee will be implemented before I do that I just want to speak to a few things like first of all like what's the big deal here why why are we putting so much effort into this issue what that we've spent, you know years now going to the legislature to get this authority. And now are going to be going to voters for a second time. And what I hope comes through is just how central the electrification strategy is to Burlington's climate action plans but really more broadly I think really often underappreciated is how electrifying everything has emerged in the last few years as really the, the critical solution for getting to our clinicals for avoiding the worst impacts of, of warming that have been projected by by scientists it's not the solution to the entire problem, but it is. And if and when we get to the point where all of our vehicles and our other buildings run on fully renewable electricity is a is is already the case here in Burlington. Since 2014 the first city in the country to have 100% renewable electricity. Right there we will have addressed more than you know half of the, what we have targeted as a kind of country for for our climate goals. The positive momentum that is starting to become a part of the narrative about the climate emergency the fact that in just five years, there has been approaching a 50% reduction in the projected warming for the years ahead. The great majority of that are very substantial percentage of that at least is being driven by assumptions now about us succeeding at that electrification effort. But, you know, those projections are just projections to actually get there is going to take state and local governments, working with communities to implement these changes and to actually make them happen and happen quickly and that's what we're trying to do here. We've been trying to do formally as part of our policy since 2019. That's why we came out with these years ago now these incentives that encourage the electrification of cars and buildings, we're now taking the next step beyond just the incentives, we're taking another I guess I should say regulatory step that pushes the market in this direction. At the same time, I think it's important for people understand there, there is another option that was considered and frankly some of our colleagues advocated for which was something that for my perspective is is is extreme and kind of goes too far which is to just say at this point in the future we're going to we're going to prohibit all new fossil fuel infrastructure and new buildings that the technology is not there yet for in this climate for us to support that kind of policy that would result if we went that far. I think in some really negative impacts on our other goals on the creation of new homes and jobs. Carbon impact fee proposal. To me gets the balance right it creates very significant penalties for making decisions that take you in a direction other than the taking towards new fossil fuel infrastructure but it doesn't make it impossible. In the areas where there's really no good alternative no good commercial alternatives. Well, no I appreciate that context mayor and I did want to mention because I know this this will come up. You know we're calling it a carbon pollution impact fee, and it really is a fee as opposed to a tax and I think that the wording here is important because this is something that's alternative compliance in the event that somebody can't build with 100% renewable fuels or technologies. It's something that is by possible in that way. Not every building would have to pay it if they're able to comply with the policy attacks on the other hand would really be based on fuel consumption and would be not by possible. We don't we don't have the option typically to not pay a tax. It's something that we pay based on the consumption of a fuel or or purchase of a good. So in this case, we've called it the carbon pollution impact fee and that really is the appropriate way to think of it. It's kind of a development impact fee of sorts. If somebody's not able to comply with the policy. And can you speak to sorry. Can you speak to how we arrived at the proposed fee. Absolutely so we looked in the memo, we're recommending that the fee would be based at $150 a ton of carbon pollution. And we looked at what other cities have done. And in some cases, it would similar building policies on New York, Boston and look at the structures that are higher. $234 a ton, $268 a ton. On the other hand, the Vermont climate council has done some analysis or looked at some analysis that's been done in New York as well that was suggesting something in the neighborhood of $128 a ton. At the federal level, they use a social cost of carbon that's that's far lower. I believe it's in the $51 a ton range or $56 a ton range. So 150 we used as being kind of a practical number. It's relatively close to the number that's being suggested to be used in Vermont. And it's not as high as what some communities are looking at. But it's impactful enough to make the determination on which technology to use in a building on meaningful. And that's kind of what this this next couple of slides, the analysis demonstrates. Great, why don't we get into these two examples and then we'll open it up for questions. So, I think these, it takes a little bit of interpretation here but I think this gives a pretty good indication based on a real world example of the kind of options that a builder would face today. And how that will change when this new regulation is in place. Absolutely. So this first example is a new construction example. It's based on a real world example in Burlington where we have new construction. This was a multi family building. And we look here on the far left in the light gray shading is the baseline fossil fuel heating and water heating system for that building. And the cost was approximately 5.2 million. And in this case, if you took the carbon feed that's that's looked at here and added it to the cost of the baseline system, you see in the darker gray, the $5.8 million. And then to the right of that in the green shading are various renewable options and again this is an upfront capital cost determination. This is not an operating cost determination. Before we move on to those scenarios there and can you just make sure people are understanding so the, this is this building had conventional systems that the cost $5.2 million. Correct. And this analysis looks at all the fossil fuels. And so based on the way this capitalized payment upfront net present value payment of the projected carbon for the life of those systems would have worked. It would have been that same building today roughly with 2022 pricing would have been an additional $600,000 to get 10% premium basically for putting a fossil fuel system in place is that I have that right. You have that right. And, and that's that's this example based on the fossil fuel output of those systems in that building obviously vary depending on the building but that's exactly right for this example. And so that should give people some sense of you. Every example will be a little bit different depending on those systems depending on the fuel, you know potentially if someone was going to use oil instead of natural gas maybe that would have an even greater impact but in this case was about a 10% premium and then the rest of the this draft shows that the builder has a whole range of options for bringing down the cost, either very comparable to the new fee and base system or even lower as a few of these examples are then then the conventional system at all so That's right. So in this case, there were options, such as the air to water heat pump and water loop heat pump, as well as the air source heat pump and electric resistance and the ground source heat pump and water loop heat pump that you see labeled here that were actually cheaper upfront than the conventional system even without the carbon pollution impact fee. And obviously they become even more cost effective and economical when you include the fee. So you're comparing in some cases 4.8 or 4.9 million for those systems compared to an upfront cost of 5.2 for the conventional fossil fuel system or 5.8 million if you include the carbon pollution impact fee. We looked at what the cost would be if you did the conventional system but bought renewable natural gas and didn't present value analysis on that and it's almost identical to what it would have been to have the baseline system plus the carbon fee. So that's an important point is, as you mentioned, we're not banning any infrastructure here, not proposing to ban any infrastructure. So somebody could look at this example and say I want to use a baseline system, conventional system, but I'm going to purchase renewable fuel for that system. That's one option. But in this case as well, there were other options on the electrification side that would have yielded a significant savings up front. And then as I mentioned, it's not an operational analysis. So the cost to operate these different systems varies. And I would say that Burlington Electric continuing to have very reasonable rates compared to the Vermont state average and certainly compared to the New England average is beneficial when we look at the operating costs. In some cases, running a heat pump system can be cheaper in some context than a conventional system, a fossil fuel system. In some cases, it might be a little bit more expensive. It really does vary, but our lower rates in Burlington benefit us when it comes to looking at the operational side of that relative to the rest of New England. Great. And to these models, and I see it's even in the, there are some incentives as well that are being offered that the policy should be understood in that context. This is there is sort of a regulatory stick, if you will, here at the same time, again, depending on the system, there are a significant and growing number of incentives that can help builders realize the projections were shown here. That's exactly right. So Burlington Electric has been offering very, very strong incentives, both for existing buildings and for new construction to switch to heat pumps to geothermal heat and cooling. And all of those incentives will continue to be available under this policy to new construction and to existing buildings. So there is an opportunity to have lower costs. It wasn't captured in the prior example, but it's captured in this one. And that is, this is the existing building example. This is based on a retail building, again, a real world example in Burlington that was right around that 50,000 square feet threshold. And the analysis here shows that the baseline fossil fuel, this is just for a heating system, not a water heating system. The baseline fossil fuel heating system replacement cost in this case was just under $24,000. When you add the carbon pollution impact fee to that baseline system, as you see in the darker gray shading here, the cost would have been $40,700. And what you can see is that the various renewable options here, two different options that look at renewable natural gas, both a blended version and a local only renewable natural gas, as well as looking at the proposed district heating system, which we're also going to talk about tonight at the city council, what credits would be if that system was online and building could purchase renewable credits from the district energy system, as well as a heat pump, what we call a variable refrigerant flow heat pump system that's more common in commercial applications. That was $36,350. But when you include the incentive at the farthest right on the chart, the BED incentive that gets down to $20,350. And this is an important example to demonstrate how the carbon pollution impact fee can really level the playing field. If we don't account for the cost of carbon pollution, the health impacts, the societal impacts, the environmental impacts. If we don't account for that, then the fossil fuel baseline system is cheaper than the renewable options here and might be the system that the building owner might decide to go with. With the carbon impacts accounted for in the baseline plus carbon fee example, we now have a level playing field where all of the externalized costs are accounted for. And now the renewable systems and the renewable fuels are all cost effective in upfront capital relative to the fossil fuel system. So that's the concept here. It's the idea that we're not saying that there's no environmental impact or health impact when we're burning fossil fuels. We know there is. We know there is a cost associated with that. And by putting that cost into the upfront decision making process, we can have a much truer apples to apples comparison between renewable systems and a fossil fuel system. And I think that's what this chart shows in more clear detail. Very good, Darren. And does that include the expected incentives coming from the new inflation reduction act? Or is it this is before, before you even get to this, what can be very sustained when the rules finally all are written here and we know how to use it. This, this graph could change considerably I don't think right. That's correct. Yeah, this was, this was analysis that predates the inflation reduction act incentives being available. We're still learning the details of those programs. In this case, you're correct that the heat pump based systems might have an even greater incentive compared to what's shown on the graph here. And those incentives be very important in a variety of contexts and driving down costs for consumers and providing more access to renewable technologies. All right, well, as you know, I'm looking forward to getting to come back and have a briefing that shows Burlington homeowners and drivers and business owners, how the new federal incentives will work in combination with local incentives. And when that happens, we really think there's going to be an acceleration of these exciting trends here in Burlington in the last couple of years. So, but I think that is for another day. Thank you for walking everyone through that. Thanks for sticking with us everyone for an extended briefing here hope that helps understand more posing and now happy to answer further questions about it if there are any. All right, so I see we have hands up from three people Samantha, are you going to be able to. I guess I can hear. Yes, I can take care of it. Yeah, Courtney from seven days I just enabled your microphone you can go ahead. Great, can you all hear me. Yes. Okay, couple questions. Does municipal buildings does that include school buildings for one. I think in the memo, we did not include school buildings in municipal buildings but there may be school buildings that are in the threshold of being 50,000 square feet or larger. So there are, there's potential eligibility in that category but with the other category city municipal buildings we were focused primarily on on city buildings and not school buildings. Okay, great. And then just sort of a process question. What happens next. I know it's on the council agenda but I don't. It looks like the recommended motion is is to place it on this on file. Does it has to go through the ordinance committee or something next. Yeah, I believe it's our hope that there will be council will. I think there will be a need for some committee work on this and we are talking to the council about initiating that as soon as tonight and getting that work started so that about language can come back in the next by mid January the latest for action to put this to put language on the town. Do I have that right there. That's my understanding as well. Okay, great. I did. I did have some questions about the weekend the homicide over the weekend but if you want to come back to that maybe at the end so people can ask Darren questions. Happy to wait. Okay, I appreciate that Courtney let's do it that way. Okay. Okay. I think Catherine Huntley. You can go next. You can. Okay, great. So, with all of your housing plan and all the stuff that you're hoping to build here how can you hope to make sure that you're protecting the environment but also making sure you're not deterring builders from spending higher costs. Building with these heating systems with the carbon fee and not you know maybe wanting to build in South Burlington or elsewhere. I, it's a really important question. Fortunately, as I hope you saw in the examples, the where we are right now in 2022 excitingly is a place where there are very competitive alternatives to fossil fuel systems. And not only that, we are a place where our local Burlington Electric Department is offering incentives that don't exist in South Burlington or really anywhere else these are only. I don't believe any other utility. The street utilities in the country that has been as aggressive as Burlington Electric has been about offering incentives. And we know in a matter of months as soon as they get the rules written here. We, there are even further federal incentives that can be layered in here and then are going to make these alternative technologies even more competitive so I really. I would say for that for most of what builders need to do today. There is no substantial premium it's even sometimes even less expensive to be working with these alternatives what this regulation does is really ensure that builders look carefully at that. And in the rare cases where there is a, there is not a good alternative to fossil fuels builders still can. We're not saying we're not prohibiting it we're not saying, we're, you know, we're not putting some project killing restriction in place. What we're saying is if you if you have to go that direction, you're going to have to pay this modest fee that in other ways helps the city and the community meet it meet its climate goals. I don't believe I'm pretty hopeful based on the feedback that we've had with the various stakeholders so far that we've gotten it right here and that this is a balanced proposal that is not going. It is going to help us achieve our climate goals without fundamentally seriously undermining our, our, our housing goals. You know we do expect some additional public process over the next couple months if we flush something out that suggests that's not the case will, you know, we'll consider it because certainly housing is very important as well. I think we need to do both fundamentally, that's what why we're bringing this forward we need, we need housing and a lot more housing it is one of the biggest problems we face, but we can't be building new housing that doesn't also advance and forward us towards our climate goals we need to be doing both I think we can. Thank you. Great thank you Catherine. I, the next step is Patrick Crowley. I was just, I wanted to ask about the application of this policy to existing buildings. Are you able to give an example or two for the sake of comparison of those buildings that are right around that 50,000 foot square foot threshold. Yeah, we can get you want to do that. I think the, you know, the last example that we went over was was exactly that kind of building was an existing building, a retail in that case, right at that 50,000 square foot threshold, looking at the conventional system versus the renewable alternatives. We did some of this analysis with the building electrification Institute. And we don't have an exhaustive list, obviously, you know, each building is going to be different. That's part of the reason for putting in the cap on the fee for existing buildings at the 75% of the installed cost of the conventional technology as the mayor pointed out earlier. In some cases, the premium associated with the carbon pollution impact the might be 10%. I think in the existing building example that we used it moved from being a $24,000 system to being a $40,000 system. So the percentage was higher in that case. But by capping it at the 75%, if that really creates an additional kind of economic protection against having the fee being, you know, a much more significant portion of the cost for putting in a new system. So if somebody was replacing, let's say, a $10,000 boiler, the maximum amount of the fee would be 7500 in that case. And not something more extreme like, you know, $100,000 or $300,000 on a $10,000 system. So it's a really important pragmatic step to make sure as the mayor mentioned that we're considering these alternatives when we make these investments, but it's cap such as not to be in any way punitive for existing buildings. We do understand that the distribution infrastructure and existing building creates different challenges than when you're building new. Karen, I think Patrick was in part asking like, I think what is a 50,000 square foot building? For example, Memorial Auditorium is a little bit more than 50,000 square feet. There are a number of buildings up on the UVM campus and in the hospital certainly. Right. Do you want to add any other examples, Karen? Yeah, absolutely. No, those are good examples. I think if I'm remembering correctly, City Hall might be in that category potentially. Buildings like that. Certainly UVM, UVM Medical Center, Champlain College and buildings in that size range. You know, the school district, they have buildings in that size range. We looked at it. It was really among the 80 or so buildings that might be in that category. And the number of them were either the city, the school district or the University Medical Center or Champlain College as well. We have been engaging UVM and UVMC through this process and getting their feedback. Did that cover it, Patrick? Yes, thank you. Okay, great. Next up, and maybe our last question, Liam. Yeah, just two questions first briefly. Right now you're not contemplating existing residential structures and smaller commercial buildings, but do you think that you will want to consider a policy for those in the future? You're correct. We're not considering those right now. We, from my perspective, it will be, we certainly care about what happens with existing buildings, other small buildings. We are going to get to our climate goals ultimately if we don't see action there as well. We are entering this new era of dramatically expanded incentives, federal incentives for those buildings. And from my perspective, I think we want to see how this new regulation works with larger buildings and we want to see how well we do. This is purely from an incentive strategy with the smaller buildings before we seriously consider expanding this regulation to others. We've been pretty clear with people throughout this process that we have no active plans for that, and that's still the case. I think that's a conversation for some years down the road. Okay. And then sort of more on the types of renewable energy that people could use for buildings. You know, I know that there's some kind of discussion about what actually is considered renewable energy. You know, I know things like green hydrogen is still kind of a developing technology. Renewable natural gas is a little bit controversial from my understanding. So in terms of what has the city, what you're going to decide is considered renewable. Do you have any safeguards to make sure you're not going to like fall prey to things that companies are greenwashing that aren't actually really renewable. Great question. Darren, why do you take that? Absolutely. So I think we're really trying to build on the definition that was included already in the renewable heating ordinance. So renewable gas is offered under a tariff structure that's regulated by the Public Utility Commission through Vermont Gas. So there's some built-in protection in terms of procuring renewable natural gas. There's already public utility commission regulation of that process. I think we've looked at including hydrogen if it's renewable, but as you mentioned, that's not really commercialized at this point. So that would be something that could be included for the future, provided it is renewably sourced. We also include all the various electrification technologies, which we know are being sourced through Burlington Electric's 100% renewable energy. So anyone putting in a heat pump or air to water heat pump or a ground source geothermal heat pump, they can know that they're getting 100% renewable electricity through Burlington Electric. And of course, we're also regulated by the Public Utility Commission, and we report every year on how we procure our resources and how we meet that standard. And I think we also included in the memo the opportunity, I think this is important, for the Department of Permitting Inspections to be able to qualify additional renewable fuels or technologies in the future. Because what I've learned working in this space for a period of time is you can't predict what may end up being commercialized. And as the mayor said at the outset, if we were talking about this maybe 15 years ago, the idea that heat pumps would be working so well in a cold climate wasn't something that was a really prevalent topic of conversation. But now we know they work really, really well, even in negative 13 or negative 18 temperatures. So we wanted to make sure that the process would remain that we could qualify additional renewable fuels or technologies if they aren't truly renewably sourced. And if they are new and coming on to the market, we don't want to just create a static definition in 2022 and not have it be adaptable for future developments. Thank you. Great, thank you, Liam. I'm looking at the attendees and not seeing any other hands up from members of the media. So, give people another couple seconds if they, if they want to jump in on this, but then we're going to let Darren go Darren any any final thoughts about about this topic we haven't covered sufficiently. Well, we're looking forward to talking more about it tonight. I think it's, it's important to know that we're acting, we're not acting alone in Burlington. We're acting in conjunction with communities around the state around the country that are working on this. Ann Arbor, Michigan, for example, has adopted a similarly ambitious net zero 2030 goal as we adopted here. We were first, I think, but other communities are looking at that. And even closer to home, as I mentioned, South Burlington has adopted a renewable heating and water heating ordinance. So we know we're not acting alone and that we're not unique and having some of these requirements. But at the same time, as you mentioned, Mayor, this is this charter change gives us a really unique aspect to be able to work on and not only to demonstrate progress towards our net zero 2030 goal, but to use carbon pricing in an economically rational way to really help shape these decisions. So I think what we're doing here has has importance to the climate conversation at the community level, both in Vermont and nationally. And I think that in addition to the inflation reduction act incentives, there's a possibility at the state level of having a clean heat standard, which would further support a lot of the approaches that were outlining here. I know that was considered last session and is likely to be considered again in the legislature so appreciate that we're working in that context and appreciate your support and leadership on this issue and we're looking forward to being there this evening to talk more about it. Hey, well thanks there and it's even a great partner working with on this. I'm I'm excited about this proposal I think it does advance the conversation about where we need to go at really all levels of city, state, federal really even internationally, we need to find more market signals to help us move it move in the direction that we need to do it. I'm sure, you know, in the past, there's been any time proposals like this gets offered. There can be some pretty kind of cheap and inaccurate I think headlines about taxes and make it making framing this as some kind of extreme idea and it's, it's just really not this is more and more around the world, there are structures for pricing carbon into market decisions in one way or another. There is quite a bit of bipartisan discussion happening about proposals like this in Congress. And again, the way we have proposed it here. I really see this as a really pragmatic way of moving us towards our climate goals. We have extreme mandates that would really cause cause big problems to our to our housing and other economic goals so I hope the proposals understood in that context. I hopefully by having this to be here in Burlington by. Again, I think it's another point I just want to remind members of the media, this, we are doing this after the endorsement of about 65% of the city's voters, encouraging to get into the direction and voters get another shot at this, this, this coming year will certainly intend to be out there educating voters and advocating for to a certain degree. But this is, this is a proposal that can only go forward. If, if the council and then ultimately the voters support this as a way to try to achieve our, our critical climate goals I think will happen, given that I know bro and I know deeply about the climate emergency and want to be on the cutting edge of doing something about it and taking consequential action. And I'll be out there. I'm sure you go to Darren talking to voters about it through time be today. Make sure people understand what they're voting on. All right with that. Thank you Darren, you can can log off and I will go back to you Courtney. As far as